On Blondes

by Joanna Pitman

  Except for one. During the 1950s and early 1960s there was a film director in Hollywood who made a profession out of torturing blondes. Over and over again, Alfred Hitchcock picked slim, elegant blondes to star in his films, fine-boned ethereal actresses with a glint of repressed sensuality lurking beneath a smooth surface. Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren – physically and psychologically they were all of a type. There was something about the delicate features, the vulnerable ladylike control and the blonde hair that excited Hitchcock. ‘Suspense’,109 he said in 1957, the year he made Vertigo, ‘is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement . . . The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect “woman of mystery” is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic . . .’

  Hitchcock’s favourite actresses were all blonde, subtle and Nordic-looking, and to their polished refinement he introduced a conflicting brutal sensuality. ‘Tear them down at the very start,’ he said, ‘that’s much the best way.’ He delivered the sardonic, the sadistic and the savage with a famously impassive relish. He stripped them naked psychologically. He manipulated them, broke them down and then feasted on them like a vampire.110 ‘Blondes are the best victims,’ he explained. ‘They’re like virgin snow which shows up the bloody footprints.’ Tippi Hedren began filming The Birds as the silky champagne blonde Melanie, her hair twisted up into a smooth chignon, her elegant suit and glistening maquillage perfect. But by the end, both she and Melanie were a wreck. She was terrorised by the seven days required to film the horrifying sequence for the climactic attic scene. ‘They had me down on the floor with the birds tied loosely to me through the peck-holes in my dress. Well, one of the birds clawed my eye and that did it; I just sat and cried. It was an incredible physical ordeal,’ she recalled later.111

  ‘Torture the women,’ Hitchcock once joked. In Vertigo he has James Stewart psychologically torturing Kim Novak; and in Mamie, Sean Connery does the same to Tippi Hedren. There is also a story of how Hitchcock once terrified Hedren’s young daughter by giving her a tiny coffin. Inside it was a doll, a perfect replica in miniature of her mother, down to the suit she wore in The Birds, and a perfectly crafted smooth blonde chignon wig. Blonde hair seems to have been erotic fixation for Hitchcock. Many of his films contain lingering shots of a woman’s hair, but there is obsession beneath the aesthetic pleasure. His Jack the Ripper in The Lodger, a London film from 1926, assaults and murders only blonde women. In Mamie, our first glimpse of Hedren’s face comes just after she has washed swirls of dark brown dye out of her hair and re-emerged as a blonde; and in The Birds, the bottle-blonde Hedren swabs her wounds with a bottle of peroxide. In her superb short book on the film, Camille Paglia notices that the chemical revives her like some magic elixir. Paglia notes too that Hitchcock has jokingly seated her beneath a sign reading ‘Packaged Goods Sold Here’.

  He considered his women captivating but dangerous, their blondeness a beautiful but false colour that hid something dark and threatening. It was as if the camouflage of the hair expressed the camouflage inherent in the character; and this was profoundly exciting to Hitchcock. His own dreamlike nature repeatedly invented an urgent fantasy of being trapped in the back of a taxi with one of his soignee blondes at the moment when her armoured personality opens up and her dammed-up sexual energies are finally unleashed. Whatever his personal pleasures, the effect of Hitchcock’s films was to present beautiful blonde women as ruling goddesses whose triumphs eventually turn them into victims to be tortured and violated.

  When Paglia first saw The Birds in 1963, ‘blonde sorority queens ruled social life in most American high schools, a tyranny I accepted as their divine due. Melanie Daniels [Hedren] has the arrogant sense of entitlement of all beautiful people who sail to the top, from Athenian stoa and Florentine court to Parisian salon and New York disco. Nature gives to them, but then nature takes away.’ Hitchcock didn’t just take away. He ground down his blondes and destroyed them. In the climate of postwar America, this too, like the creation of the dumb blonde, amounted to an attempt – conscious or otherwise – to subvert the growing power of women.112

  But these were dangerously insensitive strategies, even if they were subconscious. Hollywood depended on women. Seventy-five per cent of America’s cinema audiences were women, and to repulse them with too many images of tortured or dumb blondes was not good business practice. By the early 1960s Hollywood was suffering the effects of the rise of television, and its ruthless tycoons knew that their future lay in the indoctrination of teenage girls. They set out to seduce America’s daughters. Before long a third species of blonde emerged – again created by the male controllers of Hollywood – who had a greater aspirational appeal to young women. They were the chirpy, peppy girls-next-door represented on screen by the ineffably winning characters of Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day and Sandra Dee. These girls added a further convenient blow to the tender shoots of female emancipation. Loving and innocent, they were slightly more grown-up versions of Shirley Temple, monstrous pink dollies professionally bursting with girlish exuberance. There were dozens of them in Hollywood in the early 1960s, bland and sweetly snub-nosed Daddy’s girls, almost indistinguishable from one another; and they perfectly reflected the docile role that most men preferred women to play in postwar American society.

  They made the buxom fantasy Monroe, with her complex self-interests and dark demons, look like a dirty joke; a tantalising dish, certainly, but no good as a wife or mother. These perky blondes, on the other hand, were inoffensive girls with a resolutely clean and unthreatening sexuality. Doris Day was said to be so pure, even Moses couldn’t part her knees. Dwight Macdonald wrote about this American Dream Girl in his 1969 book, On Movies:

  She is as wholesome as a bowl of cornflakes and at least as sexy. She has the standard American figure: long-legged, tallish (everything is on the ish side) with highish smallish breasts and no hips or buttocks to speak of. And the standard American (female) face, speaking in terms of aspirations rather than of realities: Nordic blonde, features regular, nose shortish and straightish, lips thinnish, Good Bone Structure . . . She has the healthy, antiseptic Good Looks and the Good Sport personality that the American middle class – that is, practically everybody – admires as a matter of duty. Especially the females. No competition.

  So the blonde – whether buxom, coolly elegant or bland – was still the dominant female type in Hollywood and as such covered the aspirational ground for much of America. Naturally, the attentions being lavished on blonde goddesses had begun to rile large numbers of women who were not blonde. In 1955, Eleanor Pollock wrote caustically in Good Housekeeping:

  In my studies of blonde behavior, I have seen yellow-haired dynamos who can repair cars, run offices, talk knowingly about the H-bomb, do anything a man can do and do it better. So long as there are no men around. Let one appear, and our golden-haired expert becomes as fragile and helpless as a doe caught in the headlights of an automobile at night. This happens almost overnight, even to blondes by choice. What’s more, it works. I’d like to see any brown-haired damsel get away with it. She’d be treated as if she had rocks in her head. But not our little yellow chickadee.

  Carol Channing found when she starred in the 1949 musical version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes that men sat on the edges of their chairs to hear what she thought about the weather. ‘I didn’t have to be bright; I wasn’t expected to.’ She told Good Housekeeping in 1955. ‘All I had to do was be blonde.’ Many more dreamed of following her lead.

  For a woman, being blonde in 1950s America was part of a dream of being desirable to men. It was also part of a dream of inclusion. For those still excluded from the highest levels of American society by virtue of a background which was not northern European, the development of new and more effective home hair dyes brought the possibilities of assimilation closer to reality. They introdu
ced the arousing idea that you could slip from one identity to the next with no more ado than twenty minutes in the bathroom. Now anyone could begin to acquire the trappings of the established affluent class, which still included a head of blonde hair.

  In 1956 Clairol brought out a new hair-colour product which made it possible to bleach, shampoo and condition in one step, and at home. In the words of Bruce Gelb, who ran Clairol at the time, it was to the world of hair colour what computers were to the world of adding machines. But there was still the slight stigma of blonde hair being associated with fast women. Malcolm Gladwell describes the dilemma in his fascinating 1999 New Yorker feature on hair dye and the hidden history of post-war America. Clairol handed the advertising account to Foote, Cone & Belding, where a junior copywriter named Shirley Polykoff came up with the teasing line ‘Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.’ The message effectively justified a convincing fake. The new product flew off the shelves. For her next campaign for Lady Clairol, Polykoff came up with ‘Is it true blondes have more fun?’ She followed that with one of the most famous lines in advertising history: ‘If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde.’ Blonde was no longer just a look; it was a whole psychology. In the summer of 1962, just before The Feminine Mystique came out, Betty Friedan was so ‘bewitched’ by that phrase, according to her biographer, that she dyed her hair blonde. David Hockney was equally attracted by the dream. After watching the commercial late one night on television, he rushed out to his nearest all-night chemist, bought a tube and bleached his hair.

  Clairol bought acres of advertising space and filled it with sentimental images of pretty and tastefully dressed blonde women, contentedly preparing delicious dinners for their husbands, or lying happily on the grass beside their matching blonde children. The idea was to make bleaching hair as respectable as possible. One of the key changes in the perception of dyeing was a subtle semantic one. Just as wigs were coyly renamed ‘transformations’ to gain respectability in the 1920s, when Clairol banished the word ‘dye’ and replaced it with ‘tint’, women all over the country silently cheered and began experimenting with this once-scandalous process. By 1957 Look magazine was reporting that 55 million American women were adding colour to their hair. In the twenty odd years when Polykoff wrote copy for Clairol, the number of American women colouring their hair rose from per cent to more than 40 percent.

  Polykoff herself, the brown-haired Jewish daughter of a tie salesman and a housewife, believed that a woman should be allowed to be whatever she wanted, including being a blonde. Ever since the age of fifteen she had dyed her own hair blonde. When her daughter turned thirteen and her natural blonde hair began to darken, Polykoff started bleaching that, too. She believed in appearances, in becoming fictions and self-reinvention. As a teenager, Shirley Polykoff had applied for a job as an insurance agency clerk and been turned down. When she tried again at another firm, as Shirley Miller, she got the job. Such efforts at assimilation in 1950s America were par for the course for Jews, Italians, Irish – all of them trying to win acceptance in a nation which was still racially insecure. Polykoff’s ‘Does she or doesn’t she?’ campaign was all about how no one could ever really know who you were. According to her daughter, ‘It really meant not “Does she?” but “Is she?” It really meant “Is she a contented homemaker or a feminist, a Jew or a Gentile – or isn’t she?”’113

  The desire to be white and preferably blonde was still powerful in the early 1960s. In California, the source of national and often international trends and assumptions, America’s youth culture was devoting itself to sun, surf and endless summers. For them tanned skin and blonde hair was a symbol of perfection. The Beach Boys sang about blonde girls, and beach bunnies gathered in fluffy little clusters on the sand, dedicating hours to bleaching their hair in the sun and the surf. For those without time for the beach, there was always Clairol, or a visit to Raymond, one of the first hairdressers of repute to develop his own blonde dyes. He made a specialty of turning hair of any colour ash-blonde by first bleaching it, then colouring it with very strong coffee or tea, finally adding two drops of clove oil to conceal the peculiar smell. Blonde was the aspirational standard of American beauty.

  Young American girls soon had a distinct model on which to base their appearance: a stick-thin doll with pointy toes called Barbie, crafted in durable pink plastic by a military weapons designer, an expert on missile casings. When Barbie and her cruise missile breasts were launched into popular culture with that mass of long hair, the shopping habits, the ballerina outfits and the pyjama parties, she was an emblem of the 1960s American Dream. She symbolised the ideals of affluence and material comfort that were shaping America’s developing consumer economy. This was outwardly a time of conservatism and conformity centred on the ideal family popularised by the media. Father was the breadwinner, mother was the homemaker, and they lived happily with their two to four children in a sunny suburban home. Barbie was the natural role model of the daughter of the house. But in spite of the impression of happy families, rigid gender roles as well as barriers of class and social conformity were already under assault. The looks, sounds and ideals of a previous generation were being energetically overturned, and much of the momentum was coming from London.

  n In 1957 when she starred in Et Dieu Crca la Femme (And God Created Woman), the magazine Cinemonde reported that a million lines had been devoted to her in the French dailies, two million lines in the weeklies, and that this gush of words had been illustrated with 29,345 photographs of her. It also claimed that she had been the subject of 47 percent of French conversation.

  15

  Of Princesses, Punks and Prime Ministers

  The noise was deafening at the Ad Lib in Soho, the hottest nightclub in London. Red, green and blue lights straked back and forth across the pulsating crowd, cutting through a thick fog of cigarette smoke. Models with cropped blonde hair and men in tight black Carnaby Street trousers draped themselves around each other at the bar. An energetic beat group pounded out radical numbers and on the dance floor, a frenzy of long legs in short skirts, perhaps Julie Christie and Marianne Faithfull among them, vibrated close to the scruffy young bloods of the moment, David Bailey, Terry Donovan, maybe Terence Stamp or Michael Caine if they happened to be in town. At the corner table, more or less permanently reserved for the Beatles,Ringo made eyes at Maureen. In the surrounding streets, dozens more clubs throbbed with the energy of dashing young bodies gyrating late into the night, every night; Annabel’s for the elegant and titled crowd, The Scene on Great Windmill Street for the Mods, Ronnie Scott’s for the jazz and The Flamingo for the beat crowds.

  What was it that created ‘Swinging London’ in the 1960s? When John Crosby, an American journalist, did his research for an April 1965 feature in the Daily Telegraph, he discovered the answer:

  It’s the girls. Italian and Spanish men are kinky for English girls . . . The girls are prettier here than anywhere else . . . They’re more than pretty; they’re young, appreciative, sharp-tongued, glowingly alive. Even the sex orgies among the sex-and-pot set in Chelsea and Kensington have youth and eagerness and, in a strange way, a quality of innocence about them. In Rome and Paris, the sex orgies are for the old, the jaded, the disgusting and disgusted. Young English girls take to sex as if it’s candy and it’s delicious.

  The goddesses of the scene were mesmerising blondes. Julie Christie had won an Oscar in 1965 for her performance in Darling. Marianne Faithfull was the reigning queen of rock chicks. Veruschka painted herself gold all over and Ursula Andress and Catherine Deneuve simply smouldered beneath their thick blonde manes. The power of the blonde was magnetic. And then in 1966 Twiggy became the most famous model in the world with her meagre child’s body (Barbie without the breasts) and an immaculately dyed golden gamine hairdo that took eight hours to perfect and made her look like a cross between an angel and Greta Garbo. Twiggy as the beautiful blonde child was a devastating combination of innocence and sexualit
y. Thousands of girls rushed out, blonded and chopped off their hair and squeezed themselves into Op Art mini shift dresses and PVC boots. Twiggy went to America on a wave of English fashion fever and prompted Mia Farrow to chop off and bleach her hair, too. The look had somehow become caught up with Britain’s drastic redefinition of social and cultural attitudes and its infectious belief, for a while, that, crazily, anything was possible.

  In America, too, hair colour was becoming unexpectedly significant. The years between the late ’50s and the early ’70s had marked a strange period of social history in which hair dye and the campaigns used to sell it became intimately linked with the politics of assimilation, with feminism and with women’s self-esteem. ‘Women entered the workplace, fought for social emancipation, got the Pill, and changed what they did with their hair,’ wrote Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. ‘To examine the hair-color campaigns of the period is to see, quite unexpectedly, all these things as bound up together, the profound with the seemingly trivial. In writing the history of women in the postwar era, did we forget something important? Did we leave out hair?’

  It seems that we did. The women’s movement was gaining momentum during this period and, strangely, hair colour was playing a part. By the mid-1960s, American women born in the Depression era were experiencing tensions between reality and ideology. Most of the media, educators and policymakers continued to laud domestic fulfillment for women, assuming the voluntary full-time dedication of married women to their families. Their message, relentlessly repeated, was that women did not need careers and that their role as mothers was completely self-justifying. But their message ignored reality. In an era of apparently exhilarating possibilities defined by the rise of the youth counterculture, with more women educated to university level, smaller families as the baby boom slowed down, growing financial and intellectual incentives to seek employment, and more clerical, sales and teaching jobs available, women were becoming vaguely, guiltily, aware that they were hungry for more experience of life. In the absence of a visible feminist movement and in the face of the imagery everywhere of fulfilled and enriched full-time mothers, they could only interpret their frustrations as personal.