ANOTHER VOICE

The hair-raising history of Charles the Bald

CHARLES MOORE

We in the editorial community, as I am surprised no one yet calls it, have endless discussions about why people read what they do or don't read what they don't. If only we could enter the minds of the people 'out there', we think, we would sell millions upon millions of copies. It was in one of these discussions recently that I heard myself airing the opinion that women liked reading about health and men did not. I never read about health, I said, and I felt rather proud of myself, as if there was something stoical in my attitude.

Brooding afterwards, however, I have to confess that as I pass high-mindedly over all those bits in the newspapers about breast cancer and passive smoking and back pain, my eye does nowadays linger on any item about baldness.

So I am in a position to inform readers that the current situation in the depilation community is as follows. A team at Cam- bridge, which includes a friend of mine called Terence Kealey, has managed to grow a human hair in a test-tube. The trick, according to the Independent on Sunday, was to extract a hair follicle from spare human skin 'without putting these important dermal papilla cells under stress'. So far Dr Kealey has failed to follow the injunction, 'Physician, heal thy- self' (he is strikingly bald), but apparently all sorts of experiments can now be carried out on these important dermal papilla cells, and it is only a matter of time before great auburn manes and woolly mops will be sprouting in laboratories, tended, perhaps, by secretaries who at present have to confine their nurturing skills to spider plants and busy Lizzies.

Meanwhile, at Bradford University, Valerie Randall is isolating these impor- tant dermal papilla cells, distinguishing three types of follicle — from the adult, male beard, from the 'non-balding' part of the scalp, and from the pubic area. Perhaps she will soon be able to flood the market with those pubic wigs, known as merkins, which were particularly popular in the Tudor period.

It is difficult to describe the mixed emotions with which an interested party reads of these developments. One would like to think, of course, that one was perfectly indifferent. Who cares about being bald? one asks defiantly; people will still love me for myself. There is even a certain distinction in baldness (as people tell one when they are trying to be kind). Shakespeare was bald, and Aeschylus died when an eagle, mistaking his naked pate for a rock, dropped a tortoise on it.

But the truth is that it is quite hard to love anyone for himself and for no other reason, and one therefore does well to give people a little assistance. And although one might accept that baldness is one of the ills that the male flesh is often heir to, one does not want to come into the inheritance too quickly. 'Not too much off the top, sir?' asks the barber considerately. Nowa- days I prefer to get the point in first myself. 'Not too much off the top, I suppose,' I say with a merry laugh, but my face in the glass looks a little sad.

When I was a child, my mother used to induce me to have my hair washed (I think this only happened about once a month) by lathering it into the shape of a rabbit or a unicorn. I have never asked my wife to perform a similar service, but if I did she would not be able to make much more than a snail's antenna.

It is one thing, however, to mourn the tresses which lie thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa every time one runs out the bathwater, and another to scrape them up and try to stick them back on, which is what Mr Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times, looks as if he does. Vanity makes one regret one's loss of hair, but an even greater vanity makes one dread the idea that friends would discover that one was trying to regain it.

Outraged nature might wreak some terrible revenge. The re-implanted hairs would grow at a different pace from the surviving originals, or they would turn a different colour, or one's entire head would become an illustration of the para- ble of the sower. Even worse, some of Dr Randall's follicles might be misplaced, and one would find oneself crowned by a thick pubic wire. The Spectator's High life cor- respondent, whose own hair retreats but still clings to the top, like mountain snow in summer, once pressed on me a wonder drug that would make it all grow back. I was too vain to dare to try it.

Besides, even if it did all grow back in a perfectly orderly manner, how would one be received during the course of the treatment? Would people notice the change, but be too polite to comment, as most friends do when the opposite hap- pens? Or would they inspect it admiringly as one might a well prepared garden in February? Or would they only mock?

For the moment, then, it is reasonably easy to resist. Safer to stay in the rearguard of technology, and only read about the new possibilities, and sigh.

But the culture does not stay still. The canon of taste changes with surprising speed. Until quite recently, it was regarded as tarty or vulgar for women to dye their hair. Now it is entirely accepted. Presum- ably this is because the dyes have become very convincing, and because the idea of re-inventing your appearance is considered attractive rather than sinister. The same will eventually happen with baldness. Everyone who goes bald will regrow his hair, perhaps becoming more admired than the man who never lost it in the first place, rather as divorced women over 30 are now considered more eligible than those who have stayed single. The man who stays bald will become defiant, even ill-mannered, like people who refuse to replace their teeth. But my generation will be too late for the fun, and will be interviewed on television by people who laughingly ask what it is like to go round with nothing on your head.

I am writing this at a time when a bald man is making difficulties. Mr Gorbachev is trying to bring 'peace' to the Middle East in a form which would more or less undo the recent achievements of the Western allies. The editor, who has a full head of hair, has chosen not to publish much about him this week, feeling that everything may have changed by the time the magazine has found its way round our railway and postal systems. So this may be the only comment you read this week on the great matter of the hour.

Mrs Thatcher is blamed for almost everything, and for the most part unjustly. But one thing she is not criticised enough for is her enthusiasm for Mr Gorbachev. Her declaration that she could do business with him probably gave him about two years' breathing space with Western con- servative opinion, and recent events show that he knew how to take advantage of it. I do not know why Mrs Thatcher formed the view that she did. These articles that I have been reading say that bald men have a tremendous number of testosterone hor- mones. Anyway, since she is a woman, she could not possibly have understood the drive for world domination that the trauma of baldness can engender in the male psyche.