Midtown man weaves new images for baldies Throughout the centuries, man has tried everything to hide, treat and repair baldness one of humanity most irksome problems.In mankind historic quest to end baldness, gersh kuntzman, whose column gnome appears in the post every monday, takes an irreverent look at baldness and the remedies from the laboratories of pharmaceutical companies, to the operating rooms of the nation best hair transplant surgeons, to the rug men working on the cutting edge of artificial hair design.Here is an excerpt. In the back corner of a styling room at penthouse for hair recovery, a toupee parlor on west 34th street, is a life sized photograph of owner elliot nonas that is as great a reminder of the 1970s than any time capsule buried in the cornerstone of a school. The black and white photo shows nonas decked out in decade perfect tennis whites lacoste polo shirt, polyester shorts,
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knee high sweat socks, puma sneakers holding aloft a wilson wood racquet. Ah, but there one more element of the picture that dates it to the disco era. On top of nonas head is a pate of curly hair so thick, so lush that looks as if john mcenroe hair not the individual follicles, mind you, but the entire scalp had been surgically removed and repositioned on nonas head, sweatband and all. That crown, that pelt, that elysium of hair, was a toupee of nonas creation.He called it headhugger.Nonas keeps the photo around as a cautionary souvenir of a decade of shaggy excess, a reminder that the picture that still flashes into the public consciousness whenever the word is uttered is that of a man wearing ear to ear floor mats. Knew it looked like s even back then!Nonas told me, this was the and people wanted hair, hair, hair!The headhugger was enormous!It covered the whole head.It had a stainless steel band across the top.I used to set off metal detectors at airports!If it sounds strange to hear a toupee man mock his own product, you don know elliot nonas, one of the last of a dying breed of rug men. Where there was once shame, nonas gave bald men of the 1960s the faith and support to do what real men simply did not do back then wear a knitted skullcap of someone else hair. There really are only two businesses in which a character like elliot nonas could thrive and, conveniently, they are the same business. Before he started selling hairpieces, nonas worked on madison avenue, cranking out ad copy for clients as diverse as grolier encyclopedia(Read a good book?The irish tourist office(Last angry bargain!And faberge cosmetics(One of nonas perfume commercials, featuring a woman in a slip, won a clio even thought it was turned down by cbs it was too raunchy but when he started doing print ads for a friend toupee company(You can stop it through castration.If that too drastic, read on he started down an inexorable road to becoming a as the term goes. Selling ads or selling hair, elliot nonas is still doing the same thing:Image making. Is so much more gratifying than advertising, said nonas, who would later do liberace bald guy comes in, and he leaves with the confidence to go hit on all the broads.This is a persistent theme you hear from all the rug men especially the ones who prospered during the sexual revolution, an age when even fat men, ugly men and ill mannered men were enjoying the company(Among other things)Of attractive, free spirited women.But not if they were bald unless they wore headhuggers. Fortunately, the age of aquarius ended and with it, its
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excessive styles. Where nonas old headhugger was a true rug of hair on top of hair on top of hair on top of a sweat trapping cloth mesh, today hairpieces have a fraction of the hair atop a thin, breathable mesh that invisible when it lays against bare skin. When the hair is parted, you actually see the bald man natural scalp just as you do on a head. Elliot nonas did not set out to be a rug man.He studied journalism at the university of georgia and wrote articles for the local paper. By the time he graduated, he got an offer for a job as copy boy at a still fledgling magazine called time.It was a good, get in on the ground floor offer, but nonas(Idiot! )Turned it down. Did i know? !He says today.Thought it was beneath me!I been published in the athens daily news! So he went into advertising.Years later, a friend needed the bald nonas to out a toupee parlor he was thinking of buying to
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make sure they knew what they were doing. The very idea of trying on a toupee made nonas so nervous that he didn even enter the store for two days. Those days, the only people who wore toupees were actors or jerks, he said.Nonas wearing a toupee? !Never!But he finally gave his approval and bought into the store.Now he was forced to wear a toupee, lest his customers think he didn believe in his own product. Eventually, nonas bought out his co owners and renamed the place for hair recovery, rechristening it as a bald man clubhouse, a real, old time barbershop where the cigarette smoke is thick, the coffee is free and the porn magazines are front and center on the waiting room table. To accompany the frat house feel of his salon, nonas publishes the quarterly papers, the official organ of the toupee wearing world. In keeping with nonas spirit, penthouse papers is filled with old stories, editorials, poems, and bitter tirades against everything from bad toupees to rudy giuliani and sam donaldson combovers would two celebrated men opt for a comb over rather than accepting their baldness(As did koch)Or opting for some kind of hair replacement or transplants(As did hugh downs)?Nonas asked. And naturally, there heaping portions of nonas poems a clef, most of which are paeans to an unrequited love:Would that i could act as dowson, faithful in his fashion / but for the nonce, cynara is my one and only passion / like dowson, i am sore beset with love that unrequited / perhaps some day she say f and say it uninvited.Told you i was a peculiar guy, he said.I get pats on the back all the time from the guys.They tell me, want to be like you when i 85 a horny old man.Yes, nonas horniness is a staple of his business, a comforting idiosyncrasy that, in its own small way, tells his bald customers, know what?It going to be ok.You bald, but you going to wear a toupee, and you going to have sex.Which are, after all, the only words a man wants to hear.It often unabashed, certainly.But without sex, how are you going to sell a man a glued on mat of someone else hair?
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