Читать книгу HOLLYWOOD SHAPED MY HAIR - James King - Страница 6

In the beginning there was Grease. Grease was, is and always will be ‘The Word’.

Why? Well, obviously, a) it’s got groove, b) it’s got meaning, and c) it’s got that always entertaining teen movie thing of having actors way too old pretending to be high schoolers (Stockard Channing, as Rydell High’s resident bad girl Betty Rizzo, was 33 at the time of filming).

Most importantly for me though, watching Grease is my first big memory of really loving a movie, an explosion of Yankee teen poppiness that showered down on my rural upbringing like rain to a wilting desert crop. As the first film that I remember cherishing, Grease is what I grew from. Grease shaped my life. Grease shaped my hair.

I don’t know exactly how old I was when I first saw it or even how, although I’m presuming that I was about six or seven and it was on video (it’s amazing how weird, in this shiny, silvery, Tron-like world of streaming, it feels to type ‘v-i-d-e-o’). Of course, in that era (the early eighties), it probably should have been Star Wars I was obsessed with. But whilst my friends pretended to be Luke Skywalker using the force, I was Danny Zucko using a comb. I didn’t care that Zuck would be pretty useless attacking the Death Star; at least he didn’t have a pudding bowl hairdo. John Travolta’s Zucko, you see, was the coolest guy at Rydell High. As soon as I saw him I knew that’s all I wanted to be, too.

And, even aged five, I knew that to achieve that, I’d need the hairdo.

The Zucko hairstyle is a work of art: rich black, lustrous, greased back carefully but not too neatly, a springy curl at the front breaking away from the pack and forming a cheekily loose and louche quiff (quiff n. probably from the French ‘coiffure’, meaning ‘hairstyle’). We don’t see the back of his head much, but one can only imagine the perfection of the D.A. (D.A. n. [slang] short for ‘duck’s arse’, most famously sported by actor Tony Curtis) that resides there, the two sides of his hair uniting at the rear to form a ridge as epic as the parting of the Red Sea. There are cinematic quiffs that have been tidier (James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause) and bolder (Brad Pitt in Johnny Suede), but none have been paraded with the effortless cool of Danny. It’s like he knows he’s in a movie, being watched by millions.

Movies were a big part of my school life. Unofficial video clubs took place in classrooms during lunch break, antiquated departmental VCRs secretly whirring away whilst the teachers were relaxing in the common room, blissfully unaware that gangs of kids were gawping at Bruce Willis slaying bad guys in Die Hard or Patsy Kensit going topless in Lethal Weapon 2. They were fun times – but I’d still rather have been watching Grease. Those films had action, sure … but Grease had a style which they were lacking. Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs looked as if his clothing considerations every morning were little more than ‘which old lumberjack shirt to wear today’, whilst his grooming routine seemed to consist of merely a hasty running-of-hand-through-mullet. His scruffy beachside caravan living, meanwhile, hardly screamed attention to detail. Luckily the mullet look never tickled my fancy, even if there was plenty of cinematic inspiration …