Will 'Betty' Betray Bogota? Stay Tuned
Soap Star's Transformation Has Colombia Transfixed
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 26, 2001; Page A01
BOGOTA, Colombia -- When she first appeared on the small screen 16 months ago, Betty had attributes never seen before in a Latin American soap opera heroine: Pimples. Oily black hair plastered to her forehead. A mouthful of braces. Also slightly mustachioed, Betty remained nothing if not true to the title of the show: "Betty la fea." Betty the Ugly.
Since then, the nightly half-hour telenovela has become a smash hit and social phenomenon. Betty has graced the covers of the nation's most important newsmagazines -- one naming her "Person of the Year" -- and she's been commented upon by leading political columnists and the president himself during controversial plot twists. David Letterman recently mentioned Betty and her legion of followers, who can see the show in the United States on the Telemundo network.
Here in Bogota, the homely but highly intelligent finance whiz, played by a 27-year-old model named Ana Maria Orozco, has become an empowering Everywoman in a country where winning a national beauty pageant is among the highest expressions of female achievement.
As the show approaches the end of a telenovela's traditional 18-month cycle, however, something is happening to Betty. She is becoming beautiful. And the transformation, which has already included a new hairdo, the purging of her blackheads and replacing her Elvis Costello glasses with more dainty frames, is prompting some feminists who once praised the show for deftly skewering Colombia's aesthetic obsession to call its final chapters a betrayal.
"In all the countries in the world, ugly people are more numerous than beautiful ones, so there has been tremendous public solidarity with Betty," says Fernando Gaitan, Betty's creator who turns out five shows a week by himself. "During its earlier times, fans loved her ugly and wanted her to stay that way. But the truth is now that as the show ends they want to see Betty become beautiful."
It is, perhaps, a tug of tradition that cannot be resisted. Here, people are frequently referred to as "fatso" or "skinny," "baldy" or "blondie." And a constant source of cabdriver conversation is not whether the most beautiful women in the world live in Colombia -- something accepted as an article of faith -- but whether the majority hail from Cali or Medellin.
Colombian soap operas have long revolved around, in Gaitan's words, "the indescribably beautiful" heroine who is also a good person facing long odds at work, home and love. The demographic formula for success -- and Gaitan should know, since he has written the three most successful telenovelas in Colombian history -- is to win over middle- and upper-class women while also capturing the imagination of poor viewers. Above all, as in Hollywood, a happy ending is required.
According to RCN Television, more than 18 million people, or half of every prime-time weeknight audience, tune in to watch Betty and her travails at the upscale yet financially troubled fashion house Eco Moda. The show now appears in 15 Western countries, with 80 million viewers in Latin America alone. Israel and Jordan are next.
Gaitan, a balding 40-year-old father of two daughters, wanted to play against telenovela type when he created Betty for her October 1999 debut on RCN Television. Traditionally, he says, Colombian television has taught that ugly people are poor and of Indian origin, the beautiful rich and European. And only the uncommonly beautiful poor woman overcomes her social circumstances, usually by marrying the hacienda owner or corporate president rather than through individual moxie or wiles.
"Now with plastic surgeons able to repair any blemish or problem with appearance, it has become an obligation to be beautiful," Gaitan says. "So the only women who are ugly today must be poor."
Betty, or more formally Beatriz Pinzon Solano, was to be different: a middle-class woman whose bad hair was keeping her from professional advancement despite two master's degrees. Indeed, the show's logo is a scrap of her résumé with a photo attached -- a requirement among many firms in Latin America.
She finds herself stuck in a back office at Eco Moda, part of a group of similarly aesthetically challenged women who together comprise "The Ugly Women's Platoon." From here, Betty solves problem after problem, serving as indispensable financial counselor and relationship adviser to the brazenly beautiful models who traipse through the halls. Gaitan envisioned the office as a microcosm of his country.
Betty, whom we see type "Single" in the "Marital Status" column of her résumé as the show starts, longs for love in the person of the philandering company president, Armando Mendoza. Son of the company founder, Armando does better matching his tie with his shirt than making corporate financial decisions, and, with about two months to go in the show's cycle, we find Eco Moda in big trouble.
Three questions now dominate the story line: Does Betty end up with Armando, who one night in a fit of drunken passion kissed her, or will she run off with the loyal nerd she has known forever? How will she save Eco Moda, since, given her business acumen, the job will surely be left to her? And, perhaps most important, what will she look like at the end?
These are questions that thousands of Colombians, as well as Betty followers from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires, are trying to influence with bushels of e-mail and in at least three online chat rooms devoted to the show. Gaitan, sitting in his smoky office at RCN headquarters, says with customary calmness that he is being pulled in two directions -- to be a social commentator and to be a soap opera writer who, first and foremost, must please his audience.
"Betty," like his other smash if more traditional hits "Cafe" and "Guajira," is to Gaitan a quintessentially Colombian show without relying on Colombia's well-known problems to define it. The country has been engaged in a brutal civil war for decades, a conflict now intensifying as drug profits fuel the fighting. "This show does not use the word 'massacre' or 'kidnap,' " he says. "There are no guerrillas, paramilitaries or narcos in this show."
But Gaitan was stunned by the hue and cry that ensued when he put Betty in the position of accepting a bribe, a situation as common in Colombia as kidnapping. "The country shut down," he says, referring to a week-long period last year when a textile merchant hoping to fix a bid with Eco Moda offered to deposit $80,000 in a Panamanian bank account for Betty in exchange for her help.
First, every major columnist in the country weighed in, urging the fictional character not to be bought. It was as if William Safire, George Will and David Broder, with great gravity, decided to advise Chandler of "Friends." At the time, two major public corruption cases were playing out in the nation's newspapers. But Betty's dilemma held far more sway over the public imagination -- President Andres Pastrana wrote Gaitan expressing his concern over the situation. And Vice President Gustavo Bell called the writer, urging him to have Betty do the right thing. In the end, she did.
"It was incredible self-censorship -- not on the case of the writer but on the part of Colombian society," says Alejandro Santos, editor in chief of the prestigious Semana magazine, which this year featured Betty on two covers. "The public just didn't want to see it. And half of the people scandalized probably have paid or taken bribes themselves."
Betty's increasing beauty, which began when the show was shot at a national beauty pageant in Cartagena late last year, is shaping up to be an even bigger issue. Santos says the push to transform Betty was inevitable in Colombia's beauty-first culture. "The feminists see it as a problem, but this is the public's aspiration -- to be beautiful," he says. "You can't hide that. And everybody wants a happy ending, especially in Colombia."
Florence Thomas, a columnist for Colombia's leading newspaper, El Tiempo, says Gaitan is squandering another valuable opportunity to teach the country a lesson. The first mistake, she says, came when the show's producers failed to cast an ugly woman in the lead role. They opted instead to disguise a beautiful woman, who though not blond, is lighter skinned than many of the show's racially mixed fans.
"The ugly have been cheated," Thomas says. "He is writing to the needs of the people, who want her to go to the hairdresser, to a glasses shop. But she could have shown us the limits of beauty. Now that opportunity has ended."
Truth be told, for all its popularity, the show has had little visible effect on Colombia's opinion about looks. Advertising that features beautiful people pitching makeup, dieting schemes and other beauty products interrupts each episode.
And for all his remarkable talent and success, Gaitan is not out to hector his fans like some social scold. "This is not a deception," he says. "It is a way to make people's lives better, to make them happy for a half-hour a night. This country is hurting enough."
Martha Pinzon, a 31-year-old mother of two, mops floors at Bogota's El Dorado international airport. She watches Betty every night -- and so, for the first time, does her husband after long days manufacturing kitchen utensils. She endorses the beauty improvements Betty has made so far with one caveat.
"I don't want her to get any more elegant than she is now," Pinzon says. "She is a humble person, and she shouldn't change from that."
As for the man she hopes Betty ends up with, Pinzon chooses Armando, who destroyed his last marriage by cheating on his wife. "I trust him now," she says. "He only has eyes for Betty."
But at Oma Libros, a bookstore, three sales clerks agree that Betty's new style has not gone nearly far enough: The braces must go, and the glasses too. She also needs a better wardrobe.
"The point has already been made that ugly people may not be what they seem, and if she gets more beautiful, it helps to say this even more," says Elizabeth Rojas, a 29-year-old clerk.
But if the transformation continues, wouldn't the clearer message be that, in the end, only beautiful people succeed with love and happiness?
"Yes, that's what it would mean," says Viviana Luna, a 26-year-old clerk standing nearby. "But that's also the truth."