BLOND AMBITION
Hairstylist went to extreme lengths to achieve the coifs for Bombshell
Though it is gauche to speak ill of the dead, the truth is that Roger Ailes had no imagination. The longtime Fox News chief had the most predictable of palates: He liked long legs, short skirts and blond hair. Specifically, a vivid blond that is relatively rare in the natural world: Only two per cent of people on Earth really have blond hair.
Hairstylist Anne Morgan was tasked with re-creating the looks of some of Fox News’ most famous blonds for the movie Bombshell, which is based on the accounts of women at the network — among them Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) and Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) — who exposed how Ailes preyed on his female employees. In addition to those recognizable faces, Morgan also helped create the look of a fictional millennial comer, Kayla Pospisil, played by Margot Robbie.
For their accomplishment, Morgan, alongside Kazu Hiro and Vivian Baker, has been nominated for an Academy Award for achievement in makeup and hairstyling.
The architect of the esthetic that Morgan set out to reproduce — and the villain of Bombshell — is Ailes, who was chairman and chief executive of Fox News until he resigned under pressure in July 2016 after 25 women accused him of sexual harassment. He died in 2017 at age 77.
Morgan’s initial sense of the look that Ailes created was straightforward: “It’s just overdone,” she says. But she soon came to believe that there was something more disturbing at work. “When you go down the rabbit hole, you see the sexuality that’s placed on them,” she says of the women she was helping to depict. “And we take it for granted that was normal, that that’s not a big deal.” (Carlson and Kelly did not respond to requests for comment. Fox News has said that the network has changed since Ailes’ departure and the work environment depicted in the film doesn’t reflect its current one.)
For Bombshell, Kidman, Theron and Robbie all wore wigs, to which wefts (hair extensions) were added.
Wigs for the movie cost about $7,000 to $10,000 a pop, with a few exceptions; the wig for the actor playing Geraldo Rivera cost just $800, though the front had to be rebuilt, adding $2,000 to the tab. “Labour makes up the bulk of that cost,” Morgan says. “Each hair is hand-tied one by one.”
The whole process, from design to execution, “is best done with a six-week lead,” Morgan says, though sometimes the timelines are significantly tighter. Roger Ailes’ wife, Beth, is played by Connie Britton, who famously has “that gorgeous head of hair,” and Morgan and her team only had 48 hours to build “a conservative shoulder-length bob” that could fit Britton’s hairline.
Of the three women at the centre of the film, Morgan gave the most extreme styling to Robbie’s character, Kayla, who, after all, is fictional. “Kayla is this weather girl from Florida, a right-wing, Christian, youthful Youtuber,” Morgan says. On top of the blond locks, Robbie wore three sets of false eyelashes, high heels and a white dress “so skin-tight Margot could barely walk.”
While the movie focuses on the culture Ailes created at Fox, it’s also true that the network has been far from alone in paying attention to the smallest details of how its talent looks on-air.
Certain patterns reign across broadcast news in general, especially for women. A study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, which was published in 2018 and based on an analysis of hundreds of photos of broadcast journalists, found that 95.8 per cent of female reporters and anchors had smooth hair, about twothirds had short or medium-length styles, and nearly half were blond.
Of her days spent thinking about the Fox look, Morgan has a similar take-away: “It’s really crazy what we, as women, allow to tell our story,” she says. “Your hair is how you are perceived, (along with) your makeup, your shoe and dress choice. And it’s interesting how (at Fox) it was so curated by Roger Ailes, completely designed by him.”
The Washington Post
When you go down the rabbit hole, you see the sexuality that’s placed on them. And we take it for granted that was normal, that that’s not a big deal. ANNE MORGAN