Javier Bardem may have come away from No Country For Old Men drenched in praise and clutching an Oscar but he still couldn't shake that sociopathic haircut out of his mind: "You see yourself, you see the haircut. You don't realise that it's affecting you in a very delicate way, through your own psyche… It's the worst haircut I've ever had. [The Coen Brothers] owe me another movie."
It's a sentiment anyone whose mother gave them a bowl cut will sympathise with, but few people understand the impact of hair on an individual's sense of themselves in this way quite so well as Leonard Lewis. As London's barber of choice for three decades, Leonard revolutionised the way hair was thought of. Trained in the Fifties, when hair was permed, primped and tonged into stiff waves a la Doris Day or dressed up into a Marie Antoninette-style bouffant for special occasions, Leonard came into his own in the Sixties, when he was at the forefront of offering hair that was free to move, free to shock, could be coloured every shade on the chart and was pdrsonally tailored to the individual.
"What would you like done to your hair, for instance?" Leonard demands, when I first meet him, and ask how he persuaded an unknown, whippet thin 15 year old named Lesley Hornby to allow him to cut off all her long blonde hair - in favour of the Eton Crop that made her Twiggy. " We'd discuss it. We'd discuss how you felt, what you wanted to be. And then we would achieve it, together. It was a radical step for Twiggs, because like most girls she was fond of her long hair, and at one point she seemed close to tears. But I knew it would show off her boyish looks – and no boy had eyes or a neck quite like hers. And so we persuaded her. Later she said, 'Looking in the mirror at the back, I saw all these faces staring at me, in a way that no one had ever done before.'"
Just as the hair madeth the psychopath for Bardem, the hair madeth the star for Twiggs. Barry Lategan took Twiggy's photograph, Leonard mounted it on the wall of his salon, which caught the attention of a regular customer, fashion editor, Deirdre McSharry, who hunted down and interviewed the ingénue, running a feature in the Express, 'I Name This Girl The Face of '66.' Bam. The Swinging Sixties had arrived. Leonard's Mayfair salon became not just a magnet for the high society ladies who could afford him, but the hundred or so top models of the day. American President John F. Kennedy came in, filmstars – from Grace Kelly to Liza Minelli –, notorious East End gangsters including Reggie Kray – whose bride Leonard styled on their wedding day -, and rock royalty – as Mick and Bianca Jagger played out their huge marital rows across the salon floor.
There is no underestimating just how radical was Leonard's approach to hair. One of his most important contributions was the crossover into shoots, fashion shows and film - his role in the defining generation. Most hairdressers had neither the time nor the inclination to do all this and hairdressing – focussing on their franchise or their products sometimes at the expense of pure, wild experimentation. Leonard, as he freely admits, "never had a head for the business side". His most creative transition, perhaps, was to the world of film, where he was recruited by infamous auteur, Stanley Kubrick on 2001: Space Odyssey - for which Leonard offered to make the ape suits with the help of his wig-maker. And he went on to collaborate with Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, a forerunner if any to Bardem's hair = psycho equation as Kubrick "didn't want wigs – he wanted the cut. An intense, painful haircut." Next, he created all the lavish period wigs for Barry Lyndon – so precious, Leonard found himself flying to the set with a jet booked solely for him and the wigs, which had been allocated one seat each. "When he died everyone started saying how difficult Kubrick was to work with. But he was lovely. He did tear out the pages of the beautiful books I had bought to research the hair – but that was just Stanley. He let me cut his hair too, but then immediately made it scruffy again – that was just how he wanted to look. Sometimes people like their own look. Margaret Thatcher's advisors once brought her to me, before she was elected. They wanted her to soften her image, and I tried to persuade her to let me help her free up her hair. But she wouldn't let me touch a strand. She was perfectly nice. But that was her hair, and that was how she would keep it."
Today Leonard's circumstances are a far cry from the glory years when such figures were daily acquaintances and he was the owner and star of Leonard of Mayfair, the opulent, three-tiered townhouse on Upper Grosvenor Street that catered to them all. In 1988, trying to balance the constant demands of his creativity against a growing struggle with alcohol and the trauma of a divorce, everything came to a halt as he found himself hospitalised with a brain tumour. Unable to work, and then severely afflicted with epilepsy, Leonard's debts mounted and he lost everything. Leonard, who had started at the bottom, as a barrow boy born on a Shepherd's Bush estate, running about with "villains", went back to where he started, - living for a time with his adored older sister, Rene, who had never moved from their parents' council house.
He had gone full circle. "The last thing my mother wanted was another child when she fell pregnant with me – Rene was nearly twenty years old. And my family were not well off. So my mother she did everything she could to get rid of me, took hot baths, drank gin and poisons - which made her go blind. I was obviously a stubborn foetus, perhaps I knew all the excitements I was going to have… But since then I was always determined to do something different with my life. I couldn't help thinking there must be something better to do than the traditional options." For a working class boy whose Dad mixed with gangsters like Billy Hill and Jack Spot in his job in the used car market, hairdressing was, at best, an irregular career choice. And it perhaps would not have occurred even to Leonard, had he not first been seduced from selling fruit and veg from a Roehampton barrow by the glamour of the Curzon Cinema in the West End. One night, sitting out a subtitled French film he'd elected to see just so he could sit in the plush atmosphere, he had his epiphany: "An Artist with Ladies" starred an actor called Fernandel and the images flickering on the film showed exactly the life that the young Leonard wanted. "This was the world I wanted to join." And it was exactly the world he got. Paying his way through an apprenticeship at Evansky's and then through a cutting traineeship at Vidal Sassoon, Leonard's talents for hairdressing were rapidly noticed, and by his early twenties he was a superstar in his own right – cutting all day and partying all night.
Now confined to a wheelchair and living modestly in South London, his handsome dark eyes still alive with charm, his talent for friendship is very much in evidence – and he still cuts Jack Nicholson's hair when he comes to London. When he was in hospital with the tumour "I really found who my friends were. Stanley [Kubrick] came to visit me, and Jack… And John Frieda and the others started an award in my name." A new range of haircare products, based on those he had developed to keep Liz Taylor's hair luscious, is just about to be launched at Harrods. "It has sold out twice in Fenwicks already," Leonard assures me as we rattle down the side streets on the way to Mimmo's, another one of his old haunts, driven by his friend and cabby, Barry. "I'm determined to walk again," Leonard informs me as we later taxi back towards High Street Kensington. "Yeah, the ladies had better watch out" shouts Barry, "Cos you'll be running after 'em!"
But while Leonard might not yet be running, his innovations still reign today. Amongst those that worked at his Mayfair salon were all the names now ubiquitous in hairdressing. John Frieda met Lulu when he she was a starlet and he was Leonard's personal assistant. Daniel Galvin, the famous colourist, was Leonard's right hand man, and they developed an approach to women's hair that was, at the time, revolutionary – determined to get all the women in the salon to come in for colour as well as cut, as a routine. During his twenty years of experimentation he helped make possible everything from Zandra Rhode's silk painted, shock pink helmet of hair to the invention of gels that would make punk's Mohican possible. "When kids first started to wear the spiky punk hairstyles they used to make them stand up stiffly with sugared water." Leonard explained. "It worked fine but when the sugar dried out it would attract flies and bees – which we didn't want in the salon. So we had to think of a better way to achieve the effect."
If there was a legend for hairdressing as there was for the blues, it might well focus on a young West End barrow boy named Leonard, who met the devil at a crossroads somewhere around Roehampton and sold his soul for a pair of scissors. For, to everyone who knew him, his skill with the silver blades, was nothing short of magic.
It's a sentiment anyone whose mother gave them a bowl cut will sympathise with, but few people understand the impact of hair on an individual's sense of themselves in this way quite so well as Leonard Lewis. As London's barber of choice for three decades, Leonard revolutionised the way hair was thought of. Trained in the Fifties, when hair was permed, primped and tonged into stiff waves a la Doris Day or dressed up into a Marie Antoninette-style bouffant for special occasions, Leonard came into his own in the Sixties, when he was at the forefront of offering hair that was free to move, free to shock, could be coloured every shade on the chart and was pdrsonally tailored to the individual.
"What would you like done to your hair, for instance?" Leonard demands, when I first meet him, and ask how he persuaded an unknown, whippet thin 15 year old named Lesley Hornby to allow him to cut off all her long blonde hair - in favour of the Eton Crop that made her Twiggy. " We'd discuss it. We'd discuss how you felt, what you wanted to be. And then we would achieve it, together. It was a radical step for Twiggs, because like most girls she was fond of her long hair, and at one point she seemed close to tears. But I knew it would show off her boyish looks – and no boy had eyes or a neck quite like hers. And so we persuaded her. Later she said, 'Looking in the mirror at the back, I saw all these faces staring at me, in a way that no one had ever done before.'"
Just as the hair madeth the psychopath for Bardem, the hair madeth the star for Twiggs. Barry Lategan took Twiggy's photograph, Leonard mounted it on the wall of his salon, which caught the attention of a regular customer, fashion editor, Deirdre McSharry, who hunted down and interviewed the ingénue, running a feature in the Express, 'I Name This Girl The Face of '66.' Bam. The Swinging Sixties had arrived. Leonard's Mayfair salon became not just a magnet for the high society ladies who could afford him, but the hundred or so top models of the day. American President John F. Kennedy came in, filmstars – from Grace Kelly to Liza Minelli –, notorious East End gangsters including Reggie Kray – whose bride Leonard styled on their wedding day -, and rock royalty – as Mick and Bianca Jagger played out their huge marital rows across the salon floor.
There is no underestimating just how radical was Leonard's approach to hair. One of his most important contributions was the crossover into shoots, fashion shows and film - his role in the defining generation. Most hairdressers had neither the time nor the inclination to do all this and hairdressing – focussing on their franchise or their products sometimes at the expense of pure, wild experimentation. Leonard, as he freely admits, "never had a head for the business side". His most creative transition, perhaps, was to the world of film, where he was recruited by infamous auteur, Stanley Kubrick on 2001: Space Odyssey - for which Leonard offered to make the ape suits with the help of his wig-maker. And he went on to collaborate with Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, a forerunner if any to Bardem's hair = psycho equation as Kubrick "didn't want wigs – he wanted the cut. An intense, painful haircut." Next, he created all the lavish period wigs for Barry Lyndon – so precious, Leonard found himself flying to the set with a jet booked solely for him and the wigs, which had been allocated one seat each. "When he died everyone started saying how difficult Kubrick was to work with. But he was lovely. He did tear out the pages of the beautiful books I had bought to research the hair – but that was just Stanley. He let me cut his hair too, but then immediately made it scruffy again – that was just how he wanted to look. Sometimes people like their own look. Margaret Thatcher's advisors once brought her to me, before she was elected. They wanted her to soften her image, and I tried to persuade her to let me help her free up her hair. But she wouldn't let me touch a strand. She was perfectly nice. But that was her hair, and that was how she would keep it."
Today Leonard's circumstances are a far cry from the glory years when such figures were daily acquaintances and he was the owner and star of Leonard of Mayfair, the opulent, three-tiered townhouse on Upper Grosvenor Street that catered to them all. In 1988, trying to balance the constant demands of his creativity against a growing struggle with alcohol and the trauma of a divorce, everything came to a halt as he found himself hospitalised with a brain tumour. Unable to work, and then severely afflicted with epilepsy, Leonard's debts mounted and he lost everything. Leonard, who had started at the bottom, as a barrow boy born on a Shepherd's Bush estate, running about with "villains", went back to where he started, - living for a time with his adored older sister, Rene, who had never moved from their parents' council house.
He had gone full circle. "The last thing my mother wanted was another child when she fell pregnant with me – Rene was nearly twenty years old. And my family were not well off. So my mother she did everything she could to get rid of me, took hot baths, drank gin and poisons - which made her go blind. I was obviously a stubborn foetus, perhaps I knew all the excitements I was going to have… But since then I was always determined to do something different with my life. I couldn't help thinking there must be something better to do than the traditional options." For a working class boy whose Dad mixed with gangsters like Billy Hill and Jack Spot in his job in the used car market, hairdressing was, at best, an irregular career choice. And it perhaps would not have occurred even to Leonard, had he not first been seduced from selling fruit and veg from a Roehampton barrow by the glamour of the Curzon Cinema in the West End. One night, sitting out a subtitled French film he'd elected to see just so he could sit in the plush atmosphere, he had his epiphany: "An Artist with Ladies" starred an actor called Fernandel and the images flickering on the film showed exactly the life that the young Leonard wanted. "This was the world I wanted to join." And it was exactly the world he got. Paying his way through an apprenticeship at Evansky's and then through a cutting traineeship at Vidal Sassoon, Leonard's talents for hairdressing were rapidly noticed, and by his early twenties he was a superstar in his own right – cutting all day and partying all night.
Now confined to a wheelchair and living modestly in South London, his handsome dark eyes still alive with charm, his talent for friendship is very much in evidence – and he still cuts Jack Nicholson's hair when he comes to London. When he was in hospital with the tumour "I really found who my friends were. Stanley [Kubrick] came to visit me, and Jack… And John Frieda and the others started an award in my name." A new range of haircare products, based on those he had developed to keep Liz Taylor's hair luscious, is just about to be launched at Harrods. "It has sold out twice in Fenwicks already," Leonard assures me as we rattle down the side streets on the way to Mimmo's, another one of his old haunts, driven by his friend and cabby, Barry. "I'm determined to walk again," Leonard informs me as we later taxi back towards High Street Kensington. "Yeah, the ladies had better watch out" shouts Barry, "Cos you'll be running after 'em!"
But while Leonard might not yet be running, his innovations still reign today. Amongst those that worked at his Mayfair salon were all the names now ubiquitous in hairdressing. John Frieda met Lulu when he she was a starlet and he was Leonard's personal assistant. Daniel Galvin, the famous colourist, was Leonard's right hand man, and they developed an approach to women's hair that was, at the time, revolutionary – determined to get all the women in the salon to come in for colour as well as cut, as a routine. During his twenty years of experimentation he helped make possible everything from Zandra Rhode's silk painted, shock pink helmet of hair to the invention of gels that would make punk's Mohican possible. "When kids first started to wear the spiky punk hairstyles they used to make them stand up stiffly with sugared water." Leonard explained. "It worked fine but when the sugar dried out it would attract flies and bees – which we didn't want in the salon. So we had to think of a better way to achieve the effect."
If there was a legend for hairdressing as there was for the blues, it might well focus on a young West End barrow boy named Leonard, who met the devil at a crossroads somewhere around Roehampton and sold his soul for a pair of scissors. For, to everyone who knew him, his skill with the silver blades, was nothing short of magic.
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