Baldness Pill Prompts a Hair-Raising Plea

Oh yes, it’s wonderful that they have come up with a pill to cure baldness.

However, hair people in these parts sound like the chorus from “Oklahoma!” when they describe the desperate men who will swallow it: Sorry with a fringe on top.

Brad Helton, owner of Cavalier Men’s Hairpieces in Ventura, dryly pronounced the new pill, Propecia, “the greatest thing since peanut butter.”

“Anything like this is good for my business,” he said. “Most of these things don’t work--and then people come to me.”

At the Hair and Image Restoration Center in Camarillo, Brian Mattley also was something less than wigged out by Merck’s wonder drug.

“I have a client who tested it for two years, and it did him no good,” said Mattley, who sends his customers to a sister clinic in Redondo Beach for hair transplants. “I’m very skeptical. If anything really worked, there’d be a big song-and-dance about it.”

But there wasn’t even a happy tune at Pete’s Barber Shop in Thousand Oaks. “Most of the guys in here don’t mess around with pills or Rogaine,” said barber Louie Norica. “They figure it won’t work anyway.”

Even so, the drug companies can be mightily persuasive, especially when wooing such vulnerable types as balding, middle-aged men.

When Propecia hits the market in January, brace for it. Americans will be asked to open their hearts to the hairless. Groups like the Save the Bald Man Federation will spring up like Alfalfa’s cowlick. Look kindly upon them. When you receive solicitations like the one below, reach for your checkbook. Remember: Charity begins at dome.

Dear Friend,

As you read this, run your fingers through the miracle sitting on your head--the natural wonder of hair.

Lustrous. Sensual. Tantalizing. A fistful of self-esteem. Yet you probably take your hair for granted--just as the nation’s 30 million Baldo-Americans once did.

Who are the Baldo-Americans? They are rich and poor, fat and thin, white and black and brown.

They are the billionaires who can mobilize armies of workers and flotillas of salespeople but who cannot command one single follicle to grow. They are the wearers of hats and the way-sideways-combers and the toupee Toms and the middle-aged boy next door.

They are different yet they are all the same. For each day, they get up and gaze in the mirror upon an ever-more colossal expanse of cranium and they wonder: Where has my hair gone? Whither my youth? Why me and not Fabio?

A courageous Baldo-American in Ventura County, California--we’ll call him Steven C.--speaks for millions:

“My mom told me it would be OK, that at least I would always be the first one to feel the raindrops. But it’s not OK, it’s not OK at all.

“When you’re at parties, people chattering about hair like there was no tomorrow change the subject the second you walk into the room. On the street, they pretend not to look but they can’t pass without sneaking a snickering glance at your ‘receding hairline,’ your ‘runways,’ your ‘vacant lot.’

“Soon you find yourself passed over for promotions. ‘No, Steven C.,’ your boss will tell you as he drapes his miserable arm over your shoulder, ‘we need someone much smarter than you for this job.’ ”

But Steven C. isn’t so easily fooled.

“You want to know the real meaning of that corporate gobbledygook?” he plaintively asks. “It means: ‘Someone with hair!’ ”

Baldo-Americans also encounter tough sledding in the romance department.

Consider the plight of S.C., a well-built, 49-year-old business executive who is ruggedly handsome--from the bifocals down.

“I knew it was time for a change,” he said, “when one night my date looked deep into my eyes, pursed her lips, and plucked a hair from her left eyebrow. Turned out she was checking her makeup . . . in my forehead!”

But what to do?

To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, who had a full head of hair but a lot of other problems:

Rogaine is messy,

Plugs are a dread,

Weaving’s expensive:

I might as well shed!

But now all that has changed. One pill can end the heartbreak of hair-based social isolation. It can put strands where there were none: a full, luxuriant, natural thatch where there was only barren tundra. It is a capsule filled with hope--unless, like S. “Steve” C., $45 a month is simply beyond your means.

That might not seem like much to you, but think of the expensive potions for which the average Baldo-American already shells out hundreds of dollars a month. Saw palmetto pills for his swollen prostate. Vitamin E for his sagging vitality. Vitamin C to ward off the flu. St. John’s wort to straighten the head. And on and on and on.

With the help of the Save a Bald Man Federation, you can sponsor a deserving have-not hair-not like S. “Steve” C. For $45 a month--less than what the typical American spends on shampoo--you will receive joyous letters like this one: “Oh, my sponsor, thank you, thank you, thank you! My family, we are happy again. Two months ago, I was just another ‘baldie,’ putting up with guys at work calling me ‘Curly.’ Funny, right? Wrong! Now, 94 strands later--well, who said the rain forests were dying? Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Imagine monthly updates from S. “Steve” C. Imagine receiving treasured photographs, strand by strand, inch by inch.

Imagine the pride you will feel when eventually you receive a photo of a glistening pompadour . . . or a thick buzz-cut . . . or a billowing, blow-dried work of art that could rival that of any local newscaster. And who knows? One day you might open your mail to find not a note, not a photo, but a curly lock--a heady expression of gratitude from someone who was once without.

Won’t you help to save a bald man?

Won’t you spread hope in the coming year?

Won’t you give?

Even a hair?

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer.