What the Dog Saw

the very reasons that Sassoon is important. If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?

“Because I’m worth it” and “Does she or doesn’t she?” were powerful, then, precisely because they were commercials, for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation. “We discovered in the first few years of the ‘Because I’m worth it’ campaign that we were getting more than our fair share of new users to the category—women who were just beginning to color their hair,” Sennott told me. “And within that group we were getting those undergoing life changes, which usually meant divorce. We had far more women who were getting divorced than Clairol had. Their children had grown, and something had happened, and they were reinventing themselves.” They felt different, and Ilon Specht gave them the means to look different—and do we really know which came first, or even how to separate the two? They changed their lives and their hair. But it wasn’t one thing or the other. It was both.

7.

In the midnineties, the spokesperson for Clairol’s Nice’n Easy was Julia Louis-Dreyfus, better known as Elaine from Seinfeld. In the Clairol tradition, she is the girl next door—a postmodern Doris Day. But the spots themselves could not be less like the original Polykoff campaigns for Miss Clairol. In the best of them, Louis-Dreyfus says to the dark-haired woman in front of her on a city bus, “You know, you’d look great as a blonde.” Louis-Dreyfus then shampoos in Nice ’n Easy Shade 104 right then and there, to the gasps and cheers of the other passengers. It is Shirley Polykoff turned upside down: funny, not serious; public, not covert.

L’Oreal, too, has changed. Meredith Baxter Birney said “Because I’m worth it” with an earnestness appropriate to the line. By the time Cybill Shepherd became the brand spokeswoman, in the eighties, it was almost flip—a nod to the materialism of the times—and today, with Heather Locklear, the spots have a lush, indulgent feel. “New Preference by L’Oreal,” she says in one of the current commercials. “Pass it on. You’re worth it.” The “because”—which gave Ilon Specht’s original punch line such emphasis—is gone. The forceful I’m has been replaced by you’re. The Clairol and L’Oreal campaigns have converged. According to the Spectra marketing firm, there are almost exactly as many Preference users as Nice ’n Easy users who earn between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand dollars a year, listen to religious radio, rent their apartments, watch the Weather Channel, bought more than six books last year, are fans of professional football, and belong to a union.

But it is a tribute to Ilon Specht and Shirley Polykoff’s legacy that there is still a real difference between the two brands. It’s not that there are Clairol women or L’Oreal women. It’s something a little subtler. As Herzog knew, all of us, when it comes to constructing our sense of self, borrow bits and pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us—over-the-counter ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our identities. Our religion matters, the music we listen to matters, the clothes we wear matter, the food we eat matters—and our brand of hair dye matters, too. Carol Hamilton, L’Oreal’s vice president of marketing, says she can walk into a hair-color focus group and instantly distinguish the Clairol users from the L’Oreal users. “The L’Oreal user always exhibits a greater air of confidence, and she usually looks better—not just her hair color, but she always has spent a little more time putting on her makeup, styling her hair,” Hamilton told me. “Her clothing is a little bit more fashion-forward. Absolutely, I can tell the difference.” Jeanne Matson, Hamilton’s counterpart at Clairol, says she can do the same thing. “Oh, yes,” Matson told me. “There’s no doubt. The Clairol woman would represent more the American-beauty icon, more naturalness. But it’s more of a beauty for me, as opposed to a beauty for the external world. L’Oreal users tend to be a bit more aloof. There is a certain warmth you see in the Clairol people. They interact with each other more. They’ll say, ‘I use Shade 101.’ And someone else will say, ‘Ah, I do, too!’ There is this big exchange.”

These are not exactly the brand personalities laid down by Polykoff and Specht, because this is 1999, and not 1956 or 1973. The complexities of Polykoff’s artifice have been muted. Specht’s anger has turned to glamour. We have been left with just a few bars of the original melody. But even that is enough to ensure that “Because I’m worth it” will never be confused with “Does she or doesn’t she?” Specht says, “It meant I know you don’t think I’m worth it, because that’s what it was with the guys in the room. They were going to take a woman and make her the object. I was defensive and defiant. I thought, I’ll fight you. Don’t you tell me what I am. You’ve been telling me what I am for generations.” As she said fight, she extended the middle finger of her right hand. Shirley Polykoff would never have given anyone the finger. She was too busy exulting in the possibilities for self-invention in her America—a land where a single woman could dye her hair and end up lying on a beach with a ring on her finger. At her retirement party, in 1973, Polykoff reminded the assembled executives of Clairol and of Foote, Cone & Belding about the avalanche of mail that arrived after their early campaigns: “Remember that letter from the girl who got to a Bermuda honeymoon by becoming a blonde?”

Everybody did.

“Well,” she said, with what we can only imagine was a certain sweet vindication, “I wrote it.”

March 22, 1999

John Rock’s Error WHAT THE INVENTOR OF THE BIRTH CONTROL PILL DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT WOMEN’S HEALTH

1.

John Rock was christened in 1890 at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and married by Cardinal William O’Connell, of Boston. He had five children and nineteen grandchildren. A crucifix hung above his desk, and nearly every day of his adult life he attended the 7 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s in Brookline. Rock, his friends would say, was in love with his church. He was also one of the inventors of the birth-control pill, and it was his conviction that his faith and his vocation were perfectly compatible. To anyone who disagreed he would simply repeat the words spoken to him as a child by his hometown priest: “John, always stick to your conscience. Never let anyone else keep it for you. And I mean anyone else.” Even when Monsignor Francis W. Carney, of Cleveland, called him a “moral rapist,” and when Frederick Good, the longtime head of obstetrics at Boston City Hospital, went to Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing to have Rock excommunicated, Rock was unmoved. “You should be afraid to meet your Maker,” one angry woman wrote to him, soon after the Pill was approved. “My dear madam,” Rock wrote back, “in my faith, we are taught that the Lord is with us always. When my time comes, there will be no need for introductions.”

In the years immediately after the Pill was approved by the FDA, in 1960, Rock was everywhere. He appeared in interviews and documentaries on CBS and NBC, in Time, Newsweek, Life, The Saturday Evening Post. He toured the country tirelessly. He wrote a widely discussed book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle over Birth Control, which was translated into French, German, and Dutch. Rock was six feet three and rail-thin, with impeccable manners; he held doors open for his patients and addressed them as “Mrs.” or “Miss.” His mere association with the Pill helped make it seem respectable. “He was a man of great dignity,” Dr. Sheldon J. Segal, of the Population Council, recalls. “Even if the occasion called for an open collar, you’d never find him without an ascot. He had the shock of white hair to go along with that. And posture, straight as an arrow, even to his last year.” At Harvard Medical School, he was a giant, teaching obstetrics for more than three decades. He was a pioneer in in-vitro fertilization and the freezing of sperm cells, and was the first to extract an intact fertilized egg. The Pill was his crowning achievement. His two collaborators, Gregory Pincus and Min-Cheuh Chang, worked out the mechanism. He shepherded the drug through its clinical trials. “It was his name and his reputation that gave ultimate validity to the claims that the pill would