A Short History of Shaves and Haircuts

being a hair raising chronicle of perukes, Vandykes, mutton chops, beatle cuts and sundry other hirsute adornments for pate and visage

People have been fiddling with their hair ever since the discovery of fingers. At various times and places man's most curious growth has been cut, shaved, plucked, curled, singed, braided, dyed, waxed, waved, greased, powdered, plastered, combed, brushed, fondled, fetished, feared, envied and adored.

According to the bewhiskered psychologist Havelock Ellis, hair is "sexually the most generally noted part of the feminine body after the eyes." Judging from the cartoonists' conception of primitive courting behavior, it was also the most frequently grabbed, and Stone Age cuties were continually being dragged off on dates by shaggy clubmen, who towed them along by the tresses.

Actually, however, most primitive peoples believe that the head and all its hairs are occupied by spirits, and are taboo to the touch. In The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer's masterwork on myths, folklore and religion, the anthropologist records that if a Maori so much as scratched his head with his fingers, "he was immediately obliged to apply them to his nose, and snuff up the sanctity which they had acquired by the touch," and the son of a Marquesan high priest "has been seen to roll on the ground in an agony of rage and despair, begging for death, because someone had desecrated his head and deprived him of his divinity by sprinkling a few drops of water on his hair."

Among such taboo-ridden types there is no such thing as a once-over-lightly, Frazer notes, and "when it becomes necessary to crop the hair, measures are taken to lessen the dangers which are supposed to attend the operation. The chief of Namoli in Fiji always ate a man by way of precaution when he had his hair cut. ... Among the Maoris many spells were uttered at haircutting; one, for example, was spoken to consecrate the obsidian knife with which the hair was cut; another was pronounced to avert the thunder and lightning which haircutting was believed to cause."

The notion that hair is a source of supernatural power is common to most ancient religions, and is reflected in the Biblical law of Leviticus, which requires that men "shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard." To cut a man's hair or beard against his will was to offer him the greatest indignity, and when the minions of Hanun sent David's good-will ambassadors packing, they first "shaved off the one half of their beards, and cut off their garments in the middle, even unto their buttocks." David, it will be recalled, was not half so affronted by their bare backsides as he was by the brevity of their whiskers, and sent messengers to head them off with an order to "tarry at Jericho until your beards be grown."

The most famous haircut of all time, of course, was the Old Testament trimming Delilah gave Samson at the behest of the scheming Philistines. Having wheedled the Scriptural strong man into revealing that the source of all his strength lay in his hair, "she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head ... and his strength went from him."

Like most ancient peoples, the Hebrews cut their hair and beards only at times of penitence and bereavement. The Egyptians, on the other hand, regularly shaved their heads and faces, and let their hair grow only when in mourning. Egyptian priests, Herodotus tells us, "shaved their whole body every other day," while the rest of the populace had their heads shaved "from early childhood ... and so by the action of the sun the skull becomes thick and (continued on page 186)Shaves and Haircuts(continued from page 117) hard." For all their hardheadedness, the Egyptians were never so thickskulled as to maintain that baldness was beautiful, however, and wigs were worn by men and women alike.

On ceremonial occasions the cleanshaven Pharaohs wore false beards, which eventually took the form of a golden triangle. Whether of gold or hair, the beard was traditionally a symbol of virility, maturity, wisdom and authority. As such, the ample beards of the Assyrians were proudly arranged in rows of curls, stiffened with perfumed gum. Curly, too, were the beards of the early Greeks, though young men usually shaved, and whiskers went out of fashion with Alexander the Great, who ordered his troops to shave their faces clean on the grounds that a soldier's beard offered too convenient a handle for the enemy to grab at close quarters.

The cropped hair and beardless chins of ancient Greek GIs set the style for Romans of all ranks, whose every day began with a slow, soapless shave at the barber's. At a time when razors were roughhewn, and dull iron scissors resembled small hedge clippers, even the best barbers were none too adept, while the majority were murderously crude. "He who desires not yet to go down to Stygian shades, let him, if he be wise, avoid barber Antiochus," Martial cautioned out of painful experience. "With gentler touch the surgeon Alcon cuts the knotted hernia and lops away broken bones with workman's hand."

Understandably, a young Roman's first shave was celebrated with a ceremony which marked his emergence into manhood. On this occasion, the hairs of the beard were offered to the gods in a religious rite which was eagerly anticipated by all members of the family. When, as Suetonius tells us, young Nero visited his aunt Domitia Lapida, who was "confined to bed with severe constipation," the old lady fondled the budding monster's downy beard, and wistfully murmured, "Whenever you celebrate your coming-of-age ceremony and present me with this, I shall die happy." Whereupon, the roguish teenogre "turned to his courtiers and said laughingly: 'In that case I must shave at once'—which he did. Then he ordered the doctors to give her a laxative of fatal strength, seized her property before she was quite dead," and tore up her will.

By way of late, late gossip, Suetonius also reports in his Roman scandal column that Nero's illustrious predecessor, Julius Caesar, always kept carefully trimmed and shaved, and was "accused of having certain other hairy parts of his body depilated with tweezers." More sensitive concerning his baldness than of having his short hairs yanked out by the roots, Julius "used to comb the thin strands forward from his poll," and made chintzy use of a laurel wreath to hide the bare spots.

Early Britons, according to Julius' first-hand account, had "long flowing hair," and shaved "every part of their bodies except the head and upper lip," from which dangled long, drooping mustaches that were often dyed blue, green or orange. Danish warriors, bulky and bold, were as hair-happy as the silky young chicks in a modern shampoo commercial, and groomed their shoulder-length tresses as carefully as if they were going to a prom. Short hair styles for Frankish royalty came in with Charlemagne, and reached a dazzling extreme in the well-polished pate of Charles the Bald, who could take Christian comfort in St. Paul's widely preached opinion that "if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him."

As a result of Paul's aversion to long hair, the clergy of the Roman Church have been tonsured since the Seventh Century. The shaven heads of monk and priest were so familiar a sight at the time of the Norman invasion of England that one of King Harold's spies, assigned to make a count of William's troops, mistook the close-cropped Normans for an army of priests sent to "chant Masses." This erroneous intelligence led to such a fatal misjudgment of Norman strength that William became the Conqueror.

It wasn't long, however, before the lengthy beards and draped finery of the English captured the fancy of the victorious Normans, and during the ensuing Crusades the home-grown Gothic whiskers of both were overshadowed by the fierce Moslem-type beards and mustachios of knights returning from the East. Unsightly in the eyes of the Church, the exotic imports were denounced by Bishop Serle, who described the hirsute Henry I and his hairy henchmen as "filthy goats and bristly Saracens," and made so passionate a plea for Christian haircuts, both king and courtiers weepingly consented to let the pontiff scissor off their offensive fleece during Mass in the parish church.

No less offensive to the pious was the erotic appeal of women's hair, the mere sight of which supposedly had the power to drive men into frenzies of lust. For this reason, head coverings and caps were worn indoors and out by women of all ages, and prostitutes were sentenced to have their tresses sheared off in public. When a London hustler was caught soliciting off limits, she was taken to the pillory "with minstrelsye," and had her hair cut "round about her head." To the merry music of flutes and trumpets, male procurers and keepers of "leaping houses" were given the same distinctive trims, and lost their beards in the bargain. To avoid such conspicuous consequences, pimps and harlots often set up sexual speak-easies in barbershops and bathhouses, which became medieval versions of modern "massage" salons.

With an eye to eliminating the erotic "extras" which took the place of hot towels and spicy tonics in 14th Century barbershops, London authorities chose one Richard Le Barber to make a monthly "scrutiny throughout the whole of his trade," to discover "any among them keeping brothels." Since barbers also ran the notorious public baths, where a plenitude of hot water and the recent advent of English soap made a tubside shave the ultimate in medieval luxury, it can be assumed that Richard's monthly tour was one long walk on the wild side. As the first Master of the Barber's Company, he not only had to keep on the lookout for bawds behind every bush, but was required to supervise the surgical side of barbery, which included bloodletting, cupping, and the pulling of teeth.

To advertise these sanguinary sidelines, the barber-surgeon hung a brass bleeding basin on a blood-red pole wrapped with white bandage, and set it in front of his shop—thus planting the prototype of the present-day barber's pole. Attempts at a harder sell were discouraged by an ordinance which stated that "no barbers shall be so bold or so hardy as to put blood on their windows, openly or in view of folk, but let them have it privily carried unto the Thames." That the blood was often carried away by the bucketful, we cannot doubt, since complaints were continually being made against barbers who left their patrons "worse off at their departure than they were at their coming; and that, by reason of the inexperience of the same barbers, such persons are oftentimes maimed." Though the hazards of getting a haircut were considerably less lethal, Edward III prudently preserved his long hair and forked beard, while other hair hobbyists cultivated beavers in the shapes of spades, stilettos, corkscrews and spreading fantails—the latter beauties being stiffened with wax or gum and protected by special nightcaps during sleep.

In the first half of the 15th Century hair was frequently cropped above the ears, in the curious soup-bowl style worn by Sir Laurence Olivier in the movie version of Shakespeare's Henry V. Shaving became more popular, and Edward IV's household "barbour" was instructed to appear "every satterday night if it please the Kinge to cleanse his head, leggs or feete, and for his shaveing." As Saturday nights continued to roll around, the throne passed from Richard Crouchback to Henry VII, and shoulder-length curls were sported by "ye prowd galantts," who—in the words of the eternal critic Anonymous—went strutting about with "long here" in their eyes bringing England "to gret payne."

England didn't begin to know what "payne" was until the 16th Century, however, when hair went wild in a bizarre assortment of mustachios and beards. The age began mildly enough, when clean-shaven Henry VIII sealed an agreement with Francis I of France by vowing to let his beard grow as long as the pact was in effect. When it became expedient to scuttle the agreement, Henry followed Nero's lead, and had his beard shaved on the spot. To explain the breach of faith, Sir Thomas Boleyn was sent to tell the king of France that Henry's Queen Catherine objected to a "bushy chin." Oddly enough, it was Francis who was responsible for the later vogue of close-cropped hair, worn with pancake hats. By way of a little winter sport, the French monarch let his hair down to indulge in a snowball fight, when somebody tossed a firebrand at his head, "which grievously wounded him, and obliged the hair to be cut off." To help the clobbered king forget his smoldering loss, courtiers adopted the same clip with a verve that made it smart to be shorn, and the mode became universal.

In keeping with the French fashion, Henry VIII had his hair trimmed short in 1535, and balanced the loss on top by growing his famous Tudor beard. Courtiers complimented the rotund ruler by wearing similar adornments, and Englishmen's faces began to bristle with whiskers so long and extravagant that the city fathers of London passed "An Acute Agaynst Bearded Men." Despite all legal restrictions, beards flourished and long hair came in again—possibly as the result of a new rash of complaints that barbers were employing diseased persons in their shops, where they "doo use and exercise barbery." More alarming was the charge that such "common artificers as Smythes, wevers, and women" were undertaking to perform "grete cures and thyngys of grete difficultie" under the sign of the barber's basin, and Henry issued a ruling that no barber henceforth be allowed to practice "letting of bludde, or any other thing belonging to surgery," except "drawing of teth."

With nothing to lose but a few molars, Elizabethan rakes and dandies repaired to the barbershops to smoke, sing and scribble sonnets. Lutes, viols and quill pens served to while away the long wait, as the barber and his assistants painstakingly styled and stiffened beards in a variety of wondrous shapes. As the disapproving Puritan, Philip Stubbes, described it: "When you come to be trimmed, they will aske you whether you will be cut to look terrible to your enimie, or amiable to your freend, grim and sterne in countenance, or pleasant and demure"—the customers giving exact orders as to "how their mowchatowes must be preserved and laid out from one cheek to another, yea, almost from one care to another, and turned up like two homes toward the forehead."

Besides being curled, stiffened and clamped in a protective box at night, beards were often dyed. If an Elizabethan belle were moved to wonder "Doth he or doth he not tint his mowchatowes?" the chances were that he did—choosing the desired color from a spectrum so diverse that Shakespeare's Bottom names but a few in his Midsummer Night's Dream mention of "your straw-coloured beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow." Of all possible hues, young bloods favored yellow and orange. Beards of these colors were worn as a tribute to the queen, whose own natural hair was reputed to be reddish-blonde—though few could say they had ever seen it, since Elizabeth always wore a wig.

During the reign of the first James, the mentionable hair of both sexes remained in the care of barbers and hairdressers, though more and more men ventured to shave their own necks and cheeks with straight "cutthroat" razors. Mustaches and beards were gradually tapered into points, as though in preparation for dapper Charles I, who had his portrait painted wearing a trim triangular beard, to which posterity gave the name of the artist—Vandyke. The hair of Charles' courtly Cavaliers was long and sleek, and "spruse coxcombes" wore bowtied "love-locks" and "heart-breakers" of hair that grew down to their chests. Against such unholy hairiness the Puritans aimed a barrage of testy treatises on the Unloveliness of Love-locks and The Loathsomeness of Long Hair. To which the Cavaliers replied by dubbing their clipped critics "Roundheads."

Actually, however, Puritans had to struggle with their conscience every time they visited a barber. Too great a growth on head or chin marked a man as ungodly, but shaving clean and clipping too close gave the pious Protestants the appearance of Catholic priests. To solve this hairsplitting dilemma, some settled for the merest dab of beard beneath the lower lip, while others shaved clean and wore their locks fairly long. The latter dodge was chosen by Cromwell, who made his first appearance in Parliament with long hair, smooth chin, and two specks of blood on his white collar from having nicked his neck while shaving.

With the restoration of the Stuarts, all beards disappeared, mustaches faded from sight, and Wigsville became the fashion capital of Western Europe. While many English-speaking scholars credit Charles II as the bigwig most responsible for the triumph of the outré toupee, the merry monarch's fondness for fancy funny tops was something he picked up in France, during exile at the court of Louis XIV. Louis, it seems, had such beautiful golden curls as a boy, that courtiers took to wearing blond wigs in flattering imitation of the princely hairs and graces. Faced with baldness in his old age, Louis himself then wore enormous wigs, which were powdered white in keeping with his advanced years.

When Charles II and his elegant retinue arrived from France wearing similar way-out wigs, the English were only too eager to indulge their pent-up passion for anti-Puritan fun and fads, and immediately set about to adopt the French perruque—roughly rendering the word as "peruke," "perwyke" and "periwig." Regardless of name, the prestige power of the powdered wig was soon recognized by English judges and lawyers, who still cling to the custom of wearing white wigs in court, and status-conscious Samuel Pepys scrupulously recorded the emotions and expense involved in maintaining a well-dressed head. "Comes Chapman the Perriwig maker," he wrote, in 1663, "and he cut off my hair, which went a little to my heart to part with it; but it being over and my perriwig on I paid him £3 for it and awaye went he with my owne hair to make another of."

At one point, Pepys predicted an early break in the wig market following the plague: "for nobody will dare to buy hair for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague." The English were more courageous than Pepys supposed, however, and wigs continued to grow in size until, at the beginning of the 18th Century, they covered the shoulders like a shawl, and hung below the waist in back.

It was in this hair-hipped era that Alexander Pope penned his "heroi-comical" poem, The Rape of the Lock—a social satire which became a schoolroom classic, despite the fact that it quite accurately details the psychosexual compulsions of the pre-Freudian hair fetishist. In synopsis, the object of the offbeat lust is the hair apparent of the beautiful young Belinda, who, "to the destruction of mankind":

Nourish'd two Locks, which graceful hung behind In equal curls.

So bewitching are these ringlets that they stimulate strange stirrings in the lopsided libido of an "advent'rous Baron," who finally achieves his erotic aim by snipping the girl's two curls with a scissors. Shorn of the hair she prizes most, the outraged Belinda upbraids the baron, and implies that he might have found her a willing-enough victim to his odd amours, if he had "been content to seize"

"Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!"

By such tearful words of reproach, the half-tressed maiden betrays a fetching innocence of the hair fetishist's quirks. In all likelihood the adventurous baron would not have been the least bit interested in seizing Belinda's hidden hairs. As the English sex encyclopedist, Dr. Norman Haire, has pointed out, "In most cases these hair-cutters are not capable of normal sexual intercourse, and their passion for hair [of the head] is so exclusive that it leaves little place for any other sexual activity."

"The fetish may be either flowing hair or braided hair, but is usually one or the other, and not both," Havelock Ellis explains. "Sexual excitement and ejaculation may be produced in the act of touching or cutting off the hair, which is subsequently used for masturbation." If clinical records of the 18th Century are notably silent on the practice, it is largely because it was considered a rather harmless hobby in comparison to the period's other sexual eccentricities. The great age of fetishism was the 19th Century, when sexual repression and an abundance of long hair led to a wide-scale wave of tress lifting in Europe.

As might be expected, the female of our species is more interested in her own hair than she is in that of the men around her. "Women, though not indifferent to fine hair, have not supplied the medical annals with typical hair fetishism," Dr. Haire writes. "On the contrary, sexologists have noted in the female sex a tendency to make a fetish of bald heads."

Cheering as the thought may be to gents with thinning hair, the doctor makes no attempt to explain why the lady skin specialists find nude noggins so appealing. While the theory has been advanced that bald-headed men are apt to be sexually more vigorous by virtue of possessing an abundance of male hormones, the degeneration of hair follicles preceding baldness has long been established as hereditary—the result of one's inherited genes, having no relation to one's amatory prowess.

Intriguing in its own quaint way is the 18th Century theory of baldness which the bewigged Dr. Samuel Johnson quotes in his famous dictionary, "that the cause of baldness in men is dryness of the brain, and its shrinking from the skull." Harebrained as the idea may sound, it must be acknowledged that if anything could have caused the cerebrum to dry up and shrink, it was the heat generated by period wigs. Even in winter an under-cap was necessary to absorb the perspiration of the head, while the removal of the wig in a cold, damp room would often cause visible steam to rise from the scalp.

What with the heat and humidity, male wigs began to diminish in size during the first half of the 18th Century, but the number of styles increased. Basically it was the same pig-tailed peruke worn by Colonial Americans, with various arrangements of bows and curls. To the modern eye, the differences are sometimes difficult to detect, but the sedan-chair-and-snuffbox set found it as easy to distinguish one from another as we do foreign cars. To name but a few popular models, there were the Pigeon's Wing, the She-Dragon, the Cauliflower, the Rhinoceros, the Rose, the Ramillie, the Negligent, the Bag, the Wild Boar's Back and the Natty Scratch—any and all of which required a couple of pounds of flour a week to keep properly powdered.

Well-appointed town houses and bachelor digs usually included a special closet where wigs were powdered—the original of today's "powder room." The functions presently associated with such quarters were commonly performed in the bedroom, where gentlemen shaved over the basin of a mirrored washstand or shaving table. The long-legged "shaving stand," dear to the hearts of antique collectors, is actually a zograscope, and had nothing to do with shaving in any period. Though it has a magnifying mirror, it lacks a basin, and was used to examine prints and engravings.

Throughout Europe, the clean-shaven face had become a symbol of civilization and progress. Intent upon modernizing Russia, Peter the Great imposed a stiff tax on Slavic beards, and roamed the palace, scissors in hand, clipping noblemen's whiskers in a one-man effort to overtake the West in the face race. In England, daily "shaving of Face and Head" was recommended, and by 1759 the exaggerated claims of soap advertisers competing for the shaver's shillings were drawing critical fire from Dr. Johnson, who particularly objected to the copy used to promote "The True Royal Chymical Washball"—an all-purpose soap guaranteed to "give an exquisite edge to the razor, and so comfort the brain and nerves as to prevent catching cold."

Prior to the Revolutionary War, the clean-shaven American gentry wore wigs made to order in London, though natural hair was favored by farmers, artisans, merchants and sailors, and Harvard College anticipated the Ivy League cut with an early ruling against "long haire, locks, foretops, curlings, crispings, partings or powdering of ye haire." American patriots were not inclined to make a political issue of the English powdered peruke, however, since many American Royalists wore natural hair, and many rebellious Whigs wore gentlemanly wigs—the name "Whig" having no hairy connotations at all, being derived from "Whig-gamores," a Scotch word for wagon drivers, who once "marched on Edinburgh to oppose the king."

It was Rousseau, and the class-conscious French Revolutionists, who first flipped the wigs of the aristocrats. "The poor must go without bread because we must have powder for our hair," the philosopher wrote in protest against the loss of tons of flour used in whitening French perukes—and with the outbreak of mob violence, both wigs and heads were lopped off by the guillotine. Tyranny was fought with tousled hair, and bravos of the barricades had their heads roughly cropped in the rebellious "Brutus" style. Liberal sympathizers in Europe and America discarded wigs and wore their hair clipped and mussed as a matter of democratic principle. As an aftermath of crop failures and bread riots, Prime Minister William Pitt then delivered the coup de grâce to the English periwig by instituting a guinea tax on hair powder, which earned conspicuous consumers the scornful name of "guinea pigs."

With the passing of the wig, grease spots began to appear on the upholstered backs of English chairs—spots resulting from the lavish use of hair lotions, such as Rowland's Macassar Oil. To combat the greasy menace, upholstery was pinned with protective lace doilies, which came to be known as "antimacassars." No mere doily, however, could withstand the deeply penetrating power of Rowland's biggest competitor—bear grease—the commercial handling of which is tellingly revealed in a period advertisement:

H. Little, Perfumer, No. 1 Portugal Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, acquaints the Public that he has killed a remarkable fine Russian Bear, the fat of which is matured by time to a proper state. He begs leave to solicit their attention to this Animal, which, for its fatness and size, is a real curiosity. He is now selling the fat, cut from the Animal, in boxes at 2s. 6d. and 5s. each, or rendered down into pots, from One Shilling ...

In the as-yet-untamed United States, dead bears were less of a novelty, and young Yankees used the grizzly grease to dress their hair in the free-flowing style made popular by the dashing Lord Byron. Long sideburns began to develop into "mutton chop" cheek whiskers that gradually crept down under the chin to form a fringe beard, and young bucks on both sides of the Atlantic cultivated the long-lost mustache with the enthusiasm of rare-orchid fanciers. "The mustaches are glorious, glorious," young Charles Dickens wrote to a fellow devotee in 1844. "I have cut them shorter and trimmed them a little at the ends to improve their shape. They are charming, charming. Without them life would be a blank."

Happily for the creator of Fezziwig and Chuzzlewit, life during the reign of the bunned and braided Victoria was one merry round of mustaches and beards. All the square-cut, round-cut, pointed, forked and fantailed prodigies of the past were revived, and long, drooping "Dundrearies" and "Piccadilly Weepers" swept the starched shirt fronts and obscured the somber cravats. By 1860, the appeal of the beard was such that a committee of New York Republicans urged their clean-shaven Presidential candidate, A. Lincoln, to "cultivate whiskers and wear standing collars" as a sure-fire means of capturing the popular vote. Lincoln wisely accepted the advice, and a bearded "Father Abraham" became the central figure in the War Between the States.

Granted the number of beardless youths who fought in blue and gray, the Civil War must go on record as the hairiest in American history, the combined foliage of any ten generals being sufficient to stuff a horsehair sofa. In the post-War years, veterans wearing tumbleweed whiskers and tobacco-stained mustaches continued to settle the wild and woolly West, where Indian scalpers had their own notions of how a white man should be trimmed.

Meanwhile, back at the barbershop, city slickers and Main Street dudes were abandoning "old fogy" beards for heavy waxed mustaches that curled up at the ends, like the steering gear on one of the newfangled bicycles. "That mustache looks like a handle bar," some wisecracker exclaimed, and the joke was carried to barbershops all over the country by back-slapping traveling men, who parted their hair in the middle, and brushed both sides at once with a pair of military brushes. Often the only roots a traveling salesman had was a shaving mug with his name on it, standing in the mug rack of some barbershop. The local customer kept his mug there, too—its presence in a niche entitling him to all the social privileges of the place, like singing tenor in an impromptu quartet, ogling the big-hipped beauties in The Police Gazette, or gazing out the window in the hopes of catching a glimpse of ankle at the corner horsecar stop.

In the Eighties and Nineties, the club-like atmosphere was elevated to gaslit splendor in the big-city "tonsorial parlor," a luxurious masculine refuge replete with white marble, black-leather upholstery, mahogany cabinetwork and mirrored walls. In the sparkle of its brass spittoons, cut-glass decanters and tall bottles of red, green and yellow tonic, the large metropolitan barbershop rivaled the glittering decor of a plush saloon or carriage-trade sporting house. If in a social mood, a man was assured of conversation that ranged from politics, stocks and bonds to prize fights, race horses and women. To the soothing slipslap rhythm of the leather razor-strop, the thoughtful could retreat behind a newspaper selected from a convenient rack where each daily was hung in a split-bamboo clip. Amidst a comforting medley of floral scents, the gleaming hot-towel machine puffed steamy promises of relaxation to the weary, who found in the barber's reclining chair all the restful benefits of modern "heart-saver" seating. Here was no quick clip-and-tip. The leisurely therapy of shampoo, shave, hot towel and scalp massage sent a man forth into the world with his psyche refreshed and his face aglow with the tingle of bay rum.

As America twenty-three-skiddooed into the 20th Century, grandpa was still combing his whiskers, and father was still drinking his morning coffee from a mustache cup—a convenient piece of china with a built-in shield across the top to keep his handle bars out of the hot Java. His up-to-the-minute collegiate son laughingly called the "old man's" mustache a "soup strainer" or "cookie duster," while father scowled at the thin line of growth on the young whipper-snapper's lip and muttered something about a "misplaced eyebrow."

The outbreak of the War in Europe, in 1914, found a bearded King in England, a mustached Premier in France, a clean-shaven Chief Executive in the White House, and a German Kaiser with—as the Elizabethan Puritan Stubbs once put it—mustaches "turned up like two hornes toward the forehead" to make himself "look terrible" to his enemies. When American forces entered the conflict under mustached General Pershing, Army barbers worked overtime mass-producing close-cropped "cootie haircuts" with mechanical hand clippers, and King C. Gillette's ingenious safety razors were issued to recruits. Originally marketed in 1903 at five dollars, the handy little shavers were now priced at a dime—though country boys using the gadget for the first time declared it couldn't shave worth a cent. Hundreds were thrown away before it was discovered that the strawfeet were putting the blades in their razors without removing the wax-paper wrapping.

In the peace that followed, barbers began to rely heavily on electric clippers. With the aid of these buzzing marvels, neck hair was trimmed so high and close, customers felt cheated unless the rearview mirror reflected a clean display of talcumed skull bone behind each ear. "See you got a haircut," one sport would remark to another. "No, I didn't," the post-War wag would reply. "Had my ears lowered, instead!" Even more uproarious was the laughter which greeted the suggestion that a man in need of a haircut should "buy a violin." Long hair was strictly for artists and musicians, while beards were for Bolsheviks, bohemians and bums.

Allowing for variations in tonsorial artistry, haircuts of the Twenties were remarkably standardized. Sheiks and sugar daddies were clipped and trimmed in pretty much the same "regular" style as bookkeepers and bootleggers, and the vast majority of American males shaved at home. Balancing the barbers' loss was the fact that more and more women were visiting their shops to have their hair shingled and bobbed. Once considered the hallmark of a mannish radical, the short shingle was now being worn by daring young flappers and gin-slinging jazz babies, who flattened their bosoms and donned straight-cut sacks in the mistaken belief that sexual emancipation demanded they look and act like young boys.

During the Depression-ridden Thirties, most men got a haircut only when they needed it, and shook their heads firmly to the barber's hopeful litany of extras: "Shave? Shampoo? A little tonic?" In 1932, the price of a haircut was seldom more than 35 cents and a nickel tip was considered sufficient. If a customer didn't mind killing an hour reading back issues of Ballyhoo, he could "wait for the boss," and eliminate the need for a tip. The boss was presumed to be so rich he didn't need the nickel.

Determined to keep up a presentable appearance, the more heroic among the unemployed subjected themselves to the uncertain skills of barber-college students, who charged a dime for a haircut and five cents for a shaky shave. At home, penny-wise shavers whisked away the bristles with single-and double-edged safety razors, and experimented with patented blade sharpeners whose thrifty appeal paralleled that of the roll-your-own cigarette machine. While professional barbers continued to suffer from the slump, the market for home-shaving products boomed, and advertisers poured millions into the promotion of brushless shaving creams. On radio Singin' Sam, the Barbasol Man, crooned the new no-brush theme in a lusty baritone. On the highways motorists developed a quoting acquaintance with groups of signboards strung along the side of the road, each displaying one line of a brushless-cream jingle: to get away ... from hairy apes ... Ladies Jump ... from fire escapes ... Burma Shave.

Pulling uphill into the Forties, the American economy recovered to the point where merchandisers began to find a market for prestige-type razors, such as a premium-priced English job with a permanent sword-steel blade, and a lifetime honing strop built into the case. (In 1941, the first Schick Injector razor made a bid for attention with the "push-pull-click-click" of its automatic blade changer.) By 1942, the price of a haircut had climbed to 50 cents, and tips were up to a dime, but millions of able-bodied Americans were getting GI haircuts at Government expense. Whether given in a barber's chair at a Stateside base, or while seated on an oilcan on Okinawa, the standard service clip was short and speedy. But despite the jokes and griping about the GI cut, many discharged veterans continued to wear it in the post-War years, when it became known as the Crewcut—a cognomen that suggested college athletics under the GI Bill of Rights. In its original form, the Crewcut featured closely clipped sides and an inch of hair on top. If the hair were longer, it was a Feather Crew. Cut straight across the head in a short, stiff brush, it was a Flattop. Rounded to the shape of the skull, it was a Butch. At the opposite extreme were the long hair styles of some younger-generation males, whose carefully combed locks swirled to a crest in back, like a duck's tail feathers—hence, the D.A., or Duck's Ass.

With industry retooling for peacetime production, the Army's aerosol bug bomb was adapted to civilian use, and brushless creams were canned under pressure to eject a spurt of aerated foam at the touch of a finger. But in the late Forties and Fifties many men were switching from safety razors to electric shavers amidst a crossfire of advertising claims. One shaver boasted "the largest shaving head of all," designed to get at the "hidden beard"! Another prided itself on the thinness and flexibility of its shaving surface, and rather churlishly retorted, "Other shavers have thick rigid heads!" Alert to his consumer responsibilities, the average American male compared the differences among each year's improved models, trading in the old and trial-testing the new with the same kind of tire-kicking concentration he brought to the purchase of a new car. This affinity between electric shavers and sedans was finally made manifest by the appearance of a shaver that plugged into a car's cigarette lighter for the convenience of travelers, salesmen and commuters. With the 1959 debut of another shaver that operated on three forward speeds, like a car's automatic gearshift, it seemed that the roadside mating of razor plug and dashboard socket had resulted in the birth of progeny with two efficient little heads.

Sensing an undertone of status yearning in the electric-shaver phenomenon, one safety-razor firm successfully launched a gold-plated model in 1953, but the safety razor's strongest appeal was, and is, its low cost and upkeep—a factor not overlooked in the 1963 promotion of the new and highly successful 20-shave stainless-steel blades. In preparation for the continued coexistence of two shaving methods, purveyors of lotions and talcs shrewdly angle their lines to lure both the electric-and safety-razor customer, and, since 1961, have been recommending "preshave" lotions to "prop up" the beard for a wet electric shave.

During the battle of blades and beard mowers, the Crewcut evolved into the conservative Ivy League, and was perfectly in keeping with the trend to natural shoulders and narrow lapels. Introduced into the image-conscious precincts of advertising and television, the unassuming tonsure was modestly parted and brushed flat to give even the gray-haired an appearance of boyish sincerity. Now called the Madison Avenue, it can be seen bobbing affably in the charcoal-gray crowd, as the curates of communications and the high priests of persuasion hasten to their noonday devotions. Mingled in the midtown throng, one also sees, of late, the Caesar—a modified Madison Avenue brushed forward to conceal a bald spot in the manner of the Roman Julius.

For some years now, it has seemed that the younger man's preference was for a short haircut, while many mature types were going halfway with a semi-Crew, known as the Dutch, Detroit or California. Recently, however, the nation's better barbershops report a return to longer hair in the Continental or British style, typified by Rex Harrison and Sir Harold Macmillan; there was, until his death, an increasing number of requests for haircuts "like President Kennedy's."

Since no one had ever been known to ask for a trim like Dwight D. Eisenhower's or Harry S. Truman's, interest in the Kennedy cut could hardly be attributed to politics. It was, in fact, a result of President Kennedy's personal sense of style—a quality highly respected by his New York barber, Mr. Louis Bocchetto, who made news headlines by being invited to the President's Inaugural Ball. Besieged by customers' requests to duplicate the Kennedy haircut, Mr. Bocchetto loyally refused. "Not all men look like Mr. Kennedy, or have hair like Mr. Kennedy's," he was quoted as saying, "and on the majority of men it would look foolish."

In so commenting, Mr. Bocchetto revealed himself as a true "hair stylist," dedicated to creating custom haircuts that suit the individual. Though his rates are moderate by Manhattan standards, this sort of personalized service is beginning to command prices that promise to rival fees charged for a psychoanalytic hour. At present, customers at one hoity-toity tonsorial parlor are being clipped four bucks for a styling and two-fifty for a cut. The basic "works," which includes a shampoo, shave, manicure and brief bask under the sun lamp, totals $12, sans tip-a price which gives new significance to the traditional bleeding basin atop the blood-red pole.

The mere ability to pay does not make one eligible for a haircut at one of New York's top-status shops, however. Here, service is available only to a select group of privileged regulars. The presence of one's name in the appointment book is considered tantamount to membership in the French Academy of Immortals, and the well-heeled pledgee is required to take his place on a waiting list pending the eventual death of ten elder clients. To survive the long wait with a modicum of prestige, applicants often resort to the office haircut, given at one's desk-a tycoon-type ritual initiated by the emperor Augustus, who would call in two or three barbers to give him a shave and trim while he dictated memoranda in Latin.

To justify higher prices, barbers attending the 1960 National Barber Show were told the haircut "must be perfect. ... We don't want to have to look down when we tell the customer four-fifty." In order to maintain a cool, steady gaze at the moment of truth, some barbers have been reducing their patrons to a state of humble reverence by giving haircuts with a straight-edge razor-a technique more ancient than Rome, with a primitive kinship to Maori obsidian-knife ceremonies. While the customer need not eat a sacrificial victim, or perform incantations against thunder and lightning, he must yet be on his guard against the modern barber's mumbo jumbo of bewitching extras. "Don't forget eyebrow coloring," one razor-wielding stylist told his fellow clip artists at the show. "That's the fastest buck you ever made. A man's eyebrows get bleached by the sun; it makes his face look weak. I get one-fifty for that, two-fifty for a mustache job."

At the moment, there seems to be no immediate danger of a return to "orange-tawny" mowchatowes or "purple-in-grain" beards, but the recent resurgence of the beard has caused many urban barbers to brush up on the Elizabethan art of pogonotomy, or beard trimming. In the London of the present-day Elizabeth, one posh practitioner is specializing in a Byronesque male permanent called the Tiara-Boom D.A., while another emulates the Egyptians with custom-designed false beards for evening wear. Add to this the Caesar, the Augustan office haircut, and the increasing demand for toupees, and it would appear that the future of shaves and haircuts is rooted firmly in the past.

As this brief history is being trimmed and manicured for the press, American teen types mimic the mop-top mode of the Beatles with overgrown soup-bowl styles that are the kookie counterparts of those worn by Henrys I through IV. As a harbinger of cutless cuts to come, The New York Times appears with a neatly clipped headline: "British his and her' Hairdos blur him her Line." "Teenage couples in London have a new way of pledging their affections—by wearing their hair alike," Gloria Emerson cables in a special Times report. "The most commonly seen hairdo, acidly described as 'British togetherness,' is marked by a thick Beatle fringe over the forehead, long sideburns that could be spit curls, and a shaggy shingle effect in the back. More startling are the shoulder-length lionlike hairdos worn by other young men and their girlfriends ..." With both Mods and Rockers affecting he-lion-she-lion manes, sexual confusion is such that young men are frequently mistaken for girls, Miss Emerson reports, while older Britons "smile wanly and blame the influence of popular singers, such as the Beatles (the best groomed), the Rolling Stones, the Pretty Things, the Animals, the Kinks, the Dave Clark Five and the Daisies." Of all such nonbarbershop singers, the Pretty Things have elicited the most hostility among parents and teachers. Male Pretty Things fans who show up for class "wearing long hair in the quasi-Stuart fashion," are often threatened with suspension and "forced to tie their hair back with ribbons"—a practice which has led some observers to predict a return of 17th Century "love locks" and/or the beribboned 18th Century male pigtail.

With wigs in big for the fair sex, the possibility of a 20th Century revival of a powdered Natty Scratch for American men may not be as remote as we would like to believe, and the alert citizen can hardly be blamed for looking up with a nervous start when the smiling gent in the starched white coat calls out a cheery "... Next?"