A Cut Above : When It Comes to Barbershops, I’m Still a Sexist

Not long ago I received the following publicity handout:

“Back in the early ‘60s, when the Beatles had just emerged on the American record charts, Richard Stanley, then 20, put men and women in the same barber’s chair.

“Stanley invented the first unisex hair salon . . . which changed the hair industry and was one of the greatest reasons why you don’t see too many barber poles today. . . .”

Unisex can be fun, and I am not hostile to the intrusion of women into most of the old male strongholds, like the saloon, the steam bath and the pool hall.

But when it comes to barbershops, I’m still a sexist. There are beauty shops and there are barbershops, and never the twain shall meet.

I happen to have an old-fashioned barber named Rudy. He has a one-man shop in Highland Park. I passed it one day and stopped in and asked him if he was a hair stylist.

“No,” he said. “I’m a barber.”

“That’s what I’m looking for,” I said. I’ve been with him ever since.

Rudy’s reading material includes The Times and Sports Illustrated, of which he has not only the latest issue but also a stack of dogeared back numbers.

There is usually a line of two or three men waiting in chairs, reading the paper or SI and talking about the Dodgers or the Angels or whatever is happening in sports.

I have seen women in the shop, but usually they have come in with small boys in tow, to offer them up to this male ritual. For a small boy, a haircut in a man’s barbershop is a rite of passage.

When I was a boy, the barbershop was the most all-male place in town. It reeked of hair oil and face lotion, masculine smells unlike the seductive aromas of the beauty shop or the woman’s toilet. Men read Liberty and Collier’s and talked easily of Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey and the government, which of course was going to hell.

In the summertime the barbershop was warm and intimate, with an electric fan raking the row of waiting men and stirring up the overladen air, and in October the barber’s tinny radio carried the World Series; the announcer tried to give excitement to the action, which he was reading off the telegraph, play by play.

When you got in the chair, the barber’s scissors made a clicking sound as he began snipping, and you watched the progress of his artistry in one of those mirrors that reflected a mirror on the other side of the shop, back and forth into infinity.

When you were old enough and rich enough to have a shave, it was pure bliss, lying supine in the extended chair with the warm lather on your face, listening to the scrape of the razor as the barber made his delicate strokes.

One day, a year or so ago when my barber was on vacation, I decided to try a unisex salon in one of the shopping centers. I walked in and was directed to a chair by a hostess. Finally a young woman came to fetch me and asked me what my name was. I told her it was Jack Smith.

“OK, Jack,” she said. “Just come with me.”

She led me first to a large basin and put a towel around my shoulders.

“You have to have a shampoo first,” she said.

I told her I didn’t need a shampoo. I had had one that morning.

“You have to,” she said. “It’s a rule.”

She gave me a shampoo and then led me to a chair in which I sat uneasily as she made a few theatrical snips at my wet hair.

All of a sudden she was finished. Obviously I was expected to tip her. I gave her $2, feeling cheap, and put my jacket on and looked at myself in a mirror. I looked like an overaged punk-rocker.

I went out to the cashier to pay my bill, which was more than double what I paid Rudy.

When Rudy came back, I stopped in to show him what I had done. “Don’t worry, Jack,” he said. “It’ll grow out in a month or two.”

As I say, unisex is fine, but let’s keep those barber poles.