HOLLYWOOD SHAPED MY HAIR

CHAPTER ONE JOHN TRAVOLTA

IN THE BEGINNING

In the beginning there was Grease. Grease was, is and always will be ‘The Word’.

Why? Well, obviously, a) it’s got groove, b) it’s got meaning, and c) it’s got that always entertaining teen movie thing of having actors way too old pretending to be high schoolers (Stockard Channing, as Rydell High’s resident bad girl Betty Rizzo, was 33 at the time of filming).

Most importantly for me though, watching Grease is my first big memory of really loving a movie, an explosion of Yankee teen poppiness that showered down on my rural upbringing like rain to a wilting desert crop. As the first film that I remember cherishing, Grease is what I grew from. Grease shaped my life. Grease shaped my hair.

I don’t know exactly how old I was when I first saw it or even how, although I’m presuming that I was about six or seven and it was on video (it’s amazing how weird, in this shiny, silvery, Tron-like world of streaming, it feels to type ‘v-i-d-e-o’). Of course, in that era (the early eighties), it probably should have been Star Wars I was obsessed with. But whilst my friends pretended to be Luke Skywalker using the force, I was Danny Zucko using a comb. I didn’t care that Zuck would be pretty useless attacking the Death Star; at least he didn’t have a pudding bowl hairdo. John Travolta’s Zucko, you see, was the coolest guy at Rydell High. As soon as I saw him I knew that’s all I wanted to be, too.

And, even aged five, I knew that to achieve that, I’d need the hairdo.

The Zucko hairstyle is a work of art: rich black, lustrous, greased back carefully but not too neatly, a springy curl at the front breaking away from the pack and forming a cheekily loose and louche quiff (quiff n. probably from the French ‘coiffure’, meaning ‘hairstyle’). We don’t see the back of his head much, but one can only imagine the perfection of the D.A. (D.A. n. [slang] short for ‘duck’s arse’, most famously sported by actor Tony Curtis) that resides there, the two sides of his hair uniting at the rear to form a ridge as epic as the parting of the Red Sea. There are cinematic quiffs that have been tidier (James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause) and bolder (Brad Pitt in Johnny Suede), but none have been paraded with the effortless cool of Danny. It’s like he knows he’s in a movie, being watched by millions.

Movies were a big part of my school life. Unofficial video clubs took place in classrooms during lunch break, antiquated departmental VCRs secretly whirring away whilst the teachers were relaxing in the common room, blissfully unaware that gangs of kids were gawping at Bruce Willis slaying bad guys in Die Hard or Patsy Kensit going topless in Lethal Weapon 2. They were fun times – but I’d still rather have been watching Grease. Those films had action, sure … but Grease had a style which they were lacking. Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs looked as if his clothing considerations every morning were little more than ‘which old lumberjack shirt to wear today’, whilst his grooming routine seemed to consist of merely a hasty running-of-hand-through-mullet. His scruffy beachside caravan living, meanwhile, hardly screamed attention to detail. Luckily the mullet look never tickled my fancy, even if there was plenty of cinematic inspiration …

SOME (FRANKLY DISTURBING) ACTION MOVIE MULLETS OF THE ERA

Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China. Kurt’s mullet wasn’t just short on top and flowing at the back. Oh no. As if a remnant from his time playing Elvis in a 1979 TV movie, there was also a whiff of quiff in there, too. Quite the combo. The fact that Kurt always seemed to accessorise this shoulder-tickling barnet with a white singlet only made him look all the more like an out-of-work logger from Oregon.

Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone. Beginning with a centre parting, Mike’s mid-Eighties hair was then brushed back into a startling bouffant that was pure Duran Duran. That was the hairstyle’s problem: it was far too pretty for a real man of action buckling his swash in the Colombian jungle. Mike still has the do to this day, not one to let old age get in the way of a good blow-dry.

Patrick Swayze in Road House. The favourite movie of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin saw Swayze at his hardest. Check the cover of the DVD for proof that few things look more menacing than a man with a mullet standing with his arms crossed. Still, the few strands of hair that Swayze let delicately tumble over his forehead hinted at a softer side (more of which later).

Sylvester Stallone in Rambo III. John Rambo might be one of the ultimate movie tough guys but he still made the effort to accessorise his scruffy locks with a bandana. What’s more, by 1988’s Rambo III, I swear he’d been using a diffuser, his poodle hair then more Def Leppard than First Blood.

Hulk Hogan in Suburban Commando. I’ve never understood the man with receding hair who thinks that growing it really long at the back will somehow create a ‘trompe l’œil’, disguising his shortcomings. Even worse, Hulk is known for dying that long bit peroxide blonde; his horseshoe moustache, too. (For some reason, years later in 1997, it was exactly such a mullet that was the style choice for a receding Nicolas Cage in Con Air. The combination of long frizzy extensions, a rapidly enlarging cranium and huge sweaty biceps gave Nic the unique appearance of an especially muscly Bee Gee.)

PRODUCT PLACEMENT

Unlike those guys, Zucko made a proper effort. And Grease itself made style a priority. It’s all there in the opening credit: a cartoon Danny standing in front of the mirror, lacing his locks with product and making sure his soft quiff is just right. Of course, with animated credits like that, you know you’re in for something where style is all-important. If film producers go to that much trouble just for the first few minutes, you can only imagine what the rest of the film is going to be like (see the ultra-chic Priceless and the classy Catch Me If You Can for further evidence of this equation. Hell, you could even try eighties cheese-fest Mannequin, a film that – if there’s any sort of message in amongst the wonky sets and ropey stereotypes – is about the importance of great window dressing). There’s something brilliantly optimistic about starting a film with an animation, playfully turning the movie’s characters into wacky cartoons – because they’re that awesome – before we’ve even got to know them. The mood is perfectly set up just in those opening Grease credits (by the late, Wimbledon-born John D.Wilson, a former Disney man), where John Travolta looks like one of those pencil-drawn caricatures that you get done when you’re drunk and on holiday. Which, interestingly, is rather how he now looks in real life.

By the time the boring cropped hair and grubby white vests of Bruce Willis were leaving me cold during those lunch-breaks, I had been obsessed with Grease for years. Though I was young, I have a very distinct, remarkably clear memory of dancing around to ‘Summer Nights’ in an outfit that I had specially created for the occasion. I could only manage a jumble sale denim jacket, not a leather T-Birds one, but for someone only in single figures such savvy compromise still gives me a little shiver of satisfaction. In the memory, I am in the middle of the living room, slinging my jacket over my shoulder and punching the air as Danny Zucko hit that famous final high note, standing in the bleachers. My parents are the audience. My sister is Sandy. I sing like my life depends on it, John Travolta meets Aled Jones. In reality, my fringe hangs heavy over my eyes but in my mind, I am quiffed.

It was only a matter of time before those dreams became a reality. With parents whose own childhood had been during the real Grease era (the story takes place in the 1959–60 academic year), their encouragement in getting me to slick back my hair like a rock ‘n’ roll throwback was no surprise. I must have been one of the few pre-pubescent boys to regularly receive a bottle of Cossack men’s hairspray for birthdays and Christmas. (Cossack smelled spicy, musky and manly; what some lab guy obviously thought was the essence of the eighteenth-century Slavic military, even though it was made in Folkestone, Kent. When my bottle ran out I had to borrow my Mum’s slightly less Ukranian-whiffing Silvikrin.)

I had formerly tried mousse in order to achieve my desired Travolta quiff, carefully following the instructions to squirt out a golf ball-sized dollop of the airy foam then combing it through my locks into the required shape. But as well as setting hair into position, mousse also gave it what the beauty industry terms ‘body’. So, whilst it definitely gave me the vertical hold I was after, it also had an effect horizontally. My hair expanded outwards into something massive. Brush through with a few lumps of mousse and my barnet boasted less of the sharp attitude of Danny Zucko and more of the flouncy prettiness of Wham!-era George Michael. Not what I was after.

Ideally I wanted to use wet-look hair gel, specifically Wella’s Shock Waves since it was advertised in Smash Hits every issue and – back in the eighties – boasted excitingly cutting-edge, Piet Mondrian-style blocks of colour on the packaging. However, since the use of wet-look hair gel had, for reasons now lost in the mists of time, been banned at my uptight all-boys school I found that a combination of water and Cossack was the next best thing. A significant fire hazard I might have been, but at least my Zucko hair remained in position through even the most rough-and-tumble PE lesson on a trampette.

Not that my fellow pupils understood the greatness of this, of course. One boy in particular – boisterous and brawny in a way that seemed entirely alien to me – took great pleasure in ruffling my carefully-constructed head art whenever he saw me, persistently sneering that my look was like something from a ‘sixties war’. I wanted, naturally, to point out to him that, as he probably didn’t mean the Vietnam War, the conflict to which he was presumably referring actually took place in the forties. What’s more, my look was actually late fifties thankyouverymuch. But, as his giant sausage fingers brazenly cracked through the brittle layers of lacquer, I sensed that he wasn’t in the mood for a history lesson.

‘THE WAY WE ARE FEELING’

As childhood segued into puberty, my love of Grease didn’t wane, and I eventually ended up with a copy recorded off the telly, albeit the ‘daytime’ version of the film that cuts out a lot of the more choice language and the moment where Kenickie’s condom splits. (Apparently broken prophylactics aren’t great for a Bank Holiday Monday afternoon on BBC1.) Cut or uncut, I loved to believe that my passion for Grease made me different, at least in the crowd of adolescent boys that I shared a classroom with; classrooms where Grease wasn’t exactly the movie du jour (and where phrases such as du jour weren’t really du jour either).

What I didn’t know back then, of course, is that Grease was – still is – a cultural phenomenon. It originated as a cheeky stage musical, penned by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey at a time in the early seventies when a Western world torn apart by Vietnam, Watergate and industrial strikes was desperate to remember the comparatively carefree times of the late fifties. Around the time of Grease came other retro hits, as varied as George Lucas’ autobiographical pic American Graffiti and the cartoon teddy boys of British band Showaddywaddy. Grease the movie rode on this wave, cleaner than the stage version and released in the summer of ’78 to huge success, both at the box office (it’s still America’s biggest grossing live action film musical) and in the music chart (28 million copies of the soundtrack album sold). With endless TV showings throughout the eighties and to this day, it’s fair to say that, for a period of nearly forty years, Grease has been pretty much inescapable.

Still, my personal relationship with Grease perhaps appeared odd in the restricted confines of an action flick-obsessed boys’ school. ‘Grease is the way we are feeling’ wrote the Good Lord Barry Gibb for the movie’s theme tune, but I never felt that sense of community extended to a Suffolk secondary when Van Damme, Seagal and Lundgren were the kings of video rental. I didn’t mind though. That proudly retro hairstyle I carefully nurtured had become more than just a nod to a favourite film: it was an attempt to stand out from the crowd.

Of course, being unique is easier said than done. The more films I watched, the more I saw similar swept-back dos to mine regularly cropping up, all boasting an equally high product content. Despite my best intentions, it was clear that actually I wasn’t alone – not even close. Still, I contented myself with the fact that these hair doppelgängers were all in American high school movies, a million miles away from my own East Anglia. So, at least within the tiny confines of my school I pompously proclaimed myself a one-off. It’s true … the fact that I was failing GCSE maths probably should have been more of a concern than my haircut, but what can I say? Once you’ve fallen in love with Olivia Newton-John there’s no going back.

American teen movie quiffs turned up regularly back then. The legendary director John Hughes, a child of the rock ‘n’ roll era, clearly loved the music and style of his past, bestowing casual quiffs on his decidedly eighties teen heroes, such as Ducky from Pretty in Pink (presumably named after his ducktail hairdo) and Ferris in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Other film-makers of a similar age – Bob Zemeckis, Francis Ford Coppola, John Waters – also made films largely set during the time (and haircuts) of their adolescence (Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married, Cry-Baby). David Lynch, meanwhile, a man who continues to rock his own sprawling take on the quiff even to this day, gave us movies and shows such as Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks that displayed his warped take on retro Americana, bursting at the seams with slick-haired Elvis wannabes like Nicolas Cage and Chris Isaak. The more films I watched, the more Brylcreemed barnets I saw, this look apparently the iconic cut of the American dreamboat rebel, even thirty years from its inception. If it wasn’t a big fashion in Ipswich, well … that only made it even better.

SLICK … BUT SENSITIVE

A love of this type of grooming usually equalled, at least in cinema terms, a macho sensitivity that I might not have picked up on as a kid, but by my later teenage years I found extremely appealing. If you worried this much about your hair, it seemed, you were probably in tune with your feminine side, even if you didn’t entirely realise it (the James Dean-obsessed Christian in Clueless takes this theory to its logical conclusion, painfully disappointing Alicia Silverstone’s love-struck Cher by eventually admitting that he’s not just really into male grooming, he’s actually gay). When you think about it, Grease is basically the story of Danny’s journey towards this sensitive side.

You see, if Danny had just been open and honest, instead of being all uptight and blokey, the movie would have no plot. Everything that happens in the movie happens because he can’t just be truthful to his friends about his feelings for Sandy. On the one hand, he’s the King of the school, on the other, he’s totally repressed. He’s like Elvis meets Ralph Fiennes.

It’s only when Danny stops trying to be pouty and proud that Grease can have a happy ending. Although the big deal is made out of Sandy’s transformation into legging-clad sex kitten – ‘Tell me about it, stuuuhd’ remaining one of the least convincing yet hilariously iconic lines in cinema history – she hasn’t really done anything wrong to warrant a change. It’s the guys that need to grow up. Zucko does just that, by ultimately taking as much care over his relationship as he does over his hair.