My Icons of Hair
The Tiger Beat Years
It’s been a strange time this month, where staring at my gray, curly hair in the mirror meets up with shadows of Tiger Beat and 16, the teen magazines that gave me my early notions of a boyfriend and good hair in the late ’60s, early ’70s.
My heartthrob Bobby Sherman, a staple of those magazines and now 81, has stage 4 cancer, his wife Brigitte Poublon just announced. And this past weekend, true fans never forget, was the birthday of my other heartthrob, the late, great David Cassidy.
It wasn’t just that I loved them, as a prepubescent girl. I became them. Well, my hair became them. These teen idols were my Icons of Hair. (I see you, Davy Jones, I had a pixie cut, too.)
The heterosexuality they presented never took root, but the hair sure did. In my latest iteration, I’m a Medicare-card carrying queer senior citizen, I am my own teen idol. I, too, possess their androgynous gene. Gender neutral, leaning a little more toward the feminine as they leaned to the masculine. They weren’t the classic he-man as I am no girlie girl. They were the training wheels to a boyfriend. Or the training wheels to a girlfriend.
By 14, I had a huge crush on the most beautiful girl on the tennis team so I tried out for the tennis team, made it, and we became best friends. She never knew of my budding sapphic attraction, but we were both heart broken when she moved away a year and a half later, we had the best kind of best friend love. A platonic romance. And her boyfriend was jealous of me, not I of him. Girls get in where boys can’t go.
But back in my Bobby Sherman-loving days in the early ’70s, my parents actually bought a $4.25 ticket for me to see him at the Garden State Arts Center in New Jersey and my dad waited in the family station wagon in the parking lot during the entire concert.
For the record, he, Bobby, not my dad, wore a black shirt with fringe, black and white striped bell bottoms, and a choker of red love beads. I took photos with an Instamatic and once developed, they had a lovely overexposed speck of Bobby along with the giant flashed head of another screaming girl in front of me. I loved his love beads, God, did I make strings of beads. But I mean, his hair, come on, that hair.
I wanted that hair but I have flat yet wavy hair and the sides of my hair have a tendency to curl up like Bozo, not an Icon of Hair, at least my hair, I’m no ginger. I didn’t want those curls, I wanted Bobby’s straight hair, those bangs. So at night, I would wash my hair and then steal a stocking from my mother’s lingerie drawer and I would put that nylon over my wet head, bank-robber style. And in the morning, I would have straight hair. Maybe I would. Or maybe it would go absolute Medusa, it was always a roll of the dice what I would wake up to, how my hair had set under the pressure of the nylon casing. It continued until my mother noticed the missing stockings.
Then just as Bobby outgrew us and we him, David Cassidy comes along. He was called the “greatest teen idol of all time” and my God, was he pretty. Handsome…mmm, maybe? Definitely pretty. And his hair. Right??? That hair. Shiny. Straight. Androgynous.
*As an aside, I want to say here that I interviewed David in the ’90s for a Los Angeles newspaper, the article is actually on his fansite, but a colleague got to interview Bobby because I was interviewing a former First Lady and had already passed the background check. I was devastated, mollified only slightly by her bringing me back a Bobby Sherman magnet. Which I still have.
I often say watching cable TV with Southern California commercials from my small hometown in Arizona absolutely lured me as an adult to the San Fernando Valley. Let’s be real. Bobby and David both lived in the Valley during my crush years. And here I live. In the San Fernando Valley. In Sherman Oaks. Don’t tell me dreams don’t come true.
Crushes are fickle and don’t last forever. David Cassidy was my last teen idol, I believe I was over him before “The Partridge Family” ended. By 13, I was listening to Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin and in this era, my father hated my hair. He told me if I didn’t cut it, he would. I had hideous junior high hair, we all go through that. At that point it was parted down the middle — hey, I didn’t invent the look — and it was flat on top and curly on the sides. Robert Plant-ish, though by now I wasn’t boy crazy either and never looked at another teen idol again. My father’s threat made me sufficiently scared of the follow-through so I cut it. He was a fairly measured man so when he was displeased, he was really displeased, and I had no doubt he really would cut my hair himself. I’d seen what he did to our dog with a pair of clippers he bought to “save money” instead of taking him to the groomers and I wasn’t taking that kind of chance.
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Sure, I went a little girlie in the hair periodically but it generally met up with tragic results. Figure skater Dorothy Hamill’s unfortunate wedge when I was 17 as Exhibit A, let’s say.
In college, I wanted actress Valerie Bertinelli’s hair but as I grew mine out, it was not Valerie Bertinelli’s hair. I was haunted by Demi Moore’s “Ghost” hair in the ’90s. You in danger, girl. Yes, I was, with that hair.
Whenever my hair gets too long, my head begins to look like popped Jiffy Pop. Like bad Donny Osmond, not my Hair Icon. Full and fluffy.
The last time I wrote about my hair was in the ’80s when I worked for a tiny twice weekly paper and had a column I wracked my brain trying to fill each week so I simply wrote about getting a hair cut, the hair had gone Jiffy Pop. A few days later, on my bowling night (I know, weird fact about me, I was on a bowling team when I worked in a remote desert town with very limited entertainment choices. I couldn’t bowl then, I can’t bowl now), a guy comes up to me and says, “The same, but shorter!” I look at him puzzled, he says it again and makes a snipping gesture. And again. What is this crazy man talking about? And then, I realized, he had read my stupid column about my hair. It’s what I always ask for when I get a cut.
I got a series of creepy boy haircuts, where I alternately looked like mom and pop killer Lyle Menendez and pop star Justin Bieber, not that I asked for it, I am always asking for the same, but shorter.
My father, a Minnesotan of Swedish ancestry, had thinning gray hair in his late 30s. My mother, that spicy Puerto Rican, had coarse, straight black hair throughout her 70s until finally in her 80s, a little salt got added to the pepper. But her father, my grandfather, had the most beautiful pure white hair, set off by his tan skin and black glasses. I got a mixture of all of it.
I did the dye thing for a while, always a temporary color on my dark brown lest I got the white stripes at the roots instead of a fade to highlights. Right as the pandemic broke, I said, fuck this, I’m not coloring it anymore. You’ll remember we all went a little home crazy, what with sourdough starters, happy hours beginning at 3 in the afternoon, and staying socially distant with our pods, for me, the neighbors next door.
That’s when I started cutting my own hair as well, during this lockdown. What were my neighbors going to say, they both buzz their heads, but their beards were growing religiously long. We were all going a little feral. When at long last I saw Maxine, my stylist, she kept lifting up strands of my hair, trying to find anything that looked like there had been a plan, even the slightest of plans. “I-I-I just don’t understand what you’ve done,” she said, finally. “Please don’t ever do this again.”
After that initial pandemic cut, I remembered I had sea salt spray that my hair/makeup artist had used on someone I was photographing. So I tried that and it gave my hair a lot of body on top where it’s flat, it made my curls a little curlier. And then you add a little spray clay for texture. I also stopped washing it every time I took a shower, I started letting it go just as long as I could, maybe four days. I just wet it under the shower, then add my salt and clay when I dried it. They have anti-bacterial properties, no? And look, after I discovered my personal formula of salt while wet, clay when dry, there is a product that combines both, people! It’s Rudy’s Clay Spray, surf style salt and clay blend! It’s fine, if anyone asked, I just prefer the separate wet/dry products.
Suddenly I had hair more predictable, yet somehow wilder. The salt gave it that lift and soft curl, the clay gave it a certain messiness. I don’t want my hair to be too studied, too conventional, too helmet head. I want it to look like I did nothing but run my fingers through it, which is actually what I usually do. Did I say not studied? So studied.
And thus my hair became wild with streaks of gray and white with whatever is left of my dark brown, the temples as snowy as Paulie Walnuts’ from “The Sopranos,” still with the weird Bozo curls on the side. I don’t stop ’em anymore, I let whatever wave that wants out, to come out. I saw a woman at the grocery store who had fantastic hair and I told her so, why withhold a compliment. She said, “Oh, thank you. But I wish I had your hair. The curls.”
I mean… the thing you most try to get rid of is, of course, who you are. Accept it.
My hair looks more like a teen idol’s hair than ever. Oh, wait, no it doesn’t, it now has more of a mature aspect to it. I have Vincent Ledu’s hair from Apple’s haute couture series “La Maison.” Late stage Beethoven, young Wolverine.
When I got Medicare, I also got an eye exam and a $300 credit toward a pair of glasses. I didn’t love any of the glasses my health plan offered so I passed on buying there. But then, I realized I could get a pair of sunglasses with my progressive prescription so of all things, I ordered a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Talk about iconic.
I picked up my glasses, got them properly fitted, and I said to the optician, “Oooh, should I say what a great deal I got with my Medicare?”
She said, “No, honey, with hair like yours, you just tell them you got a fabulous discount.”
