Think you’ve ever had a bad hair day? Just be glad you never had one like these folks. (This article was first published in Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader.)
BACKGROUND
“One kind of day that everyone dreads is the widely known and feared bad hair day,” wrote columnist William Safire when a reader asked him about the term. Safire speculated that it started with comedian Gary Shandling. “Irritated with his coverage in Us magazine. Shandling (who used to begin his routine with ‘Is my hair all right?’) told the Seattle Times in January 1991: ‘I was at a celebrity screening of Misery and they made up a quote for me. They said I told them I was having a bad hair day. They didn’t even talk to me.” A month later the phrase appeared in the L.A. Times, then the Toronto Star (“Was Robert DeNiro caught in a crosswind, or was he just having a bad hair day?”), and now it’s a part of our lexicon.
SIX REAL BAD HAIR DAYS
Michael Jackson
In February 1984, Jackson and his brothers were filming a $1.5 million commercial for Pepsi-Cola in which he walked down a staircase as a pyrotechnic display went off behind him. They shot the scene four times, but according to Time magazine, “The effect was not quite right for Director Bob Giraldi…He asked the singer to move more slowly and ordered the fireworks ‘heated up’ a bit. The combination proved volatile: On the fiery fifth take…sparks from a smoke bomb ignited Jackson’s hair, sending the singer to the hospital with second- and third-degree burns on his scalp.
Albert Anastasia
Anastasia was head of the Mangano crime family, one of the infamous “five families” of the New York mafia. On the morning of October 25, 1957, he went for a haircut at the Park Sheraton Hotel. While his bodyguard parked the car, Anastasia sat down in the barber chair and fell asleep. Minutes later, two men wearing scarves over their faces walked up to him, drew their guns, and opened fire. Anastasia jumped out of the chair and tried to attack the gunmen, but he was too badly wounded and collapsed dead on the floor.
Hans Steininger
Steininger was a 16th-century Austrian man famous for having the longest beard in the world. In September 1567, he tripped on his beard as he was climbing the stairs to the council chamber of Brunn, Austria. He fell down the stairs and died.
Hans Hoffman
In 1993, Hoffman, a 31-year-old vagrant, robbed a Rotterdam (Netherlands) bank of $15,000, telling the teller he needed the money to get a haircut and buy a piece of cheese. A few hours later he showed up at the Rotterdam police department, surrendered, and handed over a bag full of cash. Police counted the money and it was all there minus the price of a haircut and a piece of cheese.
King Louis VII of France
King Louis had a beard when he married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1137, but when he shaved it off, Eleanor thought he looked ugly without it and insisted he grow it back. Louis refused—so she left him and married King Henry II of England. However, Louis refused to give back Aquitaine, Eleanor’s ancestral lands, which had become part of France when the couple got married. King Henry declared war. “The War of the Whiskers” lasted 301 years, until peace was finally signed in 1453.
President Bill Clinton
In May 1993, President Clinton received a $200 haircut on Air Force One. The only problem: At the time, Air Force One was parked on the tarmac, and according to a Federal Aviation Administration official, the trim shut down two of LAX’s four runways for 56 minutes. The scene generated so much bad publicity that the hair stylist, Christophe, held a press conference to deny that Clinton was as smug, self-important, or stylish as the incident suggested.
“I am not saying this in a negative way,” he told reporters, “but from what you can see, do you really think that Hillary or Bill Clinton, are very concerned about their appearance?”
The whole thing may have been the work of a political trickster. Subsequent checks of the records at LAX showed that the haircut had actually caused no problems. Runways were not shut down, and no planes were kept waiting.
