Two Blushing Pilgrims
Just before Romeo kisses Juliet for the first time, he says, “My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand, . . .” and she’s hooked. The lovers banter about lips for the rest of the scene. They’re besotted with lips. And who could blame them? Everybody remembers their first kiss. I may have conveniently forgotten a few abortive lunges, but I certainly recall the first time a girl kissed back. As naive as we both were (we’re talking the suburbs of the Midwest in the early ‘50s), we still knew just what to do. Holding hands wasn’t enough, and rubbing noses held little appeal.
A guileless smooch was the most natural act. I can no longer recall her name, but I do remember the sweet fullness of her lips and a heady sensation that made me aware that I was entering the adult world. Very few among us, after a first kiss, think: Well, now that I’ve done that, I don’t have to do it again. I, like most everyone else, was launching a never-ending pursuit.
As the baby boomers march along, their lips are wrinkling a bit and narrowing. They’ve had a lifetime of watching giant lips on movie screens, offering lessons in kissing technique. Aging lips have made collagen a popular, if expensive and slightly desperate, procedure. In “The First Wives Club,” Goldie Hawn’s character pursued that solution and wound up looking wonderfully preposterous. A few seasons ago, Barbara Hershey had collagen injected into her lips for her role in “Beaches.” She looked great, but then again, when the collagen disappeared and her lips returned to normal, she still looked great. The fullest lips seem to belong to French women. The Paris pout can be seen to great advantage on the young Bardot or, more recently, Isabelle Adjani.
Hollywood has offered the world decades of memorable lips. My nominee for the best-ever lips is Ingrid Bergman, whose plump, soft-cushioned mouth, which bore only the faintest trace of lipstick, made her appear both wholesome and erotic, a powerful and sometimes confusing combination. Today, when movie lips send a mixed signal, it’s likely to be a blend of the tart and the cutie-pie. Drew Barrymore’s American version of the Paris pout is a vivid example. Barrymore’s counterpart in an earlier era might have been the “It” girl, Clara Bow, with her bee-stung, kewpie-doll lips, which were caricatured in the pen-and-ink form of Betty Boop.
But the most famous movie lips, which always seemed on the verge of trembling, belonged to Marilyn Monroe. There was nothing unclear about the carnal signal that her ample lips presented. Just the sight of them made strong men quiver. Monroe’s lips might have suggested availability, but it was of a vulnerable sort, not hard or threatening like the scorcher Gloria Grahame, who often played loose women in the 1940s and ‘50s. The lewd charade of her mouth, painted with a high false lip line, screamed “cheap” as surely as black fishnet stockings and a dangling cigarette.
Other memorable screen lips of the moment: Julia Roberts and Kim Basinger. Other gaudy lips of the past: Colette. OK, she was a novelist, but she seemed like an actress. In her later years, she so overpainted her mouth that it looked like a bloody smear.
From the beginning, movies have fetishized lips. Painted lips, as the filmmakers and their audience well knew, were a sign of sexual license, and yet no matter how exaggerated, lips escaped the censors. Excessive cleavage wasn’t permitted; a word as mild as “damn” was forbidden. But even the most garish mouth was acceptable. It might have been the movies’ earliest secret thrill.
On today’s big screen, explicit love scenes have been done so often that the sequences feel stamped out by machine, as if pornographic stock footage had been dropped into an otherwise traditional movie. But kisses, tender mouths lip to lip, tentative or passionate, can make us all still sigh.
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Makeup: Gianaolo Ceciliato/Judy Casey, New York City; Model: Michele Rozmarin/Elite, New York City-L.A.