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McCann and L’Oréal wanted models who somehow embodied the complicated mixture of strength and vulnerability implied by “Because I’m worth it.” In the late seventies, Meredith Baxter Birney was the brand spokeswoman. At that time, she was playing a recently divorced mom going to law school on the TV drama Family. McCann scheduled her spots during Dallas and other shows featuring so-called silk blouse women — women of strength and independence. Then came Cybill Shepherd, at the height of her run as the brash, independent Maddie on Moonlighting, in the eighties. She, in turn, was followed by Heather Locklear, the tough and sexy star of the 1990s hit Melrose Place. All the L’Oréal spokeswomen are blondes, but blondes of a particular type. In his brilliant 1995 book, Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self, the Canadian anthropologist Grant McCracken argued for something he calls the “blondness periodic table,” in which blondes are divided into six categories: the bombshell blonde (Mae West, Marilyn Monroe), the sunny blonde (Doris Day, Goldie Hawn), the brassy blonde (Candice Bergen), the dangerous blonde (Sharon Stone), the society blonde (C. Z. Guest), and the cool blonde (Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly). L’Oréal’s innovation was to carve out a niche for itself in between the sunny blondes — the “simple, mild, and innocent” blondes — and the smart, bold, brassy blondes, who, in McCracken’s words, “do not mediate their feelings or modulate their voices.”

This is not an easy sensibility to capture. Countless actresses have auditioned for L’Oréal over the years and been turned down. “There was one casting we did with Brigitte Bardot,” Ira Madris recalls (this was for another L’Oréal product), “and Brigitte, being who she is, had the damnedest time saying that line. There was something inside of her that didn’t believe it. It didn’t have any conviction.” Of course it didn’t: Bardot is bombshell, not sassy. Clairol made a run at the Preference sensibility for itself, hiring Linda Evans in the eighties as the pitchwoman for Ultress, the brand aimed at Preference’s upscale positioning. This didn’t work, either. Evans, who played the adoring wife of Blake Carrington on Dynasty, was too sunny. (“The hardest thing she did on that show,” Michael Sennott says, perhaps a bit unfairly, “was rearrange the flowers.”)

Even if you got the blonde right, though, there was still the matter of the slogan. For a Miss Clairol campaign in the seventies, Polykoff wrote a series of spots with the tag line “This I do for me.” But “This I do for me” was at best a halfhearted approximation of “Because I’m worth it” — particularly for a brand that had spent its first twenty years saying something entirely different. “My mother thought there was something too brazen about ‘I’m worth it,’ ” Frick told me. “She was always concerned with what people around her might think. She could never have come out with that bald-faced an equation between hair color and self-esteem.”

The truth is that Polykoff’s sensibility — which found freedom in assimilation — had been overtaken by events. In one of Polykoff’s “Is it true blondes have more fun?” commercials for Lady Clairol in the sixties, for example, there is a moment that by 1973 must have been painful to watch. A young woman, radiantly blond, is by a lake, being swung around in the air by a darkly handsome young man. His arms are around her waist. Her arms are around his neck, her shoes off, her face aglow. The voice-over is male, deep and sonorous. “Chances are,” the voice says, “she’d have gotten the young man anyhow, but you’ll never convince her of that.” Here was the downside to Shirley Polykoff’s world. You could get what you wanted by faking it, but then you would never know whether it was you or the bit of fakery that made the difference. You ran the risk of losing sight of who you really were. Shirley Polykoff knew that the all-American life was worth it, and that “he” — the handsome man by the lake, or the reluctant boyfriend who finally whisks you off to Bermuda — was worth it. But, by the