Hollywood Hairitage - hairstyles in Hollywood - Brief Article

WITH BLOW DRY, THE SILVER SCREEN FOLLICLE FASCINATION CONTINUES. HERE WE TEASE THE SUBJECT

Almost all of us humans have hair on our heads at some time in our lives (yes, I, The Fabulous Lypsinka, admit that I'm human). So hair and the world of hairstyling often serve to unify themes in the visual medium known as cinema. Who can forget the worldwide uproar when I dyed blond my abundantly thick, naturally red locks for the film noir I Wake Up Lip-Synching (1953)? And poor Lana Turner, who plucked her eyebrows to play an Asian siren in The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938), only to have them never grow in again. She spent the rest of her life daily painting on fresh arches. And then there was Hitchcock's subtle hair fetish: Check out the loving back-of-the-head camera caresses of blond screen goddesses Anne Baxter, Kim Novak, and Tippi Hedren in I Confess (1953), Vertigo (1958), and Marnie (1964).

Hair was so important in early Hollywood that Joan Crawford, at the height of her power as a 1930s movie star, had MGM import Sydney Guilaroff, a hairdresser she discovered in New York. Guilaroff became so popular at the fabled studio that the imaginary Manhattan day spa in George Cukor's film The Women (1940) was even named Sydney's. Over 30 years later, Guilaroff still held sway at MGM. You can actually see Sydney styling a tousled Geraldine Page in the film Sweet Bird of Youth (1962).

John Waters's skewed hair obsession pops up in his subversive masterpiece Female Trouble (1975), in which a fascist married couple run the manic Lipstick Beauty Salon. (In a nod to Waters's idol William Castle and Castle's Barbara Stanwyck shocker The Night Walker [1964], the Dashers live in an apartment behind the salon.) Waters's follicular fanaticism fully flowered in the more sweet-natured Hairspray (1988). Next stop for Hair-spray: an upcoming Broadway musical version.

Hal Ashby brilliantly portrayed the milieu of Beverly Hills hairstyling and Jay Sebring/Vidal Sassoon--type celebrity hairdressers in Shampoo (1975), an alternately hilarious and melancholy satire of politics and what used to be known as the Generation Gap. In Herbert Ross's Steel Magnolias (1989), Dolly Parton runs a Southern, small-town establishment that serves women as a bonding refuge. Both films cleverly capitalize on the salon as a lively place. And why not? As Al Pacino once said, "Life is people." And I, Lypsinka, add, "People equals hair!" (Excepting, perhaps, my male maid John Epperson, who is forever asking for a raise in order to afford his monthly ration of hair-regeneration pills. "Propecia, get in here!")

Now comes Blow Dry, The First Official Hair Movie of the New Millennium. I have deemed it such, and as The Official Celebrity of the New Millennium (it says so on www.lypsinka.com), I have the power to do so. Like a Strictly Ballroom (1992) with hair, Blow Dry focuses on the world of hairstyling competitions (yes, there are such things; I've been in two of them) to observe, with detachment and mordancy, alternative family values and the nebulousness of life and sexuality. Colorful and affecting, the film stars Natasha Richardson, model Heidi Klum, Rachel Leigh Cook, Hugh Bonneville, and Josh Hartnett and does for hair what The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) did for outrageous, over-the-top drag.

Well, I could go on forever here, but it's time for my weekly trip on the Concorde to make my appointment at coiffurier extraordinaire, Alexandre de Paris!

Lypsinka is the female alter-ego of actor John Epperson.

THREE HAIRY QUESTIONS FOR THREE STAR HAIRDRESSERS

INTERVIEW: If Hollywood were to make a movie of your career, who would you choose to play the lead?

EUGENE SOULIEMAN: Not Warren Beatty.

I think it would be an English actor named Phil Daniels. He's in a great film called Quadrophenia [1979].

FREDERIC FEKKAI: Daniel Day-Lewis. I think he's very sexy and cool. And my second choice would be me.

DANILO: Rupert Everett. He's like today's Warren Beatty, and he would be able to do the other side of my life that's not about hair--the crazy, fabulous, kooky side. He's got the attitude and the humor. And he's gorgeous--who wouldn't wanna be played by him, hello?

I: What makes hairdressers so sexy to the people whose hair they style?

ES: I suppose it has something to do with communicating well and having a good sense of humor. Plus the fact that people get a chance to be with someone for like an hour at a time, a luxury most don't have.

FF: It's the hairdresser himself who is sexy. To be successful as a hairdresser, you have to be sexy.

D: Generally the fact that your crotch is near your client's head, and you're rubbing against them while looking in their eyes. And then there's the fact that it's safe territory.

I: Do blondes have more fun?

ES: I think blondes like to think they have more fun, but they don't.

FF: Some blondes have more fun, certainly, but others only think they do.

D: Only in a blonde-conscious society, of which ours happens to be one. Having been a blonde and not been a blonde I can say there's definitely a difference.

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