Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (28 page)

The answer was that the public was nearing the limits of its tolerance. Finot won his appeal in the spring of 1967, but if the judges had known what was coming, perhaps they would have thought twice. Later that year, the dam burst. The “Summer of Love” in San Francisco exhibited a heady mix of drugs, music, hair, and rebellion. In England, the world’s most famous rock band, the Beatles, appeared for the first time with long sideburns and mustaches on the cover of their experimental, drug-fueled musical voyage,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Later in the year, on the cover of the American release of the single “Hello, Goodbye,” George Harrison had advanced to a full dark beard. The Beatles were not innovators in this respect, but they were powerful role models. When John, Paul, George, and Ringo grew mop tops in 1965, the youth of the world followed suit. The pattern was repeated in 1967, starting with mustaches, then with beards.

“Today, hair power is second only to black power as a driving force of American life,” announced
Newsweek
magazine in 1968.
13
By this time long hair and beards, along with flared jeans and tie-died shirts, had become the emblems of a new liberal romanticism not unlike that which swept Europe in the 1830s and 1840s. Once again the rising generation declared its dissatisfaction with the social order by showing a contrary face to the world. For nineteenth-century romantics, hair expressed discontent with the lack of democratic progress in postrevolutionary Europe. In the 1960s, hair expressed a similar frustration with limits on personal freedom in the postwar West. In early 1968, for example,
an underground newspaper editor in Detroit admitted that he viewed his bushy mustache as a “revolutionary, romanticist accouterment.”
14
“Rebellion begins on your face,” antiwar activist Jerry Rubin declared.
15
In jail in for his part in the Chicago riots outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Rubin suffered the humiliation of a forced haircut and shave. “Amerika asks us,” Rubin declared afterward (using a Russianized spelling of his country), “‘Why the beards, hairy legs, arms and long hair?’ but we ask Amerika, ‘Why do you do the unnatural act of cutting your hair and shaving the beautiful hair off your face and body?’ Our hair prevents Amerika from seeing its reflection in our face—therefore we are a living rejection of its misdeeds and violence—our hair is our picket sign and our Molotov cocktail. Our hair hurts/offends them more than anything we can say or do.”
16

While Rubin fulminated in jail, rock singer David Crosby—he of flying hair and expansive mustache—wrote and performed this hit song:

As long-haired, bearded bandmate Graham Nash later explained, men with long hair were proclaiming that “they were into good music, a reasonable life, and they probably hated the government.”
17
Even those who were not particularly political could show sympathy with the spirit of the times by forgoing scissors and blades. In fact, growing one’s hair was an excellent substitute for activism. It was relatively easy to do, and yet it rarely failed to deliver a strong message of defiance.

The battle of hair was fought in thousands of ways in thousands of places. A survey conducted in 1967 by the Student Union at the University of Hamburg in Germany found that residents strongly disapproved of long hair and beards and blamed students for undermining social values and wasting taxpayer’s hard-earned money.
18
Employers
also continued to resist. A survey of members of the New York City Administrative Management Society in 1968 found that 95 percent of the firms represented had rules against long hair, 74 percent disallowed beards, 54 percent banned long sideburns, and 27 percent disallowed mustaches.
19
Advertising campaigns were another tactic. Billboards appeared in New England declaring “Beautify America, Get a Haircut.” Inspired, the
Christian Science Monitor
urged America’s barbers to expand this effort and publicize “the handsomeness of cut, groomed, clean hair.”
20
Even revolutionary Cuba and its bearded leader got in on the act. In 1968, Fidel Castro’s government announced that Havana University would enforce military discipline, including a ban on beards, mustaches, and long hair.
21

Often, the emotions generated by beards were immediate and personal. Travel writer Richard Atcheson cultivated a full beard before venturing across America in 1970 and soon found himself in a world of hostility. “I have been up the Zambesi without a paddle; I have flapped through the sky in a disabled helicopter over the Great Barrier Reef; I have been menaced by slitty-eyed pimps of Tijuana . . . but I have never been as scared in distant places as I was while traveling in my own country, in the summer of 1970, while wearing long hair and a beard.”
22
In restaurants, bars, and motels in the South and West, many reacted with fear and aggression to a stranger they condemned only for his nonconformist appearance.

When John Lennon decided to cut his hair and shave his beard in 1970, it was major news. While on retreat in Denmark, he decided to adopt a less spectacular look for himself, trimming way back. He told a friend that he felt like a change and hoped it would “enable me to move about anonymously.”
23
The following year the beard was gone for good. He was clearly burdened by the exposure, publicity, and symbolic weight of his hair. Lennon was stepping back, but many others stepped into the breach.

The championship match of the 1974 World Cup soccer final, between the Netherlands and West Germany in the Olympic Stadium in Munich, was unusual in several ways. It opened with the quickest score in tournament
history when the Dutch converted a penalty kick before their opponents had even touched the ball. It also featured the hairiest athletes in World Cup history. Today, football stars are more likely to appear with bald heads than long hair, but players in the early 1970s dared long sideburns, mustaches, and flowing manes. German star Paul Breitner stood out even among this furry crowd. His full beard and halo of curly hair were his calling cards, winning him epithets like “Krauskopf” (frizzy head) and “Mister Vollbart” (Mr. Full-beard). Fans seated in the highest seats could instantly recognize the iconoclastic kicker with flaring hair to match his outsized ego.

Though the huge worldwide audience was surprised at how quickly the Dutch had jumped ahead, they were not surprised that the team in orange was winning. The artful and powerful Dutch had marched to the
final by overwhelming their opponents, while the more pedestrian West Germans had just scraped by. The early goal was not the beginning of a rout, however, and Germany soon evened the score. A German player was tackled in the penalty box, and Breitner stepped forward to take the penalty kick. Without doubt or hesitation, he smoothly chopped the ball into the left corner of the net. He later claimed that there was no advance agreement as to who should take the ball, and that he had stepped up simply because he happened to be closest.
24
When the Germans scored again and rode the turnaround to victory, his place in football history was assured.
25

Before he helped his country win the World Cup, Breitner was a star defender for Bayern Munich, famous in equal measure for his stellar play, outspoken politics, and outlandish looks. Portraits of communist leaders Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara graced the walls of his home, and visiting interviewers recorded streams of invective against capitalist exploitation of workers and athletes. Breitner portrayed himself as a working-class victim in spite of earning three hundred thousand deutsche marks ($92,000 in 2013 dollars) when he was only twenty years old, and more than half a million ($800,000) by age twenty-five.
26
He was a rebel at heart, railing against the modern “circus” of professional football, in which players were bought and sold, and toured from city to city to entertain heckling crowds. In the name of freedom, he fought team management, and within a year of his World Cup triumph he pressed successfully for a transfer from Munich to Real Madrid in Spain. Afterward, the young star petulantly proclaimed that he no longer felt like a German.
27
Further disputes led to his departure from the national team, which played the 1978 tournament without him. On and off the field, Breitner was sure to generate plenty of drama.

For admirers and detractors alike, Breitner’s rebellious hair suited his iconoclastic personality. His defiance of convention and authority took visible form in his afro and beard, which in turn reinforced the cultural association between hair and nonconformity. In 1981, as a rehabilitated Breitner prepared to rejoin the German squad for the next year’s World Cup, Joachim Wachtel rhapsodized in
Das Buch vom Bart
(The Book of the Beard) that “the full beard has for years been part of the image of this outspoken troublemaker and playmaker who makes wonderful passes. . . . Hasn’t he now, when he sometimes resembles
a highly trained, wrathful Viking, become his true self, Paul Breitner? What would Breitner be today without a beard? The full beard is part of this personality, it emphasizes the spirit of contradiction, the sense of everything unfitting.”
28

Breitner may have evoked the Viking spirit, but he more obviously channeled bearded revolutionaries from Marx to Che Guevara, whose fearsome figures adorned his walls. Guevara’s reputation as a fighter and martyr has long stood as a challenge to the establishment; from 1967 (the year of his death) to the present day, the most famous photograph of the Cuban revolutionary has been a ubiquitous icon of the left, deployed in an astonishing number of forms and circumstances. In fact, the often highly stylized image—showing Che’s piercing glare, flowing hair, dark, wispy beard, and starred beret—is said to be the most reproduced image in the history of photography.
29
By 1968 students in Paris, Berlin, Prague, Berkeley, and elsewhere had rallied around it, and Guevara-style beards sprouted on thousands of young chins, sometimes complemented by Guevara-style berets.
30
Che and his fellow Cuban communists originally grew their beards in their jungle bases, and became known during the guerrilla war as
los barbudas
, or the bearded ones. After their victory in 1959, Fidel, Che, and other leaders kept their hair as a symbol of the continuing worldwide struggle against bourgeois capitalism. Castro reminded his victorious followers that “your beard does not belong to you. It belongs to the Revolution.”
31
This did not apply to the younger generation, however. When long hair, along with Che’s image, became symbols of youthful challenge to authority in the West, the revolutionary old guard feared Cuban youth would imitate their antiestablishmentarianism. Castro’s government decreed in 1968 that Cuban university students would be subject to military training and discipline, including a ban on beards and long hair.
32
Revolution had become the status quo, and the youth were now expected to obey.

Paul Breitner’s emulation of Guevara represented all that twentieth-century society admired and feared in facial hair: the allure of freedom and the specter of anarchy. As the 1970s adavnced, utopian dreams of the Age of Aquarius faded. The decline of radicalism, however, did not mean a return to smooth faces and crew cuts. On the contrary, long hair advanced into the mainstream, along with sideburns and facial fuzz, as a kind of physical residue of a decade of upheaval. With respect
to the general population, the high point of facial hair in the twentieth century was not the 1960s but the 1970s, when it escaped the confines of rock music festivals and war protests. Breitner was part of this trend, as athletes, performers, teachers, scientists, civil servants, and even the occasional businessman tested the limits of social tolerance.

One measure of this trend was the transformation of Oakland Athletics baseball team. In 1971, the
New York Times
reported that a few basketball and football players had mustaches and small beards, but that hockey and baseball players were entirely clean-shaven. A spokesman for the baseball commissioner’s office declared that this was unlikely to change until someone is “is good enough to make a real test of it.”
33
Little did that official know, that man was already on deck. Reggie Jackson, like Paul Breitner, was a rising star with plenty of ego. When Jackson appeared in the Oakland A’s training camp in the spring of 1972 with a mustache, the opinionated owner, Charlie Finley, instructed his young slugger to remove it. When Jackson resisted, Finley applied some reverse psychology, figuring it would deny Jackson his uniqueness if he could coax some of his other players to grow their own mustaches.
34
Though Finley was an effective club owner, he was not skilled in psychological trickery. Instead of a shaved Jackson, he ended up with a team that looked like a throwback to the 1890s.

At this point, however, Finley’s salesman instincts took over, and he found a way to make the best of an awkward situation. He proclaimed that his club would celebrate “Mustache Day” in honor of Father’s Day, and any man with a mustache would be admitted free to the game. He even offered cash bonuses to any player who grew a mustache. Some players complied only grudgingly, while others were more enthusiastic. Jackson advanced to a goatee, but relief pitcher Rollie Fingers grabbed the most attention with a natty handlebar mustache that was to make him the most recognizable face in baseball. What started as a psychological tactic became a marketing stunt, and then something much more. The freewheeling, gutsy A’s had discovered a new identity and esprit de corps that set them apart from other teams.

This was the beginning of a dynasty. The A’s won the World Series that year and in the following two seasons. Baseball writers could not resist interpreting their rise as a harbinger of the times, when a spirit of liberal individualism supplanted corporate conformity. This was especially true
of the 1972 World Series, which pitted a team one reporter described as the “bad guys with mustaches and beards” against the straitlaced “good guys, the clean shaven Cincys,”
35
or in the phrase of another columnist, “the Bikers against the Boy Scouts.” Cincinnati’s crisp, by-the-book appearance matched its playing style, and the Reds were heavily favored to win the championship. Against all expectation the A’s took the first two of the four games needed for victory in their opponent’s home stadium. “The Hairs put the clippers to the squares,” enthused one reporter, “and these throwbacks from the Gay Nineties have struck a damaging blow against the clean-cut American boy image.”
36

The eventual triumph of the A’s that year, and in the succeeding two years, lent new prestige to facial hair by connecting it with athletic success. In this way, sports heroes played a big role in promoting bolder hair across Europe and the United States. Besides Paul Breitner and the Oakland A’s, notable figures ranging from Gerd Müller, another German soccer star, to Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, American football quarterback Joe Namath, and basketball great Wilt Chamberlain, graced the pages of newspapers and magazines with attention-grabbing mustaches or beards. It is fair to say that the celebrity of these figures resided to some degree in their reputation as nonconformist individualists as well as successful athletes, with all the positive and negative implications this identity carried.

It was not to last, however, and by the 1980s, long hair, sideburns, and beards were in full retreat, trimmed back by a powerful reassertion of the shaven ideal. Once again, Breitner exemplified the trend. In 1982, he contradicted his own spirit of contradiction by accepting 150,000 marks to cut off his famous beard, leaving only a modest mustache, to appear in an aftershave advertisement. Who knew that lurking behind the curly-headed communist was a smooth-faced capitalist? Pitralon, the company that talked him into it, understood that this turnabout would cause a sensation, that the taming of Germany’s most famous beard would be a signal triumph for both shaving and their bottom line. “There were a few big titles in his life,” the advertisement copy read, “but only one aftershave, Pitralon.” The ad continued, “Since he doesn’t wear a full beard any longer, he grooms himself with Pitralon with Cedar Oil. He learned about it from his father. ‘He knew what felt good,’ says Breitner, and strokes his well-groomed chin.”
37

To those who were disappointed at this apparent sellout, Breitner was unapologetic, insisting that his beard was just a beard, after all. Advertising was part of his job as an entertainer, even if he was also proud that his fame had boosted Pitralon’s market share dramatically.
38
In retrospect, Breitner had never been an idealist so as much as a pragmatist, and surely that is what he meant when he said that his beard was just a beard. Freedom of action was for him more important than political purity. The defiant beard could be sacrificed if the money was right. The soccer star’s reasons for abandoning his defiant hair were in line with the thinking of the 1980s. At one level the decline of facial hair was a matter of money, particularly the need to hold down jobs. Employers and other social authorities had adopted what one journalist called the doctrine of “shavism,”
39
deploying various means, including the law, to tamp down hairy nonconformity. The demand for reliability, regularity, and cooperation was reasserting itself.