GETTING OVER GREY
Denial. Disguise. And then, finally, acceptance. How a man learns to embrace his silver fox
How one ageing essayist came to terms with joining The Silver Fox Club.
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE OUR SECRET. My hairdresser claimed to possess a special elixir that could subtly, naturally, almost undetectably ‘blend away’ grey hair, which, at 45, I had a touch of. Sitting before the mirror in her chair, uncertain whether to start the masquerade, I examined my head in a way I shied away from when I was alone at home without support. I looked at myself from angles I wasn’t used to, discovering that the grey was more extensive than I’d been willing to admit.
Instead of threading its way between the darker hairs, it had consumed whole sectors of my head, especially on the sides and in the back. It was advancing the way frost does, or mould.
“I suggest we leave some in,” my hairdresser said. “Just enough to make you look distinguished.” I nodded, but that last word did not sit well with me. It sounded exactly like what it was: another way of saying ‘old’.
Every month for seven years, this conversation, or some version of it, was repeated. The world moved along, the seasons changed, but my hair stayed the same or approximately the same. Towards the end of each colour cycle, my natural colour – or lack of it – would reassert itself, a bit more
conspicuously each time, forcing me deeper and deeper into fraudulence.
My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, began to argue – increasingly emphatically – that grey hair looked terrific on men my age. For evidence, she pointed to various luminaries: George Clooney, Anderson Cooper. They were the silver all-stars, and I hated them. I hated them not for their age-defying male beauty but for their ability to accept themselves.
In the short story ‘ The Mask’ by French writer Guy de Maupassant, a
rakish man about town who loves the nightlife collapses at a dance. While attempting to revive him, a doctor notices that his patient is wearing a lifelike youthful mask. The doctor cuts it off, revealing the man’s white hair and wrinkled face.
I’d read this story when I was young, along with similar tales of postponed decrepitude such as The Picture of Dorian Grey. Their gloomy message seemed to be that when it comes to signs of ageing, you can run but you cannot hide – and that the longer you attempt to run, the worse the final reckoning will be.
My hairdresser disagreed: her faith in modern products was that strong. And so was mine, until six months ago, when my hairdresser tried a stronger potion, convinced the old one would no longer suffice.
The results were disastrous. Denying that your hair is grey gets easier, but denying that it’s green is difficult. I managed the feat anyway, temporarily. The bathroom mirror told me something was wrong, which I decided was its – the mirror’s – fault.
I avoided it. What I couldn’t avoid was the mirror in the make-up room of a late-night TV show I appeared on. My hair had become the colour of an army uniform. The make-up woman said nothing. She only frowned, but my teenage daughter was not so kind. “Your hair is all weird,” she said one afternoon, in the pitiless light of 4pm.
My wife broke her diplomatic silence then. “It’s green,” she said. “And not a subtle green.” As if there could be such a thing. I’d hoped there was. The process of coming out as a grey was not, in fact, a process but an event, a little like a first weigh-in at a diet clinic after a decade spent eating chilli cheeseburgers. While walking the streets one moody evening, I decided to stop at a beauty shop in downtown Missoula, Montana, where I was teaching. I walked into the shop and stood beside the chair of a grey-haired beautician with a pompadour. I let my head tell the story; I didn’t speak.
He showed me to a sofa, where I sat for an hour awaiting emergency treatment. When the time came, I said, “Don’t try to save it. Shave it.”
Slowly, my new old hair grew in and grew longer, obliging me to confront, with awful clarity, a general greyness that startled even me. Time had accelerated under the mask, just as the great writers had said it would. Worse, I began to detect in those around me changes in how they viewed me, treated me. My students in the graduate-school writing programme at the University of Montana asked me
My wife broke her diplomatic silence about my hair. “It’s green. And not a subtle green”
about authors of 40 years ago as though I might have known them personally. My wife ran her fingers through my hair more often, as though she were checking if it would stay on.
One morning, my teenage daughter asked me to change a black T-shirt that I’d obtained at a rock concert that month for a light blue cotton buttondown shirt she had spied in my closet. Grumpily, I put it on. “That looks a lot more appropriate,” she said.
The keenest humiliation of all, the one that at last compelled me to accept myself, occurred at a New York sandwich shop. After taking my order, the girl behind the counter asked if she could ask me something. Being asked if you’re willing to be asked a thing is always a bad sign; I instantly stiffened. “What?” I grunted. The girl, who appeared to be 18 or so, followed with: “It’s not that I think you look old or anything, but when was doo-wop? Do you remember? Doowop music? When was that? The ’60s? The ’50s?” It just got worse. “The ’40s?”
“Late ’50s, early ’60s,” I said coolly, wondering if I was being paranoid. Did the girl really think that I’d been on the scene then, or did she merely find me professorial, a man who appeared to be rich in general knowledge?
“That must have been so cool,” she said. “Walking around hearing singing on all the corners!”
I’ve grown into my grey hair since then. I’ve had to. The celebrity ‘silver foxes’ (to use my wife’s term) don’t irritate me as profoundly as they used to. On my good days, I even count myself as one of them, convinced that my colour shift has revealed in me a certain mischievous élan that was veiled before. When asked by my juniors about the distant past, I reply with an overemphatic cheerfulness, as though the questions are patently absurd but I am too seasoned and comfortable with myself to take offence, at anything.
The hard part is when I’m alone, out on the street, and glimpse a male stranger who looks fully as old as I once pretended not to be. Is that how I appear to others now? I try not to think about it. I let it go.
I let my old hairdresser go, too. I avoid her now – I can’t face her. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been seeing other scissors, or perhaps it’s because I don’t want to embarrass her. In the highest tradition of her profession, she attempted to do the impossible and failed. But she’s young. She’ll get over it. I won’t even try.