What the Dog Saw [33]
In the fall of 2001, Niederhoffer sold a large number of options, betting that the markets would be quiet, and they were, until out of nowhere two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. “I was exposed. It was nip and tuck.” Niederhoffer shook his head, because there was no way to have anticipated September 11. “That was a totally unexpected event.”*
April 22 and 29, 2002
True Colors
HAIR DYE AND THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF POSTWAR AMERICA
1.
During the Depression — long before she became one of the most famous copywriters of her day — Shirley Polykoff met a man named George Halperin. He was the son of an Orthodox rabbi from Reading, Pennsylvania, and soon after they began courting he took her home for Passover to meet his family. They ate roast chicken, tzimmes, and sponge cake, and Polykoff hit it off with Rabbi Halperin, who was warm and funny. George’s mother was another story. She was Old World Orthodox, with severe, tightly pulled back hair; no one was good enough for her son.
“How’d I do, George?” Shirley asked as soon as they got in the car for the drive home. “Did your mother like me?”
He was evasive. “My sister Mildred thought you were great.”
“That’s nice, George,” she said. “But what did your mother say?”
There was a pause. “She says you paint your hair.” Another pause. “Well, do you?”
Shirley Polykoff was humiliated. In her mind she could hear her future mother-in-law: Fahrbt zi der huer? Oder fahrbt zi nisht? Does she color her hair? Or doesn’t she?
The answer, of course, was that she did. Shirley Polykoff always dyed her hair, even in the days when the only women who went blond were chorus girls and hookers. At home in Brooklyn, starting when she was fifteen, she would go to Mr. Nicholas’s beauty salon, one flight up, and he would “lighten the back” until all traces of her natural brown were gone. She thought she ought to be a blonde — or, to be more precise, she thought that the decision about whether she could be a blonde was rightfully hers, and not God’s. Shirley dressed in deep oranges and deep reds and creamy beiges and royal hues. She wore purple suede and aqua silk, and was the kind of person who might take a couture jacket home and embroider some new detail on it. Once, in the days when she had her own advertising agency, she was on her way to Memphis to make a presentation to Maybelline and her taxi broke down in the middle of the expressway. She jumped out and flagged down a Pepsi-Cola truck, and the truck driver told her he had picked her up because he’d never seen anyone quite like her before. “Shirley would wear three outfits, all at once, and each one of them would look great,” Dick Huebner, who was her creative director, says. She was flamboyant and brilliant and vain in an irresistible way, and it was her conviction that none of those qualities went with brown hair. The kind of person she spent her life turning herself into did not go with brown hair. Shirley’s parents were Hyman Polykoff, small-time necktie merchant, and Rose Polykoff, housewife and mother, of East New York and Flatbush, by way of the Ukraine. Shirley ended up on Park Avenue at Eighty-second. “If you asked my mother ‘Are you proud to be Jewish?’ she would have said yes,” her daughter, Alix Nelson Frick, says. “She wasn’t trying to pass. But she believed in the dream, and the dream was that you could acquire all the accouterments of the established affluent class, which included a certain breeding and a certain kind of look. Her idea was that you should be whatever you want to be, including being a blonde.”
In 1956, when Shirley Polykoff was a junior copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding, she was given the Clairol account. The product the company was launching was Miss Clairol, the first hair-color bath that made it possible to lighten, tint, condition, and shampoo at home, in a single step — to take, say, Topaz (for a champagne blond) or Moon Gold (for a medium ash), apply it in a peroxide solution