By now you’ve probably seen “The New New Face,” Jonathan Van Meter’s cover story in the current issue of New York. If not, read it whenever you can: it’s superb. Even if you find plastic surgery ghastly to contemplate based on the most hideous of its results, this is an amazingly light-fingered piece of work. It’s an effortless read even if the subject skeeves you; it dashes any expectations you might have almost gleefully–and none more so than when Van Meter brings into the story Liz Rosenberg, Madonna and Cher’s publicist.

Page 3 of the online version ends with a teaser that says, “Next: What Madonna’s publicist says about celebrities and plastic surgery.” Great, I thought, I’m sure I really want to know that. What, variations on “no comment”? Not even close:

I decided to e-mail Liz Rosenberg, Madonna’s publicist since fuh-evah . . . to see if she would have lunch with me and talk about celebrities and plastic surgery. “Absofuckinlutely,” she wrote back. “Though why you think anyone I represent has done anything to their faces is beyond me. Ha-ha. Getting any artist besides Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin to go on record about the subject is not easy. Of course one of the great quotes came from my gal Cher, who said in an interview, ‘If I want to put my tits on my back it’s my business.’ Whatever Madonna has had done–and I really don’t know–she looks truly amazing.”

Rosenberg is in splendid form over lunch, ripping into Madonna’s brother’s new tell-all (”Guy Ritchie is homophobic? It’s so stupid. No, Christopher, it’s just you he didn’t like”) and all but admitting her charges have had work done. “Improve the product,” she figures, is a star’s motto, and this is one way of doing it. Whatever you think of such procedures, Van Meter’s piece has real insight into their PR functions as well as their aesthetics.

About-Face [NYM]