Kathleen Sullivan is fed up with her reputation as the Lana Turner of television news.
She rocketed to fame on the strength of her girlish good looks and her trademark sweaters during the Winter Olympic games at Sarajevo. Her perkiness made her an instant star at ABC News, but only at the price of dozens of jokes about her credibility and intelligence.
So when she switched over to the Serious News Network, to anchor ”CBS This Morning,” she underwent a transformation that focused attention on her head for a change: She let her hair go gray.
Actually, Sullivan says her hair color didn`t really change. ”I have not gone gray,” she explains. ”I`ve had gray hair since I was 12. But when I went to CBS, the lighting was different, so it became more obvious.”
On her first day on-air, the lighting change was so dramatic that her hair looked totally white. Since then, the lights have been toned down somewhat, but the dramatic white remains highly visible.
At first glance, the change was a stroke-or rather, a streak-of image makeover genius. There`s nothing like gray hair to make a girl look like Walter Cronkite.
The downside is, it also makes you look a lot like Walter Cronkite.
INSIDE AND OUT
Sullivan`s decision to show the world that she had finally earned her stripes has given her critics a whole new arena. Now, instead of just criticizing what`s inside her head, they`re also taking a few swipes at the silvery strands springing out of it.
”It`s become an issue,” Sullivan admits. ”My hair has become an issue with people. I think there`s concern among some of the affiliates because I look different.”
Some cynics believed the gray hairs were part of a CBS effort to give Sullivan a new image as a silver-haired Solonette. But that, apparently, is not the case.
”That`s incorrect,” Sullivan states. ”I`m just letting me be me. I couldn`t imagine touching my hair. It`s part of my heritage. My whole family is prematurely gray.”
SPLITTING HAIRS
Rumor has it that Sullivan`s critics include a few higher-ups at CBS News. Though Sullivan says she has not been asked to cover her gray, network insiders say that Sullivan has been asked-and has flatly refused-to restore her hair to its original brown. (If true, it`s ironic, given that former CBS chairman William Paley`s late wife, the legendary Babe Paley, is credited with being the first fashion-prominent woman to let her hair become gray.)
Even if network pressure were brought to bear, Sullivan says she wouldn`t change her look. ”You have to be comfortable with who you are. When you`re on television 10 hours a week, the camera doesn`t blink. You have to be comfortable, and I`m not comfortable with dyeing my hair. I just hope the affiliates understand that.”
Such undyeing devotion is becoming more common. What demographers have referred to as the graying of America has become a cosmetic trend as well. In growing numbers, women in their 30s and 40s have decided to kick the bottle and let their gray hairs show.
That decision takes some courage. Let`s face it, no Prince Charming ever shouted: ”Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, that I might climb up the pewter stair.”
GRAY DAYS
Americans worship youth, viewed as synonymous with sex appeal, and gray hair is seen as the first step of that grim journey from the boudoir to the rocking chair. For example, in her profile of George Bush for Vanity Fair, Gail Sheehy attached great importance to Barbara Bush`s decision to stop dyeing her white hair brown. ”It was as if she made a conscious decision to move into another role in his life,” assumes Sheehy, a 50-year-old redhead.
The assumption that white hairs bespeak an equally pallid sex life is perpetuated throughout society. So far, Hollywood hasn`t given us many gray-haired romantic leads. (The most dramatic may have been Elsa Lanchester in
”The Bride of Frankenstein.”)
The media silver shortage can be traced, in part, to a vast conspiracy on the part of the hairdressing industry. Hairstylists have a vested interest in haircoloring. More important, most hair professionals view gray hair in the way dentists see cavities; the idea of allowing their clients` gray to flourish undisturbed is enough to turn their own hair stark white.
One such adamant stylist is Marco Bonne, a coloring legend who works at Paul Glick Salon. ”On certain occasions I will tell someone that their gray hair looks very nice,” Bonne said, grudgingly. ”But it`s seldom that it looks so nice that it`s not aging. Gray is always aging. It`s very seldom that a woman would look wonderful with gray hair unless she`s got a nice, young face. When it`s obvious that you`re old enough to have it, that`s the time to get rid of it.”
INSTANT AGE
In fact, Bonne recommends gray hair to clients who think they look too young. ”Well, I had one client in particular. She was married to an older man, and she`d always looked like his daughter. She didn`t have any gray hair of her own, but she wanted me to add highlighting to her hair to give it a look of being gray, so they`d stop mistaking her for her husband`s daughter. That just goes to show you how easy it is for someone to assume that you`re old because you have gray hair.”
As to the growing trend of proudly allowing the gray to show, Bonne just snipped: ”I do think that most people find gray hair attractive-on someone else.”
That`s simply not true, say some women who have rejected the never-ending follicle follies of trying to keep their gray hairs touched up. In fact, some women adore their own gray. Many women say they got their gray hair the old-fashioned way: They earned it.
Some women trumpet its ability to set them apart from the crowd, as does model Tish Hooker, a Nashville socialite in her late 40s who was tapped in 1984 to personify the Germaine Monteil Supplegen skincare line.
SHOCK VALUE
Two years before beating out 7,000 other applicants in a contest for the job, Hooker decided to stop covering up her silvery gray. ”I liked it because I like shocking people,” she says. ”I`ve had a number of women tell me they didn`t like it, but the men have loved it. I think they see it as reckless abandon, because when everyone else is covering up, I`m bold enough to say I`m confortable with myself.”
Other graying women, more simply, just think it`s pretty.
One such eminence grise is Marie Seznec, top model for hot French designer Christian Lacroix. Seznec, 27, has gray hair hanging to her waist. That river of silver down her back has become her trademark.
”I started turning gray at 15 years old,” Seznec says. ”My parents have white hair, my brother and sister have, too. It`s completely hereditary. I always saw my mother with this color of hair, so to me it was normal.”
Seznec says her hair has been a mixed blessing in her modeling career.
”I am the only one to have white hair,” she says. It sets her apart, but it also turns off potential clients looking for a more conventional model. There`s one advantage, Seznec says. ”If they don`t like it immediately, they don`t want to see my book. At the first minute, when I have an appointment, people like me or they don`t.”
PRESTO CHANGE-O
One time, she recalls, she was called in for a commercial job, for a client who wanted her face but not her hair. For the session, her hair was temporarily dyed its original black.
”I couldn`t look at myself in the mirror,” she says. ”It completely changed my face. It looked hard. White hair is really softer.”
Luckily for Seznec, most clients are fascinated by the combination of her youthful face and her prematurely gray hair. She says Lacroix believes her hair gives her an 18th Century appeal, recalling baby-faced courtesans in powdered white wigs.
And on a practical basis, Seznec`s look lets Lacroix appeal to two sectors of the market with just one model. ”With the face, you have a child, and with the hair, you have a woman. For him, it`s nice, because he doesn`t have to choose. He has both the image of a woman and the image of a young girl.”
Seznec admits that she sometimes worries about what she`ll do when her face catches up to her hair. ”Every day, I am getting more white. Now, it`s really gray. In three years or four years, I`m going to be really white. I don`t know how I`m going to react to that.”
