Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (26 page)

The rise of this new ideal did not entirely eliminate facial hair, but it did establish a new configuration of meaning. Those choosing to grow a mustache were now, depending on their age, either quaintly old-fashioned or daringly unconventional. Mustaches remained a widely accepted style in continental Europe after the war, but the smooth look steadily gained ground because of what some Europeans described as the “Americanization” of men’s faces.
17
The facial hair divide now distinguished two contrasting masculine types: sociable and autonomous. A man was neither wholly one nor the other, of course, but the presence and size of a mustache or beard—or their absence—served to move a man one way or another along the continuum. According to the twentieth-century gender code, a clean-shaven man’s virtue indicated, as it had for Lawrence of Arabia, his commitment to his male peers and to local, national, or corporate institutions. The mustached or bearded man, by contrast, was much more his own man: a patriarch, authority figure, or free agent who was able to play by his own rules. These were stereotypes, of course, but like most stereotypes they carried real social power. This interpretive frame held firm for performer and audience alike, offering men with facial hair both risks and rewards, depending on who was watching.

For most urban men, a focus on sports and the muscled body diminished the importance of facial hair in the performance of manliness. This was particularly true for those influenced by Eugen Sandow and the “physical culture” movement, in that hair interfered with the display of both Grecian youthfulness and well-defined muscles. Americans were quicker than Europeans to adopt the new clean-shaven look, and many observers thought this reflected the Americans’ particular enthusiasm
for both youthfulness and sports.
18
This idea was not without foundation. When a
Chicago Tribune
reporter asked about mustaches in 1925, one man in the street opined that they were not good because “right now everybody wants to look young and keep looking young, and we all like to have everybody else looking young and feel young. And that’s a good sign.”
19
Joseph Schusser, a New Yorker who managed America’s largest barbershop chain, believed the same thing and surmised that, in America, youthfulness was associated with strength. “Every American man,” he argued, “wants to have ‘a strong face;’ square jaws, with a clean-cut, firm mouth. This is our ideal, we try to present that kind of face to the world.”
20

Americans may have been the quicker to abandon their facial hair, but Europeans were not far behind. Beards survived only on the faces of old or outmoded men who provided amusement in the 1920s for children who spotted them in the street. Young Frenchmen played games of “tennis-barbe,” while British children delighted in games of “Beaver,” which was also scored like tennis, with greater point values given for rarer beards, such as a red one, or the rarest sighting of all, a royal beard—which scored as game, set, and match.
21
One legend has it that the arrival of a bearded royal at an assembly at the University of Cambridge prompted the undergraduates to rise to their feet and shout in unison “Royal Beaver! Game, Set and Match!”
22

Even those great champions of tradition, the British aristocracy, succumbed by the 1920s to the overwhelming compulsion of masculine redefinition. The story is told of a sharp exchange between Lord Quickswood and his cousin Algernon Cecil. In spite of the fact that his father was Lord Salisbury, Britain’s last bearded prime minister, Lord Quickswood would not abide his cousin’s anachronistic beard, inquiring, “Algernon, why have you grown that beard?” Algernon replied, “Well, why not? Our Lord is supposed to have been bearded.” Quickswood retorted, “That’s no answer. Our Lord was not a gentleman.”
23

Clark Gable, or at least his film characters, were not perfect gentlemen either, and that was his special charm. While European and American manliness shifted toward well-regulated sociability after the Great War,
masculine roguishness persisted in the cultural imagination, often in the form of mustachioed movie stars. In the land of wish-fulfillment called Hollywood, film studios produced visions of rugged and rakish individualism that was neither possible nor acceptable in everyday existence. For this reason it made perfect sense that many stars in the early decades of film history, including Adolphe Menjou, Ronald Colman, Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks (Senior and Junior), and Clark Gable
sported natty mustaches. In the 1930s, a dash of daring hair became the hallmark of swashbuckling romantic heroes. Its visual and metaphorical opposite was the dark smudge on the lip of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp.

Clark Gable was the “King of Hollywood” in part because he was the most successful in deploying the romantic potential of mustached manliness. Unlike Chaplin, who was clean-shaven off camera, Gable cut the same dashing figure wherever he appeared, though he would make adjustments to his hair from time to time. For his best known role, as Rhett Butler in the blockbuster epic
Gone with the Wind
, he took pains to determine just the right sort of lip ornament, finally deciding on “a dashing thin line with spiked waxed ends.”
24
This, Gable believed, was just the look for Butler, a resourceful, self-centered gambler and smuggler. Though a rogue and rule-breaker, Rhett was also honest and unpretentious. In short, he was fine example of Hollywood’s rugged individualist. His forwardness in his first encounter with the vivacious and proud Scarlett O’Hara provokes her to declare, “Sir, you are no gentleman!” to which Rhett coolly responds, “And you, miss, are no lady. Don’t think that I hold that against you. Ladies have never held any charm for me.” This comment, of course, does not win Scarlett over. She is doggedly determined to prove herself a true lady by marrying the smooth-faced and gentlemanly Ashley Wilkes.

Audiences thrilled to see a rugged Rhett stand masterfully above the fray, immune to those who would question his character and judgment. In his second encounter with Scarlett, he brushes off her compliments about his service to the Southern cause:

Here was the colorful nonconformist to match the strong-willed Scarlett O’Hara. After rescuing Scarlett from burning Atlanta, Rhett opens up: “I love you, Scarlett, in spite of you, me, and whole silly world going to pieces around us, I love you because we are both alike: bad lots, both
of us, selfish and shrewd, but able to look things in their eyes and call them by their right names.” Scarlett, unfortunately, cannot be so honest in her feelings. She is stuck on the unobtainable Ashley and her selfish dreams of being better than she is. Even after she marries Rhett, and he sweeps his pouty wife off her feet and has his way with her, Scarlett still cannot allow her obvious pleasure to interfere with her fantasy of being a true lady. In the end, Rhett leaves her, and Scarlett belatedly becomes aware that she has made a grave mistake. She beseeches her departing lover, “Where shall I go; what shall I do?” to which he famously replies, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” This was a manly answer to the troubles of life, and to those who spurn you.

Long before these lines were written for him, Hollywood observers had noted that Gable’s appeal as a leading man was built on his devil-may-care forcefulness. Hollywood reporter Ruth Biery declared in 1932 that he was “the epitome of the ruthless, handsome knock-’em-down, treat-’em-rough, virile, modern cave man,” qualities that made him popular with men and alluring to women.
25
The year after this description appeared in print, Gable grew his trademark mustache, which he wore, with only a few exceptions, for the rest of his life. There was even a public kerfuffle in 1936 when Warner Brothers Studios, which had obtained Gable on loan from Metro Goldwyn Mayer, ordered him to shave for a movie. MGM formally complained to Warner Brothers that this would interfere with their star’s image and lower the value of one of its prime assets.
26

By the mid-1930s mustaches like Gable’s were all the rage. According to the
Los Angeles Times
, half the leading men in Hollywood had joined the trend.
27
Even the mild-mannered Bing Crosby was urged by a flood of fan letters to enhance his upper lip, which he did in 1935 for his part in the musical
Mississippi
. The studios believed they were on to something, and they often ordered their leading men to meet the new standard. In 1939, a Hollywood reporter noted that “nearly every big-time, and small-time film star too, is wooing and winning the ladies with the aid of a bit of brush on his upper lip.”
28
When, in 1940, a director insisted that the young star Robert Taylor grow a mustache for his film
Waterloo Bridge
, he did so “to make him appear more mature, rugged, and virile” instead of a “well-scrubbed choir boy.”
29

While Gable stuck with his mustache for the rest of his life, other movie actors began in the 1940s to abandon what detractors derided as “lip lettuce.” Even in its heyday there were indications of resistance. In 1937 it was reported that Errol Flynn was receiving fan mail both for and against his mustache, and Flynn was unsure what he should do.
30
Some studios decided not to leave it to chance; in one case, a series of screen tests featuring Tyrone Power with different sorts of facial hair was shown to a sample audience of women.
31
This led to Power’s clean-shaven appearance in his subsequent film,
Old Chicago
. A number of female stars were on record as disapproving of facial hair, including Marsha Hunt, Marlene Dietrich, Doris Nolan, Martha Raye, and Dorothy Lamour.
32
Actresses were no more unanimous than Errol Flynn’s female fans, however. In 1940, for example, Rosalind Russell expressed approval for a hairy lip, while Barbara Stanwyck opined that “worn properly, the mustache can lend character and dignity to a man’s face.”
33

If Clark Gable was the king of Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin was its court jester. Chaplin improvised this famous tramp character one day in 1914 during a break in filming. On a lark, to amuse his fellow actors, he put on parts of their costumes: the baggy trousers of a much bigger man, the tight-fitting coat of a thinner actor, and another’s derby hat. According to one of those present, Chaplin dashed to the makeup room for a piece of crepe hair, cutting himself a mustache and trimming the sides to a rectangle small enough to wiggle when he made a face.
34
He was a huge hit with the actors and stagehands. The tramp was born.

The character was a fool, with a fool’s motley costume. At a time when mustaches were falling from favor, and those that remained were pencil-thin, the tramp’s square smudge, as ill-proportioned and ill-fitting as his jacket, served as their comedic opposite. This inappropriate and outdated style contributed to what Chaplin himself described as the tramp’s “shabby gentility.”
35
The tramp’s mustache also hinted at the character’s manic masculinity. In truth, Gable’s “modern cave man” and Chaplin’s tramp had more in common than one would first imagine. They were both rule-breakers and loners, and while the tramp was poor and weak, he was also, like Gable’s characters, surprisingly and refreshingly resilient. Viewed in this light, Chaplin’s lip smudge was not so absurd after all.

In December 1939, as American audiences crowded into theaters to see Rhett and Scarlett face a disastrous war, an even greater cataclysm was commencing in Europe. Four months earlier, a triumphant Adolf Hitler hung up the phone at his Berghof retreat in Bavaria and exclaimed, “I have the world in my pocket!”
36
He had just received news that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had agreed to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany, giving the two tyrants a free hand to carve up Eastern Europe between them. Hitler confidante Albert Speer later intimated that “to see the names of Hitler and Stalin linked in friendship on a piece of paper was the most staggering, the most exciting turn of events I could possibly have imagined.”
37
According to Winston Churchill, “the sinister news broke upon the world like an explosion.”
38
For him it was the culminating failure of prewar British diplomacy. The nonaggression pact was the green light for Hitler to start World War II.

All the powers knew that the Nazis were planning to attack Poland in the summer of 1939, and Stalin was not certain what to do and whom to trust. In the end, he sensed that he could understand Hitler better than Britain and France, which were hesitating to strike an accord with the Soviet Union to counter Naziism. The western Europeans were counting too much on the historical and ideological animosity between fascist Germany and communist Russia. The British and French might have worked harder to forestall Hitler’s diplomatic moves had they considered more thoroughly the ways in which Hitler and Stalin were alike, for it was these commonalities that allowed them to forge a deal. Neither Hitler nor Stalin recognized moral or political constraints on his pursuit of power. Each had a militaristic view of the world and favored military clothing and symbols, including mustaches, in presenting an impressive face to the world. Their mutual commitment to power and mustaches was not a simple coincidence, either. Both knew that an extraordinary and forceful face was essential for men who ruled through adulation and fear. Stalin and Hitler never met, but they believed they understood each other. When negotiations between them sputtered in 1939, Hitler circumvented diplomatic channels and wrote to the Soviet leader directly, and Stalin reciprocated. As only dictators could, they dispensed with formalities and got straight to business.

An analysis of mustaches might have alerted the western allies to the real possibility of German-Soviet agreement. Both dictators came by their look quite deliberately, and their choices offered important clues about their thinking. Each man made an effort with his hair to stand apart and above the men around him by refusing to conform either to past traditions or current trends.

As leader of the Soviet Union since 1922, Stalin’s political fortunes were tied to the ideological and symbolic heritage of communism.
There was no specific leftist style as such, but beards of some kind were a common feature among the movement’s leading men. Besides Marx and Engels, August Bebel, the longtime leader of the German Social Democrats, was also famous for his luxuriant beard. German labor leaders emulated Bebel’s look in the decades before World War I, contrasting themselves to right-wing imitators of the Kaiser’s mustachioed grandiloquence.
39
Another German socialist leader, Eduard Bernstein, though he renounced revolution in favor of constitutional reform, did not retreat on the hair front. In France, Jean Jaurés fit the mold as he railed against both the center and the right. In Russia, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky opted for smaller pointed beards, helpful in distinguishing themselves, on the one hand, from the hirsute tsars, priests, and peasants, and, on the other hand, from the clean-shaven Alexander Kerensky and his fellow professionals and industrialists who formed a centrist government after the tsar abdicated in 1917. Trotsky forged a particularly memorable style for himself, aptly described by a visiting English artist in the 1920s: “Full face he is a Mephisto. His eyebrows go up, at an angle, and the lower part of his face tapers into a pointed and defiant beard.”
40

Hair on the chin helped a balding Lenin appear wiser and more forceful. Ironically, he was beardless during the critical months of the Bolshevik revolution, having shaved to disguise himself from the police. As he pressed forward with revolution, Lenin adamantly refused to be photographed for many months afterward, until his mark of uniqueness and wisdom was fully restored.
41
He rightly understood the propaganda power of his bearded image. Trotsky confirmed this after Lenin’s death, remarking in a review of children’s writings about Lenin that for young people, “Lenin’s beard becomes a very important element. It seems to symbolize maturity, manliness, and the fighting spirit.”
42

Stalin did not look like these paragons of the left. While Lenin and Trotsky favored civilian coats and ties, Stalin, from 1918 onward, opted for military-style tunics, trousers, and leather boots.
43
The mustache rather than the beard was the natural complement to this choice. His deportment declared that he was more militant and less cerebral than his communist predecessors.

Hitler’s style was also explicitly militant. He served throughout World War I as a corporal stationed at field offices, where he cultivated a typical officer’s adornment according to long military tradition. Germany’s
defeat, however, was also the downfall of the German mustache. Even the Kaiser reduced himself in 1918 to a small, pacific beard. Hitler rejected this humiliation and made it his life’s mission to revive German military might and national fortunes. It made perfect sense for him to preserve the stiff upper lip, but he understood that Germany would not rise again by clinging to the past. He knew his country must modernize and that he must present himself as a modern leader. He needed new symbols and a new mustache.

The “toothbrush” mustache that he settled on was known before the war as a modern look, becoming popular at the beginning of the twentieth century as larger effusions of hair fell from favor. In Germany the new style was sometimes adopted as a more practical and hygienic version of the traditional style, but it was also derided on occasion as an undesirable American or English import.
44
The German military establishment was certainly opposed. In 1914, the commander of the German Guard Corps forbade this “modern fashion,” declaring that “a trifling tuft of hair under the nose is unsuitable for Prussian soldiers and irreconcilable with the true German character.”
45
After the war, however, such regulations and traditions were abandoned in the quest for a new German manliness. As he honed his skills and image on the rostrums of Nazi party rallies, Hitler experimented with different haircuts and mustache trims to get the right effect. The grandly upturned
kaiserbart
, the drooping walrus of Bismarck, and even the ordinary officer’s trim all invoked the failed past. Clean shaving, on the other hand, though admirable for evoking youth and efficiency, also suggested the bland and unromantic modernity of Germany’s western rivals. The famous square of dark hair under the nose became the ideal alternative. It delivered just enough of that forceful distinctiveness that Hitler needed to project an aura of command.
46

No one was more alert to the power of symbols and propaganda than Hitler. As the embodiment of his movement, he needed always to appear imperturbably strong. Hair on his lip, even a small amount, helped him avoid betraying vulnerability. This was keenly perceived in 1931 by James Abbe, the first foreign photographer allowed access to Hitler. Abbe came away from his much-anticipated photo shoot frustrated by his failure to capture the inner dimensions of Hitler’s personality. His camera, he said, simply could not penetrate the mustache mask. Abbe had previously photographed Charlie Chaplin and recalled
that when the movie star removed his tramp costume and fake fuzz, Chaplin the man emerged before the camera. “But I couldn’t ask Hitler to remove his mustache. Hitler, Hitlerism, and the entire Nazi movement, are identified with that mustache. Like the swastika, the brown shirt . . . it lures voters and adorers and baffles reporters and photographers.”
47
Hitler could smile for others, Abbe discovered, but never for the camera. “Once or twice he started to smile in my direction, but each time he saw the camera the smile froze.” Hitler remained barricaded behind his steely facade.

Besides this inscrutable defensive quality, Hitler’s mustache had an unintentionally favorable effect for him. Hitler’s resemblance to Chaplin’s iconic tramp led western Europeans and Americans to underestimate the Fuhrer as something of a clown. Hitler scholar Hugh Trevor-Roper made this observation, and essayist Ron Rosenbaum has amplified it, accusing Chaplin himself of promoting this perception through his mockery of the Fuhrer in his film
The Great Dictator
.
48
There is ample evidence that Trevor-Roper and Rosenbaum are right. In 1931, for example, the editors of the
Boston Globe
found it incredible that “a man who would wear the little scrub of a mustache affected by Adolf Hitler could really be the rip-snorting, hard-boiled Fascist leader that he is, especially when one remembers some other famous German mustaches.”
49
Even after the war had begun in 1939, there was a propensity to belittle rather than denounce the German dictator, prompting a correspondent to pen an eloquent letter to the
Times
of London complaining that official British programming on the BBC was aimed at mocking Hitler and his silly mustache, rather than exposing him as “a greater peril than ever Napoleon was.”
50

Stalin and Hitler presented a similar face to the world in part to show what they wanted to be, and also what they did
not
want to be. They refused to be men either of the bearded past or of the clean-shaven present. They intended to be modern warriors, blending cold ferocity with modern efficiency to carry out unprecedented destruction.