EDGE on the Net

There’s a musical named after it, another one named after the spray you put on top of it. It’s long or short, thick or thin, wavy, curly, dyed, streaked, spiked, blown, permed, or a feathered friend. You can go kinky or straighten it out, wear a wig, transplant it, or pull the plug. As long as you’ve got it, play the part and flaunt it. If you lose it, you’re more than likely a blind-date nightmare or an Extreme Makeover victim.

While separation of Church and State has been much debated in this country, follicle worship has not. We are one nation, under hair. In the 1970s, girlhood idol Barbies had beautiful, flowing hair; the original Chelsea Boy, Ken, was coiffed perfection. Dorothy Hamill bobbed her way into our hearts, while the Hardy Boys, Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy, were so layered you wondered if they could take flight in order to solve crimes. Fonzie’s hair was as tight as his T-shirts, as macho as his motorcycle, and Barbarino’s Brooklyn ’do was a welcome back nod to the feminine side of manly men. Jesus Christ, even that Superstar had luscious locks.

In the ’80s, hair took over; bigger, better, as over the top as the decade. Ronald Reagan had slick-backed jet black hair, not a receding line or streak of grey. It was a look as fitting as his figurehead leadership. Jon Bon Jovi was living on a hair, and the Go-Go’s wore fluffy skirts, played fluffy songs, and sprouted fluffy updo’s. Their hair was so big you didn’t notice their lips were sealed with contraband. Linda Evans and Joan Collins wore shoulder pads almost as spiked as their hairstyles. Soon, the Rachel would tower over her five Friends, and Madonna would ’do-over hairstyles from a millennium of ambition, blond and otherwise.

From mullets to mohawks, hair has always measured our culture; without it, we are as nothing as Sinead O’Connor’s career. Most of us don’t pay attention to the turning tides until it parts ways. My first hair scare occurred when I was 12 and noticed a wedding photo of my parents, then in their early twenties. Dad was so Hollywood gorgeous I’d never before noticed his receding hairline. Mom, ever the consoler, reassured me that hair loss is on the mother’s side of the gene pool (the creators of that wives’-family tale should be scalped). Since the men on her side were all thick-cropped guys, I had nothing to worry about. She gave me similar upbeat news when I asked if there’d ever be another Vietnam War. By the time I was 18 and my two older brothers started resembling the Coneheads, I grew worried. I did not, however, grow hair.

If you don’t think hair equals power, look at Bill Clinton’s coif, W.’s helmet head (appropriate, as it’s the closest thing he ever wore to combat gear), and Obama’s pepper spray. If you don’t think baldness equals evil check out Eric Bana’s villain in the remake prequel of a sequel of a movie based on a syndicated TV show from a film based on a ’60s television series, Star Trek. Or Dick Cheney. TV’s Leading men, like Ray Romano, usually have lots of hair; neurotic sidekicks are best represented by George Constanza, whose forehead precedes him. And don’t think a toupee will solve your problems. Had William Shatner been cast in Star Trek, the first thing young Captain Kirk would have said upon seeing his older self is, "We can boldly go where no man’s gone before, but we can’t pick up a decent rug along the way?"

Hair frames the face, and amid all the gay brouhaha of the past couple months -- Adam Lambert, California and 8, Maine, "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" and the firing of openly gay Arab translator Lt. Dan Choi, Carrie Prejean (though I’m still not sure if her parody-inducing press conference was a boon for the gay community or a silly bust) -- we’ve neglected one of the biggest advances of gay rights in years, and it’s a hair-raiser. CoverGirl, the most glamorous name in cosmetics, hired Ellen Degeneres as the new face of the company. Degeneres joins the ranks of former models Christie Brinkley, Cybill Shepherd, and Tyra Banks, with the notable exception that she’s over 50, not a conventional beauty, and a dyke. While lipstick lesbian jokes have already made the rounds, more important is the lack of controversy surrounding the placement of a gay person into the center of the advertising storm. We’ve come a long way since Greg Louganis’s California wave was kicked off the Wheaties box.

Grey Gardens, so far the year’s best movie despite, or because of, its HBO origins, is the story of two women who would have locked each other’s jaws to covet that CoverGirl gig. Reality TV’s original train wreck, Little Edie (in a star performance by Drew Barrymore), wants nothing more than to grab the spotlight. She’s doomed by insecurity, her mother, and her circumstances. Edie’s hopeless state is poetically and symbolically realized through alopecia, a hair-loss disease. The young beauty goes from photogenic party girl to eccentric spinster who covers her head up in scarves and blouses and safety pins. In the 1975 documentary of the same name, the cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis showed off everything in her canon except, tellingly, a bald head. If silence equals death for AIDS activists, an imperfect head of hair equals the death of activity for beauty queens.

No one should understand the hair-equals-glamour equation better than Farrah Fawcett, Charlie’s most famous Angel, and one of the 20th Century’s most dazzling sex symbols. Fawcett’s appeal was always the sum of her parts -- her smile, her teeth, her braless T-shirts, her pink-champagne-whispered-through-a-Texas-breeze-voice -- but her legendary blond mane sealed the deal. The Poster sold 12 million copies and probably thrice as many masturbation sessions (even this boy tried), and there’s a copy in the Smithsonian. No matter that she left the flip-and-jiggle TV show after one season, or worked at becoming a serious actress in film, television, and theater; when the conversation turned to Farrah, your thoughts turned to hair.

That all changed last month when Farrah documented her losing struggle with terminal anal cancer in the NBC special Farrah’s Story, a nightmare accompaniment to the Golden Girl’s own roots. The athletic super sleuth who could once sail to safety with nothing more than tight jeans and a skateboard was now the shell of herself, in hospital after hospital, flying back and forth to Germany for experimental treatments. Simply documented, surprisingly frank and un-sensationalized, Farrah said she wanted to show cancer as it really is, and, as such, sacrificed that lasting image of glamour most cover girls insist upon. There’s no soft focus, no makeup, and, for one brief moment, no hair.

After chemotherapy makes it fall out, Farrah first tells the cameraperson not to show her head, then, almost as quickly, allows it. It’s a seminal TV moment. The viewer’s at first shocked, even embarrassed for her, then, almost as quickly, we notice her expression, the eyes, the smile, and that voice. The inside has taken over the outside’s decline, and her hair is in every gesture reflected.

Those outer strands that we existentially fret for in ourselves, and cover up and splash with Rogaine and Propecia and comb over and hide, don’t define us any more than the sprays and shampoos and styling products we buy to help maintain material that, once sprouted, was already dead. Farrah Fawcett knows that, and the top of her head has been replaced by a halo of hope.