Vidal Sassoon: The Movie

The documentary Vidal Sassoon: The Movie holds many surprises about the London-born hairdresser who shot to fame in the 1960s and founded an international brand of salons and hair products.

Sassoon, born in 1928 and 81 years old at the time the documentary was filmed, is in terrific shape, having been a devotee of physical fitness all his life. (His energetic haircutting style--a "dance" that engages his whole body, not just his scissors-weilding hand--probably also has something to do with this.)

Sassoon's background is like something out of a Dickens novel. His father abandoned the family, leaving his mother so poor that she had to leave young Vidal, and his younger brother, in the care of an orphanage. When London was bombed during World War II, Sassoon was among the children taken to the countryside for safekeeping; upon his return to London at age 14, the young man took a job cutting material for gloves, and then became a bicycle messenger, navigating the city's rubble-filled streets.

Eventually, Sassoon's mother decided (based on a "premonition") that the young man should apprentice as a hairdresser. The young Sassoon was less than enthusiastic at first, but his new vocation and his fascination for architecture began to merge, leading to Sassoon's signature styles: All angles, ratios, and proportions, what he liked to refer to as "geometry" that is designed to flatter each client's individual bone structure.

Sassoon's Bond Street Salon also benefitted from his architectural inclinations: Sassoon created a space that looked, as one interviewee puts it, more like "an art gallery" than a salon. Among other innovations, the design of the space allowed the clients to be observed from the street as they got their hair styled. This literally brought Sassoon--and the art of hairstyling--a new and exciting visibility, leading to intense "buzz." A hair styling session with star Mary Kwan proved so inspiring that Sassoon set up a photo shoot for later that evening with model Grace Coddington, whose hair Sassoon had styled in the "five point" cut--which made, of course, for the iconic photo that sums up the period's flair, visual invention, and sexual energy.

Which leads to another of the movie's revelations: Sassoon is totally straight, something that took me by surprise. Describing the film to others, I heard the same reaction: "He's heterosexual?" And how: interviewees tell the filmmakers that Sassoon and his troupe of stylists (one of them recalls that they were the "hairdressing Beatles") were living a real-life version of the movie Shampoo, the Warren Beatty film in which a straight man discovers that being a heterosexual hairdresser is like being a fox in a henhouse. Sassoon, we hear, always had "gorgeous girlfriends" on his arm.

Whether this impacted his family life is unclear; the documentary examines Sassoon's history, his style, and his intense work ethic in some detail, but we only get a vague sense of his domestic life. Sassoon's first marriage ended while he was still in England; his second marriage ended after he moved his family to Los Angeles, but we aren't privy to what stresses and strains precipitated the breakup, hearing only generalities from both parties that don't quite match up. (However, it surely says something that even Sassoon's ex-wife looks as though he had styled her hair just prior to her interview.) We hear little or nothing of his third wife, but we do meet fourth wife Ronnie.

There is a brief appearance by one of Sassoon's sons, and we hear about the death of a daughter, but it's almost in passing; soon enough the movie whisks us right back into the realm of swirling celebrity and the wide canvas on which Sassoon operates. Like any other celebrity, Sassoon has political opinions; he weighs in on general subjects like greed, and specific ones like the scandal of how the disastrous flooding of New Orleans was handled. But Sassoon has the fighting experience to back up his opinions: he served in the Israeli military in his youth, and brawled in London's post-WWII streets with anti-Semitic Fascists as part of Jewish veterans' organization 43 Group.

The movie begins and ends with a book project launched by Sassoon's friend Michael Gordon, a fellow hairdresser and founder of Bumble & bumble. Gordon is succinct in putting his finger on Sassoon's enduring legacy: "He changed the way women look!"