Mary Wells: 'Birthdays Are Bad for Your Health'

JOAN: Does your definition of beauty change as you do?

MARLO: Yes, I think you change your mind about beauty as you change. When I was younger I didn’t think older women were that pretty. Now I think they’re gorgeous. You start to say, “Now wait a minute … you know, this woman is beautiful. And I look good.”

MARY: Don’t you think, also, that styles have changed in that what is beautiful used to be just — pretty?

MARLO: We still have 15-year-olds on the covers of magazines.

MARY: There’s the most beautiful cover on one of these film magazines of Meryl Streep without any makeup, looking so absolutely beautiful. That natural look, when you’re 50, has become really kind of —

MARLO: That’s because you’re 50. I don’t know that the 20-year-olds are thinking it’s beautiful.

MARY: Well, there are more of us.

MARLO: Well, that’s always good.

LILY: When I was a child, our mothers — unless they were in another circle, a social circle — my mother never exercised.

MARLO: No. Right.

LILY: Women didn’t even drive. They just were not physical people. As times have gone on, consciousness has been raised and women came more into their own; they realized that they could be athletic and physical and dynamic and all kinds of things. Women were very old at 50, in the old days.

MARLO: They did housework.

LILY: I’m not saying they didn’t work and do plenty of —

MARLO: It’s also about taking control of your health, that you could take care of your heart and your bones and you don’t have to just be dependent on what a doctor says, who, most of the time, doesn’t know anything about nutrition.

MARY: But don’t you often think what beauty is today also is much more ethnically diverse, because we’re living with people from all parts of the world now, so that your idea of what is beautiful has stretched and —

LILY: When I was a teenager the beauty standard was Marilyn Monroe or Kim Novak – very curvaceous. I used to pad my hips, literally, when I was an adolescent – 13, 14 years old – because I had such straight hips. Skirts had extra material in them for that.

MARLO: Oh, that’s awful. And they were all blond. They were all blond.

LILY: I got a lot of mileage out of padding those hips.

MARY: If you look at those underfed models that scare me to death, that are obviously going to die tomorrow … but they are from all different countries and they’re —

JOAN: Mainly Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia.

MARY: Now, yes. They go through different periods — and they’re gorgeous. They’re all so different. It’s not like they were all just stamped out of the machine. And they’re so wonderfully different looking.

JOAN: As you age, your focus changes. You stop focusing quite so much on yourself.

MARLO: Or you’ve accepted how you look and realize that there’s beauty in it.

JOAN: When my first novel came out, a fashion photographer agreed to take my picture for publicity. I went to his studio and sat in the makeup chair while the makeup lady worked on me, looking exhausted because I had just finished three years on the book. And there was a model sitting on my left, who was maybe 17 years old. I was 33. And she kept glancing at me and glancing at me. And finally she said, very timidly, “Do you get much work?”

MARLO: That’s hysterical.