Her life may read like a bad soap, but Beverly Hills broker Elaine Young says that after six marriages and a cosmetic surgery nightmare she’s . . . : Down, but Not Out

I’m a matchmaker. I match people up with houses. The odds are better. In my experience people and houses are the most durable love affairs in town. --from Elaine Young’s autobiography, “A Million Dollars Down”

Elaine Young is busy scanning the green shores of her personal horizon. In the distance loom the seaweed-colored banquettes of the Polo Lounge, Young’s lush hunting ground of choice. There, she has trolled for clients and husbands more days than not over the last 33 years.

This may not look like the waiting room of one of Beverly Hills’ snazzy real estate businesses to you, but to Young, one of a score of brokers to the stars, business is a pleasure. And at the moment, she’s making it her business to scrutinize the lunching throng. A couple of perfect-looking men stroll out the door, inspiring the instant Young analysis: refugees from the recent Oscar crush.

“I guess, being in real estate, I can tell everybody who walks in this room where they’re from. And this is the Beverly Hills Hotel, so obviously it’s very international,” she preens. “And I’m never wrong.”

Young, 57, quintessential child of Beverly Hills that she is, looks very much the part. Her hair, the color of baby chicks, frames her face in a gravity-defying cloud. She is swathed in beige leather shoulder to toe. Her face is coffee-colored after the morning’s trip to the tanning salon, but it’s still not quite right even now--32 corrective operations after a plastic surgeon botched it by injecting silicone into her cheeks.

“Silicone belongs in automobiles and not humans, period,” she says.

Elaine Young’s life sounds like the stuff of miniseries--six husbands including one movie star, Gig Young; trafficking in zillion-dollar homes and celebrity clients. Her favorite vacation destination? Why, Beverly Hills, of course. Her perfume? The lucrative scent of Rodeo Drive--Fred Hayman or Giorgio.

“She’s a real byproduct of the whole Beverly Hills style of life,” says her friend, Theo Wilson.

And because this is L.A., Young could be in the odd position of watching her miniseries-like life actually transformed into a movie of the week. At least, that’s what husband No. 5 has in mind. Movie director Bill Levey can see it now: the Elaine Young Story--one woman’s battle with silicone.

“The fact that she had the strength to try it and then find out it was a disaster and put up with it is a testament to her constitution. Just the story of that is tremendous,” says Levey, who directed “Skatetown, U.S.A.”

Indeed, Young’s constitution has taken a battering lately. The departure of Husband No. 6 is still raw, having happened less than two weeks earlier, and Young needs to order a little sympathy along with her tea. (Cream of broccoli soup, actually.)

“Did you know I’m getting a divorce?” she sighs to the befuddled waiter.

It’s not easy being the poster child for the good life.

“The life of the rich and the glamorous isn’t always as rich and glamorous as it appears. I’m living proof, getting my sixth divorce, that this is a very tough town to live in,” she says, sounding very much like, well, a character in a miniseries.

A tough town? How about the fate of these Young listings, like the Cielo Drive estate that Sharon Tate was leasing. The house experienced a rush of popularity after her 1969 murder. People offered twice, even three times its value to the home’s owner, who declined.

Or how about Young’s own home, the one she put on the market after she split with Gig Young? The buyer threw in an extra 20,000 bucks for the bed Gig slept in.

Still, Young will tell you that the glamorous life is somehow still worth it, that living in Hollywood’s long shadow is still fun, even if it’s sometimes painful fun.

“Life is like a Jacuzzi,” she gushed in her 1979 autobiography. “The lucky ones never dry off.”

Young’s father, David Garber, was a studio manager at Universal for 20 years. When she was growing up, Young wanted to be an actress--natch--but she couldn’t act. So she entered and excelled in one of those handmaiden-to-the-stars professions, the sort where the big schmooze drifts back and forth along the great business-pleasure divide. She’s been a real estate broker for 33 years, the last 15 years a partner in Alvarez, Hyland & Young. It’s a 70-broker office across from Gucci on North Canon Drive, filled with blond wood and blond brokers. In a good year--and there haven’t been any in the ‘90s--Young says her annual income ranges from $300,000 to $600,000.

“We’re friendly competitors, and we make deals together,” says her former employer, Beverly Hills broker Mike Silverman. “I have a lot of respect for her, as she does for me.”

On a personal level: “I realized that however phony and hard and illusionary show life was and however much I had been the classic victim of the fantasy life, for me show business was captivating and fascinating, and I couldn’t marry someone who was not part of it.”

Husbands No. 1 and No. 3, a writer-producer-manager and a songwriter, respectively, filled the bill--for a while. (No. 3, Stanley Stein, was also born into the business--his father was MCA founder Jules.)

But her second shot at marriage was the apogee, “that most Goldilocked fantasy of all: meeting and then marrying an Academy Award-winning star (Gig Young). . . .” Reality ultimately took over, and the 1963 marriage fell apart in 1967 under the weight of the actor’s alcoholism, says Elaine, who met Young when she showed him a house.

They had one daughter, Jennifer, a 26-year-old singer. She says she kept his name because of Jennifer and for business reasons. (Young died in 1978 when he shot himself and his fifth wife in their New York apartment, three weeks into their marriage.)

“I got him into AA for two years,” she says. “When I’d go to meetings with him, they’d ask him for his autograph.”

Husband No. 4 was supposed to reverse the trend. (So was No. 6, a developer from New York, for that matter.)

“Everyone said, ‘If you stopped marrying people in the picture business, maybe you’d get real.’ So I walked into this restaurant and I met a man and I took one look at his eyes and I was in love. And I said, ‘What do you do?’ And he said, ‘I’m a professional gambler.’ I thought, ‘Great. He’s not in the picture business.’ Little did I know.”

That husband held the briefest reign. The marriage ended after six months, when he went off to prison.

“He owed the bookies money. They wanted to break his legs. I don’t understand that kind of lifestyle. I’m a California girl. That’s Chicago, New York.”

But L.A. life did its part in helping to do in other marriages. Levey says his two-year marriage to Young collapsed in 1987, partly under the pressure of the couple’s intensive partying.

“If she misses a party, that could cost her half a million dollars. That’s Beverly Hills,” he says. “It wasn’t my style, and it most likely will never be my style.”

Elaine Young on style: Her taste in cars runs to Rolls-Royces and Jags. Her license plate lets you know who’s at the wheel--ELANE 7 (ELAINE was taken). She used to carry a sequined mallet for pounding in For Sale signs. Her couturier , Flamboyance. She likes short, short skirts and teeny, tiny tops.

“As I grew up I thought nobody will notice me unless I dress a certain way, and then it became second nature,” she says. “I know what’s chic and classy. I’m not stupid. I probably dress like my daughter who’s 26 and shouldn’t, and I don’t care.”

It’s a cliche to say that appearance counts for a lot in this town. So suffice to say that when Young was 17, she had her nosed fixed. Later, her eyes. And when a woman walked into her office in the spring of 1977 with the most fabulous cheekbones Young had seen, she jumped at the chance to buy a set for herself. That involved monthly silicone injections over the next year and a half.

A couple of years later, the silicone seemed to be growing and hardening.

“My eyes were swollen shut. I looked like a monster. It grew every day.”

After the doctor who did the damage stopped returning her calls, “I started running from doctor to doctor, and nobody could help me. Finally Lawrence Seifert (then chairman of plastic surgery) at Cedars helped me. He took pity on me. Nobody wanted to touch me because they didn’t know anything about silicone.”

Over the years, Young has undergone 32 corrective operations, one a 12-hour procedure to remove a chunk of silicone she described as the size of a grapefruit. But some hardened silicone remains beyond the surgeon’s reach.

“My last surgery was in December. My nose collapsed, the silicone was so heavy. When they took (the silicone) out, they went into my head, took out bone marrow and stuffed it in my face, because when they took out the silicone, if they didn’t put something there, I’d be caved in.”

Young is counting on you to be horrified by that. She’s made the talk-show rounds and worked with support groups as a sort of missionary against silicone, the much-touted--and now controversial--wonder drug for the beauty-deprived. (Young planned to sue the first plastic surgeon, but he died before she filed.)

“I’d had a false sense of thinking, if you look better, it’s going to make you better. It’s inside, and it took me all these years to realize that it’s an inside job.”

What’s bad for the daily business of living can be good for business. Divorce? In real estate, it’s a sure-fire moneymaker.

“I make money when people get married; I make money when they get divorced. I’m making money on myself right now--I’m getting divorced. I’m going to sell my own house.”

And although close friends insist that Young is sincere in going public to warn others off silicone, hey, this is L.A., where there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

“Isn’t everybody who’s selling something into publicity?” muses Theo Wilson. “I think she’s into publicity, but I don’t mean that as a detraction. That’s her job.”

Young was camera-shy as a movie star’s wife, but she learned to develop a taste for the lens. When Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes” interviewed her for a story about high-rolling real estate 15 years ago, she caused a tasty industry furor with her admission that there was “hanky-panky” in the business, to use Wallace’s words.

She clearly relishes the memory: “Some people said I was horrible and I was a tramp, and others said they loved my candor.”

And now, she is quickly calculating how to turn this interview from fun to profit. A “$10-million client” has just walked into the Polo Lounge, and she’s burbling into a portable phone: “I want him to see me being interviewed. I’m going to make some points with him if I can get his attention. Charles !”

Blame it on Beverly Hills. When you grow up wanting to be like the Joneses, you don’t necessarily need the Joneses to be the most beautiful, famous people that special effects can create.

Of course, Elaine Young would never bad-mouth her hometown. “I’ve never lived anywhere but here,” she says. “In fact I love it here so much I don’t even travel. Ever. When I was married to Gig, I went to London. He did a movie there. But basically I love California. I love it.”