Hair-Razing Stories From Lesley Stahl

Attention, all you movie people out there who cruise the paper looking for ideas. Here’s one from Lesley Stahl:

“A story of a girl and her presidents, a girl and her mother, a girl and her daughter and a girl and her hair.”

Especially the hair.

“When I went to ’60 Minutes,’ [Executive Producer] Don Hewitt said, ‘I hate your hair.’ ”

Actually, so did we. But we were too polite to say so.

“He said it was too stiff. It looked too much like Nancy Reagan’s. When he found out I was going to her hairdresser, he said, ‘Well, that explains it. I’m going to take you to someone else.’ ”

A visit to Frederic Fekkai later, Stahl was helmet-free, a state of hair that’s maintained by her current stylist Xavier. You can see the tousled blond results at a bookstore near you, on the cover of her new memoir, “Reporting Live” (Simon & Shuster), the story of a girl’s hairy experiences with presidents and relatives.

“I wrote it because my daughter was going to Amherst, and I was really afraid of the empty nest, so I looked around for something to fill up what I thought was going to be horrible loneliness. My daughter calls it the replacement child.”

We are in Stahl’s room at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, where the high-energy CBS News star has ricocheted after a flight from San Francisco. We are clinking cups of caffeine and commiserating over the heavy hand of fate that dealt us the double-edged blond card.

“My mother was always explaining, ‘Don’t be silly, kiddo. You’re on television. You have to look good.’ Then there was this other sort of pull--this was going back to the ‘70s when there were very few women in positions of power and authority--how was a woman supposed to convey heft and strength?

“Well, if you were too pretty, it wasn’t going to work, and I remember once one of the bosses screaming for me after I had done a story that was somewhat humorous and I had smiled [on camera]. And he screamed at me and said, ‘Never smile.’ They didn’t tell men that. I wasn’t supposed to smile because there was something soft about smiling, and I had to go into the cold and redo the on-camera because my mouth went up.”

These days, Stahl has plenty of reason to smile, and not just because it finally became acceptable for her to do so on camera in the early ‘90s. With more women assuming positions of power as news broadcasters and newsmakers, Stahl is enjoying that tastiest of victories, the last laugh.

At the top of her game, gender “is not an issue for me, and it’s not an issue for the women I came up with, who, by the way, are basically all there still. This idea that we weren’t going to last--ha, ha, ha. We all lasted. Almost to a person. And we’re all either hovering around or over 50.”

How dare you?

“I was actually told, ‘You’ll never last beyond 35.’ Then it was 40. 45. Then it was 50.”

Going, going . . .

*

They said sexy diva Debbie Harry would be finished at 35. Then it was 40. 45. Then it was 50. Apparently, Angelenos can’t count because her reconstituted band, Blondie, had the joint jumping Wednesday in its first appearance here since the group split up 17 years ago.

The joint was the El Rey Theatre, where people with good memories rocked at the post-premiere party for Paramount’s “200 Cigarettes,” which stars the second-generation Harry, Courtney Love. A couple of Blondie classics are on the soundtrack, but the group didn’t rest on its hits. The set included songs from its new album, “No Exit,” which is being released Feb. 23.

Speeding to the airport in a limo the next morning, Harry deconstructed the album title to us by phone.

“One day we were in the studio recording, and Clem [Burke], who’s the drummer, was having a fit. He kept looking at the door, and it said ‘exit.’ He said, ‘There is no exit.’ And we saw the Jean-Paul Sartre play, ‘No Exit,’ and we liked the idea of all these people that sort of know each other but don’t know each other.”

Band co-founder Chris Stein got on the phone. “Relationships [in the band] have changed a lot. I used to think I had all the answers for everything. Now I don’t think I know anything.”

Who knew Blondie had become so philosophical in its old age?

Also evolving is the audience, which is finally giving Harry her due, Stein says. “People are paying attention to her singing instead of her attitude.”

Not to mention her acting. Harry has been carving out a role for herself as a character actress in the indie world, and she’s hitting the screen next month as a siren mom in writer-director Adam Bernstein’s quirky “Six Ways to Sunday.”