2 Monday February 21 2022 | the timestimes2
STEVE GRANITZ/WIREIMAGE VIA GETTY IMAGEST
he first rule about face
work, especially in the
upper reaches of the
celebosphere, is that
you don’t talk about
face work. The 57-year-
old Friends star
Courteney Cox broke
that rule in a recent interview, where
she reflected on her past cosmetic
procedures and admitted, “I didn’t
realise that, oh shit, I’m actually
looking really strange with injections
and doing stuff to my face that I would
never do now.” She added that she
became aware that friends were
talking about her appearance, and she
reached a point where she said, “I’ve
got to stop. That’s just crazy.”
It may not seem like it, but this is a
bombshell. Hollywood stars do not
talk about cosmetic surgery in this
context. Yes, they joke about it, or
lightly disclose a brief dalliance with
Botox (everyone from Nicole Kidman
to Olivia Colman), but they won’t
admit to the bigger stuff or to the
deeper fundamental truth of all
cosmetic surgery, which is that it
simply makes you look weird. Think
about it: 43 facial muscles and more
than 10,000 subtly varied expressions
all slowly and meticulously refined
over 1.5 million years of Homo erectus
evolution to become the ultimate
non-verbal communication tool. And
what do we offer in return? Puffy lips,
swollen cheekbones and dead,
unblinking eyeholes? And we tell
them that they look fabulous and that
they need to go back on camera and
express and emote?
I’ve spent decades sitting opposite
Hollywood heavyweights, male and
female, whose appearances have been
pushed to the point of clownish
absurdity by an industry that has lied
to them about the importance of
looking eternally 20, and about the
ability of surgeons to make that
happen. I’ve listened to a former
Eighties pin-up rage against the evils
of cosmetic tinkering and swear blind
that she would never contemplate
such a thing even as her jaw seemed
wired shut with tension from the work
that she was clearly carrying. I’ve sat
inches away from a male A-lister
whose countenance had been reduced
to an inscrutable slab after years of
nipping and tucking.
I had dinner once in Los Angeles
with the publicist of an actionKevin Maher
No, don’t
take my
smoothie!
Oh come on! I’ve cut
back on meat because
of the planet. I’ve cut
out fish because of the
oceans. And now I can’t
even have berries?!
It seems that the
berries in many UK
supermarkets (certainly
the shops I frequent)
are all coming from
one intensive farming
region in southern
Portugal. Here
polytunnel-filled
megafarms are sucking
up all the surrounding
water and thus
responsible for
damaging the local
ecology, specifically the
Alentejo and Vicentine
Coast Natural Park.
Which is annoying.
Because I start every
day, religiously, with a
pint of blueberry and
spinach smoothie. It
keeps my digestive
system nicely alkaline,
gives me an
antioxidant-laced brain
boost (the magic of
blueberries, apparently)
and makes me feel
remarkably virtuous
as I pass through the
usual morning rush of
coffee-chugging
croissant-chewers.
But now? Do I
forsake my daily buzz
for the good of
Portugal? Do I whizz
up, carefully, just a
half-punnet? Or do I
simply consume,
instead, my usual large
and luscious berry-
filled pint of guilt?Who’s a
sweary
boy then?
world are back. Five
foul-mouthed African
greys that were
removed from display
at Lincolnshire Wildlife
Park for swearing have
been reintroduced, but
with a public warning
sign on their cage.
The birds, Billy,Tyson, Eric, Jade and
Elise, learnt their
cussing in separate UK
households and were
briefly caged among
less sweary parrots in
the hope they might be
purified by the company
(a risky strategy — they
could have infected theflock with f-bombs).
When interviewed,
park CEO Steve
Nichols said: “When a
parrot tells you to ‘f***
off ’ it amuses people
very highly.” I was
always partial to “Who’s
a pretty boy then?” But
“f*** off ” will do.I see that the bad boys
and girls of the parrotmegastar, and her cosmetic work was
so profound that she seemed to have
lost all feeling in her face. When the
pasta course arrived she drooled
automatically, like Pavlov’s dog, and
the sputum spilt out over her chin and
onto the place setting while she
remained oblivious. It reminds me of
the one-liner told by the comedian Bill
Burr: “Which would you rather be, 52
and look like you’re 52, or be 52 and
look like a 28-year-old lizard?”
And it’s not just the Hollywood
people either. We all know someone
who’s arrived beaming at the front
door, after a little “treat” procedure,
and said, “Do I look different?” And
the real answer, of course, is, “Yes,
slightly weird and waxy.” But instead
we lie and say, “You look so young!”
And the men are just as bad. I know
men who’ve had hair implants, teeth
enamels and ear tucks. And in each
case the genuine response to the
procedure, alas, should be, “No, I’m
sorry, it hasn’t worked. Something
synthetic has been crudely grafted
onto something organic, and you
look odd.”
I feel the same about hair dye.
When I meet a man my age with dark
dyed hair (Not sure? Just look at the
sideburns — they can never do the
sideburns) I have the urge to take
them aside and give them a good
talking to. I want to say, “What bizarre
retro Seventies fashion catalogue
universe are you living in? You’re not
fooling anyone! In fact, quite the
opposite. This instinctively distracting
combination of old face and young
hair colour only makes you look, in
the revealing words of Courteney Cox,
really strange.”Courteney’s right about
cosmetic tweaks. And
it’s not just women at it
Netflix’s new series about the con artist
Anna Sorokin plays lip service to the
truth, says Rachel DeLoache Williams,
one of her victims. By Andrew Billen
P
altering, Rachel
DeLoache Williams
explains to me, is using
small truths to convince
people of a big lie. You
scatter an untrue story
with reassuringly
verifiable or well-known
facts. It is among the most lethal
arrows in a con artist’s quiver, as
Williams has good reason to know.
She is the best-known target of
Anna Sorokin, the young Russian
émigrée who burst upon New York
in 2013, worked in the US office of a
French arts magazine and inveigled
herself into the Manhattan highlife.
Styling herself as a German heiress
with a huge trust fund, she defrauded
hotels, banks and acquaintances out of
more than $250,000 while striving to
secure a $22 million hedge fund loan
to open a private club in Manhattan.
Along the way she met Williams and —
or so the young toiler from Tennessee
working on Vanity Fair’s picture desk
thought — became her friend.
In 2017, to escape a little financial
heat, Sorokin (or Delvey, as Anna had
rechristened herself) invited Williams
on a luxurious holiday in Marrakesh.
When Sorokin’s credit cards were
refused, she persuaded Williams to
appease the hotel with hers on the
understanding that she would be
repaid within days or even hours.
Before long, Williams had spent nearly
$70,000 on a break that was wildly
beyond her means. It took her a little
longer to realise she was never going
to get the money back and to go to the
cops. In 2019 Sorokin was found guilty
of many charges of dishonesty and
sentenced to between four and 12
years in jail — although exonerated of
stealing from Williams, her character
having been deftly assassinated by
Sorokin’s lawyer who made her out to
be a materialist scrounger.
Yet when we speak it is not Sorokin
whom Williams accuses of paltering.
She flings the charge at Netflix, whose
nine-part drama Inventing Anna — its
most-viewed show in the UK last week
— is based on the affair. You might say
loosely based since each episode is
prefaced with the larky disclaimer
“This whole story is completely true.
Except for all the parts that are totally
made up.”
“Selective truth-telling wasn’t what
Anna was doing,” Williams says from a
friend’s place in California, where she
is escaping from the scene of Sorokin’s
crimes. “Anna was falsifying bank
documents. There wasn’t a whole lot
of truth going on there, but this
Netflix show cherry-picked pieces of
truth to create a narrative that is not
true.” Williams is plainly furious about
Inventing Anna, which Netflix, having
failed to acquire the rights to her book,
My Friend Anna, made without
reference to her. She has not brought
herself to watch the entire series, but
even skimming through it was“disconcerting”, she says, eschewing
the word “traumatising” lest people
accuse her of playing the victim.
Although it is just 7am Pacific
Standard Time, she speaks at a
pelt over Zoom, tripping over words,
wondering whether hers are the right
ones, and worrying that she will
appear self-pitying or self-publicising.
“For the world’s most popular
streaming service, behind the curtain,
to have the decision-making processes
in place to allow for this to happen is
appalling,” she says. “I don’t mean that
just with regard to what they’ve done
to my character. I mean it with regard
to the way that they have ignored the
reality of criminal behaviour, of
pathological lying, of reprehensible
example-setting and just completely
ignored the reality to create this
fictional alternative version.”
Williams says that the only material
accuracy in Netflix’s portrayal of her is
that it gets her name right. Even this
prompts the question why it used her
real name while changing that of the
investigative journalist who worked
on the series and through whose
reporting the story is told. After all,
the actress playing Williams, Katie
Lowes, is, at 39, five years older than
Williams is now, and a decade older
than Williams was in Marrakesh, and
looks nothing like her.
Some inaccuracies are minor. The
cameraman “Noah” in Marrakesh
with her and Sorokin was not her love
interest (although weirdly she has a
brother called Noah). Her boyfriend
was a man called Nick Rogers, whom
she thanks in her book for his “love,
patience and support”. Never did
Sorokin buy her shoes or clothes.
And, I check, she was not interested
in bumming free champagne off a
glamorous friend? “Not now, nor have
I ever been. I was working at Vanity
Fair. I have lovely, long-term friends.
Anna was a friend, she was never a
best friend, and she certainly wasn’t
presenting me with some dazzling
entrance to some grand world I’d
never seen before. We spent most
of our time hanging out in her hotel.
I never went shopping with her. We
didn’t go to fancy parties. She was odd.
I couldn’t figure out what her deal was.
I liked her ambitiousness. She was
smart. We spent a few months as close
friends and then everything took a
turn which I then spent years trying to
grapple with.”
More important is the detail of
the corporate Vanity Fair Amex card
that Williams used at the Marrakesh
hotel to pay Sorokin’s bills. As was
normal practice at the magazine
when a corporate card was used for
personal items, Williams deleted the
hotel and travel charges from her
expenses claims. Management did not,
as per Inventing Anna, quiz her about
them, still less suspend her. In fact it
was supportive, for the simple reason
that it had never paid those bills.Is Inventing