Hair today, GONE…
THE PUBLIC IS SELF-CONSCIOUS ABOUT BEARDS, PARTICULARLYWHEN PUBLIC FIGURES GROW THEM
In his retirement, David Letterman has grown a beard and the beard has grown a following. He had a beard once during his tenure on The Late Show when there was a writers’ strike, but never to this wizard-like degree. This beard is a beard that would not have passed CBS censors. This beard is a beard that could house sparrows.
It is a Retirement Beard. It’s a biological reaction to a lifetime of performing under intense scrutiny. Letterman’s face is saying, months after his final show, that it is free.
The public reacted first with admiration then with alarm. Letterman initially appeared statesmanlike and then, last week, a set of unflattering photos made the rounds. He was out for a run, without makeup or glasses, in chintzy sports gear.
“I’ve kind of developed a real creepy look with it that I’m sort of enjoying,” Letterman told the Whitefish Review in December, when asked about his facial hair.
“And I can tell that people are off-put by it. And the more people implore me to shave, the stronger my resolve is to not shave.”
Letterman surrendering to his own face is both an act of convenience and rebellion. But it’s also affirmation of the beard’s inherent power.
Historically, the beard “was universally regarded as an emblem of manliness and dignity,” wrote The New York Times in 1924, “and the imagination does not tolerate the thought of a patriarch or patriot or prophet with a razor in his hand.”
Around the turn of the first millennium, an elderly Laconian was asked why he wore his beard so long. His reply, according to Greek historian Plutarch: “It is that, seeing continually my white beard, I may do nothing unworthy of its whiteness.”
Beards make men live up to them, in other words.
There are practical concerns, of course. Alexander the Great ordered his military to shave in order to deprive enemies of an easy handle during combat.
Fast-forward a couple thousand years to that flurry of news reports about how beards are quite dirty, and may harbour specks of poop.
Beards are freighted and fraught. The public is self-conscious about beards, particularly when public figures grow them. The Retirement Beard is very similar to the Exile Beard, which is similar to the Metamorphosis Beard. All three beards signal that something has changed, or is changing. The modern pioneer on all fronts is, of course, Al Gore, who won the popular vote but lost the U.S. presidency, receded from public view to nurse his wounds, and grew on his face a sign that said, in whiskers instead of words, “I don’t give a damn. I am reborn.”
There was something macho and reckless about it, but also something endearing and homey. Gore had been parodied throughout Campaign 2000 as bland and robotic, but robots can’t grow beards (though give them time). The summer after his defeat, Gore was taken more seriously because he was taking himself less seriously. Gore emerging in 2001 with a hairy face was a first step toward a reinvention. A Nobel Peace Prize followed, though he delivered his lecture in Oslo clean-shaven. He is Al Gore, after all.
The “condition of our own times is visible on men’s faces,” writes Christopher Oldstone-Moore in Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair. There are “a wide variety of issues at play, including personal autonomy, social regulation, religious identity, gender roles and sexual attraction. We live in interesting times.”
Indeed. The last president who wore a full, real-deal beard was Benjamin Harrison, 123 years ago, but we’ve got plenty of beards to go around.