Like most overnight successes, it was painful years in the making. Sassoon declared: ‘It took me from ‘54 to ‘63 to do my work, which was to untangle what was there – the teasing, the backcombing, the hairdressing – and turn it into a haircutting art form. I’m not disparaging in any way the hairdressing art form, because it was very clever, and it made people look extremely pretty. But it wasn’t for me. My work had to look much more architectural.’
And when his theory had been realised, an entire world embraced it. In less than a year, Sassoon had perfected his ideas and become known for them all around the world – you could realistically compare him to the Beatles, who were doing the same to pop music at exactly the same time. His innovations – like those of the Beatles – completely remade the field he’d mastered. The only thing more impressive, perhaps, was the path he took to his singular station.
Like so many of the people who made London swing, Vidal Sassoon was an East Ender, born in Shepherd’s Bush but moving to Aldgate in 1932 at the age of four. His father, a Sephardic Jew who sold carpets and had the gift of guile, had just left his mother, Betty. In order to support Vidal and his younger brother, Ivor, Betty moved the family to Wentworth Street, near the mythic Petticoat Lane, so that she could work—under Dickensian conditions and for Dickensian wages – in the area’s garment sweatshops. After a year of struggle, she felt she had no choice but to hand the boys over to the Orphanage for Sephardic Jews in Maida Vale, where for the next six years they saw her only during Sabbath services and a regular monthly visit.
When Betty remarried, she brought her boys home, but the Nazi blitz forced them to relocate to Wiltshire and then, when London was safe again, to a condemned house in Lawrence Road, West Ham. Sassoon, now an adolescent, skipped school for a job as a messenger boy and a life of hijinks with friends. And his family didn’t like the trend. One night they sat him down to tell him outright that he would have to learn a trade and that they’d chosen one for him: he was to report to Professor Adolf Cohen in Whitechapel Road where he would be apprenticed as … a hairdresser.
Sassoon, who liked the rough-and-tumble of football and larking about on bomb sites, couldn’t believe his ears: ‘They were trying to make a ladies’ hairdresser out of me!’ But he was a dutiful son and reported in his one good suit at the appointed hour. Cohen, who wasn’t really a professor but certainly had a donnish air, asked a few questions, ascertained Sassoon’s aptitude (if acknowledging his disinterest) and announced that he would take the boy on – for the standard apprenticeship fee of 100 guineas. He might as well have asked the Sassoons to square the circle. They apologised and started to leave.
And then Sassoon did something: by one of his accounts, he tipped his cap and then held the door open for his mother; by another, he thanked Cohen for his time as he made to leave. Whichever it was, Sassoon’s deferential mien caught Cohen’s eye, and the old master bade them stay. ‘It’s not every day I see a polite boy around here,’ he told Betty. ‘Let’s forget about the fee.’
And so Sassoon began his career, partly as a janitor, partly as a shampooer, for a grand total of five shillings a week. For two and a half years, Sassoon studied under Cohen – really studied, practising every technique over and over again until he got it right, attending whatever night-school classes Cohen recommended, honing his skills on models and down-and-out men at an East End homeless shelter.
When the time came for him to leave, his ambitions pointed west to the posh salons of Mayfair. He was an apt boy and presentable, but, despite his earnest efforts to imitate the actors he’d watched in West End plays, he still spoke with a raw Cockney accent. The most polite salon proprietors suggested he was too young to work for them; others responded as if to a trained monkey looking for a job. He found a position in a Shaftesbury Avenue salon that catered to the streetwalker trade – classy streetwalkers, mind you – and then moved on to salons in Putney, Bayswater, Stamford Bridge, Camberwell, Knights-bridge and Maida Vale: just another youngster learning a trade, building a clientele, making a living.
Well, almost just another. Unlike most of the legions of aspiring young hairdressers, Sassoon was a Jew – not Orthodox, but certainly observant – and was well cognisant of what that meant. He had been raised, after all, in a Jewish neighbourhood that, especially before the war, had been besieged by Fascists marching against the Jews, whom they accused of poisoning the global economy. ‘The East End of London was a very political place,’ he remembered, ‘an area of disquiet with loads of anti-Semitism. You had to be careful where you walked. I never went into Bethnal Green because it was a very Fascist area.’ Just before the war, the English Fascist Party had been outlawed and some of its leaders jailed. But they were given their liberty after the war and, amazingly, used it to once again march against England’s Jews. Said Sassoon, ‘They started holding their meetings and wearing Fascist uniforms – if you can believe Fascist uniforms in London – sometimes helped by the police, depending on which neighbourhood they were in. And you thought, “Didn’t we defeat all this?”’
Others had the same reaction – and not just young men, but war veterans from the Jewish East End who’d come home from battlegrounds in Germany and Poland with reports of the Holocaust. These men were decorated combat heroes – tough guys, to their bones – and they weren’t going to sit still for any hint of anti-Semitism in their midst. When the re-emergent Fascists began making their presence felt in Jewish neighbourhoods in the East End and North London, these veterans, loosely confederated in a gang known as the 43 Group, decided to fight them in the streets.
Sassoon wasn’t a born fighter, but he knew some of the neighbourhood tough guys such as the human colossus known as Big Jacky Myerovitch, who worked as a bouncer for a Soho gangster and came calling on the Sassoon brothers one night in the winter of ‘47-8, asking them to attend a meeting of London Jews who were massing against the Fascists. The rendezvous point was a room near Leicester Square that drew young Jewish men from all over the city – ‘any of us’, Sassoon remembered, ‘that were fit enough and could run fast enough and could actually conquer the fear, the extraordinary fear, of being a foreigner in your own country. When I was a kid we were made to feel as if we were foreigners in the country that we were born in. You had to conquer the fear before you could conquer the Fascists.’
A few nights later, several 43 Group members attacked a Fascist meeting in Hackney; after the Jewish combatants were arrested, they appeared in court to face charges wearing the decorations they had won from the Crown for fighting the Nazis. Sassoon, and other East End boys who decided to join the 43s, were taught how to fight – and not à la Marquess of Queensberry, but scrappy stuff: real guerrilla combat. They engaged in attacks on Fascists in Whitechapel Road, Kilburn High Road and the West End. These were carefully mounted battles, with carloads of back-up fighters called in at crucial moments and other tactics of military warfare. Sassoon got beaten – he’d show up at work occasionally in bandages, bruised – and he was once arrested. But he was thrilled by his actions, by the defeats the Fascists suffered – ‘they were beaten in the streets, it was as simple as that’ – and by the sense of belonging to something bigger than himself and his world.
When another meeting was called, this time to recruit young London Jews to help fight for Israeli independence, he heard the call. He hadn’t served England, but he would join the Israeli army. This was, technically, illegal: England had only recently sanctioned the partitioning of Palestine, and British subjects were banned from joining the infant nation’s armed forces. Sassoon and his fellow recruits were forced to travel to France in small, secretive groups, pretending to be tourists. Then they assembled in a tent city near Marseilles, where they were evaluated and trained. After several weeks, they were flown, via Rome and Athens, to an airfield near Haifa and assigned to training camps. Eventually, Sassoon was outfitted and armed and sent into the Negev desert to fight the Egyptian army.
Even compared to mêlées in the London streets