To Live And Dye In LA

 This piece was written over thirty years ago, sold to three magazines but never published because all three went bankrupt beforehand. Talk about kill fees. So, here it is, as it was, thirty two, no, thirty three years later.

To Live and Dye in LA

I am a man nearly fifty years old, trim, fit, energetic, a man who has spent a good deal of his life engaged in traditional male activities: a hitch in the Marine Corps, hunting, fishing, bushwhacking...As the years passed, I liked the weathered countenance which stared back at me from the mirror, those creases around the eyes which told a tale of a guy who had faced wind and sun and never flinched. In short, I am not a man who ever imagined he would dye his hair. But, I just did.

Why? Maybe it was because a friend of my three year old daughter, noting my hair was nearly white, asked her what would happen to her when her daddy died? Or maybe it was because a twenty-something secretary at Warner Bros. told me how much she liked white hair on "older" men. But probably it was because I work in Hollywood, a place where the aging process is more terrifying than the Bubonic plague. What finally convinced me was when my wife told me her colorist, Michael, was a Texan who grew up hunting quail. You see, the credentials I was looking for in a colorist were different from those you might expect. He had to have shot game birds on the prairies, trekked through Alaska, and be able to name five rivers he had white-watered.

I called for an appointment. My wife was out of town. This was to be between me and Michael, nobody else. His place, The Salon on the Plaza, was in the middle of an upscale stretch of Sunset Boulevard directly opposite a heavily credentialed restaurant named Le Dome. During lunch, on any given day, most of the major players in Hollywood could be found here. How was I supposed to get in the hair salon without anybody seeing me? "Come through the back door," Michael said. I thought I detected some contempt in his voice, but I didn't care. Stealth and secrecy were the operative words here. The appointment was for eleven a.m., time enough to beat the warm duck salad crowd across the street. Worse than Michael’s contempt would be the sneers of my fellow traveler's in the celluloid asylum.

The receptionist guided me to a small changing room. She told me to take off my shirt and put on what looked like a hospital gown, except it was black, crisp, and tied around the front. She then led me through the shop to a chair right smack in the front window.

    "Michael will be with you shortly," she said.

    "I can't sit here," I yelped.

    "Sorry," she shrugged, "All the other chairs are taken".

I panicked and lunged for the newspaper. I had two choices: leave or hide behind the sports section. A little voice in my head said, "Daddy, what'll happen to me when you die?" That left me no choice but to hunker down with the box scores. By the time Michael arrived I had memorized the batting averages of the fifty leading hitters in both leagues, and those parking attendants at Le Dome were limbering up.

We decided to go a conservative route, one that would leave me "graying" but not "grayed". I did not want to look like a middle-aged lounge lizard with his hair dyed black as a mailman's shoe. The formula Michael mixed together looked like icing you'd put on a cake, except it was beige-ish, and it smelled horrible. As he began to work, he took the newspaper from my hand and set it aside. He said it got in his way. I could not run; I could not hide. If I'd given the keynote address stark naked at the Tailhook convention I could not have felt more exposed. 

I watched in the mirror as Michael parted my hair into sections, painted individual strands with a small fan-shaped brush then wrapped them with tinfoil. This was an artist at work. He was meticulous, exacting, precise. And slow. Here I was, a man who once laughed when a sperm whale rammed his little wooden boat, sitting in the window of a beauty parlor with tin foil in my hair, paralyzed with fear that someone would walk by and recognize me.

Finally, my hair was done. I looked front, right, left. Michael held the mirror up behind me so I could see the back. What was so different? This was the way I always looked. Nope. This was the way I always looked ten years ago. Was it really possible that nobody would actually know what I had done? It was time for a test run. I left the shop by the front door and ran into a producer I knew. He asked me where I got the great tan? I hadn't been near the sun for weeks. At home my neighbor told me how good I looked since I took off the weight. What weight? My rabbi's wife thought I was forty-four, and my own wife didn't catch on for three days. But I knew I had really gotten away with it a few days later when a young television executive confided in me how annoyed he was with all the "fossils" in this business. I felt a bit like a traitor -- a geriatric double agent -- but mostly I felt terrific. Little did I know that I was truly in deep and serious trouble. I woke up one morning thinking, "Wouldn't I look great, just a shade darker?" One week later it was even worse. I needed to see Michael. Not that I'd ever do it, but I wanted to ask him: "What would a perm do for me?"