02.05.02
Beards in History
I myself wear a Van Dyke: A mustache with a goatee. It’s more out of an inability to actually grow a full beard, but I don’t let anyone know that…
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Below the Beltway
By Gene Weingarten
One day recently, I arrived at work four days unshaven. I got stares. The Post is not a particularly stodgy workplace — David Broder, for example, frequently goes shirtless, with nipple rings — but in the matter of the abrupt appearance of serious stubble, the newsroom may as well be the law firm of Snort, Grumble and Harrumph Ltd. Many of my colleagues seem to assume the worst: nervous breakdown, substance abuse, wife and lover in trunk of car, etc.
I think I know why. Newspaper people follow the news; intuitively, they know what beard growth tends to mean. It isn’t good.
Below the Beltway
By Gene Weingarten
From the Washington Post, 2002 January 30
One day recently, I arrived at work four days unshaven. I got stares. The Post is not a particularly stodgy workplace — David Broder, for example, frequently goes shirtless, with nipple rings — but in the matter of the abrupt appearance of serious stubble, the newsroom may as well be the law firm of Snort, Grumble and Harrumph Ltd. Many of my colleagues seem to assume the worst: nervous breakdown, substance abuse, wife and lover in trunk of car, etc.
I think I know why. Newspaper people follow the news; intuitively, they know what beard growth tends to mean. It isn’t good.
Beards typically follow or accompany catastrophic, humiliating public failure. Evidently, when a man loses face, he decides to lose even more. This has been particularly apparent in recent months, beginning with the fellow who managed to lose an election for president of the United States despite having oodles of campaign money, serving as vice president during a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, and running against a candidate widely presumed at the time to be as sharp as a soup ladle. After this history-making pratfall, Al Gore’s very first act was to grow a beard. (He is supposed to look professorial but instead resembles a man being set upon by a face-eating mongoose.)
Then, just a couple of weeks ago, we discovered that Michael Saylor — the techie wunderkind whose billion-dollar dot-com took a dive of a magnitude unseen since the second Clay-Liston fight — reacted by scaling down his business, ramping up his liquor consumption and . . . growing a beard! (His is more sculpted. If Dom DeLuise had a prissier brother, he would be named Dmitri, and he would have this beard.)
Also, from news articles we learn that Jeff Skilling, the Enron CEO, recently (1) presided over a massive, legally suspect corporate collapse, (2) resigned with a jaunty tip of the hat, and (3) grew a beard.
This is no recent phenomenon. Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman micromanages the greatest presidential scandal in history, gets indicted, gets fired, grows a beard. The very day JoJo Starbuck tells him their marriage is over, sportscaster Terry Bradshaw gets depressed, starts on his beard. Marital strife put a beard on U.S. Rep. David Bonior, too.
It just goes on and on. The vomitous John Tesh grows one after being laughed off various public gigs. Ray Handley takes command of a championship New York Giants football team, methodically grinds it into mediocrity, gets fired, grows a beard. Heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson starts his beard after being knocked out by the Swedish cream puff Ingemar Johansson. The second thing Boris Becker does in 1992 after his tennis career starts going down the toilet is to fire his manager. The first is start on a beard.
There are two ways to understand this phenomenon. The first is the way that my friend Tom sees it: Growing a beard, he says, is reacting to public opprobrium with an act of heroic defiance, embracing one’s truer nature by boldly rejecting the phony trappings of success in favor of an unambiguous statement of nonconformity. In short, Tom sees it as a gesture of Jeffersonian grandeur — a personal declaration of independence. (Right, Tom has a beard.)
The second way of understanding this phenomenon is the way my cleanshaven friend Hank sees it: as a combination of writhing self-pity (“I’m a castaway, like Robinson Crusoe”) and messianic martyrdom (“Forgive them, Father . . .”).
I prefer Hank’s view. I have no beard. I have a mustache. I began growing it at Woodstock, and short of chemotherapy, it’s not coming off in this lifetime.
Men with mustaches face a form of subtle prejudice not experienced by men with beards. I trace this to the events of April 14, 1865, when a man with a mustache but no beard assassinated a man with a beard but no mustache. This confrontation first established the mustache as a sign of the fiend. Snidely Whiplash had a mustache. (This may change, of course. The most famous beard in the world today belongs to an actual fiend.)
But I digress. We are talking about beards as a sign of failure. The fact is, in all of history, Abe Lincoln stands as one of the few cases where a person of historical importance grew a beard after a major success. Lincoln had been cleanshaven during a life characterized by repeated flops and failures. Finally, as president-elect, the famously ugly Illinoisan was informed by an 11-year-old girl that he’d look better with a beard, and Lincoln — being famously wise — concurred.
I am going to end with the most interesting and unexpected case of failure birthing a beard. It involves a Latin American baseball player who grew up on dreams of becoming a New York Yankee. He wanted a contract, but was turned down. So he sprouted a beard and pursued other career opportunities. That’s him in the center of the page, circa 1953. Confused? Give him a long black beard and army fatigues. Still unsure? Stick a cigar in his mouth.