Me, My Hair, and I (7 page)

My Thick Hair

EMMA GILBEY KELLER

M
y current hairstyle is a shaggy bob. I take it quite seriously. Seriously enough to have a board on Pinterest called “Shaggy Bob,” where I add pictures of versions I like. For some reason the board has quite a few followers. They're not my followers (I have loads of boards that are completely ignored) but Shaggy Bob's, so I guess I'm not alone out there in liking this particular style.

What's a shaggy bob? A bob is the neat haircut ending somewhere between ear, chin, and collarbone (think Coco Chanel, Anna Wintour, and various Hillary Clintons), and a shaggy bob is the same thing with layers cut into it for “texture.” You might think of this as a scruffy rather than a shaggy bob, but for those of us with a lot of hair, it's the difference between a pyramid shaped wedge (scruffy) and a style that can actually be quite chic (shaggy).

I take my bob seriously enough to get it cut at Sally Hershberger Downtown (but not by Sally Hershberger herself—that would be overdoing it). Sally was the hairdresser who cut the Meg Ryan version of the shaggy bob that became all the rage back in the day. It's the nineties hair of
When Harry Met Sally
and
You've Got Mail
. Goodness, that's over twenty years ago now and Sally's still going strong. I don't want to boast (or age myself more than I have to), but I was getting shaggy bobs in Tribeca as a twentysomething in the late eighties when I first moved to New York from London—for free, by students on certain Saturday mornings at edgy downtown salons on West Broadway.

These days, James at Sally H. cuts my hair. Two good things about him: (1) He can cut the best shaggy bob on the planet. (2) He's a Brit. So when I'm getting my hair done, we talk about the King's Road and hot chocolate and Marmite and all the other things Brits talk about when they're in the USA. The other day, when I was in the salon getting my hair cut, Sally was there too. She works off to one side behind a partition so you can't see her. I knew she was there, though, because they were playing Sally music, Burt Bacharach, instead of whatever they normally play that I never recognize because I'm too old. At that precise moment, I thought I was in heaven. A Brit-cut shaggy bob in New York and Burt Bacharach music. That is so
me
, I thought. This is so
right
.

I HAVE A
lot of hair, it's very thick, and it's a good texture. I'll be honest: it's one of my best features, but I wasn't brought up to think of it like that—English people are excellent are turning assets into flaws. And they don't like anything that smacks of wretched excess.

“Your hair is so
thick
,” my grandmother used to tell me with a curled-lip emphasis that immediately turned the statement into an insult. Even now I apologize when anyone washing, cutting, or drying it comments on its thickness. “But it's a good thing,” they often reply, in surprise. This is one of the reasons I love America.

When I was a child in London, my American mother took my two brothers and me to get our hair cut in the children's department at Harrods, because Harrods was at the end of our street. We loved going there. In the center of the floor was a rocking horse that you could ride when the old ladies had finished their work on your head. No, they didn't put a bowl over the top and cut round it, as legend has it. But looking back at childhood pictures, I can see how that legend got started.

As far as I can remember, they could do only one style, or maybe my mother got a discount for getting three haircuts all the same. Still, my brothers and I came out all looking identical. If I asked about this, I was told I needed to keep my hair that short because it was so . . . thick. When I got to an age to mildly rebel—I was ten—I asked if I could grow my hair. I was told that because of its thickness it simply couldn't grow past my shoulders. Thickness, as I remember it, was presented to me as a disability. I remember the conversations like this:

ME
: Can I have my hair a bit longer?

MY MOTHER
: No, it's too thick.

ME
: But it's so short.

MY MOTHER
: Because it's so thick. (
Walks off
.)

ME
: (
Rolls eyes
.)

Now I realize she meant it was too thick to be long, because it would look messy. Someone—my mother, for instance—would have to brush it. I can see how all of that seemed like too much effort. Life was an enormous effort for my mother when I was a child. Laundry, grocery shopping, housework, even hair brushing, were either farmed out to other people or just not done. So I accepted a compromise, happy not to look like a boy as I was allowed to grow my hair just as far as my ears. That's how I got my first little bob.

I had a fringe too. Or what Americans called bangs. This was because my eyebrows weren't round like most people's but went up into little mountain peaks at the center. I was called Spock at school. Until I got the fringe. Then the eyebrows were thankfully obscured and everyone shut up.

My mother had a sense of humor that I found incomprehensible as a child but am more in tune with now that I have daughters of my own. On my first passport application, when I was some tender age under five, she wrote “auburn” for hair color, and they accepted it. “Eyes: green. Hair: auburn.” And so it continued through each passport renewal until I was an adult. My mother was living in a society she had a love-hate relationship with. The school uniforms and convent boarding school of my childhood were part of her hate. But with “Eyes: green. Hair: auburn,” she showed me how to be subversive—and glamorous. Until one day when the passport system caught on to the joke, and my hair officially turned brown.

It's still brown auburn, but no longer naturally. My two daughters have inherited my hair, so I can see the original on them. I have the expensive auburn highlights that women my age graduate to when time and circumstances go our way. We call them “caramel” and “honey.” We use the words “tawny” and “ash.” In the summer, we can go as far as “buttery,” but we have to be careful. We don't want to look cheap.

The highlights cost a fortune, but I can't tell you the exact amount, as I've taught myself not to look when I sign the credit card slip. The tips alone make me blush. I like to tell people I have the most expensive hair in New York, but I know I'm wrong. Those women sitting behind Sally H.'s partition are certain to have bills higher than mine.

When I was pregnant with my first child, Molly, I didn't cut my hair. I felt like Björn Borg, who never cut his hair or shaved during Wimbledon, for luck. My hair grew and grew, finally long, and thicker than ever, due to pregnancy hormones and prenatal vitamins. I loved it. Then Molly was born, a large, bouncy, overdue baby. Everything was there—except hair. She was completely bald until she was two. Whose joke was that?

I kept my hair long throughout Molly's early years and those of her younger sister, Alice. The Spock eyebrows were professionally dealt with on a monthly basis so I could get rid of the bangs. I got my hair blown out once a week, and I turned into a sleek New York City housewife. My English friends described me as “glossy” with that same age-old inflection I understood not to be complimentary. Then the girls grew older, and their hair grew longer. It grew down their backs and it was beautiful. It made mine look like what it was, the older woman's version of long, thick hair. Time for a haircut—a return to the shaggy bob.

Coincidentally, my decision to return to the hairstyle of my youth occurred just before I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Was I aware of the coincidence? I'd say not. Instead I'd point out that most breast cancer diagnoses come in late middle age, and that's when most women change hairstyles anyway. What I will admit to is a multitude of visits to the hairdresser before, during, and after my bilateral mastectomy. My body looked awful—swollen, misshapen, and scarred. But if you looked at my hair, you'd think nothing was wrong. A week after my operation, my surgeon told me I was done. No chemo or radiation in my future, because surgery had removed the cancer in its early entirety. The relief at not having to have chemotherapy was enormous, but as I recall I never once considered losing my hair. I just assumed there was so much of it, it would somehow survive.

I found it soothing to get my hair done while I recovered from surgery. A beauty salon was the antithesis of a doctor's office. It was a place I could relax and emerge looking better. Looking better made me feel healthier. It lifted my spirits.

Later that same year, my father died. I spent the last week of his life with him in hospital on the British East Anglian coast. I was in his room practically round the clock and loved being there. I did leave one lunchtime to go to a local place for a wash and blow-dry, but I hated the experience and the result. It was the wrong time to look for an escape. After my dad died, I got on the train to London and went straight to get my hair cut very short. It was similar to my first little ear-length bob.

I've often read about women getting trauma cuts. This was mine. My grief at my father's death was enormous. I was completely engulfed by it. My bob cut back to my ears was its sign. The contrast strikes me now as I write about it. Long, long hair at the birth of my daughter; short, short hair at the death of my father.

Some women might extend the comparison and say something along the lines of there being a reason I was born with thick hair. It's a reflection of the richness of my life and so on. But I'm afraid that's not my style. Still, it's made me think about a period in my early thirties when I drove a convertible VW with the roof permanently down. I felt very Italian. My love life was a chaos that I remember as a series of unfortunate events. My hair was one big tangled mess. That's the analogy for me.

What shall I do with my hair as I grow old? Recently I went to Sweden, where the population is homogeneous enough to describe in broad strokes. I looked at the hair of women in their fifties and sixties and was thrilled to see that they all had shaggy bobs! True, some of them were shaggier than others, and some had bangs while others didn't. But the bobs were there, blond and heavily highlighted. No need to go gray, it seems. Yet the faces were bare of makeup and free from cosmetic procedures. It's a pretty look. Still scruffy but still chic. Feminine, with a definite toughness. This is the hairstyle I want as an old woman. This is how I see myself aging. With thick auburnish hair and wise, green eyes. Glamorous and subversive—still living as my mother taught me to be.

Oh Capello

ADRIANA TRIGIANI

Let me take you back in time to a garden in Pompeii, Italy, in AD 79-ish.

Imagine an Italian mother and her daughter. Pretend it's my mom and me. My mother has perfect Dolores del Rio / Hedy Lamarr hair; present day, think Penélope Cruz and Shalom Harlow, hairwise.
Th
ink smooth, full, waxy, straight brunette hair. For the daughter, imagine Lionel Richie's full-moon Afro from his early days with the Commodores.

Th
ere, beneath the hot Italian sun somewhere outside Rome and just a few kilometers from Naples, Mother sits in her garden sorting beans, her raven hair in a sleek chignon, while her daughter, her unruly hair slicked back with a rope, helps. Lava begins to pour from Vesuvius. Sounds of running and screaming, while molten goo spews over the village. Mother looks at daughter. Instead of saying “Run!” she says, “I wish we could do something with your hair.”

I CAME UP
in the age of Madonna Ciccone, a pop star who changed her hair daily. It was so much fun to watch her go from pitch-black geisha to mahogany-brown curls, from a dirty-blond pixie to neutron-blond bob. But once she hit her midforties, she went Upper East Side blond, where she has stayed for about twelve years. This is upsetting to me, as I expect trends out of her, not long hair with split ends snipped at Supercuts, like, say, my own hair. I figure when Madonna gets scared about changing her hair, something is about to blow again, like Vesuvius.

I watch TCM a lot and study the movie stars of the golden age of Hollywood for hair inspiration. I've had every hair incarnation from the sculptured medium-length hair of Myrna Loy to the sassy short cut of Jean Simmons in the Bible epic, but no matter what I do, my curls fight their way through, and I'm right back at Shirley Temple. Luckily, she gets a film festival once a year on TCM.

I come from a big family. Most of the kids in the family have my mother's hair, a sleek brunette version of wavy, bordering on straight. I got my father's hair, tight curls and fine texture, as if B. B. King and Louis Prima had a baby. The tight curls were there when I was an infant, and then they sort of shook out until I was a teenager, when they came roaring back just in time to kill any chance I might be asked out on a date. Never one to sulk, I shook up my routine and cut my long hair short, into a wedge. It was a disaster. I was the only girl in my ninth-grade class who looked fifty-three.

It wasn't that I was unsophisticated. Yes, I was growing up in the glorious Blue Ridge Mountains, but I read fashion magazines, went to the library, and even bought an out-of-print beauty book from the fifties, a primer called
Taffy's Tips to Teens
. There was a section that helped the reader figure out her face shape so she could choose a complementary hairdo. Taffy instructed the reader to stand in front of a mirror and outline her face with a crayon on the glass. You figured out your shape: oblong, oval, square, round, or heart shaped (mine was a shape called old sponge).

According to Taffy (surely a nom de plume for a drunk book editor out to make extra money to go on a cruise), you were to choose the hairstyle that went with your face shape and stick to it for life. Taffy said I was never to get a pixie. I was never to get a chin-length bob. She didn't mention the wedge, so I figured I was safe. In retrospect, it may be that it was the combination of the short cut and the ashtray-thick lenses in my eyeglasses that ruined my social life, but we can never be sure. All I know is that Taffy's hair rules have stuck. To this day, when I see a long-faced woman with a slicked-back bun, I think, Forehead alert: Taffy said no. You need bangs.
Bangs!

Taffy said a good hairdresser was as important as a good doctor.

I went on a lifelong search to find someone who could cut my hair properly. I did not find that person in Virginia or Indiana. I had high hopes when I moved to New York City, because there was a hair salon on every corner. Surely the odds were finally in my favor and one of these folks could do the job. I learned one important lesson as I went from salon to salon. Never trust a salon with three names if all of them are first names. I could get a good cut at the Gloria In Excelsis Deo Salon, but never at the Charles Thomas William Salon.

I've gone to fancy beauty parlors, low-rent salons, and, once, a woman's basement in Queens in order to save fifty bucks, but it was a wash, since I ended up spending the cash I saved on a cab because I was late for the train. Avoid any long-distance travel when it comes to hair—always choose your neighborhood over a long drive or train ride or flight. If you make it impossible for yourself geographically, you'll be one of those people who is forever letting a cut “grow out.” When you look up “grow out a cut” in the beauty bible, it translates to “cheap and lazy” or “you deserve whatever happens to you because you went to a basement in Queens.”

I'm not blaming the stylists for letting me down. When you have curly hair, your choice in cut is somewhere between Barbra Streisand in
A Star Is Born
and Barbra Streisand in
Th
e Main Event.
Stylists try so hard to change up curly hair, but there are really only two techniques: they either blunt-cut it or layer it. That's all. You could use nail scissors or a Weedwacker, but the results will pretty much be the same—unless you cut bangs. Then you have the Mamie Eisenhower problem.

Mamie, the First Lady of the 1950s, had a wave in her hair, therefore her bangs had a crimp. You don't want crimps in your bangs; you want them to lie flat like the fringe on an ottoman. Every once in a while, I forget this rule, cut the bangs, and have to blow them straight. I get so tired doing this chore, I leave the rest curly—which gives me the look of a stern poodle or a beauty slacker who was exhausted and decided to blow only the front of her head.

Hair is so important to people. When I wrote for television, I couldn't believe how critical hair was to final casting decisions. Long hair was the only way to go for women—even if they were over eighty. Men had to have hair, store bought or otherwise, even if they were over eighty.

I would study the faces of the actors at auditions, listen to their words, and watch as a character on the page seemed to inhabit their bodies as they interpreted a scene. The network saw nothing but hair. “But we can change the hair!” I'd proclaim. They would look at me as though mine were on fire.

Why couldn't executives imagine a sultry brunette as a hot blond, or a hot blond as a glorious redhead? Perhaps my curls made me think outside the box. I acknowledge the possibilities of hair because my own is so limiting. I refused to accept that hair alone could kill any chance an actor had at a great role. I was so relieved that a writer didn't have to obsess about such things, though more than one person has told me that behind my back, producers would say, “Get me that curly-haired Italian girl in New York.”

No one escapes the hair label.

I married a man with hair, and now I'm married to a man who only has some. Same guy. Is it a sin that I love that he's bald? My husband is handsome, but without hair he looks older than me, which is the great blessing of a long marriage. One day a man came to fix our furnace, and he said, “The last time I was here, I told your father this furnace was on borrowed time.” I didn't bother to tell the repairman that my father had been dead for nine years. Instead, I left him there and tore up those rickety basement stairs to call my husband. On the way, I fell, hit my chin, bruised my hip, and busted my lip, but it didn't matter. I crawled to the phone to tell my husband the bad news: We need a new furnace. And the good news: The repairman thinks you're my father!

When I get depressed, I just think of that story, and suddenly I'm gay and happy and it's springtime everywhere!

When I had a baby girl with my handsome husband, I was shocked when her hair grew in—it was blond—and it was straight. When I took her to the park, people spoke Spanish to me. With my dark hair, they thought I was her nanny. The mix-up was not without its benefits. I learned that “arriba” on the swings means “Push me higher, Mommy!”

Any conversation about hair is really, at its root, about vanity. I learned that early on, as a theater major in college, when one of my first jobs was to dye an actor's brown hair gray. I read the instructions on the box carefully, but as a brunette, I knew very little about peroxide. I applied the creamy mixture to the actor's hair and put a shower cap on his head. When I removed the cap about forty minutes later, his hair was the color of a new lime—a bright yellowish green. The director began to scream; the actor, to weep. The look in the young man's eyes when he saw that I had turned him into something you shove into a Bloody Mary was one I will never forget. The director ran around in a circle like Henny Penny, cursing me. I had ruined their lives; at the very least, their play. But I didn't let it kill my spirit. When you entrust your head to a girl with 20/80 vision in one eye and an astigmatism and 20/200 in the other, you get what you pay for, which, for the record, was green hair.

Flash forward to last year, when I found Edward, the perfect stylist, after a lifetime of searching for him. Our enchantment was mutual and immediate. When I said, “No soccer mom,” he did his best to give me courant and funky with his magic scissors. He was so flexible! I'd call Edward on a whim and he'd take me, any day, any time. The salon where he worked was bohemian in that artistic East Village style. There were mannequins with eyes missing, paintings that moved, and a nude statue that took me four visits to figure out was a nude. The manager, who had to be a great-nephew of Ernest Borgnine, as he was his dead ringer, was six feet three inches and wore kneesocks, culottes, and a Glenda Jackson ginger-red pageboy.

Despite the
House of Wax
decor at the House of Hair, I ignored the surroundings and settled in with Edward. We talked and laughed, and he gave my curls something they hadn't seen in twenty years of growth: he gave them love.

Things could go wrong in my life, and there Edward would be, my stylist and prince, waiting for me with a cold glass of water that had slices of cucumber floating in it (it's good for the hair or the colon; either way, I'm a taker), and I'd relax, knowing that in an hour, I'd have big, wild, shiny curls, fashion be ignored and be damned, in an era where even Lionel Richie has straight hair.

Edward would tell me that he loved my curls, and his enthusiasm made me love them too. In an age where every third person asks me if I've “tried a blowout” or tells me “you should do keratin,” I realize that this straight-hair-over-curly thing is real: they want curls banned. I'm a rebel—well, not exactly. I just do what's easy—and
easy
translated from the Italian means curly (and if it doesn't, it should).

One day, Edward called me. He said he had to leave New York City. He had seen a news report that said if everyone left their apartments in Manhattan at the same moment, the population of the city could not fit in the streets. He couldn't live in a place where everyone couldn't fit in the streets and he hoped I understood. He said he was going to find himself. I said, “Edward, if you are going to find yourself, who was that man who gave me the perfect haircut?” He laughed and told me that life is short. Hair grows out, and people have to grow up. He called this his
Eat, Pray, Love
tour. He told me he needed to see the world in a new way. Evidently my curls could not make him stay. I wished him well, hung up, and had a nervous breakdown.

I called my mother and told her about Edward's soul-journ. She was silent as I wept. Finally she said, “Now, will you try a blowout? Curls are out, you know.”

I know, Ma. I know.