The story goes that the head writer on The Simpsons television show walked into a meeting one morning, two small band-aids on the same cheek, another on his neck under his chin. “What kind of a country is this?” he exclaimed. “They can kill all the Kennedys, but they can’t make a decent razor blade.” A fine touch of anarchic humor, that, but with a low truth quotient.
My friend Edward Shils once asked the historian R. H. Tawney, author of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, if over his long lifetime he had noted any progress. “Yes,” replied Professor Tawney, “in the deportment of dogs. Dogs are much better behaved today than when I was a boy.” If I were asked the same question, my reply would be, “Yes, in gym shoes and in the manufacture of razor blades.”
I am not old enough to have known anyone who, death-defyingly, daily shaved with a straight razor, though over the years I have had two professional shaves administered to me with that fierce weapon. My father shaved with a single-blade “safety razor,” as they were called, often singing the British music hall song “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” as he did so. As a small boy, some mornings I would sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch him as he applied shaving cream out of a jar and wielded the blade, frequently running the razor under the tap and knocking it lightly against the sink to clear off the extra cream that had gathered on it. This was a manly rite, if ever there was one, and I was mildly impatient for the day when I might take part in it on my own.
That day was a touch slow in coming. On the hirsute front, I matured more slowly than some of my friends, a few of whom began shaving as early as 15. When I noted friends and acquaintances whose cheeks and chins began spouting hair earlier than mine, I felt a blip of envy. If there had been Rogaine for the face, I’d have dashed out to buy it. (Riddle: What do you get when you combine Rogaine with Viagra? Answer: Don King.) I had to wait until 19 or so before I needed to shave.
When my beard did finally arrive, it turned out to be a fairly strong one—too strong for me to use an electric razor. Of the two leading razors and blades then on the market, Gillette and Schick, I went for Gillette, in part because, a good liberal in those days, I had heard that Schick, whoever he was, backed the John Birch Society. Shaving cream now came in spray cans, and men went in for after-shave colognes of various kinds, Brut and Old Spice chief among them.
For many men shaving is a burden, and they tend to knock off shaving on weekends and holidays. I happen to enjoy shaving, view it as part of my regular hygiene, like the sound of the razor scraping against my cheeks and neck, feel cleaner, fresher, revived after having shaved. In recent years I have taken to shaving in the shower, without aid of a mirror, using soap instead of shaving cream, trimming the hair growing up to my sideburns in the bathroom mirror afterwards. While doing so, I have been known to do a turn on Petula Clark’s “Don’t Sleep in the Subway, Darling,” changing the lyric to “Don’t shave in the shower, darling.”
Never for a moment has it occurred to me to grow a full beard. Any such beard I might grow now figures to come in white, and a white beard, in one stroke, adds roughly 10 years to one’s actual age and, à la Colonel Sanders and Santa Claus, nicely desexualizes a man. One summer, vacationing in Wisconsin, I decided to grow a mustache. I was hoping for something decidedly English—Douglas Fairbanks Jr., say, or the young Ronald Colman. What grew in two weeks later was Guatemalan illegal alien. That mustache never crossed the border back into Illinois.
From soul patches to Fu Manchus to beards ranging in length from Hasidic to goatee, face hair for men today seems more common than not. The latest innovation in this realm has been the unshaved look, also known as “double-stubble” and “permastubble.” I say latest, but the look began as long ago as the mid-1980s in the television program Miami Vice with a handsome actor named Don Johnson who wore it well. Unfortunately, if one is less good-looking than Señor Johnson, perma-stubble merely makes most men seem unclean, grubby, badly in need of, yep, a shave.
As for me, I’m the clean-shaven guy, neat, trim, impeccably kempt, with maybe just a touch of soap clinging to the lobe of my left ear.
