On fame, fortune, celebrity clientele, and cosmetic surgery—then vs now

It’s a warm afternoon at a small café in South Florida, and Dr. Kurt Wagner is looking decidedly cool. Dressed in denim and wearing designer eyewear, at age 75 he resembles someone years younger. That is appropriate, given his career of making people look younger—and in the glamorous environs of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, no less. To say he has aged gracefully over time, however, is a misnomer. Having performed some 20,000 cosmetic procedures himself, he has also relied on a succession of facelifts, eye jobs, hair and chin transplants—initially undertaken decades ago and replenished since.

“I practice what I preach,” Wagner says, proud of a career that has found him on both sides of the scalpel, and frequently in the limelight himself. His penchant for publicity and self-promotion helped fuel his fame as the youngest cosmetic surgeon ever to practice in movieland, and he never relinquished the opportunity to tout his skills on national television or in the pages of the world’s most popular publications.

The Glamour Years

A native of Vienna, Wagner became one of the youngest board-certified plastic surgeons in the U.S. in 1967, when he opened an office in Beverly Hills following a stint in the military (where he honed his skills) and a medical degree from New York University. He was soon servicing a celebrity clientele, thanks to referrals from his Beverly Hills hairdresser friend Harold Chalef. Among his first show business clients were Don Adams’ wife, Jack Lemon’s wife, and the wife of Jerry Lewis’ manager.

“What was very popular at the time were eyelid and facelifts. I was doing hair transplants, too,” Wagner recalls. “I always said that if there had been a decathlon in plastic surgery, I would win it, because I did just about everything. If I couldn’t do it well, I’d send the patient elsewhere.”

Eventually Wagner’s following among the rich and famous swelled to include the likes of Red Skelton, Elizabeth Taylor, June Allyson, Edward Everett Horton, Greer Garson, and Barbara Feldman—yes, Agent 99 in the original “Get Smart” television series.

Wagner says that he performed facelifts on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Peter Lorre and Joan Crawford, too, had a little nip and tuck in his care. The glamorous and seductive Hedy Lamarr, another of his patients, had a facelift and her eyes done. Yul Brynner also had his eyes done by Wagner and, in turn, suggested an improvement for his doctor to consider.

“He told me, ‘You’d look good with your head shaved like me’ as he sat there in my office puffing away on a cigarette.”

Even so, Wagner claims he never pandered to his star charges. “Most people in show business get an overstated sense of importance about who they are and what they do,” he says. “But I didn’t cater to these people. You manage them same way you manage anyone… I’d tell them, ‘This is what I can do, and this is what I can’t do. And if you’re too demanding, I’m not going to deal with you.’ I’ve turned down as many patients as I’ve accepted. Some demanded certain things and I wouldn’t do it.”

“I didn’t know half the people I was operating on because I was too busy,” he says. “People would come in and say ‘I’m an actor,’ but if it wasn’t someone from the ‘40s or ‘50s, I wouldn’t know. There was a show called ‘General Hospital’ and one day I happened to pass a television set… my God, wouldn’t you know—the patient is my patient, the doctor is my patient, the orderly is my patient. I said to myself. ‘Look what I did—I did them all!’

Not only did Wagner perform procedures on the stars, however; along the way he became something of a celebrity himself. In the 1970s his personal fame took off. After a local NBC affiliate did a makeover show that featured him, he grabbed the cover of LOOK magazine with a story about facelifts for men, then released his first book, “How to Win in the Youth Game: The Magic of Plastic Surgery.” In short order, Wagner found himself feted by Merv Griffin, Steve Allen, the Tonight Show, the Tomorrow Show, Good Morning America and the BBC. He became the new darling of the international media (Time, Cosmopolitan, Der Spiegel, and Stern magazines among them) with a growing celebrity clientele to match.

Eventually his following among the rich and famous swelled to include the likes of Red Skelton, Elizabeth Taylor, June Allyson, Edward Everett Horton, Greer Garson, and Barbara Feldman—yes, Agent 99 in the original “Get Smart” television series.

“I didn’t solicit these people,” says Wagner, “and there were plenty of other guys who did movie stars. But I did [my share of] nipping and tucking.” Nonetheless, Wagner says he was never an elitist, and did plenty of work on ‘ordinary’ people, including ‘half the show girls’ in Las Vegas. “My message was that plastic surgery isn’t only for the movie stars, but also for anyone who could afford it.”

Then vs Now

By the late 1990s, the Wagners had grown tired of the glamour of Southern California, and opted to relocate to South Florida. “I just wanted to leave,” Wagner recalls. “I was burned out. So we went to Costa Rica for awhile and then we came here. I spent my time playing golf until my wife said, ‘You’re going to die if you don’t do anything.’” Consequently, Wagner joined the practice of Dr. Jason Pozner, a Boca Raton cosmetic surgeon.

Wagner is quick to acknowledge the advances in his profession over the decades, and how much has changed. “More people are doing procedures in their offices and… there are more people practicing cosmetic surgery, and most of them are better trained,” he says. And whereas Wagner prided himself on being a doc of all trades, nowadays practitioners tend to specialize in different areas. Equally significant are the technological innovations.

“Today there is less scarring, for example, because we use endoscopes to make smaller incisions,” he says. Lasers, unheard of in Wagner’s Hollywood heyday, have become a favored tool of the trade, and there’s been an increase in the number of materials used as fillers. Wagner himself is currently working with a company developing methods to extract stem cells from fat for use in fat grafting (transfer). Today’s holistic approach to the patient has also transformed the cosmetic surgery field, he says.

One early star encounter for Wagner transpired during his residency at Cedars, when he was called to the room of a certain “Mrs. Miller” who was recovering from a gall bladder attack and writhing in pain. As it turned out, that Mrs. Miller was actually one Miss Monroe, married at the time to playwright Arthur Miller.

“It’s not enough to do a facelift now. You have to be concerned with what the patient does after they leave the table. They have to learn to eat better, to live better, to have better skin—it’s about continual maintenance,” he says.
Wagner himself designed new shapes for breast implants, pushing Dow from their standard ‘tear drop’ to various round and oval forms that could accommodate different tastes and body shapes. “I became a plastic surgeon because I wanted my
mother to have breast [augmentation],” says Wagner, half seriously, and while he did perform the procedures for his aunts and cousins, his old world Austrian mother “never let me do it.”

“I watched the evolution of implants go from silicone gel, which was relatively firm, to thinner and thinner capsules, with thinner gels, and then saline, and then some polyurethane,” says Wagner, who worked with Dow Corning on silicone implants until they were taken off the market in the 1990s. “Now the implants have firm [silicone] gel again, and it’s basically still a similar operation. It’s sort of like having a Cadillac in the 1960s and an Escalade now. Different but the same.”

And when the results have gone awry or are taking time to heal? “What you say is ‘Don’t worry, papa’s here… you trusted me… this is going to get better.’ And eventually the worry does go away. They know that I will be there, that they can call up and I won’t say, ‘Don’t bother me,’ or, ‘Take two aspirins and go away.’ They know I will listen.”

Of course, Wagner will tell you, it still comes down to skill.

“Sometimes you just have to have it,” he says with a smile. “Some people are just masters [at their work]. I’d like to think that at times in my life I was close to being a master.”