Hugh Hefner has a soft spot for this kind of blonde. He shares his Playboy Mansion in California with seven girlfriends, Katie, Tina, Tiffany, Cathi, Stephanie, Regina and Buffy. Hugh is seventy-five, his girlfriends are aged between nineteen and twenty-eight. All seven of them have long platinum-blonde hair, big painted puppy eyes, bubbly personalities, orthodontic smiles and breasts which burst like melons out of their matching bikini tops. They might have been cloned to order. In 2001 Hefner explained to Vanity Fair that he is in his Blonde Period. ‘There is something cute and sweet about the way they all have this kind of blonde-girl-next-door look . . . We do all kinds of wonderful things together. We go to Disneyland together. We go out to the movies, and we go out to the clubs At seventy-five, post-stroke and still, with the help of Viagra, performing as he says like a ‘class act’, Hefner’s personal Bunny world is still swinging. His girls idle away their time adrift in a sunshiny world of clubs, parties, expensive clothes and compliant bodies. They share rooms decorated with Barbie dolls and Playboy centrefolds. Most of them seem to be on long-term audition for a centrefold of their own.
The popularity of the blonde Barbie look is remarkably enduring. Cindy Jackson runs a consulting service in London for people considering cosmetic surgery, and has had more than twenty operations herself to achieve her goal of looking like Barbie. For Cindy, Barbie is the pinnacle of feminine beauty. The doll’s best traits, she insists, are her vulnerability, her long legs, small chin, wide eyes, soft skin and long blonde hair. The hair is essential to the look, but it is the easy part: regular highlights every month. In addition, to complete the picture, she has had multiple dermabrasion, nose jobs, chemical face peels, breast implants and removals and liposuction vacuuming work. A mole on her cheek at nose level used to be down near her jawbone: it travels north each time her face is lifted. Her obsession with looking like Barbie began in 1988 when she went to a surgeon asking for a face lift. At the time she wanted beauty, glamour and power. Now, with the whole Barbie package in place, she says she has running after her the kind of men whom most women would die for. After fifteen years and $100,000 spent on cosmetic surgery, Barbie has won herself the dubious reward of securing James Hewitt as her boyfriend.
Hewitt’s previous amours include one of the world’s most famous blondes. Princess Diana was a woman who, like many of the others, had been blonde as a child, had turned darker in adolescence and then in adulthood took steps to reverse the process. She became increasingly blonde as she acquired power. Hers was a classic case of blonding to heighten her sexual attractions, to look younger and to attract more attention. As she became more powerful, more manipulative of the press, more heavily dependent after her divorce on her public image, Diana became more brazenly blonde until by the time of her death in 1997, she was a heavily bleached platinum. In her final years, Princess Diana was a devious combination of saint, martyr, avenging Amazon and little girl. For each one of her roles, she needed to be blonde. She wanted to look innocent and portray herself as the wronged wife. She wanted to attract attention to fight her corner, and she needed to be loved.
Diana had always traded on her appearance, relying on the world loving her for her glamour. After she married in 1981, the faintly dumpy and apparently camera-shy Sloane with mousy hair blossomed quickly into a burnished glamorous blonde, a tall, often provocatively dressed royal fashion model who knew very well the value of photographic publicity. According to her friend James Gilbey, Diana could sniff a camera at a thousand yards. She seemed to enjoy the limelight and the adoration of the public, and she traded on her increasingly evident sex appeal to get it. Her wardrobe was transformed from one of fussy Sloaney outfits to a sleeker image of tailored lines and plain colours. Soon after her marriage, Kevin Shanley at Headlines in South Kensington started adding highlights to her mousy hair, returning it to the blonde shade of her early childhood years. According to many commentators, from that moment she seemed to grow in confidence. The shy hunch-shouldered posture disappeared for ever. As her preoccupation with her appearance increased, she moved on to two of London’s top stylists, Sam McKnight, who cut her hair every six weeks, and Daniel Galvin, who touched up her highlights at his Mayfair salon. By the mid-1990s, she was spending £3,600 a year on dyeing her hair blonde.
At the height of her lustrous powers Diana appeared at a glittering charity event in New York filled with the cream of American society. Nine hundred of the wealthiest and most powerfully connected people on America’s East Coast had paid £800 each for the privilege of dining with the world’s acknowledged number-one celebrity. They were expecting a princess, but Diana arrived looking like a Hollywood superstar. She walked elegantly into the room, well over six foot tall in strappy high heels. Her bright blonde cropped hair acted like a beacon as she paced through the crowd. Her daringly revealing Jacques Azagury gown attracted appreciative eyes to her cleavage. Diamond and pearl drop earrings glittered at her ears. She was stunning. Henry Kissinger looked stunned. Hundreds of other Americans were entranced. Diana was there to receive the Outstanding Achievement Award at the United Cerebral Palsy charity dinner, a reward for her years of highly professional patronage to further the aims of the charity. She stood out in the starry company of New York society because she was tall, royal, beautiful and blonde. I somehow doubt if it would ever have happened had she still been mousy.
Diana was a universal icon, already convincingly deified in 1997 when she decided, a year after her divorce, to restyle her wardrobe. Christie’s organised a celebrity sell-off at which seventy nine of her formal gowns were auctioned to eager collectors, raising $6 million for charity. Two years later, another universal blonde icon became the subject of a Christie’s sale. This time it was Marilyn Monroe. Almost six hundred of her cultural cast-offs were sold, raising over $13 million for a handful of charities and for the widow of Lee Strasberg. A pair of red stilettos encrusted with rhinestones sold for $48,300. A hand-knitted brown cardigan sold for $52,900, and the sheath dress covered with tiny rhinestones she wore at John Kennedy’s birthday tribute in 1962 went for over a million dollars. The bid smashed the previous world record for the sale of a dress: a blue velvet Victor Edelstein belonging to Princess Diana which had sold for £222,500. Monroe’s driving licence went for $130,000, her make-up case fetched $240,000, and someone bought a strangely trashy little lot which included a plastic cup, a tissue-box cover and a piece of paper with the words ‘he does not love me’ written in pencil. The public’s thirst for a soiled piece of celebrity was unquenchable. One year later, Christie’s struck gold again when it auctioned off a sweaty item from the wardrobe of a third international celebrity blonde. This time it was Madonna. The black satin Jean-Paul Gaultier bra worn on her ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour sold for $20,000.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the twentieth century’s three best-known blonde icons have literally sold themselves to the world, in photographs, on television and by distributing to the public the intimate contents of their wardrobes, to be fought over and then cherished as relics. Not one of them would have reached such heights of fame without an overbearing taste for public pawing. Like Monroe and Diana, Madonna was another dark-haired and ambitious narcissist with a streak of exhibitionism. Once she had tasted blondeness and fame, she couldn’t get enough of the public’s adoration. ‘I’ve been provoking since I was a little girl. I’m very interested in being alluring,’ she once confessed. Madonna’s bare-faced pursuit of fame as a dancer, a singer and then as an actress and celebrity superstar was swift – it took her about five years – and as she rose through the ranks of stardom, she became hooked by and then utterly addicted to mass adulation. In the process of developing her brand of rebellious sexuality, she plundered the images of other iconic sex symbols including Mae West and Marilyn Monroe, plucking elements of their style – the winking suggestiveness of West, the voluptuous wet-lipped sexuality of Monroe – to lend character to her act. But the difference between Madonna and Monroe perhaps represents the social a
nd sexual changes that have taken place since the ’80s. While Monroe was a creation by and for men, Madonna has always considered women the dominant sex. She has always been her own boss, psychologically independent, driving herself with a business sang-froid, sharp image-management and a marketing savvy that has kept her on the top perch for years. To many she has revolutionised feminist politics. With her luxuriant sexuality, her powerful ambition and a personality which challenges rather than rejects or crumples before the male gaze, she has offered proof to millions of women that they can be strong and in control without losing their essential femininity. She has demonstrated that gender need be no barrier to achievement.117
Part of her appeal lies in her embodiment of the American dream. Madonna started her public performances as a dark-haired Italian-American cheerleader in a Detroit suburb. Before long she had made her way to New York with $35 in her pocket and she ruthlessly set about pursuing her dreams. With her instinctive grasp of the pop aesthetic and of the evolving music business, she secured hundreds of millions of fans and, twenty years later she had become one of the richest women in the world, estimated to be worth between $300 and $600 million. Part of her success depends on being blonde. The colour-coding strategy began with her 1986 album True Blue, for which she appeared on the cover as a pure bleached-blonde for the first time, her head thrown back in erotic abandon. Sales ballooned to over 20 million copies worldwide. Her previous albums, for which she had been a brunette, had reached around 5 million. Madonna immediately recognised the commercial value of blonde hair and the pattern was set. For her next album, Who’s That Girl, released a year later, she performed exuberant impersonations of Marilyn Monroe, highly voluptuous with bouffant blonde hair and revealing dresses. By now Madonna realised that she looked best when blonde. The camera picked up and highlighted the dramas of her mask-like face with its contrasting pale hair, kohl-ringed eyes, white skin and full red lips. As a brunette Madonna had been a sultry beauty, but as a blonde she was a goddess. And that meant more sales, more stardom and more power.
As a star who sees the marketing value of regular reinvention, Madonna has the hardest-working hair in showbusiness. Occasionally she has veered back to dark hair, often at times of emotional upheaval. She dyed her hair brown when having an affair with her bodyguard, Tony Ward, and then again when she had an affair with the basketball star Dennis Rodman. But whether her hair is straight, curly, long, short or spiky, it always in the end returns to blonde. ‘Being blonde is definitely a different state of mind,’ Madonna told Rolling Stone magazine. ‘I can’t really put my finger on it, but the artifice of being blonde has some incredible sort of sexual connotation.’
Madonna is perhaps our ultimate power-blonde. Sales of her albums have exceeded 500 million copies and she now commands the best songwriters, producers and choreographers in the business who will keep her on top for many years yet. She is a complex, ambitious, modern American woman, the fantasy role model of millions around the world.
America is a world-class maker of fantasies. It exports these fantasies, efficiently packaged on television, in the cinema and in magazines, to enamour billions all over the world. These billions watch the beautiful, slim, blonde and independent stars of Sex in the City, of Friends, and of countless other shows and movies. They become accustomed to a rich palette of blonde shades: Just Peachy, White-Minx, Honey Doux, Frivolous Fawn and hundreds more. They watch thousands of blonde anchorwomen on television. They follow the rise of blonde pop stars and blonde television personalities. They see blonde actresses scooping the prizes of success, fame and wealth in Hollywood. They gaze at the blonde covers of Cosmopolitan and other international glossy magazines. They see global advertising campaigns marketing blonde Western glamour in any language. And eventually they enter that white Western blonde world in their imaginations, regardless of how distant they are in ethnic or economic terms. These Western qualities seem to offer everything: success, sexuality and beauty. And millions of women, in Jakarta, in Lima, in Seattle or in Cardiff, in dyeing their hair blonde are buying some small sense of dignity and self-esteem along with the glamour. They are coming a tiny bit closer to the power of the American ideal.
Li’l Kim, Tina Turner and occasionally Naomi Campbell wear blonde wigs to grab attention with the unnatural contrast of blonde hair against dark skin. RuPaul, an African-American drag queen, explains the rationale: ‘When I put on a blonde wig, I am not selling out my blackness. Wearing a blonde wig is not going to make me white. I’m not going to pass as white, and I am not trying to. The truth about the blonde wig is so simple. It really pops. I want to create outrageous sensation, and blonde hair against brown skin is a gorgeous outrageous combination.’118
In Japan, thousands of young women now use special industrial-strength dyes to turn their strong black hair peroxide-blonde, as the International Herald Tribune recently reported on its front page. ‘I want to look more American,’ said one blonde Japanese 20-year-old whom I met in Tokyo recently. ‘It’s a form of rebellion, rejecting my Japaneseness in order to look more Western, to look better, maybe more like a film star.’ Japanese fashion magazines, billboards and comics frequently feature blonde beauties who give the products they endorse some kind of magical Western superiority. The same holds for China. In Brazil, fashion magazines carry blondes on their covers, an anomaly which recently prompted the New York Times to comment that a stranger might ‘mistake this racial rainbow of a country for a Nordic outpost . . . slender blondes smile from the covers and white faces dominate all but the sports glossies’. This in spite of the fact that only 40 per cent of Brazilians are white, albeit the richest and most powerful group in the country; and very few of them are naturally blonde.
Female beauty has become a standardised commodity, conspicuously white, Western, slim, young, wealthy and typically blonde. Its image is pumped out to all corners of the world by a global culture machine which is controlled by America. Yet why is America, a culture so publicly concerned with overcoming its problems of race, still so fixated on the blonde? Could it be Aphrodite? Are these cultural myths really so deeply embedded in our psyche? Is it to do with the obsession with youth in a country where breast implants and face lifts are now the norm for Hollywood actresses and no longer a rarity for housewives? Or is it something more sinister, subliminally embedded in our make-up? Are those who blonde themselves still subconsciously seeking to distinguish themselves from darker and less powerful ethnic groups? Are dark-haired women, equally, still blonding themselves in order to ‘pass’ as members of the white AngloSaxon power elite, and to rise in status as a result of their perceived attractiveness? There are no clear answers to these questions; but they provide us with some intriguing ideas as we observe the world’s millions of lustrous blondes, flashing and scintillating, ravishing and seducing in the public eye, demonstrating their coolly bewitching, mesmeric powers.
Afterword
Very little has been written specifically about blonde hair, in spite of its cultural interest and its sociological, psychological and biological significance. Academics, perhaps concerned about racial sensitivities, tend to ban it from intelligent debate. Several American women academics whom I approached refused to discuss it at all, and were indeed deeply affronted that I had thought that they might. Perhaps they were unable to shake off associations with the dumb blonde. And I was surprised to discover that the subject has been entirely neglected as an element of portraiture. While there has therefore been little to harvest on blonde hair itself, I owe a huge debt to many writers for their authoritative background material with which I have fleshed out my subject. Of particular help were works by Richard Corson, Christine Havelock, Susan Haskins, Pamela Norris, Georgina Masson, Helen Hackett, Marina Warner, Elisabeth Gitter, Ronald Pearsall, Eric Trudgill, Reginald Horsman, Mary Blume, Igor Golomstock, Piers Brendon, Barnaby Conrad, Thomas Doherty, Marlene Le Gates, Grant McCracken and Michael Renov.
Acknowledgements
There is something about �
�The Blonde’ which excites interest and provokes opinion, and there have been few people consulted who have not kindly contributed something to this book. Given the extent of material covered, I have relied gratefully on the knowledge of a wide selection of experts, ranging from geneticists to hairdressers, cinematographers, costume historians and even a pomologist. My particular thanks go to Michele Thomas of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Susan Reed of the British Library, Carrie Tovar of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Professor Jonathan Kuntz of UCLA, Richard Jewell of the University of Southern California, Christopher Horak of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, Professor Steve Jones of UCL and Professor Jonathan Rees of the University of Edinburgh.
Professor Aileen Ribeiro and Dr Margaret Scott of the Courtauld Institute, Dr Jane Bridgeman, David Ekserdjian, Lesley Downer, Geraldine Sharpe-Newton and Olivia Stewart all kindly read through parts or all of the text. Virginia Darcy, Grace Kelly’s hairdresser, and Brian Carter, Baroness Thatcher’s, both shared their expertise on the subject of hair colour. Cally Blackman was heroic in her research efforts, and the staff of the London Library never hesitated in the face of obscure and peculiar requests. A huge debt is owed to Matthew Butson and Kate Berry for providing many of the pictures. I would also like to thank Bethan Davies, Barbara Girardet, Charlotte Hoyle, Gill Morgan, Peter Pitman, Jenny Pitman, James Pitman, Matt Ridley, Ben Macintyre, Terence Pepper, Jamie Fergusson, Emma Bassett and Nicky Hirsch.
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