After The Makeover

By Walter Kirn

Stacey Hoffman, 32, wasn't always a babe. Two years ago, when she drove her pickup truck into an auto-window-tinting shop owned by Kevin May in Lincoln, Neb., May, six years her senior, barely noticed her. Then an aide at a nearby nursing home and mired in a rocky, miserable relationship, Stacey weighed 180 lbs., deeply disliked the sight of her own face and didn't exactly radiate self-confidence. She didn't radiate much of anything, except perhaps a conviction that she looked 50 and would never be as happy or as attractive as Lisa, her bikini-contest-winning kid sister. The only detail May remembers about Stacey's visit to his shop that day is that she ordered a set of floor mats and never returned to pick them up.

In the period since that non-meeting, though, something happened--something out of a postmodern fairy tale that finally caused Kevin to pay attention and set Stacey's life on a fresh course. Thanks to the plastic surgeons, personal trainers, hair stylists and wardrobe consultants of the hit ABC TV series Extreme Makeover, homely Stacey became a raving beauty. After $18,000 worth of liposuction procedures, brow and eye lifts, Botox injections and dental work, Stacey went home to Nebraska from Hollywood an astonishing 35 lbs. lighter and looking like a newly minted pop star. In no time, her troublesome boyfriend was history and May, who glimpsed her again at a local street dance, was in hot pursuit. There were a few glitches, though: her 6-year-old niece Alexis failed to recognize her, and her co-workers at the nursing home resented her new image, she contends, and caused her to change jobs.

It has been more than a year since Stacey's transformation, time enough to assess its early consequences for her and those around her. Her story, like those of other recipients of Extreme Makeover's aesthetic magic, shows that when ugly ducklings become swans (particularly if surgery is involved) ruffled feathers can ensue, not to mention a fair amount of swelling--physical, emotional and social. In its desire to produce inspiring fables, the program plays down these complications, but they're real, and they raise important questions. Can human beings really change from the outside in? Does suddenly looking like a million bucks alienate those who can't afford to? And after the free limo ride is over, how easy is it to maintain a face and body granted by the whims of the TV gods?

"Everything about me was round. I just felt like a snowman," says Dan Restione, 41, a Seattle radio producer whose makeover last summer took six weeks and could have cost him an estimated $80,000 if he'd had to pay for it. For that kind of money, Dan deserved bionic superpowers, but what he got--a slimmed-down torso, a more prominent chin, sculpted cheeks, a fuller hairline, and teeth as white as Aspen after a blizzard--made him feel like an "action hero," he says, and lifted him out of a multiyear depression that had followed a divorce. If ever a man was ready for some superficial happiness, it was the teeth-grinding, chain-smoking Dan, who dubs his premakeover self the "king of cynics."

His ex-wife Ashley Zimmerman concurs. "You are now as fabulous on the outside as you are on the inside," she says. Dan wouldn't argue. He's a positive thinker now, full of can-do, upbeat mottoes and brimming over with assertive high spirits. The man whose favorite sayings used to be "Love is a joke" and "Sex is just friction" spends his time these days flirting and dancing. He sincerely believes that "your life is in your hands and you can make it better." His eyes, no longer obscured by thick glasses, thanks to LASIK surgery, are a striking bluish green. His weight is down from 270 lbs. to something approaching normal for a 5-ft. 7-in. man.

Although he has discarded his $10,000 hairpiece because the glue that attached it to his scalp kept peeling off and he still puffs Marlboros, Dan is on a roll. Some of the people around him feel run over, however, as he readily acknowledges. "People are sensitive to my changing," he says. Chief among them is his daughter Bonnie, 11, who thought of her old dad as a cuddly teddy bear and somehow doesn't trust his new svelte form and game-show-host good looks. Nor does she understand how she fits into her father's new romantic life with Lesli, a waitress who is 17 years his junior and has just moved into his apartment. "The time that he used to make for her or us as a family," says Dan's ex-wife, "is now devoted to the girlfriend. So Bonnie, I would say, is really angry. In her mind, he's dumped her." One person's empowerment, it seems, can be another's abandonment.

For much of her premakeover existence, Tammy Guthrie, 41, a mother of three in St. Petersburg, Fla., was a drab, weary homemaker in sweat pants and a T shirt. Then the Hollywood fairies intervened. They gave her a bright porcelain smile, a sassy California hairdo, a neck lift, a face-lift and, at least for a while, a bold new attitude that revved up her relationship with her husband Wally. "Our romance had really waned over the years," she says. Wally felt as if he were having an affair in the weeks that followed Tammy's return, but since then things have cooled. A regular date night quickly faded from the couple's busy schedule. Soon Tammy's fancy new hairstyle was gone too, replaced by a more maternal, down-home cut.

Karen Richardson has stuck with her new look and changed her eating and shopping habits accordingly. Karen, 44, an emergency-room nurse from Wilson, Ark., who hated her nose and always dreamed of going without glasses, corrected both problems, made some other fixes and arrived back at work newly cheerful and gregarious. Young patients who used to shy away from her because she looked permanently grouchy, she says, suddenly sought her company.

Such a happy post-op adjustment isn't guaranteed, though, which is one of the reasons that Dr. Stephen Schendel, professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford University, has mixed feelings about television's real-life, high-concept Cinderella stories. "It shows people what's possible," he says, "but on the other hand it leads to false expectations." Schendel feels the program glosses over "the difficulties of the postoperative period." The doctor also finds it worrisome that the show's producers offer no formal counseling to the participants. "Who's following up?" he asks. "And if they do have concerns, whom do they go see?" According to producer Marla Brodsky, the show will put participants in touch with a doctor or therapist, but only if asked. "If you need us, by all means come to us," she says. "But will we send doctors out to you and have them call you every week? No, because there's no need."

Another problem with the program is that it may be manufacturing a new form of dissatisfaction among people--particularly those without the money for a full face-and-body overhaul. In the growing list of American wants that, once identified, turn into needs, the desire for a radically new appearance just as the old one is showing signs of wear could be a source of unfathomable resentment. Already, specialized clinics devoted to remodeling the rich in the manner shown on Extreme Makeover are springing up. One of these, the Advanced Aesthetics Institute, based in West Palm Beach, Fla., intends to open branches soon in Dallas, Miami and Beverly Hills, Calif. Given that list of ritzy addresses, it's not unreasonable to imagine that one's ZIP code may someday determine one's appearance.

Stacey Hoffman felt the sting of others' resentment when she went back to work at her Nebraska nursing home. "People just made it miserable for me," she complains. She refuses to let it bring her down, though. Her dream these days is to land a sales position with Planet Thong, a suggestively named lingerie start-up that sounds just perfect for the new Stacey.

What happened to the old one? Maybe it's lying on the operating-room floor.

--Reported by Steve Barnes/Wilson, Rita Healy/Lincoln, Laura A. Locke/Seattle, Wendy Malloy/St. Petersburg and Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Steve Barnes/Wilson, Rita Healy/Lincoln, Laura A. Locke/Seattle, Wendy Malloy/St. Petersburg and Andrea Sachs/New York