To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

From PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Jim Flaming. On today's show, we look at... ...as I can grow in my head... ...grow it, show it... ...know as I can grow in my head... ...as I can grow in my head... ...as I can grow in my head... The Romans invented the two principal forms of covering baldness that existed for centuries... ...in fact, millennia, comeovers and paint on hair. We've adapted it thanks to high -tech spray on hair, but the Romans came up with this. Hair styles and attitudes, are they connected? Our styles, we embrace the matter of taste, more values, rejected. Hair

styles and attitudes, are they natively? How will we use our freedom of truth in two, three, three, eight? Hair styles and attitudes. Do bald men get half -priced haircuts? It's the title of Vince Staten's book. Staten visited more than 300 barber shops across the country to research the book. He told Anne Strange, Champs, what makes a good barber shop? A good barber shop really has almost nothing to do with the haircut. A barber shop is more like a community. It may be a community in like a small town community. It could be a community just a neighborhood in a big city or it could be a community of like -minded people. I've been in barber shops that were, I would call them baseball barber shops because that's all they talk about. Winter, spring, summer, fall, baseball. Political barber shops where the topic of the day is always politics. I grew up in East Tennessee in a little barber shop that I would call a NASCAR barber shop. Even before there was a NASCAR because that's all the

barbers and all the customers talked about was car racing and junior Johnson and Fireball Roberts. So do men choose their barber shops not for the quality of the haircut but for the quality of the conversation? I think that's a big part of why men choose their barber shop is what the conversation is that's going on in there. They want a place where they feel at home. And once you get a place like that, you just keep coming back over and over and over again. In fact, even when things change in the barber shop, it's hard to change barbers. There's a very famous Seinfeld episode where Jerry has to sneak around and go to another barber. His barber has gotten old and doesn't give us good haircuts. Once you find that barber shop, you're almost stuck with it for life. So do you have a regular barber shop you go to? I do. I go to a guy named Webb, Webb Scarborough. He's in downtown Louisville, Kentucky.

When I moved to Louisville, I found a barber shop and I went there and then my barber died. So I was I was free to look for a new shop. So I was searching and I'd passed this barber shop many times and it looked like the barber shop of my youth. So finally one day I was working at the newspaper then on my lunch hour. I tracked down to Webb's and I got to the door. It had been very cold and I stuck my head in the door and the place was absolutely packed. There was only one seat in there, even some of the extra barber chairs. Webb has four chairs, but there's only Webb cutting hair. And I thought, man, I'm on my lunch hour. I'm not going to have time to get a haircut with all these people in there. But before I could turn around and get out of the shop, everybody in there had yelled at me in unison. You're next because nobody else was in there to get a haircut. Everybody had just stopped by to chew the fat, hear Webb's famous collections of jokes, insult each other, insult Webb.

And that's when I thought, this is my kind of barber shop and I've been going there ever since. How do you tell if a barber shop is going to be the right kind? I mean, a barber shop like you're talking about where people are going for the conversation and it's really a community. I mean, they're not all like that. No, they're not all, but you know, there's something for everybody. I suspect there may be even a few people in America who want silent haircuts. Those are going to be hard to find, but every now and then you can find one. When I tell people what to look for in a new barber shop, the first thing I think they want to avoid is a barber shop that has the word style in the name of the place because style is something different than a haircut. I think you want to look for a barber pole outside. The style shops don't put barber poles outside, but the real barbers do. And I like a place that has somebody's name in it, you know, like Floyd's barber shop just to pick a name out of the air. That tells me that the barber is sort of putting himself on the line. He is taking

full credit for everything that goes on in that barber shop. You traveled all over the country going to different barber shops. Why? Well, I grew up in the South. I wanted to see when I was writing this book to make sure that, you know, the barbershops of the South weren't different from the barbershops of the Midwest or the barbershops of the North or the barbershops of the West Coast or the Southwest. And while I did find there, there are a lot of differences like when you go up into the Northeast, suddenly almost every barber up there is Italian. And while that may be a big part of the barbershop, a lot of things are still the same. It's still the same come in. It's friendly. It's your kind of place. There may be a difference. Instead of talking to you, they may sing to you. I went to one particular barbershop in Stanford, Connecticut called Three Brothers, where all the guys do all day long is sing to each other, sing to the

customers. I mean, it's a real joyous place to get a haircut. So, what do you think are America's best barbershops? Oh, I would have to put those guys in there. Three barbers in Stanford, Connecticut. And, you know, I can't leave out my own personal barber, Web. I found a guy in Kingsport, Tennessee, a guy named Claude Russell. He has a sign on the mirror that says, Haircuts 650, Silent Haircuts $10. When you leave, he'll tell you as you're going out the door, he'll say, if you can't come back in two weeks, send me a check. And he promises that your last haircut is free, that if you get a haircut and die shortly after that, he will come to the funeral home and slip a refund check into the casket. We haven't talked about the hair. I mean, we haven't talked about the actual haircut. I mean, does that even matter to men care what their hair looks like when they go to a barber shop? Well, speaking as a bald man, we care less than others. But yes,

men do have their vanity that, you know, it is the male peacock who has the colored plumage. And over the years, men have had some of the oddest, most unusual haircuts. When I was a kid growing up in the 50s, a big haircut was the flat top. I look back today and I think, why would you want your hair to need a lathe to make sure that it's flat all the way across? When Elvis became a big star, everybody adopted the Elvis haircut, the big troubadour kind of hair that stood up tall. With the sideburns. And I love haircut names. There's some great haircut names we've had over the years. The Caesar, the Papadors, a great name. Many of your listeners, of course, will know the mullet, which is probably the haircut with the most disdain towards it right now. Hairdressers call it a bilevel. Effectively what it is, it's short on top and long on the sides. It goes back behind the ears. A number of different names for that one. They call it the Tennessee Tuxedo,

the Kentucky mud flap, the waterfall. People ask me, what is a mullet? I say, do you remember Billy Ray Cyrus, the country singer with the big hit, Aiki Breakey Heart? He had a mullet, which leads us to another great name for the mullet, which is the Aiki Breakey Mistakey. Where did it get the name of the mullet? The name mullet comes from the Paul Newman movie, Cool Hand Luke. There's a scene in there where a Newman, who's on a prison detail, spots some straggly long haired guys, and he calls them mullet heads. And that's how the name got adopted. I wanted to ask you about the origins of some of the accouterments of barbershops. For instance, where does the barbershop pole come from? Oh, the barbershop pole goes all the way back to the Middle Ages when barbers were also surgeons. And they would bleed people. You know, they kept jars of leeches. What a wonderful place it must have been to go then.

Go in and get your arm opened up. Get a vein open, blood everywhere. And they would hang their white sheets out with blood stains on them. They would hang them out to dry, and the wind would whip around. Swirl the sheets with the blood stains into sort of a peppermint candy -type pattern. And this became recognized as the barbers symbol. People would see where the sheets were twisted in the wind, and they'd know, oh, there's a barbershop. We can stop there and get a haircut and a couple of leeches. You tell a funny story in your book also about an ice fisherman who had an adventure with a barber pole. An ice fisherman decided, because he was out way into the night playing his trade, he needed a way to find his house. Well, a lot of people had lights on their house. Big Lake, he couldn't tell which was his. So he decided to put up a barber pole with the red, white, and blue candy stripe. And that way he would know his house. But he finally ended up having to take the barber pole down

because when he would get back home from ice fishing, there would be a crowd of people waiting to get a haircut. You know, we've got a whole generation of men now who've never even set foot in a barbershop. Listening to you, I kind of wonder why. I mean, why have barbershops gone into decline? Well, one thing that started the decline of the barbershop was back in February of 1964. I talked to a bunch of barbers, older barbers, when I was on the barber trail. Some of whom could tell you the exact day that the Beatles landed in America. That's when they say the death of the barbershop began because suddenly all these kids who've been going to the barbershop every two weeks to get their flat top or their GI haircut saw these long haired kids on the Ed Sullivan show, saw all the girls screaming and decided maybe it was time to let the hair grow a little bit and grow and grow. You know, and I'm one of those people who didn't even go to the barbershop

for like five or six years during the late 60s, early 70s. If you needed any cutoff, you would get your girlfriend to do it. So I think that's what started the decline of the barbershop. A lot of guys left the barbering trade. There's a barber here in Kentucky where I live. I talked to him. And he was barbering in 1964. He knew the exact day. He said, in the 10 years between 64 and 74, 2000 barbers in Kentucky left the profession 2 ,000 out of 5 ,000, 40 % of the barbers in the state left. Been stating is the author of Do Baldwin get half price haircuts. In search of America's great barbershops, he spoke with end strain champs. I wish a girl would invite me to dance. But as opposed, I don't stand a chance. Maybe for a dance with the room and boy. I think I feel a

little bit sad. I think I'll get in my haircuts. Maybe I'll be a copy, a copy, a copy. When you think of barbers on the silver screen, who comes to mind? Well, perhaps Charlie Chaplin's barber character from his classic film The Great Dictator. One of the most recent films about barbers is The Man Who Wasn't Thair. Billy Bob Thornton plays the title character, Ed Crane, a barber with a low metabolism. It's how Joel and Ethan Cohen describe the Ed Crane character. The Cohen brothers are the creators of the movie. Ethan and Joel Cohen explain the inspiration behind The Man Who Wasn't Thair. We started thinking about the movie actually because we have this piece of set dressing from I think it was in the head sucker proxy. Another movie we did, we shot a scene in a barbershop and there was a poster on the wall of all the different period and haircuts

1940s haircuts. We were looking at that, it was like a fixture. We appropriated it for our office and we're looking at it. That's really where the story started. I know it's a little bit odd, but that's actually the case. It came from a haircut poster. The movie is about a barber in Northern California in the late 40s who doesn't really want to be a barber. What he wants to do is go into dry cleaning. He discovers that his wife is having an affair with her employer and in an attempt to become a dry cleaner. He sets a chain of events in motion that involve his wife and his wife's lover which have tragic consequences for everyone involved. No, barber thing is really just the backdrop. The story didn't sort of catch fire until we added the dry

cleaning to the mix. And then we knew we had something that we could take and pitch to all the studios. Yeah, I worked in a barbershop, but I never considered myself a barber. I stumbled into it, well married into it more precisely. It wasn't my establishment. Like the fellow says, I only work here. The dump was 200 feet square, three chairs or stations as we call them. Even though there were only two of us working. But this is my point. My point is that these traders and trappers would come to this country and get the pelts and the gold Ignats and silver. Frank Raffo, my brother -in -law, was the principal barber and man could he talk. It was a craze on beaver hats in Paris at the time. Now maybe if you're 11 or 12 years old, Frank's got an interesting point of view. But sometimes he got on my nerves. Nothing I complain mind you. Like I

said, he was the principal barber. Me, I don't talk much. I just cut the hair. Now being a barber is a lot like being a bar man or a soda jerk. There's not much to it once you've learned the basic moves. For the kids, there's the butcher, the heiny, the flat top, the ivy, the crew, the vanguard, the junior contour, and occasionally the executive contour. It's Billy Bob Thornton, as the barber Ed Crane and the man who wasn't there, a film by the Cohen Brothers, Joel and Ethan. It's interesting. When you show people bearded faces, they have strong reactions either way. I mean, they either think Santa or they think Satan. Coming up the long and the short of beards, and the life and times of Madam CJ Walker, I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International.

Alegria Bundles is the author of On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madam CJ Walker. It's the biography of her great -great -grandmother. In the early 1900s, Madam CJ Walker invented a revolutionary haircare formula for black women. Alegria Bundles told Steve Paulson how Madam Walker changed the way that women treated their hair. She really encouraged women to wash their hair more often, and then they applied an ointment which contains sulfur that healed their scalp disease.

Even though it's really difficult to think about it, the turn of the last century hygiene was very different in America. And Madam Walker really revolutionized the way women approached their haircare. Why was that so revolutionary to apply sulfur to your scalp? Well, you know, you consider at that time most people didn't have indoor plumbing or electricity or central heating. You know, a bath was something that people did once a week at the public baths or in a tub in the kitchen. So we really had very different ideas about hygiene, and even though she was a washer woman, washing other people's clothes, scrubbing floors, doing all those kinds of things, there was an old wives' tale that suggested to women that they really only needed to wash their hair once a month and not at all during the winter. And that probably arose because people didn't have running water and electricity and central heating. So this was really a new idea to get women to see this whole approach to caring for their hair in a very different way. They had horrible scalp disease as a result of washing their hair so

infrequently. And in order to heal that scalp disease, they had to apply some kind of healing agent. And in her case, she came up with the idea of sulfur in a formula that was called petrolatum. Now, she wasn't the first person to come up with this idea. This is a centuries old remedy. What was revolutionary about her business is that where other people had had local and regional businesses, she developed a national and international system of distribution and advertising and promotion. Was this specifically targeted for black women? Her products were targeted to black women, but there were white women who had exactly the same problem. If you look in old newspapers or a Sears catalogs, Bloomingdale's catalogs from the 1890s, you'll see advertisements for hair restores and for some of the same kinds of products that she developed. In fact, Cuda Cura had a soap and an ointment that was somewhat similar to some of the products that she sold. How did she come up with this idea? Madam Walker said that she felt so ashamed of her

frightful appearance that she prayed to the Lord for a solution. And then she said, in one night, a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up for my formula. Some of it came from Africa. I sent for it. I mixed it together. I applied it to my scalp. And my hair began to grow back faster than it had ever fallen out. Now, I think that's probably part of the truth. That sounds like a good story. It's a great story. And she was wonderful about marketing herself and creating a mythology around herself. And I do believe people have revelations in their dreams. I don't doubt that. And she knew people would be skeptical. And she said, this is really the truth. But the truth also is that there were other products very similar to that on the market. Other products that used petrolatum and sulfur. And she experimented with those products and then finally came up with her own formula. But it wasn't really the formula that was new. It was her approach to selling it and training other women and motivating almost an army of African American women who otherwise would have been washer women or sharecroppers or maids. And now they could be more economically independent as a result of being Walker agents. So,

her genius was really as an entrepreneur of launching this whole business and turning it into a national phenomenon? Well, that's really true. I think if she had figured out some other product that other people needed, she would have made her money in that way. It's just that this one was very appealing. It was very needed. Women would write letters to her saying, my hair was an eighth of an inch long. And now it's down my back and I've been able to take that hair piece off of my hair. So, she really did provide quite a service to those women who were not feeling very good about the way they look. And really, at the time, there was nobody pampering black women and telling them that they were beautiful. So, just the whole idea of someone focusing on them in the very lovely beauty salons that she built with massages and manicures. That was a real luxury for women who primarily were working in other people's kitchens and cleaning their houses to be able to begin to think of themselves in a different way. It would be tempting to say, oh, this is kind of trivial. Hair treatment and

your hair looks nicer. But culturally, it was probably really important. Well, it was. I know that makeup and hair and we can just sort of people sometimes get carried away with that and to the point of superficiality. But when you consider the times in which she lived, most African Americans were living in the rural south. But people were beginning to become more urban and they wanted to have a more sophisticated look. How you looked sometimes determined where you worked, that's still true today. And women wanted to look beautiful. Certainly, men were making choices about their mates as a result. And that may be a little superficial, but that's still true today. So, how did she do this? How did she build up this business empire? She had just amazing native intelligence and I have to tell you, I think she was a genius. You know, why is it that Mozart or Duke Ellington, why did they do what they did? There's a variable where some people have a gift and she had a gift for motivating other people. I think some of this grew

out of her early difficulties in her life. She was orphaned at seven, the daughter of slaves married at 14, mother at 17, a widow at 20. It's incredible. It isn't incredible. Right, the loss and the abuse, she was abused by her brother -in -law when she moved in with her sister and brother -in -law. So, she went through the kind of loss and abuse that most of us don't experience in a lifetime. And the reaction of some people to that kind of situation would become more insular. Her response was a response of resilience where she wanted to make sure that other people didn't have to go through what she'd gone through. And she reached out and used those negative experiences to try to make things more positive for other people. Once she started her business, there was an adrenaline that must have flowed for her as she saw the response of other people. She was helping them. She was teaching them how to make money and one thing led to another. She traveled all over the United States and even to the Caribbean and Central America training

these women. And they would write letters to her and they would say, you have made it possible for a colored woman to make more money in a day than she could in a month working in somebody else's kitchen. So, that really fed her and she then said, what I want to do is make it possible for the girls and women of my race to become more economically independent. So, she had a real philosophy behind this. I mean, this was empowerment. She really did have a philosophy and you could see the evolution in her letters to her attorney and in the speeches that she made, the approach that she had to gathering other women together. In 1917, around the time Mary Kay was born, Madame Walker was having the first convention of Walker beauty cultureist and sales agents. And she was giving prizes to these women not only for the ones who had sold the most products but also for the women who had contributed the most to charity and to political causes. She even told her agents at that first convention, I want you to understand that your first duty is to humanity. She wanted to organize these women around the principle of

corporate responsibility when that was really quite a new idea. Now, there was some controversy. Wasn't she accused by some black leaders of basically trying to make black women look more white? I mean, straightening hair and that kind of thing? There definitely was a controversy. I think as long as we've been in America and as long as we will be in America, there will be a debate about whether black women should straighten their hair or wear it natural. And I think Madame Walker was really quite aware of this controversy and she distinguished herself from the companies who made hair straighteners. Her products were hair growers, were ointments and salves that healed the scalp. But she did use the hot comb and many people believed she invented the hot comb. She did not invent the hot comb which really was a European invention and was used by European women first. But Madame Walker used that comb because she thought it made the hair look more natural. Women did want to be able to comb through their hair and to wear some of the styles of the day. And I suppose you could say that

African American women as most immigrant women were influenced by some of the beauty standards of the times. But she was so aware of the controversy that she even said, let me correct the erroneous impression that I claim to straighten hair. I grow hair and I want the great masses of my people to care more about their appearance. And that may sound a little bit condescending to us today but when you consider that most people were living on farms and they weren't well dressed and well groomed, this was something that would help them feel better about themselves. So you know, she danced right into that controversy and tried to help people understand that what she was doing was a little bit different. Booker T. Washington had been one of her critics and he really did not make this distinction between hair straightening and hair growing. But he was very old fashioned and I don't think he saw this revolution in the cosmetics industry. Really there had not been a commercial hair care and cosmetics industry until the turn of the last century of the 20th century. And women like Madame Walker and Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden were

founding this business. And though Booker T. Washington was critical of her initially, his wife was using the products. Madame C .J. Walker was your great -great -grandmother? That's correct. You must be pretty proud of her. Oh, definitely, definitely. But I had to evolve. You know, during the 1960s when I wanted a big afro, I was a little bit ambivalent about her. So I had to really begin to understand just how important she was. And now that I'm in my late 40s and I really can understand her personal evolution from the cotton fields of the South to a woman who had a global political and economic vision. I really am awed by her to look at how she empowered other women, how she became a political activist. Really is quite amazing to me. Allelia Bundles is the author of On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C .J. Walker. She spoke with Steve Paulson. On

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I'm all I want to do. I'm all I want to do. I'm all I want to do. Alan Peterkin is a psychiatrist. He's also an author. His latest book is 1 ,000 Beards, A Cultural History of Facial Hair. Peterkin told Steve Paulson just how popular facial hair is right now. Facial hair currently is experiencing a huge boom. And I think we've only seen such booms in Victorian times and possibly in the 60s. But it's very big now. It seems to be transforming since the mid -90s. But it's a trend that just won't go away. Why? Well, I think there are a number of reasons that might explain that currently. I think there's a sense of real individualism that men are trying to express their personalities with their beards and their mustaches and their sideburns. Whereas before, throughout history, you wore a beard to show your allegiance to a particular political group or religious group or your class. Now, sort of

modern men are saying this is a very individual expression. And particularly, I think you're seeing it in the business world because men want to show that they're no corporate slave, that they can get away with it. I think there's one sort of final element that seems to explain its resurgence. And that is sort of a post -feminist expression. It's something that men can do that obviously women can't. So there's something a little rebellious about wearing a beard. It's not just going to cow -tow to authority. I think that's absolutely right. It was a sign of conventionalism leading up to the 20th century. And then the meaning of the beard shifted dramatically in the 20th century. So there in previous centuries there have been different reasons for why people have had beards? Yes, absolutely. Usually the instructions came from some kind of vain leader telling people what they should do. So for instance, you had Hadrian the Emperor telling his men that they had to go beards because he grew a beard to hide his facial scars. That kind of thing sort

of comes and goes, you know, off into history. Peter the Great was embarrassed once because he had a bit of snot on his beard. And this was pointed out to him by a noble woman. He was so chagrin that he taxed beards for all Russians. And, you know, this is the kind of thing that happens throughout history. It's really quite funny. Kind of an extreme reaction, I would say. I think so, but they could get away with it. One of the most interesting chapters in your book is called The Religious Beard. As you point out, beards in other forms of facial hair have a longstanding association with religion. Absolutely. I think all of the key religions have something to say about the beard. So for Jews, the instructions come from Leviticus that a man is not to mar the corner of his beard. And that becomes a very important instruction for observant Jews. Of course, we think of in Christianity, we think of the Apostles and Jesus, who actually wore a Jewish beard. But the beard came to be very much a Christian symbol. Now, interestingly in Christianity, the beard sort of flipped flop back and forth with popularity.

At one point, it was thought that it somehow abraded the Eucharist or the holy wine, you know, as they were being ingested. So there were instructions to shave the beard. In the 11th century, there was a huge schism between the East Orthodox Church and the Vatican or the Roman Church. So you see mostly Roman Catholics being clergy being clean shaven and their Eastern counterparts having these long, magnificent beards. You had Mohammed in Islam tradition telling men as well not to shave their beards because the beard was given by God. It was not to be removed because that would deface a countenance. And it was also there to distinguish men from women. So, you know, in Islam, you have a very strong tradition of the beard as well. Seeks, of course, were long beards. And finally, the Rastas, a more recent religion, follow the instructions in Leviticus than a man shouldn't shave his beard. So very important. And I think, again, men of these religions would wear these beards to show their allegiance and to also distinguish

themselves from infidels who didn't have beards. Of course, beards have been in the news more recently ever since September 11th and the news that under the Taliban it was required for men to have beards. Do you think there's been any kind of a backlash against beards because of recent political events? I think so. Because they didn't want to be stopped at the airport or sort of seen as suspect. And I think that's regrettable because in Afghanistan those were not, you know, Islamic beards. Those were totalitarian beards and the men were forced to wear them. So I like to make that distinction that that isn't a religious beard. And I think the proof being that, you know, when the men were liberated, they shaved it off to show that they didn't have allegiance. So, you know, I think that's an important distinction to make. And one thing you do in your cultural history of beards and facial hair is you explore some of the, I suppose you could say, some of the trends on the fringe. And one of them

is the fascination with bearded ladies. Yes. This goes way back in history, doesn't it? That's right. Very neglected group. Certainly in modern times, you know, women with facial hair were thought to be, you know, sort of witches or hags or something diabolical. There were some prominent women in history, you know, friends of kings and queens and so forth who had facial hair and were quite celebrated. There have been saints in history. There are a couple of legends, the most prominent being the Portuguese woman called Wilga Fortis, who was a very devout Christian girl. Her father wanted her to marry a pagan. And she prayed for deliverance. And deliverance came by way of a beard, which of course quickly turned off her suitors. So she didn't have to marry the pagan, but unfortunately her father beheaded her for being a freak. So there was a great price to pay, but these saintly hairy girls are celebrated as being very devout, very virtuous and their beard as being a gift from God.

You move sort of to more modern times and you have circuses exhibiting women, hairy women as freaks. And I discuss the history of some of these women. Often very, very sad, they were exploited by parents or husbands, they were often sold or kidnapped. So quite a miserable existence. Can you give me some examples of one or two of these famous bearded ladies who ended up in the circus? Sure, there was one lady called Jane Barnell, that was her birth name, and she went on to be known as Lady Olga. But what happened to her, just as an example of these horrible stories, is that her mother didn't like her because she was hairy quite early. And she took her to a visiting circus called the West Orient Family Circus, and the mother simply left her there. So when Jane's father went looking for her, he found out that the circus had already left for Europe. And not only that, but poor Jane became ill on the road and was abandoned at one of the sites where the circus had set up tent. And her father had to sort

of engage in a huge search to find her and bring her back. She was in an orphanage by that point. And this time the father wisely decided to leave Jane with his mother, who was obviously better disposed to her. Another example was this woman called Julia Pastrana, who was very short and quite odd looking. She had big teeth and a big nose, and she was completely hairy, her body and her face. And she took up with a guy called Lent, I thought it was kind of a foreboding name. It was something of a Sven Galley. She died very young, giving birth to a hairy infant, who was completely sort of covered with hair. And what Lent did is he had the body of poor Giuliana and her child mummified and continued to exhibit it for years in traveling circuses. So, you know, these are rather sad tales. Now there is a modern bearded lady I should tell you about, because she's appeared in a number of documentaries. And I think she lives in New Jersey right now, but she's called Jennifer Miller.

And she's what you call sort of the postmodern bearded lady. She's no contradiction from wearing beautiful sort of silky gowns and having this magnificent black beard. So she's sort of saying, you know, I can decide what this beard means. You can't. And she does expose sort of in a modern circus and as a performance artist. And as saying, you know, I get to decide what this beard means, not you. And I think, by the way, that's an overriding trend for men and women these days is that nobody gets to tell you what your beard means. You get to tell them what it means. Alan Peterkin is the author of 1000 Beards, a cultural history of facial hair. We talk to Steve Paulson. I try to handle my design, not to mention this

beard, but my one who's calling made a wig, my point to be a main thing. But when I trip, it means for not to restrain, but never call. Well, there you go again, just using the word rug. I mean, as a journalist, I'm offended. As a guest of yours, I'm appalled. And as a listener, I would, you know, write your letters. Coming up, we'll lift the lid on mankind's historic quest to end baldness. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI, Public Radio International. Music You might think that mankind's preoccupation with baldness is a relatively new

development in the history of civilization. Turns out that's not the case. And if you don't believe me, just ask Gersh Kuntzman. That's what I did. Kuntzman's the author of Hair, mankind's historic quest to end baldness. It has been a historic problem since there was history. The ancient Egyptians talked about baldness. They prayed to a god of the head to cure them of baldness. Although in Egyptian society, the pharaohs were bald. And so, at some point, it was seen as a symbol of strength, but it was certainly not seen as natural. The Romans worried about baldness. The Romans invented the two principal forms of covering baldness that existed for centuries. In fact, millennia, comeovers, and paint on hair. We've adapted it, thanks to high tech, spray on hair. But the Romans came up with this. And it was as ridiculed in its day, then as it is now. We have a lot of things to talk about, clearly. But the funny thing is that when you see movies about ancient Egypt, for instance, always the viral guy is the bald guy. But that wasn't true then. It was true to some extent, but there were Egyptians who were concerned about

their baldness. They were cures burning, a domesticated mouse, and then turning it into a paste that one would spread on one's head. It didn't smell great. It didn't make you popular at parties, and probably didn't work either. So there was definitely some concern because the ancient papyruses do talk about curing baldness. And of course the other you talk about this being a concern in Rome. Here you have Julius Caesar, whom everybody portrays as having no hair at all. And again, one of the great leaders of Western history. Rome's obsession with vanity rivaled our own. And we are clearly obsessed if they had had high tech and four color magazines. They would have had things like glamour magazine and cosmopolitan, just like we do. And baldness was right up there. Even though Caesar was bald, Caesar always tried to cover his baldness. He himself was very nervous about his baldness. He covered it with laurels. He invented the Caesar haircut, combed his hair forward, actually. And even in his day historians would make fun of him for this. You know what this really does is beg the question, what is it about

baldness? Why are we so worried about it? Why do you think so many men are worried about losing their hair? First of all, it's several reasons. One is you look at yourself in the mirror. A guy who's maybe 35 or something. He starts seeing he's losing his hair. And that's really the first indication to the guy that he's no longer the young guy that he thinks he is. Because he can still go up a flight of stairs without breathing heavily. Or he can still carry bundles from the grocery without a problem. He looks in the mirror and he sees an old guy. He sees his father. And that's the first chance. Because when you're 35, very little else is starting to fail you. Although, in my case, my memory, but that's another story. And so that's the first thing. And then the second thing is they start projecting. They don't even do this consciously, but they start projecting a less manly image about themselves to other people. It's very subtle, but there's research. There's lots of research actually that shows it. Guys with hair versus guys without hair. Project themselves differently. And then once they start projecting themselves differently, people react to them differently. So then it becomes a chicken and egg thing. And then the bald man starts feeling, wait a minute. Not only am I now an old guy, but people aren't, you know, women or friends or

colleagues aren't reacting to me the way they used to. They think I'm an old guy. And then suddenly it's just like, well, next thing you know, you really think you're a 60 year old guy rather than a 30 year old guy. But basketball superstar Michael Jordan plays an important part in the history of baldness. Can you tell me about that? Now, this is a great psychological case study. Michael Jordan and his, actually late in his college years was starting to go bald already. Now here was a guy who knew subconsciously or consciously that, hey, if I go bald, people are no longer going to think, I want to be like Mike. I want to be Jordan. Jordan is the great. Jordan is known all over the world. They're not going to think that. So he did something masterfully said, I'm shaving my head. I'm taking back my baldness. It's like any racial or ethnic minority taking back their oppression extensively. So what he said is I'm, I'm not going to let myself go bald. I'm not going to let society define me as a, as an imponent bald man. Because that's how society looks at bald men. I'm going to shave my head and show a new image of baldness. A bald great athlete and look how many people have followed him and not just in the athletic world or in the entertainment world all over the place. You know, Bruce Willis

shaves his head when he wants to affect a certain look in a role. It's everywhere. It's in Hollywood. It's on the street. And these days, I mean, even with Michael Jordan, men are still spending thousands of dollars to fight baldness and going through a fair amount of pain half the time too. I mean, you watched as they did a hair transplant. Three of them. I kind of hesitate to bring this up because I know it's a family program and it can get quite graphic. But I watch these things and they are very gruesome operations involving. I got to say it slicing a swath about a one inch wide swath of your scalp. Off your head about 15 centimeters long, one inch wide, taking that off, chopping that up into individual hairs. Individual hairs, mind you, then poking about a thousand holes in your forehead and the upper part of your head and then planting the hairs in there. Now, when I say individual hairs, that shows you this isn't plugs like they used to be about 20 years ago. It's not that anymore at all. It's individual hairs. So that doll like Kansas drought cornfield look that you remember from 10 years ago or 20 years ago, that doesn't happen anymore. But you do have this pain and suffering. You've got this big cut in the back of your head that gets sealed up and there's a little scar

that eventually gets covered over and then you got the thousand holes in your head. Now, you're under local anesthesia, but if you were standing where I was standing, which was watching it rather than sitting in the chair, you might not go through that operation. Yeah, of course, you know, with a thousand holes in your head, what's the difference? After you get over a hundred, it probably doesn't hurt much more. Yeah, but and just the sound of it. I mean, I got to tell you, they push in the scalpel and it sounds like, you know, like when you cut a chicken bone, I mean, I don't want to get graphic, but I'll tell you it was like flat. It was flesh and bone. It was okay. This is really making the case for taking control of your baldness and being proud of it, isn't it? Or pills or or two pays or pills. Well, then another question. There are drugs these days to fight baldness. Do they work? Well, you know, they are federally approved. We have for the first time in history and the Romans would love this, I guess, two federally approved drugs, Rogaine and Propecia. Do they work? Yes. Do they work for everyone? Certainly not. And they don't work if you wait too long. If your guy is looking in the mirror and saying, wow, I'm really starting to lose a little of my hair, that's the time to start. Because if you wait until you've lost the hair, you can't grow back. Nothing that mankind will ever invent. And I'm going on record. I hope someone keeps this tape for, you know,

millennia. Nothing that mankind can invent will be able to grow hair once the follicle has been destroyed. And that's the process that happens in your body. But if you can prevent the follicle from being destroyed, which is what these drugs do, then you got a fighting chance. Okay, what about some of the others? Are there good drugs these days? Well, there you go again, just using the word rug. I mean, as a journalist, I'm offended. As a guest of yours, I'm appalled. And as a listener, I would, you know, write your letters. But I'll tell you, they're not really rugs anymore. The days of the 1970s, you know, when you go into a two -pay parlor and buy a headhugger, it was actually called a headhugger. It was this huge, it was like a car floor mat with a big sort of aluminum band underneath it that would connect it to your head. And if you went to an airport during this era, you would set off a metal detector with a headhugger. And it was quite embarrassing for Baldwin. So the days of the headhugger are long gone and thankfully gone. What they have now is basically like hair transplants, you've got individual fibers of hair, natural hair, on a very thin mesh. And it's a see -through mesh. So that when they lay the two -pay on your head, your scalp shows through. So it looks totally natural. It looks like the hairs are coming out of your scalp.

And they're done in professional salon. So it actually looks good. And I, you know, if you get a really good two -pay and they cost about a thousand bucks and you need to replace them probably once a year. So you're looking at a lifelong commitment. But if you do it, I'll tell you if this is the way you want to go. It's actually not bad. What about some of the others? I mean, we've talked about the little spray cans of paint. Are there things short of spending a thousand dollars a year on a two -pay that, well, I don't know, do any of them work? My favorite chapter in the book is we did a test of all the major baldness cover -up products, the cosmetic products, and spraying them, laying them, rolling them, putting them on all my bald friends' heads. And none of them work, however. There is one product that works very, very well if you have enough sort of wispy strands of hair to hold this product. It's a very funny product. It's called Topic. And what it is is it's a shake -on product. And it's not bits of hair. It's sheep hair. They take sheep hair. They cut it up into microscopic pieces. They put a dye on it, and then they put an electrostatic charge on it so that it'll cling to your hair.

Now, if you have enough hair, if you have, say, a winter forest on your head, and you want it to look more like spring, your rub on it's like a salt shaker. You shake on this Topic fiber, and it clings to your hair, and it basically looks like leaves on your head, but from a distance, it looks like you got more hair. Well, you can live with that if you need to. It's mostly for special occasions. The guy who invented it actually was telling me about the time that he actually wore it when he was meeting the president at some entrepreneurial business meeting or whatever. And the president didn't even notice his baldness. Now, I don't know if the president would have said something, and he's the president for a reason there. But the fact is, he felt comfortable doing it that one time, but he says it doesn't wear it regularly. And if your Yule Brenner is spraying this stuff for shaking this stuff on your head is not going to make any difference whatsoever. Yeah, it actually looks like copier toner powder. That powder that's in the copier toner cartridges, that sort of looks like on your head if you're bald. So don't do that, and now don't get the idea that you should break into the Xerox machine either, because that's not going to work. Gertz Gonsmann is the author of Hair, mankind's historic quest to end baldness.

I like bald -headed men. Everybody knows it's testosterone that turns a bushy -haired man into a chrome door. But testosterone is what makes a man a man, the more that he's got, the more that he can do the things that make the women go. I'll take the bald -headed man over a big -haired boy. Big -haired boys make very good friends, but they do not compare to bald -headed men. You said it before, you said it again. I like bald -headed men more.

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming. To the best of our knowledge is produced by Steve Paulson, Mary Lou Finnegan, and Strange Chance, Veronica Rickert, Doug Gordon, and Charles Monroe Payne, with engineering help from Marv None. If you'd like a cassette copy of this hour, please call the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444, and ask for the program Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow, number 428 -B. P -R -I Public Radio International.