The old Sephardic surname “Sassoon” was shared by two Englishmen who had little in common other than their good looks, their military valor, their love of sport, their glory in separate spheres, and their longevity. For me, however, they had a meaningful relationship. It came into focus some forty years ago, when I was a young poet, living in a London garret and working as the tutor for a rich family in Berkeley Square. I frequented the margins of two cultures: one, grand and literary; the other, madcap and Mod—both exotic to me, like that sibilant patronym, a bridge between them.

The elder Sassoon, Siegfried, was one of the leading poets and most searing critics of the First World War, in which he served as an officer, lost a brother (at Gallipoli) and a friend of the heart (Wilfred Owen), and won a Military Cross. He was born, in 1886, into a dynasty of immensely rich merchant bankers, originally Iraqi Jews. But his father, Alfred, was disinherited for marrying an Anglo-Catholic—Theresa Thornycroft, a scion of prominent sculptors, and herself an artist of note. Siegfried, named after Wagner’s hero, was educated at Cambridge; served as the literary editor of a socialist newspaper, where he employed E. M. Forster, among other luminaries; and published several acclaimed works of autobiographical fiction, in addition to the satiric poetry that he felt was misunderstood. (“I have always been a religious poet,” he said.) After a paternal aunt, Rachel Beer, the editor of the Sunday Times (which she had bought) left him a fortune, he lived the life of a British gentleman on his estate in Wiltshire—foxhunting, golfing, and playing cricket into his seventies.


The younger Sassoon, Vidal, who revolutionized the art of haircutting, and died, of leukemia, on Tuesday, at eighty-four, was the son of Jewish immigrants—a Greek father, Nathan, and a Ukrainian mother, Betty. He grew up in London tenements, and spent part of his scrappy childhood in a Jewish orphanage. (After Nathan Sassoon, a wastrel, abandoned his family, Betty was too poor to raise her sons. By the time she remarried, and was able to make them a home, Vidal was eleven.)

As a schoolboy (and a passionate soccer player), during the Second World War, Vidal was evacuated to the Wiltshire countryside, not far from Siegfried’s estate. It is tempting to imagine them crossing paths there, though it is doubtful that they ever did. Vidal’s formal education ended at fourteen, in 1942, when he apprenticed himself to a ladies’ hairdresser in a working-class neighborhood, though in his spare time, he studied elocution, to erase his Cockney accent. Hairdressing was his mother’s idea; she had somehow intuited his talent for it. At seventeen, he joined a militant Jewish underground group that broke up rallies staged by the thuggish followers of Oswald Mosley, the British fascist, earning an epithet from the Telegraph: “the anti-fascist warrior-hairdresser.” (Combatting anti-Semitism was a lifelong object of Vidal’s philanthropy; in 1982, he established a center, with that aim, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.) Three years later, he travelled to Palestine, to join the Haganah—the precursor of the Israeli Defense Forces—and he fought in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.

Vidal Sassoon married four times and had four children. (A daughter died, of a drug overdose, in 2002.) Siegfried Sassoon had many affairs with men, and a late marriage that produced his only son. He converted to Catholicism shortly before his death, just shy of eighty-one, in 1967. (His name is inscribed on a tablet in the Poet’s Corner, of Westminster Abbey.) By then, Vidal, who had opened his first London salon in 1954, was a pop-culture celebrity who literally defined fashion’s cutting edge. His radical approach to styling hair made the cotton candy beehives of the early nineteen-sixties seem as quaint as the coiffures of Marie Antoinette.

Vidal Sassoon’s technique was influenced, he said, by Bauhaus architecture, but also, more obviously, by the practical allure of new “wash and wear” clothing and the lean geometry of the era’s couture (Courrèges, Paco Rabanne, Rudi Gernreich, and Mary Quant—a mother of the miniskirt and a notable early client). Obituaries hailed him as a “feminist,” and in a sense, he was one. He liberated women from a certain form of degradation: their time-consuming primping with rollers and teasing, and their generic, yearbook-photo cuteness. His signature hairstyle, The Five-Point Cut, was a silken helmet “sculpted” or “carved” to the contours of each client’s cranium, and based on a close study of her bone structure. In 1968, Roman Polanski hired Sassoon—for the outrageous sum of five thousand dollars—to give Mia Farrow her famous pixie cut for “Rosemary’s Baby.”

The pixie cut that launched a million copies, however, was Jean Seberg’s, in Godard’s “Breathless,” from 1960. But many young women of that decade—girls like me, with heads of dark Jewish mohair and un-waiflike figures—couldn’t pull off the look. So I was grateful to Sassoon for inventing the Greek Goddess perm—a tousle of wayward curls inspired by the Afros he saw on the streets of Harlem.

Both Sassoons stayed fit into old age. The younger also turned to autobiography, and earned a fortune (greater, probably, than Siegfried’s) marketing his hair-care products. He made a dashing appearance in television commercials for them, delivering a catchy slogan: “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” It wasn’t poetry, but, as his fellow idealist and survivor wrote, “Soldiers are dreamers.” It’s a fitting epithet for them both.

Photographs courtesy of Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.



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