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Lyhaptep òix "I need someone to look after me, wifey. " Late in the 1940s, Kay took a step that would change her appearance and, she hoped, her career, for the better: she had her nose done. Rhinoplasty was nothing new—Fanny Brice had her nose bobbed back in the 1920s. And plastic surgery had made great leaps during the war. Kay was a believer in going right to the top, so she used her many social and government friends to approach the father of British plastic surgery, Sir Archibald Mclndoe. Mclndoe had established the Centre for Plastic and Jaw Surgery at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead and did outstanding work rehabilitating burned and bomb-injured RAF pilots (he had been knighted in 1947 for his work). He founded the British Association of Plastic Surgeons and, when Kay met him, was a council member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Archibald Mclndoe did not make a habit of prettying-up starlets, so Kay's success with him is astonishing. But Mclndoe was known for his psychological insights as well as for his surgical skill. Not only was Kay a promising actress held back by her previous association with London Town, but she was saddled with an inferiority complex easy for a doctor to discern . "Kay hated her nose," friends assert, and throughout her life Kay's own interviews are filled with jabs at her appearance: "People say I'm glamorous , but really, I'm not," she told reporter Jesse Zunser in 1957. "Why do you suppose producers make me get under those huge hats? To show my face? Don't believe it! Millions of women are more beautiful than I am—I mean, now, after all, let's face it!" Even years after her surgery, as Dinah Sheridan recalls, "she did nothing but grumble about her nose. She loathed it" She would tell friends, "I know what I look like—two profiles pasted together!" The combination of Kays crippling complex and her influential friends convinced Mclndoe to bob her attractive, if somewhat long, nose. According to Kay, Mclndoe could achieve one of two shapes: a ski-slope or a pug. 4 4 The Brief, Madcap Life of Kau. Kendall The one she chose was a more feminine version of Bob Hope's, or the Tin Man's from The Wizard of Oz—so pointed that it threatened to put out the eyes of her leading men. Somehow it worked and brought all her features together. It was slim, elegant, and aristocratic, which went well with Kay's light-as-air, Lady of the Manor personality. But it was also a tad silly-looking ; just long and swoopy enough to give her a madcap appearance. Kay would wiggle her nose between her fingers and crow, "Look—no cartilage! It's all Mclndoe!" It was similar to the look possessed by light comedienne Ina Claire, who once sighed, "Can you imagine anyone with a nose that tips up as mine does playing a noble, tragic character? I might get along fairly well being noble and sad until I suddenly turned my profile." Whether it was an accident or not, Kay's new nose typecast her as a comedienne. It turned out to be a fortuitous choice. Kay never admitted to anyone that she'd hated her face enough to have a knife taken to it—she invented a horrific car crash to cover up. "She said she'd gone through the windscreen and had smashed up her face from the bridge of her nose to the chin," said her longtime friend Dirk Bogarde. "What rubbish!" says Kim Kendall. "We certainly would have known about any car crash." Indeed, toward the end of her life Kay herself completely forgot her own cover story and blithely told a reporter about her nose, "I got it from my mother, she has one just like it. It's awful, really—I have terrible sinus and this nose is so thin I can scarcely breathe through it." Mclndoe later told surgeon Eric Gustavson that he himself hated the job he'd done on Kay's nose and had offered her a re-do, but that she refused, claiming that she loved it. Mclndoe begged her not to tell anyone who her surgeon had been—a promise Kay obviously did not keep. After the operation, Kay claimed to have no sense of smell or taste and would go through great theatrics over it. Once, while dining with...

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