The Columnist Manifesto

I don't go around believing that a hair-cutter can make me look like Johnny Depp. I, sir, am no Johnny Depp. But I have thick, straight hair -- I know that I can have this haircut:


I have tried mightily to get this haircut. For years, I've tried to describe this haircut to salon stylists. After I saw Finding Neverland, I've actually starting showing this photo of Depp to the hair cutters. Without fail, I've wound up with not the Johnny Depp haircut.

Instead, hair stylists have invariably given me this:


If I say, "No! It needs to be shorter at the sides and back!" they proceed to "fix" it with their knee-jerk blending and layering, making it too short at the top and bangs:


More recently, I've tried going to barbers. My theory is that Johnny Depp's haircut was the standard men's haircut for the first six decades of the 20th century. Back in the day, any barber on main street in any city or town in the U.S.A. could give you this haircut. I figure that a barber, particularly an older one, is going to be genetically programmed to give me this haircut.

Today, I went back for the fourth time to Tom the barber. I keep going back because he comes the closest to this haircut. Close but not that close. Tom's in his late 60s and has been barbering for years, but he doesn't have that old barber-shop quickness and confidence that I remember from my childhood. Back then, it seemed, barbers whipped out the electric shears and mowed you down, and then got out the scissors and set about your hair with a "snip-snip-snip-snip-comb, snip-snip-snip-snip-comb," at the quick staccato pace of a sou-chef cutting a carrot.

Tom minces around my head gingerly, like "the new girl at the salon." I silently urge him on, trying to wind up with "the Depp haircut" by sheer force of will, with tightened abdominal muscles and held breath -- as if I were trying to will Mets closer Billy Wagner to get that last hitter out in the ninth inning.

But it's always the same. Tom gives me what I call the standard "shopping mall" haircut. It looks sort of like this --

-- but you can actually get a better look at it in the "Supercuts Style File," here. It's style number 001, modelled by "Tobias." (You can rotate Tobias and see the back and sides by clicking on him -- way cool!!)

This last time, I told Tom, "It needs to be shorter at the sides and back." To which he responded, "but that won't be the picture you showed me!"

Tom's barber programming has been displaced. If he ever did the 1950s and early '60s standard men's cuts, he beat that knowhow out of himself as he retooled for the longer 70s-style haircuts (which he probably learned in the mid-'80s). And that's all he can do now -- longer or shorter versions of that. It's like the way old men, now in their 70s, 80s and 90s, still wear the horrible clothes they bought in the late 1970s rather than the now-hip retro styles of their youngers days in the 40s through 60s.

Tom obliges and takes the electric shears to the back and sides. And, as usual, I end up with a rough approximation of my haircut. Very rough -- it looks like I have two separate haircuts, one at the back and sides, and another top and front, that don't mesh. It's an effect so strange that his ability to replicate this haircut on my successive visits to him is perversely impressive.

People say to me: "you'd think a trained hair cutter could look at a picture and give you that haircut." You'd think so. But I now see it differently.

Johnny Depp's hair stylist for Finding Neverland is some highly skilled "haircut historian," who does the same kind of researched recreations done by the costume and set designers, with whom he teams up.

The haircutters I go to basically know a small handful of basic haircuts -- half a dozen or fewer -- and can only give you those, making their repertoire look bigger with miniscule variations on the basic theme, or with lots of holding gel. Asking them to do something different is like asking your Ford auto mechanic to fix your foreign car engine. The skills are not as generalizable as you think.