My grandmother Elsie couldn't bear to look at photographs of Princess Diana. A pretty face was spoiled, she felt, by the thick streak of kohl along the bottom of Diana's eyes. Odder still, the kohl was sometimes blue. To Elsie, this was a form of self-mutilation: Diana might as well have taken crayons and scribbled all over herself. 'Why must she do it?' Elsie would ask, with genuine puzzlement. My grandmother was born in 1908, two years after Madeleine Carroll, the blonde star of The 39 Steps, whom she had known slightly before she was famous. Carroll - correctly in her view - only lined above her eyes. Right to the end (she died aged 94 in 2003), Elsie's criterion for female beauty remained Margaret Lockwood, Hitchcock's other early star (so good in The Lady Vanishes), whose top eyelids were sootily shadowed, mascara'd and lined, but whose lower lids remained untouched. Elsie's eyeliner days were long behind her; her grooming consisted of Pond's Cold Cream, a spritz of L'Air du Temps and a dab of Max Factor's Truly Fair Crème Puff. Still, when judging others, she clung to the old rules: top lid, good; lower lid, bad.

LRB 8 July 2010 | PDF Download