Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (49 page)

In stylin’, you part his hair different, you cut his hair different. Say you got a part and you don’t want no part. You comb it straight back, you’re changing his style. Say his part’s on the right side. All right, you want to change his style, you put the part to the left side. Then you wash his hair and you cut him down and redress his hair over again.
That’s
hair stylin’, I actually never went much for that myself.

When I came here twenty-one years ago, I had a separate chair here in the little room, in which I cut all ladies’ hair. We’d run about six or seven or eight cuts a day in women’s hair. I love to cut women’s hair. At one time I won second prize cutting ladies’ hair, which was back in 1929. The wind-blown haircut. Their hair was all combed forward. It was like a gush of wind hits you in the back of the head and blew your hair forward. Today young girls don’t know what it is. I think it’s a lot easier than cutting men’s hair. They’re less trouble, too.

 

 

You can’t think of other things while you’re working. You concentrate on the man’s hair or you’d be talkin’ to him whatever he wants to talk about. A barber, he has to talk about everything—baseball, football, basketball, anything that comes along. Religion and politics most barbers stay away from. (Laughs.) Very few barbers that don’t know sports. A customer’ll come in, they’ll say, “What do you think of the Cubs today?” Well, you gotta know what you think. You say, “Oh, they’re doin’ swell today.” You have to tell ’em.

Fans today in sports are terrific, hockey, all those things. That counts in bein’ a barber. You gotta know your sports. They’ll come in, “What do you think of that fight last night?” Lotta sports barber has to watch on TV or hear about it or read about it. You gotta have somethin’ o tell him. You have to talk about what he wants to talk about.

Usually I do not disagree with a customer. If there is something that he wants me to agree with him, I just avoid the question. (Laughs.) This is about a candidate, and the man he’s speaking for is the man you’re not for and he asks you, “What do you think?” I usually have a catch on that. I don’t let him know what I am, what party I’m with. The way he talks, I can figure out what party he’s from, so I kind of stay neutral. That’s the best way, stay neutral. Don’t let him know what party you’re from cause you might mention the party that he’s against. And that’s gonna hurt business.

I disagree on sports. Fans are all different. TV plays a good role, especially during ball games, real good. All the shops should have TV because the customer, he wants to look at something, to forget his office work, forget the thing he has in his mind that he has to do. Watchin’ TV relaxes his mind from what he was doin’ before he came in the shop.

A lot of people sit down and relax. They don’t want to have anything to do, just sit there and close their eyes. Today there is less closin’ their eyes. We had customers at one time that if they couldn’t go to sleep, they wouldn’t get a haircut.

Customers call me by my first name—Sam. I have customers twenty years old that call me Sam. I call the customer Mister. I never jump to callin’ a man by his first name unless a man tells me himself, “Why don’t you call me Joe?” Otherwise I call him mister.

About tips. Being a boss, sometimes they figure they don’t have to tip you. They don’t know that the boss has to make a living same as anybody else. Most of your master barbers, they don’t bank on it, but they’re glad to get whatever they get. If a man, through the kind heart of his, he wants to give me something, it’s all right. It’s pretty hard to keep a person from tipping. They tip a bellhop, they tip a redcap, they tip a waiter.

If bosses in these shops would agree to pay the barber more, I’d say ninety percent of them wouldn’t do it. They’d rather the customer to help pay this barber’s salary by tipping him. I’m in favor of not tipping. I’d just as soon pay the man ten dollars more a week than have him depend on that customer. This way he knows that he’s got that steady income. In the old days you kind of depended on tips because the salary was so small. If you didn’t make the extra ten dollars a week in tips you were in had shape.

I’ll tell ya, by tipping that way it made me feel like I was a beggar. See? A doctor you don’t give him a tip. He’s a professional man. You go to a dentist, you don’t give him a tip because he fixed your tooth. Well, a barber is a professional man too. So I don’t think you should tip him.

When I leave the shop, I consider myself not a barber any more. I never think about it. When a man asks me what I do for a living, I usually try to avoid that question. I figure that it’s none of his business. There are people who think a barber is just a barber, a nobody. If I had a son, I’d want him to be more than just a barber.

 

 

They’re gonna be just another barber short.

 

 

Some people go to a barber shop, you get an old guy, he hasn’t kept up to date with the latest styles, newest cuts. They’re in a rut. They cut the same thing no matter what’s in. A barber should be a hair stylist himself. There’s some male beauty shops, they deal more in your feminine men and actors. Most actors prefer going to a beauty shop because a barber might just give you the same old cut and you might look like the janitor down the street or the vice president of a bank. Appearance is importance.

There are beauty operators, there’s hairdressers, and there’s hair stylists. A hair stylist is more than a beauty operator. Anybody can fuzz up hair, but you ask them, “Do I look good in this Chinese look which is coming in now, Anna May Wong?”—they don’t know.

You have to sense the value of your customer. If the jewelry is a little better and she’s accustomed to services, such as maids, her husband makes a good dollar. If you’re getting a woman with five kids and her husband’s a cabdriver—which is no fault in that—she is not the kind that’s gonna come in here every week. Or the little lady down the street, who lives with her cats and dogs or even her husband, who doesn’t care. They say, “Just set it nice. I can’t wash my hair because of my arthritis.” They’re not fussy. You say to the beauty operator you employ, “You take Mrs. Brown because she’s not fussy.” You pick out the fussy one that’s been around, they’ve been to Acapulco, Hawaii. They expect a little more from you than the beauty operator. Then you become the stylist. You have to know which customers are for whom and which are not.

The name counts. Kenneth does Mrs. Kennedy’s hair—Onassis. I never saw Jacqueline Kennedy’s hair when it looked anything worthwhile. Sometimes she wears a wig. Just because she came to him, this put him on a pedestal. If the Queen of England came to my place, I’d have to hire fifteen more people. They’d all come flocking in. A social thing.

The hairdresser cashes in on some of it. You’ll never get this in the smaller beauty shops. You have to be a hair stylist to attract ones with money. A hair stylist can get fifteen dollars for a haircut, whereas the beauty operator, she’ll get only three. Now your hairdresser is in the middle.

What makes a man become a hair stylist is different from what makes a woman become one. For women it’s an easy trade. They learn this when they are twelve years old, making pin curls at home. But a man, it takes a little different approach. Jacqueline Kennedy, in a book her maid or someone wrote, said, when security police found out that two employees in the White House were homosexual, she ordered them fired. She said, “I don’t want my sons to be exposed to this type of people because they’re liable to grow up to be hairdressers.” Not all hairdressers are homosexually inclined. Some enjoy the work more if you enjoy women.

The most important thing for a hairdresser, male, he has to dominate the woman. You can sense when you’re not dominating the customer. She can tell you, “I want two rollers here.” She becomes the stylist and all you become is the mechanical thing with the fingers.

In the field of beauty work, you got to have personality. I’d say one-fifth is personality. Be able to sell yourself. Your approach, your first word, like, “Good morning, the weather we’re having.” A man has to have a personality where he’s aloof. He has to act like—without a word: Don’t tell me, I’m the stylist. You expect more from Mr. Edward and you get it. If a woman needs a hair style, he says, “Madame, what you need is a little more color. I will fix it up.” He doesn’t do it. He will call his assistant. And he will tell her, “I want curls here, I want this, I want that.” And she says, “Yes, Mr. Edward.” I don’t dirty my hands with the chemicals. I’m the stylist. Your symbol right there, the male. You’re giving yourself a title. Otherwise, you’re gonna be nothing but a flunky. Being a male, it’s important you must have this ego.

Everybody expects the hairdresser to be a prototype, to have a black mustache, slick Hollywood-type or feminine. I could spot one a mile away sometimes if they’re feminine. On the other hand, I know someone you’d never know he was a hairdresser. He’s owned five shops at one time, a married man with a family and he’s bald. I’m not gonna hide the point that I’m a beauty operator.

I used to go to a tavern around here. I met this guy. He didn’t know I knew he was a cop. He knew I was a hairdresser. He was drunk. He says to me, “You’re a queer.” I says, “How could you tell by looking at people?” He says, “The way you twist your mouth.” I said, “You’re drunk and you’re a cop.” He says, “How do you know I’m a cop?” I says, “Just the way you look and act.” Right away, he says, “Aaahhh!” I said, “If you didn’t have a gun, how much authority would you pull around here? Anybody can do your job. You can’t do mine. It takes skill.” Right away he avoided me. He was an idiot. I do a lot of policemen’s wives’ hair. I always mention that he called me a queer. This other woman’s husband says, “Wait’ll I see him, I’ll bash him in the face.”

 

 

Hair stylists, even if they’re married, are called Miss This or Miss That. They don’t seem to go much for the last name. Mr. Alexander of Paris or Mr. Andre. Mr. Edward. That should go over bigger than Eddie’s Beauty Shop. It’s a little flat, see? Sometimes these young fellas who are on the feminine side lean on a feminine name. He calls himself Mr. Twinkie or something. This fella we had working here, he tried to hide the fact that he was feminine. He called himself Mr. Moran.

 

HAZEL: The name became important when the male entered the business. They built a reputation on their name. They use it rather than call a salon by some idiotic or nondescriptive name. A woman might call the shop Vanity Fair or Highlight. For a man, it’s more important that he retains his name.

 

 

HAZEL: Hazel.

 

EDWARD: She’s just called Hazel.

 

HAZEL: I worked for Mr. Maurice in Florida and all of us were known as Miss. He renamed me Miss Rena because he didn’t like Hazel.

 

 

HAZEL: Never. I never felt inferior to any of my customers. Even though sometimes they try to make you feel that way. I think I would quit a long time ago if I ever felt any inferiority.

 

EDWARD: I would not stand humiliation. It’s not openly when a woman gets hostile against you and says, “If you’re a hair stylist, you’re below me.” Many wealthy people will hire a hair stylist and haul them around and they will carry their suitcases. It really looks la-de-da, you might say elite, where she’s going to the airport with her hairdresser and her poodles and her dressmaker all following after her like the Queen of Sheba. This is a form of humiliation. But the guy don’t care. She’s paying him well and he builds his name. And she’s using his image to make herself.