Category — Celebrities

Among other things, the late Vidal Sassoon “transformed hairdressing into fashion street theater,” reports Stephen Miller in the Wall Street Journal (5/10/12). His “bustling storefronts” featured “big windows” that let passersby witness the fashion revolution happening inside. Until Vidal came along, “women’s hair styles involved perms and sets, processing with bleach, curlers, bulbous dryers and hair spray.” Vidal instead envisioned “short, geometric cuts — quickly realized and set with hand-held dryers.” It was a vision he credited to Bauhaus architecture, according to Bruce Weber in a New York Times obituary (5/10/12).

“When I looked at the architecture, the structure of buildings that were going up worldwide, you saw a whole different look, and shape,” he once said. “My sense was that hairdressing definitely needed to be changing … To me, hair meant geometry, angles. Cutting uneven shapes, as long as it suited that face and that bone structure.” His “breakthrough came in 1963 when he cut the long hair of Hong Kong-born actress Nancy Kwan into a bob with sharp face-framing points.” Later, he created “a sensation” when Roman Polanski paid him $5,000 to cut Mia Farrow‘s hair incredibly short, as featured in Rosemary’s Baby. In the film she exclaims, “It’s Vidal Sassoon! It’s very in!”

Vidal went on to create a line of hair-care products that reached $100 million in sales annually, and his ad campaign made famous his tagline, “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” He later sold the company to Richardson Vicks and it is now owned by Procter & Gamble. “This was somebody who changed our industry entirely, not just from the point of view of cutting hair but actually turning it into a business,” says John Barrett, who keeps his own salon at Bergdorf Goodman. “He was one of the first who had a product line bought out by a major corporation.” Vidal Sassoon died earlier this week at age 84, in Los Angeles.

Madonna and Lionel Richie are living the risks and rewards of old artists marketing new music, reports Eric Felten in the Wall Street Journal (5/4/12). Madonna, as you may recall, released her latest record, MDNA, with the SuperBowl halftime show — “a promotional opportunity worth more than $80 million” by some estimates. Her album sales quickly charted to number-one on Billboard during the first week, and just as quickly plummeted by “more than 86%” during the second. Its decline has continued and MDNA currently owns the #34 spot on the hit parade.

Lionel Richie, meanwhile, launched his new record, Tuskegee, with an hour-long appearance on the Home Shopping Network. Tuskegee occupied the number-two spot during its first week of release, and then climbed to number-one, where it has remained for past two weeks. Madonna certainly had an edge in the promotional department and both records received good reviews. The difference, apparently, was that Madonna was trying to get her fans to buy new music, where Lionel Ritchie’s offering was a countrified version of his greatest hits — in other words, “a pleasant reworking of his standard repertoire.”

As Eric writes: “One would think that legendary artists would have every advantage needed to put across new hits — they are brands, after all, with large and loyal customer bases.” Maybe their new songs just aren’t as good. Maybe their aging fan base has trouble connecting with new music. Or maybe, says Eric, it’s a Catch-22: “If the established musician does something really fresh, her audience is unhappy she’s strayed from what they know and like. But if she keeps doing new songs in same vein as the old, why should the listener bother with the new release?” Lionel Richie “managed to escape the conundrum by doing the old favorites in a new way.”

The Woodlawn Cemetery is the final resting place of both a man known for hot dogs and a fellow famous for mustard, reports Willa Plank in The Wall Street Journal (4/7/12). Herman Ossian Armour, “a member of the meatpacking family whose name is linked to hot dogs, rests at the same cemetery as mustard man Charles Gulden. Woodlawn is also home to Pepperidge Farm founder Margaret Rudkin and condensed milk inventor Gail Borden.”

Because of this, Woodlawn has decided to conduct a “food-related walking tour” of its 400-acre grounds. Other sites include August Luchow, “an immigrant whose eponymous restaurant on East 14th Street was known for its German fare and beer, and society caterer Louis Sherry.” Susan Olsen, Woodlawn’s director of historical services, says one of the most popular sites is that of Jeremiah P. Thomas, “a pioneering bartender who published a seminal guide on mixed drinks in 1862 … Bartenders still trek to his grave and make cocktails there in tribute to their hero.”

Susan says that “food suppliers tend to have more lavish markers than those who earned fame by working at restaurants. That same disparity is also seen in the gap between theater owners’ lavish tombs and actors’ more modest graves, she said.” Woodlawn also hosts the graves of jazz greats Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. To celebrate its 150th anniversary, Woodlawn is launching “an online database with short biographies … on all 310,000 people interred there.”

Phoebe Cates casts herself as a friendly, neighborhood shopkeeper. By Tim Manners. As a little girl, Phoebe Cates loved playing store. She loved all of it: Setting everything up, pretending to wrap packages and making her toy cash-register ring.

When her kids began to fly on their own, Phoebe knew she wanted to work again, but didn’t want to go back to acting. The idea of opening a store just kept coming back to her and she kept thinking, “wouldn’t it be great?” Phoebe’s neighborhood, Carnegie Hill on New York’s Upper East Side, needed nothing so much as a neighborhood shop … read >>

Brad Keselowski may not be a top-ten Nascar driver, but he leads the pack on Twitter, reports Richard Sandomir in the New York Times (2/29/12). The reason is simple: @keselowski is the first driver to use Twitter during a race — not while driving, of course, but in between, when the race is stopped. The effect is quite dramatic. During the Daytona 500, while the race was suspended because “part of the track was ablaze with burning jet fuel,” Brad snapped a photo from a safe distance and posted it on Twitter, along with the message, “Fire! My view.” His message “was re-tweeted 5,000 times.” Later, “when he crashed on Lap 187,” Brad “posted from the ruins of his car,” along with the message: “Nothing we could do there. Never saw the wreck till we were windshield deep.”

By the time the race was over, Brad had more than tripled his number of Twitter followers, “to more than 200,000.” Over the course of a single race, Brad Keselowski had “become the symbol of Nascar’s newly aggressive push into social media as a way to attract and interact with young fans.” He did so without violating any rules and Nascar seems pretty happy about the whole thing. “He distinguished himself in being the poster child for an engaging athlete — the type of athlete that the fans really connect to in a multitude of ways,” says Nascar spokesman David Higdon. “He’s a digital native … This is an extension of his personality.”

Previously, Brad staged a “contest that culminated in having 5,000 of his fans’ Twitter handles affixed to the bed of his truck for the Nascar Campaign World truck series race … Ten more were prominently displayed on the sides of the truck.” Other sports leagues have yet to embrace social media so enthusiastically: “Major League Baseball enforces a no-tweet zone from 30 minutes before the game until it is over” while the NFL bans “messaging from 90 minutes before kickoff until players have finished their post-game interviews.” Naturally, Omid Ashtari of Twitter thinks this is a mistake: “One of the things we preach to leagues is you need to share insider perspectives and angles that fans don’t see on TV,” he says. In the meantime, Nascar says it will allow Brad to keep his iPhone with him during future races.

She was known as "the most beautiful woman in the world," but Hedy Lamarr also helped invent technology that later led to wi-fi and GPS, reports Diane Brady in Bloomberg Businessweek (12/11/11). The Hollywood film star’s unlikely role as the co-inventor of "a jamproof radio guidance system for torpedoes at the age of 27" is the focal point of Hedy’s Folly, by Richard Rhodes. In it, he "tries to dissect the story behind the frequency-hopping radio encryption technique that was awarded US Patent No. 2292387."

Her work was actually a collaboration with another unlikely amateur inventor, George Antheil, an avant-garde composer and writer. Their goal was to find "ways to transmit signals over multiple frequencies, thus thwarting enemies’ attempts to jam radio-guided missiles by homing in on a single frequency." They knew that this "would work only if the transmitter and receiver were both synced to the same sequence of frequencies."  

Their solution was based on a technology George had developed for a composition that "called for 16 synchronized player pianos," using  “a piano roll to coordinate the frequencies." This "spread spectrum technology" as it is known, wasn’t used until the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, after their patent had expired. But incredibly, "a screen siren and an eclectic composer" created a groundbreaking technology, proving that "innovation can come from anywhere,” but also that "a world that craves new ideas also tends to dismiss those capable of producing them."

He feigns reluctance to flaunt it, but Boston Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine probably invented the sandwich wrap, reports Daniel Bararisi in the Wall Street Journal (12/2/11). The story goes that, back in 1980, the toaster broke while Bobby was making club sandwiches at his Stamford, Connecticut, restaurant. So, he grabbed some tortillas and used them to wrap up a combo of turkey, bacon, lettuce, tomato and melted cheese … and it was an instant hit. "From that day on, they called it a wrap," says Bobby.

Now, it wasn’t as if wrapping tortillas or pitas around "meat, beans, rice or vegetables" hadn’t been done before — especially in Mexico and the Middle East. The difference was wrapping up traditional sandwich fillings, which Andrew Smith, author of Fast Food and Junk Food, says sparked "a whole revolution in sandwiches … Whoevever did it, it was a tremendous change in American eating," says Andrew. "It was just everywhere — it was a matter of days from the first time I saw it until everyone was eating it," says Andrew.

However, I Love Juicy, a California restaurant chain, is often cited as the original wrap artist. But Chris Sinatra, manager of Bobby Valentine’s Sports Gallery Cafe, insists the restaurant was selling wraps well before they became widely popular in the late 1980s. In any case, this all came up again because when Bobby was introduced as the new Red Sox manager last week, his resume mentioned his invention. "Oy, the wrap thing," said Bobby, cheerfully blaming his chef for perpetuating the story. Naturally, wraps were the "food of choice" at the press conference.

Illusionist David Copperfield is willing to spend millions for a unique antique Gypsy fortuneteller machine, reports John S. Adams in USA Today (9/23/11). The machine, made by the Mills Novelty Company more than 100 years ago, currently is owned by the State of Montana. It is believed to be "one of the first amusement machines to use a recorded human voice to dispense a player’s fortune … Montana inherited the Gypsy in 1998 when it paid $6.5 million to buy nearly 250 buildings and their contents" which included "a massive collection of antique games, music machines and other oddities."

David Copperfield is also "an avid collector of turn-of-the-century penny arcade machines," and has restored other Gypsy fortuneteller machines. But he says this one is special. "There are other verbal fortunetellers that exist, but a Mills verbal like that, that’s the only one," he says. However, the Montana Heritage Commission, "which oversees a vast collection of rare antiques," says that state law prohibits it from selling "items from its collection without first completing an intensive public process." And so David says he’d be content simply to help restore this rare Gypsy to her former glory.

Montana has actually been working on doing just that for some time, although it’s not easy to find parts: "The original Edison wax cylinder phonograph records that gave the Gypsy her voice were in poor shape and couldn’t be played," for example. Her voice has been restored, however, via digital scans of the cylinders. And David is okay with not owning the Gypsy machine as long as it’s restored. "I think it deserves to be wherever it is as long as it’s going to be preserved and kept properly and that people who would understand it would be able to see it," he says.

On what would have been his 100th birthday, Marshall McLuhan is considered a prophet rather than a fraud, reports Ian Austen in the New York Times (7/26/11). "The resurrection of McLuhan has a lot to do with the eerie prescience of what he said," says Prof. B.W. Powe of York University in Toronto, a former student of McLuhan’s. "We read the 21st-century media through his eyes," he says. McLuhan is, of course, famous for "ideas like ‘the medium is the message’ and ‘the global village.’" But in his day (1911-1980), McLuhan was "often seen as an eccentric at best, a charlatan at worst."

This was perhaps because his work was "often dense and cryptic" (McLuhan once said that his ideas were so difficult even he didn’t understand them (link). He was also a celebrity, who "regularly appeared on American television, often delivering remarks that seemed obscure or tangential." He said things like: "People don’t actually read newspapers — they get into them every morning like a hot bath." And: "The electric light is pure information." He said that President Ford looked better in black-and-white than in color. I think he was right about that.

His famous book was titled "The Medium is the Massage" (rather than "message") because of a typesetter’s typo, but McLuhan left it, arguably because the word could also be read as "mass age." But McLuhan is "now widely credited as the world’s first media theorist … and widely celebrated as the man who prophesied both the internet and its impact on society." McLuhan’s theory — in the 1970s — was "that media are essentially interactive," and that "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." McLuhan’s ideas continue to be explored via the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.

"The mystery is not who Davy Crockett was but how he got that way and why," writes Henry Allen in the Wall Street Journal (5/29/11). That mystery is explored by Michael Wallis in a new book, David Crockett: The Lion of the West." (Michael refers to Davy as David because that’s the way the man, himself, signed his name.) But even Davy — or David — could not grasp the reasons for his fame. Sure, he had killed a lot of bears — 47 in a single month by his own reckoning. Yes, he had been a soldier, but not one of particular distinction. He has been elected to Congress three times, but "failed to win passage of a single bill."

He failed as a businessman, blazed no trails like Kit Carson or Daniel Boone, and left for Texas — at the time the last refuge for losers — after his wife and kids left him. In his autobiography, Davy wrote: "I know that, obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable fuss in the world … I can’t tell why it is, nor in what it is to end. Go where I will, everybody seems anxious to get a peep at me … Therefore, there must be something in me, or about me, that attracts attention, which is mysterious even to myself." In a way, he was famous for being famous — just like so many modern-day celebrities.

Perhaps his fame was because of his knack for talking about himself: "I’m that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning," he wrote. Through his words, he "helped teach Westerners who they already were and gave them a proud self-consciousness … He spoke the American language, funny and sly in the frontier style that would later make Mark Twain famous, too." And, 175 after his death at the Alamo, "we still want to hear about him."