FACE FACTS
Jane Fonda’s comments are sparking debate about how stars should address their cosmetic surgery
TALK about awkward. As far as car-crash TV goes, last week’s wreck involved a Maserati and a Lamborghini. Appearing on “Megyn Kelly Today” — the former Fox News anchor’s new show on NBC — 79-year-old Jane Fonda snapped at the host for asking about her plastic surgery. “We really want to talk about that now?” Fonda said, clearly riled. “Well, one of the things people think about when they look at you is how amazing you look,” replied a rather desperate-sounding Kelly. Tumbleweeds swept across the screen before Fonda shut down the topic for good, insisting that she jujust wanted to talk about her new movie with Robert Redford, “Our Souls at Night.” The day after the cringe-worthy moment, the Oscar-winning actress told “Enter-tainment Tonight Canada”: “[I was] a little bit [shocked by the question] . . . it’s a weird thing to bring up — whether I’ve had plastic surgery or not. I have and
I’ve talked about it. Seemed like the wrong time and place to ask that question.”
Going public about plastic surgery is a polarizing topic. On one hand, it’s everywhere: Surgeons live-stream procedures on social media, and reality stars bring their viewers into the doctor’s office with them for treatments. (Kim Kardashian has gotten Botox and laser procedures on her show.) But there’s also a premium on “natural” beauty, with celebs such as Gwyneth Paltrow eschewing conventional cosmetics for “beautifying” tonics. It’s enough to leave the average woman who looks to these stars for advice with whiplash.
Is speaking out about the measures you take to look young and gorgeous a case of too much information, or should everyone be honest about their routines, even if that includes nips and tucks? Moreover, must women be ready to discuss — and defend — their looks at all times?
For those who have followed Fonda’s age-defying face and body for decades, her reluctance to speak out on the topic puzzled some of her fans.
“It [Kelly’s query] was a very obvious question to ask because Jane Fonda has done so much publicly about her face-lift,” 89-year-old Joan Kron, former cosmetic surgery columnist at Allure magazine, tells The Post. “It seems as if she is OK to talk about it [plastic surgery] on her own terms, but not other people’s.”
Kron — director and producer of a new documentary about plastic surgery and comediennes, “Take My Nose . . . Please!” premiering in New York on Friday — still admires Fonda and her candor.
“The good thing about Fonda is that she’s just about the only dramatic actress in Hollywood that admits to having had work,” says the Upper East Sider, who has herself undergone three face-lifts as well as various filler treatments. “Like me, she has never been shy about it.”
Fonda has been quite open in the past. “I had bags taken out from under my eyes and the looseness taken out from under my chin,” Fonda told The Post in 2010. “I did it because I got tired of walking down the street and catching myself in a window, looking tired — and I didn’t feel that way.”
But Kron doesn’t condemn stars who don’t admit to going under the knife, because being judged for altering your face or body is a legitimate concern in our society.
“Throughout history, people have devalued those who’ve had plastic surgery,” she says. Still, she is aware of the message that denying it can send to the general public, who might believe that a celebrity’s age-defying features are merely genetic, the result of rigorous (and expensive) personal training or because of a hard-tomaintain fad diet — leading women to beat themselves up when they can’t achieve similar results.
“All the time on TV, actresses are being complimented on how fabulous they look,” says Kron. “And they’ll say: ‘Oh, I have this fantastic new diet.’ Without naming their patients, doctors have said to me: ‘I’ve done a major face-lift and liposuction on somebody, and she’s putting it down to diet on TV!’ ”
Even though they’re in the public eye, many stars believe their looks aren’t worthy of discussion.
“Bridget Jones’s Diary’s” Renée Zellweger was accused of having an eye lift that made her almost unrecognizable. In 2016, after critics claimed she should “own it,” she wrote a lengthy essay in HuffPost bristling at the attacks.
“Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes,” Zellweger, then 47, wrote. “This fact is of no true import to anyone at all, but that the possibility alone was discussed among respected journalists and became a public conversation is a disconcerting illustration of news/entertainment confusion and society’s fixation on physicality.”
It was a call to arms similar to thespian Kate Winslet’s efforts, with fellow Brits Rachel Weisz and Emma Thompson, to form what Winslet described as the “British Anti-Cosmetic Surgery League.” Practices such as facelifts and liposuction “go against my morals,” Winslet, now 41, said in 2011.
Thompson, now 58, chimed in: “I’m not fiddling about with myself. We’re in this awful youth-driven thing now where everybody needs to look 30 at 60.” And Weisz, now 47, said that people “who look too perfect don’t look sexy or particularly beautiful.”
Meanwhile, as far as transparency goes, top Upper East Side cosmetic surgeon Dr. Stephen Greenberg has a somewhat surprising take. The doctor, who has a roster of celebrity patients on his books, believes they should take embarrassing questions about plastic surgery in stride.
“If it’s somebody out in the public, and they have something done, they have to accept that somebody’s going to question it. It’s part of being a public figure. They can’t have it both ways.”