Plastic surgery, John Wayne

There's a website. What's it's name? Awful Plastic Surgery. It turns out pretty much ALL the celebrities have had cosmetic surgery. Even the kids. Ali Lohan has breast implants, her lips have been plumped and she has veneers on her teeth.

They say Ashlee Simpson has had two nosejobs, breast implants and a bizarre chin implant.

Miley Cyrus got veneers and also, they think, something called a gingivectomy which makes your gums smaller. She was showing too much gum when she smiled.

Zac Efron had a nosejob and got his teeth fixed.

This has been going on since the '20s!

...although it is widely accepted that many of today’s celebrities have gone under the knife, it is an astonishing fact that in the past some of the biggest stars – men and women fêted for their supposed natural good looks in a seemingly more romantic age – were used as guinea pigs in the studios’ quest to manufacture the perfect celebrity.
According to a revelatory new BBC1 documentary, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth were just a few of the stars who secretly submitted themselves to the scalpel. Plastic surgery in Hollywood dates back as far as the Twenties. However, some of the earlier operations proved disastrous, leaving patients permanently disfigured. ‘My mother was made to have her ears pinned back and they wanted her to have a nose job,’ says Carrie Fisher. ‘But she refused the nose job because they were really butchering them then.’

Mary Pickford – the silent film star known as ‘America’s sweetheart’ and the wife of Douglas Fairbanks – was left looking almost mummified by an unsophisticated face-lift in the early Thirties. Her skin was stretched so tight across her face that she was left unable to smile, her mouth, according to one commentator, left looking like a ‘little stiff, red-lined orifice in the face of a mummy’. Similarly, Carmen Miranda was another victim of the macabre face-lift technique and was forced to endure a permanent expression of surprise. Funny girl Lucille Ball was so keen on this stretch-and-pull surgery that her eyebrows gradually floated up her forehead and nearly disappeared into her hairline.

‘The early experiments in cosmetic surgery were quite crude,’ says surgeon to the stars Dr. Richard Fleming, 57, who lives in Brentwood, California, with his wife Margaret. ‘Many women were left with a rather windblown look after having a face-lift, while for years surgeons could only do one kind of nose. It used to be the case where you could walk around Hollywood and identify the surgeon by the style of a star’s nose.’

Even John Wayne...

Few people realised that John Wayne...underwent a series of operations, including a procedure to correct his flabby neck, a face-lift and upper eyelid surgery in order to look better on camera. When he entered his 50s, studio bosses urged him to consider cosmetic surgery to boost his image as a Hollywood hero. After initially refusing – he loathed the toupee thrust upon him by the studio – he finally relented when he entered his 60s, with an operation to remove excess skin from his neck and upper eyelids. The procedure was performed by Dr Franklin Ashley, the surgeon who had operated on Rita Hayworth. ‘When John Wayne came in for his surgery, I got him ready and he was on the table,’ says Norma Gerber, Ashley’s former nurse. ‘I found his pulse was racing and I had to indicate to Dr Ashley without letting John Wayne know. He said, “Hold on a minute, Duke,” and went out and got him a little injection of Valium because he was so nervous, his hands were sweating. They’re all little children when it comes to surgery.’ In order to keep the operation a secret. on being released from hospital, John Wayne went to stay at the surgeon’s home, where he was spotted by the doctor’s son Frank Ashley. Seeing the star wrapped in bandages, the boy assumed John Wayne had gone blind, and told all his school friends about the star’s misfortune. ‘In those days – I’m talking about maybe 30 years ago – men just didn’t do that,’ says Pilar Wayne Upchurch, the former wife of John Wayne. ‘It wasn’t something that was freely discussed; you had to hide for a couple of weeks.’

This is from an article written ten years ago. You can find it here:

http://www.bevhills.com/news/2001/04/28/hollywood-knives/