A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

The sweetest smile ever flashed my way came not from the face of a child or the lips of a beautiful woman but from the head of a television studio telling me what a wonderful person I was.

It was a smile of pure radiance, an almost spiritual smile, seeming to beam up from that place in the soul where flowers grow and birds sing. God must have smiled that way when he created sunrise.

We had just received word that a pilot I had written would be made into a series, and the studio president, who had achieved his position on just such a smile, was beside himself with happiness.

He told me I would be his friend for life and we would go on together to heights that would scatter the stars. But then the series failed.

It went down in less than a season, and when I approached the man to chart our next flight to the moon he passed me by without speaking.

He was still smiling, but now it was an expression of pure malice.

Not until later would I realize that in the course of a few short months I had become the recipient of the Hollywood Smile.

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We are a culture that spins on a smile, a happy-face world that demands from each of us a charity of expression that masks whatever our true inner feelings might be. We are nothing without a smile.

Never has this been clearer than in the case of 7-year-old Chelsey Thomas, the little girl born without one.

She suffered from the condition known as Moebius syndrome, lacking the nerve that transmits commands to the facial muscles and causes her face to perpetually sag.

Surgery four months ago corrected the condition on the left side of her face and doctors are confident that last Tuesday’s operation will correct the condition on the right side of her face.

A bright and lovable little girl with a winning attitude, Chelsey wants her birthday in June to be her “smile day,” that day when she can at last face the world with the same options of expression that we all have.

I await the news that everything she dreams of will be forthcoming. I want her to have what she wants. There is nothing more beguiling than a child’s look of pleasure, nothing sadder than a child’s pain.

But something about Chelsey’s case beyond her affliction bothers me: the fact that she was shunned and teased because of her inability to smile, as though the upward tilt of the mouth ought to be the very sum of one’s being.

And those of us who write and report and comment have contributed to that notion by making much of her condition not because it is life threatening but because it involves the essential face of our time: the smile.

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God knows I’m not opposed to pleasure or to a little girl’s ability to smile or to feelings associated with warmth and well-being.

What troubles me is our obsession with smiling. What troubles me is the hypocrisy a grin can contain. What troubles me, I suppose, is the smile on the face of the tiger that our world has come to represent.

I keep thinking back to the television executive not because he was the most devious person I’ve ever met but because the intensity of his smile faded in the face of reality. Its longevity was determined not by sincerity but by convenience.

His was the smile of actors, the smile of commercials, the smile of elections, the smile of defendants, the smile of salesmen. It was the smile of have-a-nice-day, full of light but lacking heat.

Perhaps Chelsey Thomas, born without a smile, forced to bear the taunts of her peers and the pity of adults, will understand its value more than most, and offer it as it was intended, along with the lesson her travail teaches.

The lesson would be that a real smile ought to be an expression of true emotion and not the expedient grin of a culture attempting to hide its history, sell its wares or mask its inadequacies.

Al Martinez can be reached through the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com