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Hostile makeover: could the beauty technicians of Dallas improve on decades of careful neglect?

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The before and after photos were my idea. I insisted, in fact. They were to be my evidence in case this experiment went terribly awry. Generally I mistrust the concept of makeovers, subscribing to the firm belief that plucking out a pig's snout hairs and exfoliating his mud-caked backside are no more effective than painting him with lipstick, an exercise in folly much discussed during the last presidential campaign. Nine times out of ten, the pig won't be able to tell the difference, and neither will anyone else. Personally, having devoted 74 hard years to creating the before, I was reluctant to put myself in the hands of a so-called "makeup artist," who, with a few dabs of monkey gland oil, might undo my dedicated years of debauchery in her pursuit of some unattainable after. Yet the editors of this magazine insisted. They cajoled and wheedled until I agreed to submit myself to their questionable plan: an extreme and total makeover at the hands of a Dallas stylist. As a condition of the surrender, however, I put them on notice that if the after was substantially inferior to the before, they could expect to hear from my attorney.

As I flew to Dallas on a foggy morning a week before Christmas to meet my makeoverers, I made a mental inventory of my scars and blemishes. The Frankenstein-quality scar that zigzags down the length of my breastplate, as well as the smaller, jagged scar on the inside of my left knee, commemorates an event in 1988 in which a surgeon sawed open my chest, removed a damaged heart artery, and replaced it with a vein extracted from my leg. The cell-phone-size bulge that swells above my left breast is a pacemaker-defibrillator. There are other deformities and irregularities that have become a part of my native character, including ten clawlike toenails and a 38-inch waist that testifies to too many pints of ale and plump pigeon pies. Yet what others might view as flaws I prefer to think of as badges of authenticity, memorials to the nobility of...

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