It’s easy to believe that Babe Marlowe never took a bad photograph. With her dark, bobbed hair and a naturally intimate smile, Babe was stunning. Her body, face, and smile were vessels for conventional, flapper-era attractiveness. 

Although those vessels have disappeared, her striking image remains. It remains in the browned pages of old family scrapbooks and forgotten Pinterest posts with descriptions like “Ziegfeld Girl, Babe Marlowe, by Alfred Cheney Johnson c.1920” and “Flo’s Follies: The Showgirls L-R.”  In one photograph, dated September, 1917, Babe’s eyes look definitively at an invisible point above the camera, her hands clasping a delicate silk dress, which lays carefully and seductively across her shoulders. In another, Babe’s body is draped in white fabric and her head supports five burning wicks. She is a human candelabra. At age 19, Babe Marlowe — according to famed producer Florenz “Flo” Ziegfeld — was one of the most beautiful girls in the world. She was also my great-grandmother.

Of course, Babe was a stage name. Her real name was Albertine. My family still remembers her as Babe, although we choose to remember her faintly, by the dwindling flicker of her candlelight. The only visible reminder of her face rests in the monstrous portrait behind the dining room table at my grandmother’s house. Babe’s elegant dark eyes stare at the clinking forks and knives of her only living relatives, dressed in old sweatshirts painted with stains. We do not want to forget her. We just want her to blend into normalcy. But Babe’s fading fire is still brighter than most. Looking too closely at it, day after day, is enough to drive anyone insane.

Sitting at the dining room table, I try not to look too closely at Babe. I think she’s had enough of being looked at for one lifetime. As a Ziegfeld Girl, that was her job — to be looked at. People looked at her in lavish New York City theatres, during rooftop parties, and even in the streets. Babe didn’t sing or dance. She didn’t even tell jokes. Babe just was, and that was enough. 

In the 1910s and 20s, Florenz Ziegfeld, a man with a record of sleeping with his showgirls, all but owned Broadway. Ziegfeld decided that he himself would dictate who was and wasn’t beautiful. Nobody questioned him, and opinion turned to fact. He believed that “beauty and brains don’t often mix” and “grey eyes cannot be beautiful because they are too intellectual.” Perhaps my great-grandmother lacked brains and grey eyes, because Ziegfeld certainly thought she was beautiful. 

Or maybe, by deeming her “beautiful,” Ziegfeld himself stole her brains. Or maybe he just told her she wasn’t allowed to use them, at least not while she was a Ziegfeld Girl. That might explain the “Ziegfeld Curse,” the unsettling tale that, one-by-one, Ziegfeld’s showgirls crumbled into a pile of alcoholism, bankruptcy, abusive relationships, depression, suicide. Babe made it out relatively unscathed. She faded from the spotlight without a fuss, married a man who owned a can factory, and a few years later, gave birth to my grandmother. Babe was never close with her daughter; I suspect it had something to do with survivors’ guilt. In the decade after the final curtain closed on the “Ziegfeld Follies of 1931,” 13 former Ziegfeld Girls died; nine of them committed suicide. Jerie Rogers, Babe’s fellow Ziegfeld star, reportedly jumped 13 stories to her death. 

I am most in tune with my body while looking out across a sea of skyscrapers, though I have never been able to figure out why. After all, they’re just buildings. Humans constructed them, piece by piece. They’re not some grand natural phenomenon, like the one my own body is supposed to be. But then again, I believe rooftops at night, especially in New York City, are inherently existential. Every little light in a city of 5.8 million people represents a tiny pocket of life. In every light, there are bodies. The bodies know they are being watched, just as Babe knew. But I don’t think they mind. Where Babe was a candle, these bodies are fluorescent bulbs. Beautiful as a collective, from a distance. Babe was best seen up close, under the microscopic view of hungry eyes.

Last summer, I lived among the skyscrapers in the East Village. I spent a lot of time on rooftops with strangers. Sometimes, when I was being looked at, it helped to imagine myself as Babe: the most beautiful girl in the world. It was easier to pretend the lookers were appreciating and not feasting. I wasn’t the life of the party on those rooftops, and I didn’t talk often. But it didn’t matter, because I just was. And that was, apparently, enough. 

I am not conceited; and yet, I counted how many people called me beautiful last summer in New York City. There was my boyfriend at the time, also living in the city. The garbage man, who saw me leave my boyfriend’s apartment with my shirt only halfway buttoned. The homeless man who, more specifically, said I had “beautiful feet.” The anonymous figure on the subway who airdropped me a note saying “hey beauty in the white shirt, give me your number ;).” I stopped keeping track after that. 

I don’t know if Babe became depressed in her later years, and it would be wrong to diagnose someone with a mental illness whom I never knew. But the notion of being a candle, only later to be snuffed because you are “no longer desirable,” sounds, to me, rather depressing. Beauty and sorrow are not mutually exclusive. I’ve learned that brains and beauty aren’t either; it takes a certain kind of intellect to know yourself so well you want to forget.

According to Dr. Renee Engeln, focus on one’s external elements (i.e., appearance) increases the likelihood of body dissatisfaction, guilt, and shame. It diminishes mental resources that might otherwise be allocated elsewhere. Such focus steals your money, wastes your time, and, since it disproportionately affects women, strengthens the patriarchy. It causes eating disorders, anxiety, and depression.

A woman’s value in society is often exclusively linked to her appearance. The Ziegfeld Girls did nothing but that — appear. Dr. Engeln’s research shows that even positive affirmation of a woman’s appearance can have negative effects. She wrote a book on the phenomenon: “Beauty Sickness.” The Ziegfeld Curse, it seems, might be more adequately dubbed a Ziegfeld disease. 

Read also:
The Filmy Babe: Aakanksha Sardana
An Open Letter To The Self-Conscious Woman
How Moving Out Of London Gave Me A Glimpse Of How I Should Be Treated