Читать книгу HOLLYWOOD SHAPED MY HAIR - James King - Страница 8

Unlike those guys, Zucko made a proper effort. And Grease itself made style a priority. It’s all there in the opening credit: a cartoon Danny standing in front of the mirror, lacing his locks with product and making sure his soft quiff is just right. Of course, with animated credits like that, you know you’re in for something where style is all-important. If film producers go to that much trouble just for the first few minutes, you can only imagine what the rest of the film is going to be like (see the ultra-chic Priceless and the classy Catch Me If You Can for further evidence of this equation. Hell, you could even try eighties cheese-fest Mannequin, a film that – if there’s any sort of message in amongst the wonky sets and ropey stereotypes – is about the importance of great window dressing). There’s something brilliantly optimistic about starting a film with an animation, playfully turning the movie’s characters into wacky cartoons – because they’re that awesome – before we’ve even got to know them. The mood is perfectly set up just in those opening Grease credits (by the late, Wimbledon-born John D.Wilson, a former Disney man), where John Travolta looks like one of those pencil-drawn caricatures that you get done when you’re drunk and on holiday. Which, interestingly, is rather how he now looks in real life.

By the time the boring cropped hair and grubby white vests of Bruce Willis were leaving me cold during those lunch-breaks, I had been obsessed with Grease for years. Though I was young, I have a very distinct, remarkably clear memory of dancing around to ‘Summer Nights’ in an outfit that I had specially created for the occasion. I could only manage a jumble sale denim jacket, not a leather T-Birds one, but for someone only in single figures such savvy compromise still gives me a little shiver of satisfaction. In the memory, I am in the middle of the living room, slinging my jacket over my shoulder and punching the air as Danny Zucko hit that famous final high note, standing in the bleachers. My parents are the audience. My sister is Sandy. I sing like my life depends on it, John Travolta meets Aled Jones. In reality, my fringe hangs heavy over my eyes but in my mind, I am quiffed.

It was only a matter of time before those dreams became a reality. With parents whose own childhood had been during the real Grease era (the story takes place in the 1959–60 academic year), their encouragement in getting me to slick back my hair like a rock ‘n’ roll throwback was no surprise. I must have been one of the few pre-pubescent boys to regularly receive a bottle of Cossack men’s hairspray for birthdays and Christmas. (Cossack smelled spicy, musky and manly; what some lab guy obviously thought was the essence of the eighteenth-century Slavic military, even though it was made in Folkestone, Kent. When my bottle ran out I had to borrow my Mum’s slightly less Ukranian-whiffing Silvikrin.)

I had formerly tried mousse in order to achieve my desired Travolta quiff, carefully following the instructions to squirt out a golf ball-sized dollop of the airy foam then combing it through my locks into the required shape. But as well as setting hair into position, mousse also gave it what the beauty industry terms ‘body’. So, whilst it definitely gave me the vertical hold I was after, it also had an effect horizontally. My hair expanded outwards into something massive. Brush through with a few lumps of mousse and my barnet boasted less of the sharp attitude of Danny Zucko and more of the flouncy prettiness of Wham!-era George Michael. Not what I was after.

Ideally I wanted to use wet-look hair gel, specifically Wella’s Shock Waves since it was advertised in Smash Hits every issue and – back in the eighties – boasted excitingly cutting-edge, Piet Mondrian-style blocks of colour on the packaging. However, since the use of wet-look hair gel had, for reasons now lost in the mists of time, been banned at my uptight all-boys school I found that a combination of water and Cossack was the next best thing. A significant fire hazard I might have been, but at least my Zucko hair remained in position through even the most rough-and-tumble PE lesson on a trampette.

Not that my fellow pupils understood the greatness of this, of course. One boy in particular – boisterous and brawny in a way that seemed entirely alien to me – took great pleasure in ruffling my carefully-constructed head art whenever he saw me, persistently sneering that my look was like something from a ‘sixties war’. I wanted, naturally, to point out to him that, as he probably didn’t mean the Vietnam War, the conflict to which he was presumably referring actually took place in the forties. What’s more, my look was actually late fifties thankyouverymuch. But, as his giant sausage fingers brazenly cracked through the brittle layers of lacquer, I sensed that he wasn’t in the mood for a history lesson.