I read somewhere that the average man grows about ten
yards of hair during his life, so I guess I’d look like an Afghan goatherd if
it weren’t for generations of barbers and hairdressers who’ve washed, cut and
dried my hair.
And what an
incredible cast of characters they’ve been. I can't remember my very earliest
haircuts, but the first barber I recall, long ago in the mid-1930s, had a shop
on High Street in our country town in Southeast England, between a pie shop and
a movie house. He was a dapper little man with a neatly trimmed mustache and,
believe it or not, his name was Mr. Tidy.
Mr.
Tidy’s barbershop was always busy. His customers sat in cane chairs along a
mirrored wall, reading newspapers that my father, a staid and serious man,
would never have allowed in our house. These reported little real news, but
spicy stories about society divorces, or bishops running away with actresses.
But for me there were also comic strips and, when I could read, I met Dagwood
Bumstead and Popeye, and Dick Tracy.
Mr. Tidy’s
barber’s chair was a miracle of chrome and leather on a swiveling pedestal that
could be pedaled up and down, and had the words ‘Made in America’ emblazoned on
a panel in its ornate silver filigree. When it was my turn, Mr. Tidy put a wooden
box on the seat and lifted me onto it.
He worked quickly and I watched, fascinated, as the hair clippings fell
on the floor around the chair. When he’d finished, he’d stoop and lift a wooden
trapdoor by its tiny brass doorknob, and sweep the clippings under the floorboards.
When I was
eight, I was sent to a boys-only boarding school about seventy miles from home,
and later to another much bigger one. At both schools, barbers came from the
town at regular intervals, carrying their equipment in black leather suitcases,
and set-up shop in the sports changing rooms. After the quiet orderliness of
Mr. Tidy’s shop, these sessions were rowdy and boisterous. The visitors clearly
didn’t think enforcing discipline was a part of their job, and the older boys fought on the floor and
elbowed the younger ones aside in the waiting line. For the smaller, younger
boys, having a haircut could be an ordeal, and often took a long time.
At
Sandhurst – Britain’s equivalent of West Point – there was a full-time
barbershop among the stables and stores tucked away behind the Academy’s
elegant buildings. Haircuts were free, probably because the authorities thought
we’d mutiny if forced to part with real money to have our hair cropped like
convicts. It was little comfort to know that distinguished former graduates
such as Sir Winston Churchill, Field Marshall (‘Monty’) Montgomery, the king of
Jordan, several members of the Royal Family and celebrities had sat in those
very same oak chairs.
The
years passed and I suffered the attention of regimental barbers in half a dozen
countries. But at least we were now officers, and could grow our hair a bit
longer and indulge in a little individualism.
Later I left
the army, I joined a London public relations firm as a trainee. By then I was
at last allowed to pick and choose whoever cut my hair. But on a monthly salary
of 41 pounds – today worth about $62 – my choice of coiffeurs was limited to
men who practiced in small back rooms behind tobacconists’ stores. The result
was often little better than the clumsy attentions of a regimental barber.
But in 1959, on my wedding day in London, I
had the most exclusive trim and shave of my life. I’d spent my last night of
bachelor bliss at the apartment of a friend of my father-in-law who was shaved
daily at Harrods, the venerable store that sells anything you can imagine at
unimaginable prices to unbelievably wealthy people. In its low-lit, walnut
paneled barbershop, respectful only-speak-when-you’re spoken-to professionals shaved
my host and me with badger-hair brushes and cutthroat razors. We lay side by
side on what seemed more like operating tables than Mr. Tidy’s chrome,
all-American barber’s chair back in the 1930s. There were hot towels and
cologne to follow, and a massage of the neck and shoulders. The faintest sound
of baroque music drifted from invisible speakers.
Nearly twenty
years later, in the late 70s, came haircuts and shaves that were at the same
time a wide-awake dream of fair women and the best barbering of a lifetime.
South East Asia has turned a normally humdrum experience into an all-but erotic
fantasy. Men’s hairdressing shops in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore are a
blend of an Arabian
Nights harem and an Upper East Side beauty shop. It’s not that there’s any
back-room impropriety going on, but simply that – however sexist this may seem four
decades later – the dozen or more geisha-like young women in these places are
recruited as much for their beauty and vivacity as for their tonsorial talents.
Their deft, perfectly manicured hands seem not so much to work on one’s head
and face, but almost to caress them, and any full-blooded male’s pulse quickens
with their warm proximity. I wonder whether, now that I’m in my eighties, their
welcome would be half as seductive.
Nowadays, accompanied
by my wife, I take my graying head to her hairdresser in Greenwich Village. Kathleen,
a charming and attractive Irish lady, now cuts my hair. She has a graduated son and plies her art better
than anyone has ever done, but the place somehow lacks the mystical sensuality
of the Orient. And, in place of the racy daily papers with their comic strips
in Mr. Tidy’s shop, there are mostly magazines, and books about hairstyling.
Things have
changed. But so, of course have I.
