Chapter 3 - An Interview With Kenneth

Perhaps the most controversial coiffeur of all on the New Frontier is Kenneth. One of his styles became almost a political issue in the early days of the Kennedy Administration. Hair stylist to the First Lady, Marilyn Monroe and Jean Kerr, he is also the first hair couturier to win an American Fashion Critics Award.

Tall, thirty-ish, well-mannered and much more handsome than photographs suggest, Kenneth recently led a beauty mission around the world, stopping along the way to talk coiffures with other such first and beautiful ladies as Queen Farah Dibah of Iran, Queen Sikirit of Thailand and Her Ladyship Muna of Jordan.

On stage, in the unpretentious back room where he works, he appears endlessly patient and imperturbable as he moves from one to another of his clients. He works without fuss and feathers, never too busy to give advice to the pretty little fashion model or TV starlet who has popped in "just for a second."

His humor is droll and his wit incisive. A look of suppressed amusement is never too far from his boyish features. But, somehow, one gets the impression that beneath this relaxed exterior lies a network of tensions.

Kenneth's first brush with the world of beauty came when as a small boy in Syracuse he occasionally called for his mother at the local beauty parlor.

The woman who ran the shop did all her work on the back porch, but even all that air couldn't drive out the smells of permanent-wave solution and peroxide," he says.

After a tour of duty in the Navy, Kenneth decided to hitch his wagon to a bobby pin, or, as it developed later, a roller. He enlisted in hairdresser's school and promptly dropped his last name—Battelle.

"I worked my way through school playing a piano extraordinarily badly," he recalls. "I'm also the worst painter alive."

Kenneth spent four years cutting and setting in Syracuse, five years with the famous Michel Kazan, where he first met Mrs. Kennedy, and then joined Lilly Dache", with whom he has been associated ever since.

One famous name told another of Kenneth's talents, and almost ever since, getting a hairdo or interview from the great man has been an occasion to herald with trumpets and alarums.

For example...

It would be an afternoon not quite like every other in the pink and silver salon in the heart of New York's Haute Coiffure. It would not be quite as busy.

"Mondays are quiet. Come at four and there'll be ample time to talk," Kenneth promised. But at 3:55 it was obvious that the continuous divertissement which is the Lilly Dach salon doesn't slow down, even on the traditionally slowest day in the salon business.

In the mirrored boutique downstairs through which all of Kenneth's customers must pass, the switchboard buzzed incessantly. Four women dressed in meticulous black were struggling valiantly to keep their unruffled chic and the huge appointment book in order.

At the door, Mrs. Pierson Dixon, on her way out, returned a polite nod to Hermione Gingold, on her way in. And a customer who had come for a new color job as well as the passing show—Joanne Woodward, Mrs. Leonard Bernstein, Betty Furness, Paulette Goddard, Lauren Bacall could come in at any minute—tried not to stare.

Upstairs, pink-frocked beauticians balancing beakers of potions rushed to and fro on missions of beauty. Black-suited assistant hair stylists bustled happily about, proud to be filling Kenneth's hair orders. And everywhere, famous heads, almost anonymous above the salon's simple pink smocks, waited patiently or impatiently for Kenneth to decide their next coiffure.

An oasis of calm in the midst of confusion, Kenneth looked comfortably cool in a beige silk suit, and completely unrushed as he put the finishing touches to a new coiffure he had just created for Mrs. William Paley.

"Now, darling, I want you to make me look just like that," Miss Gingold insisted, as the wife of the chairman of the board of the Columbia Broadcasting System disappeared into an elevator.

"There's just so much I can do, even for you," Kenneth replied, smilingly studying her reflection in the mirror. Then he reached for a roller and three assistant hair stylists, like interns eager to pass the needed clamp to a chief surgeon, rushed to be the first to put one in his hand.

Clink, went a dime in the public wall-telephone just inside the setting room door. "Daddy? Mother asked me to call and tell you she'll be another hour," reported a small boy who had climbed up on a chair to reach the mouthpiece. "No, she couldn't possibly go now. Her hair is soaking wet."

Kenneth merely continued to wind Miss Gingold's hair around plump rollers.

"Darling, where will you be going on your trip?" the comedienne asked.

"Tokyo, Bangkok, Pnompenh, Djakarta," Kenneth began.

"Djakarta," Miss Ginghold cried, accenting each syllable. "Why no one goes to Djakarta, darling. There may not be anyone there at all. You had better pack a tin of instant people."

Cl-ink, went another dime. This time, dress designer Mollie Parnis, long-time favorite of Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower, was making the call.

"Cancel that five-thirty appointment and the six o'clock and perhaps even the six-thirty. I don't know when I'll get out of here," she instructed her secretary, in tones Kenneth couldn't help but overhear. Then she strode impatiently back to her booth.

"Djakarta, why Djakarta is the capital of. . . ."

"Whelpp," screeched a low-slung champagne-blonde pup who had improvidently left his tail in the path of a quick-footed beautician.

A uniformed maid appeared to offer nourishment to the weak.

"Tuna salad on white, please," a young woman from the New York branch of Dior ordered faintly. "And I guess I'll have tea with lemon."

"No more lunches. I thought we were to have no more lunches," said Kenneth who had lowered his voice to address the maid alone. "They make this place look like a..."

"Brrr-ing," Kenneth's private phone sounded insistent.

"Yes, yes, fine, of course. I'll be there at six. What's the room number? Oh, just a second. I don't have a piece of paper." Once again, the young interns scurried to do the master's bidding.

"Marilyn Monroe/' Kenneth explained. Miss Gingold, by this time, was disappearing under a dryer. "She wants me to do her hair tonight before she leaves the hospital."

Just when all began to look hopeless, Kenneth walked quietly across the room and sank down under an adjacent dryer, the only available seat. His manner was cordial but tentative.

"First," he began in the manner of one who has been bitten just once, but remembers it all too vividly, "I must say there are certain things which I cannot discuss. Not White House goodies, but hair secrets."

Kenneth looked relieved. "But I'm afraid I can't be much help there, either. If there are any, I don't know them. I'm not doing anything magic or mysterious that any other hairdresser who has sunk six hundred dollars and a thousand hours in hairdressing school can't do. Possibly one reason why I am successful is I'm not bogged down with witchcraft."

Kenneth crossed one well-tapered trouser leg over the other and launched into an obviously favorite subject.

"For some reason Americans seem to insist on building barriers around everything. It's a plot to keep the masses from enjoying just about everything from good cooking to good hairdos. Antoine started it all. . . . Maybe these hairdressers do have secrets. But I doubt it."

Kenneth delivered a hair-color order to a passing assistant, then resumed.

"The whole attitude toward hairdressing in this country is wrong. It's much too serious in some ways and not serious enough in others. We go to extremes to make things so practical they're not pretty, or so fantastic, they're ugly. Blue hair. Pink hair. Stand-on-end hair. We don't have a healthy attitude at all."

Dismayed by "the vast number of hairdressers outside New York who are still doing those constipated Italian cuts and know only one roller pattern," Kenneth feels something akin to sorrow for women who will never be able to attend a salon like his or Enrico Caruso's.

"He's fantastically good," Kenneth said.

"I think if I have any secret it's my ability to know my customers. I try to find out if a lady is married, or if she works, what type of social life she leads, and whether or not she has adjusted to her individual idiosyncrasies. If she is, let's say, tall and has a long neck, I cut her hair short, if I think it would be becoming."

Does Kenneth appreciate clients' suggestions?

"Fortunately, most of the ladies who come here have a pretty good idea what looks best on them. If they're uncertain about a new idea I have in mind for them, I try to bring them along gradually. It took me three sessions before I convinced Marilyn Monroe to wear her hair with less curl. I try to find out why they wear their hair too long, or don't want curly hair straightened. But I never hit them over the head and say they must do this or that."

Nor does he mind if clients come in with clippings clutched in carefully manicured fingers.

"At least I have an idea of what they think is pretty. But heaven help them if they think I'll copy it line for line. In the first place, this idea of setting hair by blueprint is ridiculous." He flipped through a hair magazine filled with diagrams and frowned.

"It's impossible to make a hairdo come out the same way twice."

He does wish women would be more specific, however, in asking for what they want.

"A shaping is a haircut and a haircut is a haircut. If they don't want any hair cut off they should say so."

He's depressed, too, by the number of women who don't seem to care if they look pretty just as long as they look like someone else. And if that someone's first name happens to be Jacqueline, even at the prices his customers are vying to pay, they get an argument. If they still insist, he turns them over to an assistant.

An iconoclast, Mr. Kenneth does not hold with age cuts or different styles for different face shapes.

"I don't know what a square face is, or a diamond, or even a horse face. I go by hair, unless a woman has an elephant trunk for a nose and no neck. Even then the current hairdos, high, soft and up from the neck, minimize these faults.

"As for a customer's age, hair should be styled to flatter the individual, no matter what the cut is, not to agree with the date on her birth certificate. Any woman can wear almost any hairdo, provided it is adapted to her features."

Gray hair? Does he ever think it's better to be natural than to dye?

"Do whatever is the most becoming. Don't be white unless you feel you should. There's no need to look as though you should be lunching at Passy with your grandson until you have to. But if you do choose to go gray, now is the time. So many tints and rinses are on the market today to make gray hair prettier that never existed ten years ago."

There are two subjects on which Kenneth has definite opinions.

One: "I refuse to work on people who are ugly—in spirit. Why go to a hairdresser with a chip on your shoulder? I find the most difficult people to work with are the fringe people—the starlets and all the others who have not quite arrived. People who have achieved success are marvelous to work with. One expert seems to have respect for another."

Two: "I loathe tipping. It's the worst custom on earth. If people didn't have to tip they would be willing to pay more. People who take tips are never really respected. As long as a little man keeps himself small he is going to stay small. The whole business should be upgraded."

Kenneth moved to the edge of the chair to make his point more effectively.

"In Europe they have a service charge in beauty parlors, just as they do in restaurants. Even that is better. Suppose one day a woman comes in and she is not as happy as usual with her hairdo, yet she feels she has to tip you. Or suppose she has been really nasty and she gives you a dollar. Of course, I took tips when I was getting started; looking back now, I realize I couldn't have done without them."

Kenneth puts no restrictions, however, on his assistants, who make $5000 to $20,000 a year.

One of the hair stylists responsible for introducing line rather than curl to today's hairdos, Kenneth is now considering the return of curl, but only a half curl, which he calls his baroque curl.

"I love straight hair and I've pushed it for a long time. But unfortunately the vast majority of women—the ones who take care of their own hair—have not been too successful with almost pure line. It requires constant trimming to look well and if it's not meticulously cared for it can look horrible. There is no margin for out-of-shapeness in these hairdos. And, anyway," Kenneth sighed, "the American ideal is blue eyes and blonde hair. You know, there was a little girl who had a little curl right down the center of her forehead."

Kenneth never withholds hairdo information from his clients. "It's a much better advertisement for me if my ladies look their very best at all times. Most of our customers don't do their own hair, but many have a terrific knack with it—especially the young girls."

Faithful brushing, clean hair, shaping by a good stylist, a trim every four weeks, a color job, if necessary, and the will to learn how to set one's hair, Kenneth believes, are the six steps to beauty.

"June Allyson has fine, oily hair. It looks so wonderful because she washes it every day."

While Kenneth admires women who are mistresses of their own tresses, he insists only good stylists should do the cutting on which the shape of the final hairdo depends. Kenneth prefers scissors to a razor -and cuts hair blunt, straight across, rather than on a slant. Cut this way, he says, hair is able to support any style which requires bulk, width, or height. Tapering, he believes, robs hair of natural body.

Setting? "There are only two or three basic sets everyone uses, despite the myriad styles you see. Any woman who is willing to experiment with rollers on top and curls at the nape can learn these. It's all really a matter of practice. The first time a woman uses lipstick, the results probably aren't all that are to be desired. But the fiftieth time she does much better. It's the same with rollers. And here's a tip. Pull hair straight when rolling it so the wind is smooth and the curl has more strength."

Kenneth uses rollers two and three inches in diameter and sets hair with wave set, or beer and water. The wider the roller, the bigger the wave, and the looser the hairdo. For women with no natural wave he recommends a body wave done on a large rod. For too much wave, he suggests straightening.

Important as the shaping, Kenneth says, is the comb-out.

"This is when the hair really takes shape. I work with a brush in one hand and use the other hand to shape the hair. I practically never find it necessary to use a comb."

He usually finishes with the finest mist of spray. He uses this handy hair tool not to keep a set in but for smoothness and gloss. He cautions strongly against overuse.

To keep a set looking its best between visits to the salon, Kenneth recommends re-rolling your set on big rollers in the exact pattern of the original hairdo. Roll dry. Moisture tends to create a new pattern. Allow rollers to remain in hair for at least a half hour, longer if your hair is stubborn. Brush vigorously to restore original structure. Then mist gently with hair spray.

Someday, Kenneth hopes to write a book about his experiences—that is, if he ever gets the time.

"I've picked up some goodies, naturally, but I won't say anything in the book that isn't harmless or entertaining."

In the meantime, he's happy bolstering women's sense of security by giving them flattering hairdos and "getting rich" in the process.

"They go out not only looking better but feeling better," Kenneth said, looking, not too obviously, at his watch.

Now he would have to rush to finish his work and keep his six o'clock appointment.

"A stylist needs the strength of ten men and the emotional strength of twenty," he said, rising slowly. "Sometimes I think I work harder than a truck driver. I'm on my feet sometimes twelve and thirteen hours a day."

And Kenneth returned to his impatient audience.

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