Vidal Sassoon in London
Today Vidal Sassoon lives a life of luxury and glamour. Elegantly dressed, with a permanent Californian tan and transatlantic accent he seems a million miles from the Whitechapel of the 1930s.
Yet that was where he began. And a childhood of poverty, and of witnessing anti-semitism at first hand, moulded a far more complex and colourful figure than the glossy pictures would suggest.
Sassoon was born into a struggling East End family in 1928. Poor to start with, things were to get much worse for the Sassoons when his father abandoned them, leaving the five-year-old Vidal in a Jewish orphanage for the next six years.
His mother remarried when he was 11 and reclaimed her son, but the experience of poverty had left deep scars. Sassoon enjoyed school but the family couldn’t afford to keep him there earning no money. His mother was determined he should learn a trade and – after a dream that he should become a hairdresser – marched him off to a barber’s shop round the corner from the family home in Whitechapel and had him put to work.
The 14-year-old Vidal was mortified. “I wanted to be a footballer!” he remembered over half a century later. Instead, he reluctantly set out on the career that was to support his family and then make him a household name.
He worked hard at the basics of his trade, but could already see that he was going to have to leave the East End to get on. But applying for jobs in the late forties, he found that the doors of the plush West End salons were closed to him. It was his cockney accent that was the problem.
“In those days you couldn’t get hired in the more fashionable West End with an Artful Dodger accent like mine,” he laughed. And just as he had worked tirelessly on his cutting technique, Vidal set to training his voice. He would sit for hours in West End theatres, listening and swallowing the plummy vowels of actors such as Edith Evans, Trevor Howard and Cecil Parker.
But if he was burying his East End accent he wasn’t ignoring his past. His Whitechapel childhood may have been scarred by poverty and desertion but there was an even greater threat. Sassoon and his friends had watched as the Blackshirts marched down Brick Lane in the 1930s, but he did far more than just observe.
“My mother was very active in political, anti-Fascist movements,” he remembered. “So I met some extraordinary people.” Citing the “passion I felt about these issues” and inspired by his Zionist mother, Sassoon put his burgeoning career on one side in 1948 to go and fight in Israel’s War of Independence, following the partitioning of Palestine.
It was an extraordinary contrast. From fighting for his life and for that of the new country, Sassoon was back in the West End in the early fifties, and his career went into overdrive.
He teamed up with Mary Quant in 1957, the beginning of his association with the most glamorous designers, models and actresses of the day. Famously, with Quant’s bobbed hair, he turned the fashion designer herself into a fashion item. Soon even aristocracy were queuing to have their hair done by the cockney crimper. “When we opened the big salon in Bond Street, people came from all walks of life,” he recalled. “I remember the Duchess of Bedford and her secretary sitting on the stairs because there wasn’t any room!”
Certain people and places define the Swinging London of the 1960s – the Beatles, Twiggy, David Bailey … and Vidal Sassoon. Now into his 30s, Sassoon found himself cutting Catherine Deneuve’s hair while Roman Polanski shot a movie upstairs on the salon’s balcony. Polanski was to call on Sassoon again, to create the elfin look for Mia Farrow in horror flick Rosemary’s Baby. Such was his fame by now and such the notoriety of the production, that Vidal found himself creating the hairstyle in front of a hundred press photographers.
By the 1980s Sassoon’s interests had turned full circle. Putting down his scissors he set up the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), which publishes books and funds research into the phenomenon. The Californian millionaire had moved a long way from those East End roots, but not forgotten them.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:51 am
I picked up a copy of Saga magazine recently and there was Vidal Sassoon talking about his past in the East End. Very interesting guy, and possibly the only East End hairdresser to pop ‘fighting blackshirts’ onto this CV alongside ’skilled in back combing’. I also seem to remember something about him working as a spy for one of the intelligence services … or did I just dream that one. Sounds improbable.