Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (24 page)

In the summer of 1893, the World’s Columbian Exhibition opened its doors. It was Chicago’s great coming-out party along the shores of Lake Michigan, a fantastical “white city” of fanciful neoclassical exhibition halls, parks, fountains, and lagoons spread over six hundred acres. Millions of visitors flocked to see its marvels and to amuse themselves along the nearby Midway Plaisance, which featured countless concessions, amusements, rides, and the world’s first Ferris wheel. For Chicago
theater owners, it was a summer of golden opportunities. One variety-show producer, the youthful Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., became the envy of his peers when he staged the most popular act of that amazing summer, Eugen Sandow’s performance as “the Perfect Man.”

In the weeks before the show opened, Ziegfeld promised audiences something truly startling: the strongest man in the world. The public was to be treated to “a new Hercules,” “a veritable Colossus of Rhodes.”
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Ziegfeld knew, however, that even this would not be enough of a draw. For Sandow to capture the public’s imagination, he would need more than strength. A back story of gentlemanly character and romance would allow Ziegfeld to promote Sandow not simply as a spectacle, but as an ideal. Ziegfeld arranged for news accounts to describe the new Hercules as a gentleman of frock coats and tender feelings. The unscrupulous impresario even spread groundless rumors that Sandow was romantically involved with singing star Lillian Russell, America’s greatest sex symbol at that time. To the bold go the spoils of victory. The strategy worked perfectly. People from all walks of life flocked to the Trocadero Theater to see this wonder for themselves.

“The Perfect Man” was the final act of Ziegfeld’s variety show. It began with Sandow alone in the spotlight, striking poses that displayed his sharply defined, bulging muscles, which, according to Ziegfeld’s program notes for the subsequent tour, were “without parallel, even in the ideal Greek statues.”
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After these poses he astonished his audience by making his muscles not only bulge but ripple and dance. Then it was time to demonstrate his strength. He pressed three hundred pounds over his head, performed somersaults with fifty-six-pound weights in each hand, and delighted the crowd with one of his signature acts, in which he lifted a gigantic barbell with a man in a basket at each end. Sandow held these two men over his head with just one arm, and then with two arms straight out from his chest. At times the audience was so entranced by these marvels they forgot to applaud.
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The crowd laughed and cheered when he lifted his piano accompanist along with the piano itself. He closed his act with another elaborately devised stunt. Making an arch out of his body, chest upward, he balanced a platform on his chest upon which assistants loaded three horses, one by one. Observers admired the way in which every muscle in his body strained like a whipcord.
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Sandow’s demonstration of form and power met and even exceeded the extravagant expectations Ziegfeld had drummed up on his behalf. Ziegfeld knew his audience well. He knew they would thrill to Sandow’s indisputable skills as a weightlifter and showman. He also knew the public’s hunger for symbols of masculine triumph. A few years before his Chicago success, Sandow had certified his claim to be the world’s strongest man by winning the first official weightlifting competition
in modern history. In this event, organized by the London Athletic Institute, he became the first man to lift a 250-pound barbell over his head. He was not merely strong, however. Before and after this victory Sandow had learned how to impress audiences with the look of his body alone and had extended his global fame by posing for dozens of enthralled artists and photographers.

To enhance his naturally smooth and marblelike skin, and to help define the impressive ripples and bulges of his musculature, Sandow carefully shaved all of his body hair other than his medium-length, blond mustache. Ziegfeld took advantage of this striking quality, and introduced a new element to Sandow’s performances that would become a staple of his later career. Wealthy ladies and gentlemen who gave donations to charity were invited to touch the muscleman’s body after the show. When Chicago theater critic Amy Leslie hesitated to touch his naked torso, Sandow gently took her hand and dared her to hit him. Leslie was clearly mesmerized. “He is a dangerously handsome man,” she wrote later. Other men and women were not so shy and expressed amazement and delight at his washboard chest and velvety skin, which was “transparent white without blemish.”
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The bodybuilder encouraged them: “I want you to feel how hard these muscles are. As I stop before you, I want each of you to pass the palm of your hand across my chest.”
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“These muscles,” he informed one lady, “are hard as iron itself, I want you to convince yourself of the fact.” Taking her gloved hand in his own, he passing it slowly over his chest. “It’s unbelievable!” she gasped, staggering backward, and an attendant rushed to her aid with smelling salts.
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The Perfect Man was decades in the making. A grocer’s son, he was born in East Prussia with the mundane name Friedrich Wilhelm Müller. He left his homeland at the age of eighteen to avoid the draft and to join a traveling circus. By means of innovative physical training, a flair for showmanship, and the help of savvy impresarios, he honed his craft as a performing strong man. He changed his name to Sandow, which he derived by Germanizing his mother’s Russian maiden name, Sandov. And he claimed rather more gentlemanly origins than he really had. With enhanced body and back story, Sandow gravitated first to London, Europe’s greatest venue for mass entertainment, and then to New York and Chicago. In present-day terms, he was not a particularly remarkable specimen, standing five-feet-eight-inches tall and weighing
in at 190 pounds. Though these measurements were more remarkable in his day than now, the important thing for his admirers was not his size but his well-developed physique, his shapely proportions, and his smooth white skin. He seemed to raise the body to an art form by becoming the living embodiment of classical ideals.
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As a fresh vision of primal manliness for modern city dwellers, Sandow offered living proof that men can improve themselves through physical culture. And he emphasized this point, urging other men to follow his example. By doing so, he almost single-handedly launched the bodybuilding movement. His example helped to fix a new ideal of manliness, emphasizing the beauty of muscular form and balance as well as strength. It was an ideal that explicitly excluded hair. Though Sandow kept his trimmed, blond mustache to match his supposedly genteel Prussian breeding, the remainder of his body was marble smooth. Later bodybuilders favored the metallic sheen of tanned skin and banished the mustache as well. Today, the Sandow Prize statuette, awarded each year to the world bodybuilding champions, presents a clean-shaven Sandow, deliberately correcting the Perfect Man’s only imperfection.

In Sandow’s time, however, a hairy lip remained the calling card of a vigorous officer or aristocrat who evinced a forceful discipline that commanded respect. Any young man at this time who hoped to make an impression, whether a grocer’s son or an emperor, enhanced his lip with an honorable dash of hair.

In March 1890, matters came to a head between the two men who would rule the German Empire. On one side stood the socially awkward thirty-one-year-old Wilhelm II, emperor for less than two years. On the other side stood the masterful Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor who had served Wilhelm’s father, creating the German Empire through a policy of “blood and iron.” The emperor deeply resented the old master’s fame and presumption and believed that he, the Kaiser, could accomplish new and better things for Germany. In particular, Wilhelm wished to flex German military muscle in world affairs. He also believed
it was time to extend political rights to the laboring classes in order to dampen class strife and secure the popularly of the throne. Bismarck disagreed, certain that the Kaiser failed to understand the risks of his ambitions. Germany, the old man insisted, would be better off under his steady hand.

At a political level, the confrontation was a battle over whose policies would prevail. At a personal level, it was what would later be termed a classic Oedipal struggle between a young monarch and the father of his nation. The final break came when Wilhelm discovered that Bismarck was negotiating important legislation without his knowledge, and indeed, the chancellor had instructed his cabinet not to speak with the emperor without his prior approval. Furious, Wilhelm ordered his coach early in the morning and sped to Bismarck’s apartments, where he found the old man asleep. Not waiting even for the old man to dress, the young ruler threw down his hat and gloves on a table, demanding to know what his chancellor was up to. Bismarck stood his ground, and according to Wilhelm, slammed a notebook on the table, toppling an inkwell, insisting that, as chief minister of state, he was in charge of cabinet ministers.
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Bismarck then played his trump card, threatening to resign. To his surprise, the emperor immediately accepted. He felt ready to rule on his own.

Bismarck had not expected to lose. He had underestimated his young sovereign. He knew that behind his impressively severe exterior, the Kaiser was nervous, sensitive, and frequently indecisive. What Bismarck did not fully understand was the emperor’s white-knuckled determination to overcome these faults. To conquer Bismarck was his first great test, and there were many more in store as he willed himself to be more than he was. A key part of this effort was to make himself outwardly impressive. Wilhelm was passionate for parades, pageantry, and fiery speeches, but the signature feature of his newly invigorated image was his resplendent upturned mustache.
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Before settling on this fierce style, Wilhelm experimented with other looks. Twice he grew a full beard. The second occasion was a Scandinavian cruise in 1891, soon after firing Bismarck. Wilhelm was clearly pleased with the result, declaring to anyone who would listen that “with a beard like this you could thump on the table so hard that your ministers would fall down with fright and lie flat on their faces.”
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It is interesting that he would put it that way, for this was the same forceful gesture he reported Bismarck using a year earlier in their fateful confrontation. Now Wilhelm would be the one to slam the table! He soon decided, however, that a beard would not do. Mustaches were the approved military and royal look of his day, and beards had come to seem old-fashioned. What to do? He needed a mustache like no other: something to make him stand above all others as a man among men. He turned to his court hairdresser, Francois Haby, for a solution, and the inventive coiffeur responded with his masterstroke, perfecting the technique needed to give the German ruler his uniquely erect and manly
schnurrbarte
. A delighted emperor kept Herr Haby close at hand anywhere he traveled.

The combination of the Kaiser’s image obsession and Haby’s styling skills produced the iconic look of the age. The story is told that when Haby first succeeded in creating the famous “erect” mustache, Wilhelm delightedly exclaimed, “Es ist erreicht!” (it is achieved!). This phrase entered the lexicon as the rather phallic name for the emperor’s mustache, as well as the implements and ointments needed to accomplish it, which Haby was pleased to sell to thousands of eager customers clamoring to achieve their own spiky facial hair. Diederich Hessling, the title character in Heinrich Mann’s 1919 novel
Der Untertan
(The Subject) exemplified this sort of hero worship. As Diederich watches the Kaiser parade on horseback through the Brandenburg Gate, “an intoxication, more intense and nobler than that stimulated by beer, raised his feet off the ground and carried him in the air . . . There on the horse rode Power, through the gateway of triumphal entries, with dazzling features, but graven as stone.”
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In a rush of ecstasy, he vows to devote his life to the nation and its ruler, and as a visible sign of his new commitment, he hastens to Haby’s fashionable Berlin salon get an erect mustache for himself. “When this was done he could hardly recognize himself in the glass. When no longer concealed by hair, his mouth had something tigerish and threatening about it, especially when his lips were drawn, and the points of his moustache aimed straight at his eyes, which inspired fear in Diederich himself, as though they glared from the countenance of Power himself.”
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The Kaiser’s defeat in World War I put an end to spiky helmets and pointy mustaches, and this last stand of brave hair was swept away. The
deposed emperor lived out the remainder of his life in quiet exile in the Netherlands, without uniforms, parades, or his court hairdresser. In retrospect, Germany would have been better off with Bismarck’s unkempt walrus mustache and steady hand. Wilhelm’s impatient aggressiveness had failed his country and himself. The demise of the Kaiser and his
es ist erreicht
magnificence was another turning point for Germany and for masculine hair. The “war to end all wars” did not, of course, end wars, but it did drop the curtain on facial hair. Germans abandoned this sign of the failed past as quickly as they had adopted it, and in doing so they joined the rest of Europe and America in renouncing—for the most part—the mustachioed image of military manliness.

The war was the final end, but not the cause of the beard movement’s demise in the twentieth century. Decline had set in well before, driven by a collective reconsideration of the relation of manliness to the body. Hair seemed less relevant as men became increasingly literal in reading the male body as the source of masculine strength. More and more, it was muscles, performance, and a well-formed physique that mattered. W. G. Grace’s facial magnificence was the exception rather than the rule on the cricket grounds, and was linked more to his identity as a gentleman than as an athlete. Eugen Sandow pointed the way to the new ideal, which seemed more impressively masculine because building muscles required real work and created actual, not just symbolic, strength. Even the Kaiser’s mustache, though just hair, seemed to rise as if by its own power, and like a muscular frame, it too demanded significant effort to maintain. Mustaches held on as a limited form of hairy display, not entirely at odds with a youthful physique. Even this feature, however, was soon swept off men’s faces by new pressures demanding conformist masculinity. The nineteenth-century bloom of patriarchal and militarist manliness wilted and dropped away, making way for a future built by men with firm muscles and clean-cut faces.