Although I admire his gallantry, especially as it’s only 9.45am, I am, I confess, a bit sceptical when Vidal Sassoon, aged 82 (but still flamboyantly chiselled, twinkly, thin and, since yesterday, a CBE), glides up from behind while I am bent over my bicycle and says, “What a lovely view”. Because slick patter is pretty much what you expect from a Sixties hairdressing superstar.
This was the era when, unlike today’s snippers, who have to put up with the spectre of Bruno mincing around their auras, hairdressers were extravagantly heterosexual sex gods, all jaunty entrepreneurial showmanship and phallic hairdryers. I’m not just thinking of Vidal, I’m thinking of Justin de Villeneuve ( by common consent not a great hairdresser but definitely a great showman), of Leonard (cutter to Twiggy and the Beatles) and, later, John Frieda. And obviously I’m thinking of Warren Beatty in Shampoo.
“That was the Seventies, and California,” Vidal corrects me in his fruity Sixties-thesp voice, once we are installed in a booth upstairs at the Electric in Notting Hill (Alan Yentob is breakfasting downstairs and the two have already had a love-in while I fiddled with my bike). “But yes,” twinkle, twinkle, “the salon floor was a great way to meet women.”
Sometimes the women cried. But only because after 1963, when he invented the Nancy Kwan cut (closely followed by the Mary Quant bob, the five-point cut and the Grecian goddess), he kept shearing off all their hair. “I had three or four weepers a year,” he says breezily. “Often they would call back and say ‘everyone likes it’ — or ‘what are you going to do about my hair?’ ”
A testy Duke of Bedford asked him why he insisted on making his wife look like a lesbian, but Vidal didn’t think that his clients looked like lesbians. He thought they looked modern, liberated — which they were: liberated from the rollers, the perming, the setting, the back-combing, the huge dryers and the humungous output of aerosol particles that constituted a trip to the salon throughout the Fifties. Vidal, despite having trained with “Mr Teasy Weasy” himself, the great Raymond of Mayfair, had sensed, as a new decade dawned, that the days of teasing and weasing were numbered. The signs could be divined everywhere, even in architecture: “You had only to look at Mies’s [van der Rohe] Seagram [a 1957 New York skyscraper] or Breuer’s Whitney [the 1966 art museum, also in New York] to know.” Or, indeed, at those geometric Sixties clothes. He clipped 4ft from Nancy Kwan’s hair. “All the press came to watch and this marvellous hair tumbled to the ground. It felt as though my scissors were making love to her hair.”
I expect this looks cheesy weesy written down. But the models got it, even if the duke didn’t. None complained, even when he cut off all their hair without warning them the night before a Mary Quant fashion show. The magazines got it — Vogue immediately popped him in its next issue, declaring that, finally, “hair looks like hair again”. Roman Polanski, who had filmed Catherine Deneuve on the balcony of Vidal’s Bond Street salon for Repulsion, got it — he flew Vidal to LA and paid him $5,000 to cut Mia Farrow’s hair in a publicity stunt for Rosemary’s Baby. Vidal had cut her hair only a few weeks earlie, but she’d had a row and hacked at it. “I said, Mia, you’ve really ballsed it up. I’m going to have to go very short”. And, of course, a zillion women copied the style. What I want to know is, a row with whom? Frank Sinatra, Farrow’s husband at the time? Vidal is not saying. Discretion is the hairdresser’s watchword. But, then again, to hell with that. He thinks it probably was.
Given that these cuts didn’t just happen — he sweated over their conception, then sweated some more executing them, because each took 45 minutes of intense concentration — I wonder what he thinks of hairdressing today, now it has all gone a bit Rapunzel and laissez faire. “To be honest, I’ve been out of hairdressing so long I can’t really judge,” he says diplomatically. But even Ronnie, his fourth and current wife, has long hair (the others loyally kept theirs short). “But beautifully cut by Etienne in the West Coast Salon,” he points out, before sighing. “It’s true that in the Sixties we worked very hard to make British hairdressing the best in the world because until then it was always about France,” he says. “You had to have enormous stamina. We were doing 14-hour days — you couldn’t be druggy.”
Instead of drugs, Vidal did Grayshott health farm (twice a year) and returned with so much stamina that he kept wearing out his apprentices. His first wife, Elaine, left him for the British water-skiing champion. “I was impossible. It was all hair, hair, hair,” he says, wistfully. “Ricci Burns [the Sixties hairstylist, now a fashion designer] said that I was quite mad and impossible to work with.”
Yet he seems to have stayed friends with almost everyone, including his staff, some of whom have been with him for 30 years. “Elaine just sent the most beautiful flowers to congratulate me on the CBE. Mind you, if they’d waited any longer to give it to me, it would have had to be posthumous.”
I should mention here that Vidal is one of the least morbid people I have met, particularly given his various brushes with mortality. Catya, the eldest of his four children with his second wife Beverley, died in 2000. “She OD’d,” he says, unflinchingly. “She was 33. It was New Year’s Eve. It’s still devastating. There are Catya days. It can be very sad because she had such a big heart — she used to give her clothes away to the janitor’s kids because they didn’t have nice ones.” He had therapy to help him through the worst days. “It’s funny,” he muses, “when I was still living in London I never needed therapy. I’d meet up with the guys, have some pasta at Alvaro’s, then we’d go and watch Chelsea play.”
The shortcomings of his own father may have created an extra sense of desolation, considering how hard Vidal worked to do the right thing by his children. “You can only work from instinct when one of your parents doesn’t quite come up to scratch,” he agrees.
Not coming up to scratch is an understatement. Sassoon senior, born in Greece, was fluent in seven languages and, his son can’t resist pointing out, “had sex in all of them”. He left Vidal’s mother when his son was 4 and his brother, Ivor, was 2. Destitute, they moved from Shepherds Bush, West London, to sleep on mattresses in an aunt’s cold-water tenement flat in Petticoat Lane, on the eastern fringe of the City. When Vidal was 5, his mother, still scrabbling to make ends meet, placed him in a Jewish orphanage. Ivor, too young to be left there, joined him later. “It was,” he says, “ a bit traumatic.” Not, however, as traumatic as being evacuated to Wiltshire “and not even to a farm where there might have been some decent food, but to a council estate”. Wiltshire was so dreary that the family moved back to London in 1943. By then his mother had married Nathan Goldberg, who was good news. Nathan listened to opera and read — “good stuff, not rubbish” — setting Vidal off on a lifelong course as an autodidact. You would be hard pressed to find a split infinitive in the first part of his autobiography, published in 1968 and artlessly entitled Sorry I kept you waiting, madam. He regrets not going to university but his mother had a premonition that he would be a great hairdresser and so enrolled him, at the age of 14, at Adolf Cohen’s salon, next to a gasworks in Whitechapel, in the East End.
“Wait until you see the next instalment,” he says of his latest oeuvre. “My editor’s marvellous. She puts a red line through everything. She’s got me working six hours a day.” There is a next one, of course — and, in 2010, a documentary — because Vidal’s life has been so eventful and because he has extraordinary recall, a blessing, he says, that comes from the photographic way in which his brain works. “I can still see the streets and the faces — and they were pretty shabby.”
He was, he says, inclined to brawling. Luckily, Adolf was a disciplinarian. He insisted on trousers with creases down the front — which the apprentices achieved by folding their trousers in a blanket and sleeping on them in the Underground shelters — and clean fingernails, which they acquired by washing the clients’ hair.
After the war Vidal joined the 43 Group to fight fascism on the streets of London (Oswald Mosley was back and targeting the capital’s Jews). Sometimes he would turn up for work with bruises and cuts, telling clients that he’d had an accident with his scissors.
It is interesting how many of those post-war snipper stars were Jewish. Vidal says that he would have given up hairdressing if he had stayed in Israel — he fought in the 1948 war — but, luckily for the 1960s, a telegram arrived from his mother saying “Stepfather ill. Come home and earn a living”.
And so the long march to Mayfair began, although it took several attempts for Vidal to get himself taken on by the fabled Raymond. “The first time, I walked in and asked the receptionist if I could see the governor — I was still a bit Cockney then — and she said ‘You’ll have to learn English first, it’s the language we speak here’.” Being a diligent soul, he enlisted the help of his friend Georgia Brown, an actress, who persuaded Laurence Olivier’s voice coach to take him on. “My God, your voice is terrrrrrible,” she told him. “And I don’t do hairdressers.” Together they persisted for three years and today’s mellifluous twang is the reward — ironic, I say, really, because a decade later it was all about having a Cockney accent, wasn’t it? He looks momentarily pained. “Not really.”
I don’t think he ever really felt accepted in this country: he says this is the result of being Jewish and feeling an outsider, but I think that class may have played its part. Olivier called him a barber, so did Gielgud. It was Gielgud who also said that if Vidal (and his colourist) had made Peter O’Toole look any prettier for his role in Lawrence of Arabia, they would have had to call it Florence of Arabia. Anyway, having finally opened his own salon in 1954 (“at the wrong end of Bond Street, up near Oxford Street”), he moved to New York in 1965, opening his first salon there. “Lee Radziwill was always promising to bring her sister [Jacqueline Kennedy] but Jackie was a teasy weasy girl. And, to give her her dues, it suited her.”
Then, in the Seventies, the man who had done so much to emancipate women from hair products launched his own. This is what made him his squillions. The products are no longer sold in America and Europe, which must irk him, but there was a legal dispute with Procter & Gamble and his lips are sealed. They still make money in Asia. The Sunday Times Rich List last valued his personal fortune at about £80 million. “They said it would have been more if I hadn’t got divorced so many times.”
It doesn’t matter because, he says, the money is not the point. What is, then? Putting oceans of clear blue water between now and Petticoat Lane, probably; the charity work in which he is involved; vindicating his mother’s premonition. “I’m very glad she got to have a nice life,” he says. “She was swimming when she was 85, you know. She was in her nineties when she died.” His brother Ivor, who became an accountant, died of a heart attack when he was only 46: “He was a sweetheart but he never really got over the orphanage.”
For Vidal, in contrast, the orphanage was the spur that eventually drove him to the Neutra house where he, Ronnie and their collection of modern art now live in LA. “She’s got a wonderful eye, that girl,” he says of his wife. Deer roam outside: “It’s like being on safari.” He looks at least a quarter of a century younger than he is, which could be down to the swimming, the carb control (he pretends to eat toast with his boiled eggs but his heart’s not in it) or the work he had done “a long time ago”. What was it, I ask, because it’s terribly good. Facelift? Mesotherapy? “It’s called ‘could you kindly get rid of this’,” he says, gesturing to where there was once, presumably, the genesis of a double chin. He has maintained the same weight, he says, for 50 years and must be one of the few men over 60 who can fit into Dior by Hedi Slimane. Today the Slimane offering is a navy pinstripe jacket, worn with a natty grey cashmere scarf that Ronnie bought him and is by ... pause to check label ... Dry Clean Only.
I wonder if he ever developed a God complex. After all, along with their surgeons, hairdressers are the men to whom women turn in a crisis. “Hmm. Honestly, I always thought I could have done it better. As Montaigne says, however high your throne, you’re still sitting on your bum.”
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