Working

by Studs Terkel

  The name counts. Kenneth does Mrs. Kennedy’s hair—Onassis. I never saw Jacqueline Kennedy’s hair when it looked anything worthwhile. Sometimes she wears a wig. Just because she came to him, this put him on a pedestal. If the Queen of England came to my place, I’d have to hire fifteen more people. They’d all come flocking in. A social thing.

  The hairdresser cashes in on some of it. You’ll never get this in the smaller beauty shops. You have to be a hair stylist to attract ones with money. A hair stylist can get fifteen dollars for a haircut, whereas the beauty operator, she’ll get only three. Now your hairdresser is in the middle.

  What makes a man become a hair stylist is different from what makes a woman become one. For women it’s an easy trade. They learn this when they are twelve years old, making pin curls at home. But a man, it takes a little different approach. Jacqueline Kennedy, in a book her maid or someone wrote, said, when security police found out that two employees in the White House were homosexual, she ordered them fired. She said, “I don’t want my sons to be exposed to this type of people because they’re liable to grow up to be hairdressers.” Not all hairdressers are homosexually inclined. Some enjoy the work more if you enjoy women.

  The most important thing for a hairdresser, male, he has to dominate the woman. You can sense when you’re not dominating the customer. She can tell you, “I want two rollers here.” She becomes the stylist and all you become is the mechanical thing with the fingers.

  In the field of beauty work, you got to have personality. I’d say one-fifth is personality. Be able to sell yourself. Your approach, your first word, like, “Good morning, the weather we’re having.” A man has to have a personality where he’s aloof. He has to act like—without a word: Don’t tell me, I’m the stylist. You expect more from Mr. Edward and you get it. If a woman needs a hair style, he says, “Madame, what you need is a little more color. I will fix it up.” He doesn’t do it. He will call his assistant. And he will tell her, “I want curls here, I want this, I want that.” And she says, “Yes, Mr. Edward.” I don’t dirty my hands with the chemicals. I’m the stylist. Your symbol right there, the male. You’re giving yourself a title. Otherwise, you’re gonna be nothing but a flunky. Being a male, it’s important you must have this ego.

  Everybody expects the hairdresser to be a prototype, to have a black mustache, slick Hollywood-type or feminine. I could spot one a mile away sometimes if they’re feminine. On the other hand, I know someone you’d never know he was a hairdresser. He’s owned five shops at one time, a married man with a family and he’s bald. I’m not gonna hide the point that I’m a beauty operator.

  I used to go to a tavern around here. I met this guy. He didn’t know I knew he was a cop. He knew I was a hairdresser. He was drunk. He says to me, “You’re a queer.” I says, “How could you tell by looking at people?” He says, “The way you twist your mouth.” I said, “You’re drunk and you’re a cop.” He says, “How do you know I’m a cop?” I says, “Just the way you look and act.” Right away, he says, “Aaahhh!” I said, “If you didn’t have a gun, how much authority would you pull around here? Anybody can do your job. You can’t do mine. It takes skill.” Right away he avoided me. He was an idiot. I do a lot of policemen’s wives’ hair. I always mention that he called me a queer. This other woman’s husband says, “Wait’ll I see him, I’ll bash him in the face.”

  After an interval in the army he met his wife at a dance. She was working in a beauty parlor. “I said, ‘I think I’ll be a hairdresser.’ She says, ‘You wouldn’t last two days.’ I says, ‘Hell I won’t.’ ” He studied beauty culture. “I had my suitcase and my white jacket. I felt like an idiot. I saw these feminine young men dancing around, and these little old ladies waiting for me. They lay down and undress and you gotta rub their back and around their chest. What you learn in beauty school is nothin’. You don’t learn how to handle people. My father-in-law always says, ‘You do nothing but a lady’s work.’ But it’s hard work, psychologically hard. You gotta perform a little better than a female.”

  Hair stylists, even if they’re married, are called Miss This or Miss That. They don’t seem to go much for the last name. Mr. Alexander of Paris or Mr. Andre. Mr. Edward. That should go over bigger than Eddie’s Beauty Shop. It’s a little flat, see? Sometimes these young fellas who are on the feminine side lean on a feminine name. He calls himself Mr. Twinkie or something. This fella we had working here, he tried to hide the fact that he was feminine. He called himself Mr. Moran.

  HAZEL: The name became important when the male entered the business. They built a reputation on their name. They use it rather than call a salon by some idiotic or nondescriptive name. A woman might call the shop Vanity Fair or Highlight. For a man, it’s more important that he retains his name.

  What are you called?

  HAZEL: Hazel.

  EDWARD: She’s just called Hazel.

  HAZEL: I worked for Mr. Maurice in Florida and all of us were known as Miss. He renamed me Miss Rena because he didn’t like Hazel.

  Do you feel less when you’re called by your first name?

  HAZEL: Never. I never felt inferior to any of my customers. Even though sometimes they try to make you feel that way. I think I would quit a long time ago if I ever felt any inferiority.

  EDWARD: I would not stand humiliation. It’s not openly when a woman gets hostile against you and says, “If you’re a hair stylist, you’re below me.” Many wealthy people will hire a hair stylist and haul them around and they will carry their suitcases. It really looks la-de-da, you might say elite, where she’s going to the airport with her hairdresser and her poodles and her dressmaker all following after her like the Queen of Sheba. This is a form of humiliation. But the guy don’t care. She’s paying him well and he builds his name. And she’s using his image to make herself.

  HAZEL: The less important or average-intellectual customer is the one that tries to humiliate you more. Where she can suddenly go to the hairdresser weekly. These kind of people try to depress your importance. She’ll ask for something that you may not have heard that term. So she’ll say, “Oh, you don’t know!” But people who have been around, if they don’t like what you do, they go to another place. It’s the average-intellectual individual who’s apt to come in and show her importance and try to decrease yours. I’m very good at putting them in their place.

  EDWARD: There was some humiliation when I was newer. I didn’t rub hard enough. “Oh, just don’t bother any more! Just have Hazel do it.” The beginning hairdresser could be very embarrassed by a customer. The customer says, “Oh, just leave my hair alone! Comb this out for me, get this idiot away from me!” Because the person was green. There are times when the woman will take the comb and say, “Give me that thing!” This is an insult. When she says, “This is good enough!” and you’re not happy with it. Some hairdressers will blow their fuse and throw the comb on the floor and say, “I wouldn’t touch you with a fourteen-foot pole.” Verlaine was like that. He threw customers out of the door with wet hair. He was eccentric that way.

  But I still feel we are servants. A servant to the public, like a doctor. Not a servant that does housework. I didn’t mean in that class. Just because you’re a great hair stylist, win prizes—anybody can buy a trophy and put it in his window. But he becomes a star, arrogant. Some people say, “I won’t take this crap any more.” If they give you a hard time, all you say, “Look lady, I’m sorry, this is the way I think it should be. If I can’t please you, you’ll have to find someone else.” But you don’t argue and throw brushes around like some of these guys. You may see ads in papers for hairdressers: No stars, please.

  We hired this one guy, he was going to hair coloring school. He was using our place to practice with his hair colors. One day he took a very prominent customer of ours. He colored her hair red. She’s out in the car crying. She says, “I can’t go home like this. My husband’ll kill me.” I said, “I thought you wanted to be a redhead.” She says, “All I asked for wa
s a rinse.” I brought her back. By this time he was packing his bag. I didn’t have to fire him. He just simply walked out. He took a woman and being another genius, he’s gonna make something of her. You don’t take it upon yourself.

  You have to put in a thousand hours in beauty school to get your license. The average hair stylist, dresser, beauty operator has an equal amount of schooling as a practical nurse. You have to know blood, you have to know diseases. You have to know everything that pertains to the human body so you can understand why hair grows.

  Styles are basically the same since the bob. What can you do with hair? It’s like cooking chop suey. By adding more mushrooms or less. Styles repeat themselves over and over again, like women’s clothes. You always go back to something.

  We used to get fifty dollars for a permanent. Like silver-blonding. Years ago, a wife wouldn’t think of going to a grocery store with blond hair. ‘Cause what is she? A show girl? Light hair only went with strippers, prostitutes, and society women. In order to silver-blond in those days, you would use a lot of ammonias and bleaches and the woman would have to come back two or three times before it got light enough to be a silver blonde. This cost fifty, sixty dollars a treatment. So the average hausfrau and her husband, he’d say “What are you workin’ as a cigarette girl or something? You’re a mother, you got four kids, you’re insulting me in church, you look like a hoozy.” But today all girls look like hoozies.

  HAZEL: They have commercialized it and came out with all these gadgets, and put work that should be done in a shop into home. You can buy a comb that cuts hair. You can buy a permanent. They should have strictly remained professional. The manufacturers got greedy and they commercialized hairdressing, whereas they make it so easy it can be done at home. So you can’t command the prices you did a number of years ago. Today they sell these kits, and if you can read you can do it. It has hurt the poorer sections mostly. More wealthier neighborhoods, it hasn’t hurt them bad. Most of these women, they don’t want to take the time.

  Once in a while a hairdo will disturb me because I feel I didn’t do it quite right. I’ll brood over it for a little while. I like to feel I’ve done the best on each one every day. Once in a while I’ll flunk. (Laughs.)

  EDWARD: You feel like a doctor who has a patient who died on the operating table. You’re concerned. What went wrong? Why didn’t I get that right? A beauty operator wouldn’t care. I enjoy the work. I’d do it again even if I made less money.

  We have lost young people in the beauty shop. The average person we work on is over twenty-five. The olden-time mother would never stand to see her daughter with that straight gappy look. She looks like a witch on Halloween night. Today it’s the style for young people.

  I have a girl come in the shop: how can I straighten her hair? There was one time, a woman with hair like that, she was something on a broom. Even her mother would say, “Why the hell don’t you go to the beauty shop and get the hair out of your mouth?” Today you can’t tell a child . . .

  In my opinion, the men are getting more feminine and the women are getting more masculine. If a boy and a girl walk down the street together and his hair is as straight as hers, he’ll get a permanent at home. The one with the straight hair is usually the girl and the one with the wavy hair is the guy.

  It’s due to our permissive society. There was a time once, September rolled around, they were forced to go to the barber shop or beauty parlor and get it clipped for school. Otherwise, the teacher sent them home. Today you have a whole society where a young man can go on the street, raise a beard, wear crazy clothes, he can wear one shoe off and one shoe on, and no one bothers to look at him.

  HAZEL: It has regressed.

  Do you disagree with customers on occasion?

  EDWARD: I often disagree with customers—depends on who she is and what authority she has. I lost a customer once because she was from Germany and this other customer happened to be from a very, very pronounced Jewish family. She said she wouldn’t buy a Volkswagen because of what they did to our people. And the woman said, “What did I do? I was a child.” Next thing you know, she called her a Nazi. So here I’m bound to lose one customer. The one I favored, the one I hoped I didn’t lose, was the one that paid the most money and had the most service. But I felt sorry for the other girl. I took sides only for monetary reasons.

  JEAN STANLEY

  She sells cosmetics and perfumes in a department store. It is a suburban Connecticut branch of the city’s most fashionable establishment. The patrons are, for the most part, upper middle class.

  Though it has been her five-day-a-week job for the last seven years, she had been at it, on and off, for thirty years. “I was home for about twenty years. I went back to work when the children were in high school.”

  Her husband is a buyer in textile. Though he has an excellent record and reputation, his position is tenuous, due to the industry’s impersonal drive for young executives. They have three children, all of whom have gone to college.

  I sell cosmetics to women who are trying to look young. They are spending more on treatment creams than they did years ago. I can remember when lipstick at two dollars was tops. Now they have lipsticks that sell for five. Appearance. Many times I think, thirty dollars for this little jar of cream. I know it doesn’t have that value. But in the eye of that woman, it has that value. A cosmetic came out that was supposed to smooth out the wrinkles for five or six hours. It puffs out the skin. The wrinkles would return. We criticized it. But a woman came in one morning, she said, “I’m going for a job interview and I’m past forty. I want to look nicer.” I felt differently about selling it to her. It might bring her a job.

  They say everything comes out of the same pot. (Laughs.) There isn’t a cream that’s worth forty, fifty dollars. But when you see the enthusiasm of the women who purchase these things (laughs), you don’t want to make them feel discouraged. They’re beginning to show lines and wrinkles. They know their husbands are out in the business world with young women who are attractive. They’re trying to look nice, to keep their husbands interested. So cosmetics have their place, I think.

  There is always the competition of keeping their husbands interested. You see the fear in their faces—becoming lined. They all discuss this: “Look at me. I look terrible.” They will talk about seeing it on television—the cream that erases lines. Television is the thing that has brought all this. More anxiety.

  Customers ask your advice. They rely on you. If you’ve worked in one of these places for a number of years, you have a following. People come in and wait for you actually. You become a little bit of a friend. They can speak to a stranger more than they can to an acquaintance. They may tell you some little tragedy or something. You learn a lot about people when you’re with the public all day. There are so many lonely people. So many women between the ages of forty and seventy.

  You’re supposed to try and sell a certain brand. Many stores work that way. We suggest the brand we know about most. Many women come in and they’d like to see an Arden, a Lauder, or a Rubenstein product, and you show it to them. If they ask for a definite brand, you don’t try to sell them another. I’m not aggressive. I don’t want to send a customer home with a bag full of things and when she gets home she feels, Why did I buy this? You try to feel the customer out. I stress the saving: “How much would you like to spend?”

  Years ago, women that sold cosmetics and perfumes made more money on the average than they do now. You could earn much more than girls working in an office. Today you hardly earn as much. The companies are spending so much money on advertising. Perhaps they feel the girl will sell much more and earn more, that way. (Laughs). They don’t put it into salaries, I know that much. They have tremendous advertising budgets. We work on salary plus commission. One of my children who’s sold said, “The lowest common denominator is the salesclerk on commission.” (Laughs.) It brings out their greed and their disregard for their fellow workers.

  I’m not paid by the store.
I’m paid by the cosmetics company. The company expects you to sell their merchandise. You send them a monthly report. There are ten of us in my department. Each one represents a different company. Out here in the suburbs you represent more than one company. You might have two or three cream lines; four, five, or six perfume lines. You have a tremendous amount of stock to take care of, reports to send in. You have to have an auditor help you with your income tax. (Laughs). You have salaries from so many different companies.

  The extra work, making out reports, is done in your own home, on your own time. The Revlon report can be eighteen inches, with numerous items on it. You can’t work on these reports when you get home at night. Your eyes become a little blurred. (Laughs.) You’re a little weary. You have to do it on Sunday. You spend the whole day on it.

  There’s another hazard to the job. (Laughs.) You get no health insurance or anything like that. The companies don’t cover you for hospitalization. I have to carry my own. You can’t get in on a pension plan either. A woman that just retired worked in this section fifteen years. If she worked directly for the store, she could have retired with a little pension. She retired with nothing. I will get nothing.

  The company I represent gives you five days a year sick leave. If you’re sick more than five days, you don’t get paid. The one year I was sick, I didn’t get paid for the few days over. There are department store unions, but if you’re in the pay of someone else, it’s . . . no man’s land. Years ago, when earnings were greater, I could have retired with something. Now I won’t.