OPERATION CELEBRITY

They want to look young and they demand the best doctors, but they don't want to follow orders or pay their bills. When stars get plastic surgery, they have a list of requests-and some of them could prove risky. By Joan Kron

It looks so wholesome, in a Hollywood sort of way-a beautiful actress walking across a soccer field in a Beverly Hills park with her young son, lugging a folding chair to his weekly game. But nothing is what it seems. While the paparazzi try to get a shot of Tom and Rita or Warren and Annette and their little athletes, this actress looks around furtively for one of the soccer dads, who happens to be a publicist for a local cosmetic surgeon. He has arranged a face-lift consultation for the 35-year-old right here on the sidelines. After an introduction, some small talk, and a few cheers for the kids, the doctor says to her, "Face me, but look straight ahead." She lifts her chin and flips her hair out of her eyes, pretending to watch the game. The doctor examines her inconspicuously and pronounces his diagnosis sotto voce. The actress nods and whispers to him that she'll send her assistant around on Monday to make arrangements.

Celebrity plastic surgery is a clandestine world unto itself with its own rules, lies, codes of behavior, disguises, assumed names, and risks. Its driving force is a simple truth, best articulated by Cher in an interview on her sixtieth birthday: "Looking your age is not a great thing in our business." With that in mind, many stars do whatever is necessary to keep their youthful appearances--and their jobs. "Almost nobody [in Hollywood] doesn't get surgery," says Michael McGuire, a Santa Monica plastic surgeon and former president of the California Society of Plastic Surgeons. But he says that famous people approach the process differently than civilians. "They don't want dramatic changes," he explaxos. "They do their cosmetic surgery in small bites."

It would seem that celebrities, who have the best of everything, would also have the finest medical care that money and their considerable influence can buy, but that's not always the case. Stars often put themselves at risk by their demands for anonymity, their insistence on special treatment and rushed recoveries, and their tendency toward impulsiveness. Daniel Baker, a New York City plastic surgeon, says that he spends as much time talking stars out of surgery as he does actually perating on them. "Sometimes when actors aren't busy, they think, maybe I'd better do some-
thing-and then they screw themselves up." Many of them want after-hours consultations when a doctor's full staff is not present (which removes another safety measure), or they want the surgeon to visit them on movie locations or at home. Essentially, they want the work done, but without any publicity, inconvenience, or detectability.

While most people believe that celebrities are completely within their rights to keep their cosmetic procedures private, "the obsession with secrecy is probably the main obatacle to good patient care," says Steven Hoefflin, a Santa Monica plastic surgeon who has worked on many famous faces. Hoefflin says the use of aliases, for example, turns office visits into a nightmare. Once in his practice, the book that decoded all of the Hollywood pseudonyms got lost, so no one could get patients' charts when
they returned for checkups and more work. According to Hoefflin, celebrity patients often won't even submit to regular physical exams and blood tests. And forget about stars filling out their patient-history forms themselves. "They just assume it will be `taken care of'" says Laurie Palis, a New York City dermatologist. 'They routinely leave off personal contact information from forms, presumably to insure their privacy. But after finding ourselves unable to follow up without a lot of hassle, we
realized that was not acceptable."

While many performers wouldn't dream of dickering about price (in some cases, according to McGuire, they fee(the more expensive the work is, the better it will be), others expect to receive surgery gratis, as if it were a pair of Joe's
Jeans or Dior sunglasses. Hoefflin recalls the ingenue who switched to another doctor when she discovered he was actually going to charge her, Anthony Griffin a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon featured on Exrreme Makeover, is still smarting from the actress who wanted a breast reduction right before a big awards event. "She said, 'I need it done tomorrow,'" the doctor remembers. "We moved things around to accommodate
her, made home calls on Sundays, and when I sent the bill, she never paid it."

PART TWO TO BE CONTINUED...