The history of First Ladies’ hairstyles, untangled

By Matthew Sweet

When Richard Nixon climbed into a helicopter waiting on the South Lawn of the White House on August 9th 1974, he became a rare example of someone ascending in disgrace. Pat Nixon (First Lady, 1969-74) took her seat first, whispering, “It’s so sad, it’s so sad.” Her husband raised his arms like a game-show host and a new President and First Lady waved back at their predecessors from the grass. Blades began to turn, churning the air and threshing the leaves of the magnolia tree planted by Andrew Jackson. Betty Ford smiled upwards. Her hair, neat, swept off her forehead, barely moved. On that day, what America needed was stability.

Hair in the White House is never just hair. It’s a political construct, assembled with combs and chemicals that the bearer, knowing that the final styling will be scrutinised, must endow with meaning that accords with a broader policy. Ronald Reagan spent a decade denying that he used hair dye until reporters became too embarrassed to mention it. Donald Trump’s hair – delicate, deceptive, insubstantial, expensive – stands for the man much as a fluttering skirt stands for Marilyn Monroe, or a toothbrush moustache for – well – let’s say Charlie Chaplin. (Trump may also have the most expensive presidential locks in history: according to his recently obtained tax statements, he claimed some $70,000 in expenses for hairstyling during several years of filming “The Apprentice”).

A First Lady’s hair is similarly enmeshed in this system of signs. Whether they like it or not – and many did not – their choices of colour, texture, length and volume are treated as a text and pondered like a poem. Ida McKinley (1897-1901) was attacked by the National Audubon Society for wearing egret feathers in her hair. Bess Truman’s 1940s poodle cut required a public defence from her husband. (“Real gentlemen prefer grey,” he snapped.)

Others are more knowing. “If I want to knock a story off the front page,” joked Hillary Clinton in 1995, “I just change my hairstyle.” And because the public voices of First Ladies are heard only in very proscribed circumstances – fronting health and education campaigns, offering platform paeans to their spouses, making motherly sounding utterances in TV studios – sometimes a Marcel wave or a blow dry will be their Gettysburg Address. Yet even here, as history shows, the script may not quite be theirs.

The Gettysburg tresses Mary Todd Lincoln 1861-65
People were unkind to Mrs Lincoln. Disapproval ran through her life like a state line. She was too extravagant, too social, too mad. She grieved too much for her dead children. James Nesmith, a senator from Oregon, thought her frocks were too expensive and too low cut. A First Lady, he believed, should not “exhibit her milking apparatus to public gaze”. After attending an East Room reception in 1862, Nesmith told his wife that his hostess “had her bosom on exhibition, a flower pot on her head”.

More flower than pot. Mary Todd Lincoln loved anything with scent and petals. Red and white camellias when in season. She coloured the White House with them, brought them to injured civil-war soldiers, plastered down her light-brown hair and used them to crown herself. Here, posing uneasily in Matthew Brady’s photographic gallery in Washington, DC, four years before she was widowed, she is decked and garlanded like the May Queen (another of her errors – she was 43). Even after the fateful trip to the theatre when Abe was assassinated, the criticism didn’t stop. There were flowers in her hair that night, and red blood blooming on the red velvet.

Groom with a view Frances Folsom Cleveland 1886-89 and 1893-97
Melania Trump isn’t the first beauty to be wedded to a thick-thighed president decades her senior. As a teenager, Frances Folsom won a prize for being the prettiest girl in her church. As FLOTUS twice over she put her husband Grover in a Prince Edward coat to make his paunch look less than its 56 inches.

She was 21 when she married into the White House, with a taste for feathers and sleeveless white satin gowns, and a distinctive and much-imitated hairstyle. If a hairdresser was asked for a cut “à la Cleveland”, they knew to leave Byronic curls at the forehead and trim short at the nape of the neck.

Some American women spent $90 a month maintaining this clean and simple look. But it came at a cost to its originator, too. The American beauty industry made such promiscuous and unauthorised use of Folsom’s image that Congress drafted legislation to discourage them. When it failed to pass, campaigns continued in her name: “Ladies,” purred the advertisements, “stop your hair from combing or falling out, with only one bottle of Cleveland’s Hair Tonic.”

Taking a strand Florence Harding 1921-23
Americans voted for Warren Harding because he seemed dependably boring – an illusion that lasted until his mistress published her memoirs. His First Lady was a more serious and energetic figure. Mr Harding liked poker, whisky and adultery. Mrs Harding liked influencing cabinet appointments and giving press interviews and may even have written her husband’s inauguration speech.

Her hairstyle – a Marcel wave so tight that it turned her skull into a bowl of grey coral that some suspected was a wig – may look like more evidence of energy and attention to detail. But it isn’t her work. Maggie Rogers, a White House maid from Taft to Roosevelt, was the person with the patience and the curling tongs, though not, it seems, sufficient skill to satisfy her subsequent employer. Grace Coolidge (1923-29) adhered to the Marcel but outsourced the work to the salon of Leon and Jules in downtown Washington. This, however, was not her first choice of cut. She wanted a flapper bob, but was over-ruled.

Much ado about a do Eleanor Roosevelt 1933-45
It was February 1938. The Anschluss was approaching, Franco’s bombers were over Alicante and Japanese gunboats were surging up the Yangzi. Eleanor Roosevelt, the most intelligent and accomplished First Lady of her century, read through a pile of newspaper clippings and correspondence and discovered, to her dismay, that most of them were about her new haircut – and not even accurate.

“I am appalled”, she wrote, “at the amount of space newspaper writers have filled with nothing more important than the possibility that a woman might bob her hair!” (She hadn’t.) The coming conflict made Roosevelt’s utilitarianism a necessity and a model.

A curlicued and pomaded First Lady would have been an affront to a nation at war. In peacetime, she never wavered. Touring Europe in the summer of 1953 she delighted in swimming around the beaches of Yugoslavia. But it wasn’t until she reached Vienna that she went to the hairdressers to have the salt washed out.

Love is in the hair Mamie Eisenhower 1953-61
“Ike runs the country”, said Mamie Eisenhower, “and I turn the pork chops.” As this arrangement of bangs and sidebuns suggests, the extravagant performance of American female ordinariness came easily to the former Mamie Doud.

Some of her predecessors got a kick from campaigning, but Eisenhower was the first FLOTUS to manage her personal style with a view to attracting female voters. When she and her husband entered the White House in 1953, this haircut was hardly fashionable, but it was as reassuring as the picture on a packet of cupcake mix. (Candy pink was Mamie’s favourite colour.)

Like the woman herself, it possessed a deceptive simplicity. This unthreateningly sweet and suburban look was carefully formulated by the head stylist of Elizabeth Arden, who drew up a six-stage diagram so that it might be replicated by colleagues in Paris or at Arden’s Maine Chance beauty spa in Arizona. When Mrs Eisenhower went to the latter, the National Enquirer speculated that she was being treated for a drink problem. But this was work. “I had a career,” she said. “His name was Ike.”

A thousand cuts Jackie Kennedy 1961-63
In 1954 the newly married Jackie Kennedy found that her favourite stylist at Helena Rubinstein’s salon at 715 Fifth Avenue was unavailable, and submitted to the man whom Lucille Ball called God.

Kenneth Battelle, a shoe salesman’s son who began his career giving bobs to the prostitutes who patronised the Starlet Beauty Bar opposite the Greyhound bus station in Syracuse, told Kennedy that her hair was too short and curly for a person with such a small skull and such big cheekbones.

He decided to add volume using heated rollers. Unable to find any big enough for the job, he commissioned some to be made out of Lucite. Six years later, Battelle became part of Jackie Kennedy’s staff – the “secretary of grooming”, whose principal policy was the bouffant look that made his client’s face look longer than it was.

Though Battelle was loyal to his First Lady, he was not her confidante. If he had been he might have thought twice about his other celebrated White House gig – softening Marilyn’s curls before she wished JFK a happy 45th birthday.

She got styled Lady Bird Johnson 1963-69
Lyndon B. Johnson was no JFK, despite the policy continuities of moonshots, desegregation and expanding war in Vietnam. He was foul-mouthed, inelegant and wore shirts that made his neck fat spill over the top of his collar.

His wife, too, had little of her predecessor’s charisma, and less of her charm. (Mrs Johnson’s treatment of Eartha Kitt, for instance, is an egregious moment in the history of White House lunches.)

Her hair policy, though, was one of sensible tribute. She followed the blueprint of Jackie’s super-structured evening coiffure, like Kim Novak impersonating her drowned double in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”. In doing so she made the smooth rising helmet of hair the canonical style of the American political class. Mary Anne MacLeod Trump favoured a mannerist example of the form. Perhaps it haunts her son’s head, too.

Curl with a pearl earring Betty Ford 1974-77
When Richard Nixon debated JFK on television in 1960 he put his loss down to sweat and a five o’clock shadow. His White House inaugurated the Cosmetology Room, a chamber of mirrors and bonnet-hood hairdryers, which, like everything else, was bequeathed to the Fords in 1974 (opening image). They kept everything but the girl.

Rita de Santis, who had maintained the high escarpments of Pat Nixon, collected her cards and took a chair at Urey and Roberto in Georgetown. Instead, from Di Giovanni Coiffures on Massachusetts Avenue came handsome 30-year-old Jimmy Merson, who visited each Tuesday with a case of scissors and sufficient hairspray to achieve Betty Ford’s vast power bouffant.

“First Lady Has New Man”, smirked the headlines: this was the era of Warren Beatty in the film “Shampoo”. When Merson joined the 1975 presidential tour of Europe, press secretaries deflected reporters’ questions about who was paying his bills. Thanks to the store of declassified documents at the Ford Library, we now know. It was the president.

Speaking volumes Nancy Reagan 1981-89
The index of Kitty Kelley’s scurrilous biography of Nancy Reagan contains three lines of citations for her subject’s hairdressers. They were an excellent source of poisoned bonbons. Nancy, they said, never paid her longest-serving stylist, Julius Bengtsson, a former ballet dancer from California. She muscled Clairol into supplying the White House with hair products and flying Bengtsson to Washington and around the world at her side. (Though not quite – he cashed in the first-class tickets, flew tourist and spent the difference.)

Reagan’s Hollywood career shaped her belief in the importance of immaculacy and the vulgarity of being shown the bill for it. But the contrast with her successor – whom she disliked – tells the real story.

Barbara Bush (1989-93) stopped dying her hair in 1970 after an incident on the campaign trail when a faulty air-conditioning system caused streaks of Fabulous Fawn to dribble down her neck. “People who worry about their hair all the time”, said Bush, in a remark as barbed as anything in Kelley, “frankly are boring.”

Locks are up Hillary Clinton 1993-2001
In the spring that she became a senator, Hillary Clinton stood in the quad at Yale and told the assembled graduates what she wished her teachers at the Law School had thought to instil in her. “The most important thing I have to say to you today is that hair matters,” she said. “Pay attention to your hair, because everyone else will.” This was 2001.

Her in-salon decisions – from the Alice bands of the first Clinton term to the elevated “Something About Mary” quiff of the second – had already produced a substantial discourse. One presidential campaign and two decades on, they constitute a field of study.

Her genius was to participate in it herself. “I’ve been colouring my hair for years,” she declared in 2015, moving the conversation to a place her rival would not have cared to follow. “You’re not going to see me turn white in the White House.” She was right about that.

Making waves Michelle Obama 2009-17
The night before his second inaugural address, Barack Obama gave a private reception to thank his supporters. “To address the most significant event of this weekend,” he said, “I love her bangs.” His wife’s, naturally.

And with Michelle Obama’s hair – probably the most policed and politicised mass of protein filaments in White House history – nature was always the issue. Obama had a “hair strategy”, and it was one developed in the knowledge that African-American women with no straighteners and relaxers in their bathroom cabinets are often passed over for promotion. (California recently tried to combat this problem with anti-discrimination legislation.)

“This wasn’t just a First Lady journey,” she told the 2 Dope Queens podcast. “This is a black professional women’s journey.” Photographs of her since she left office, not least one used on the cover of Essence magazine, that picture her emerging from a tide of foamy curls, show the destination.

Hair today… Melania Trump 2017-
There’s room for only one blonde in the Trump marriage. Beyond it, of course, there’s space for plenty – Ivanka, Stormy, his ex-wives, the glassy Nordic fembots of Fox News – but the hair of the First Lady is brown. Glossy, yes. Primped and hairsprayed into a pair of sleek curtains through which she can do her Blue Steel thing, yes. But brown.

Blondeness is surely the state most befitting the gilded spaces favoured by her husband. Peroxide would return the glow of that dazzling lift, that burnished Trump Tower toilet cistern. During his presidency, however, she has adopted it only once – for three days in December 2017 when her main engagement was visiting an aircraft-carrier to catch a few soft-ball questions from Sean Hannity of Fox News.

The change sparked speculation, the weirdest being that she was growing a new toupée for her husband. And then it was over and the old Melania was back. Mainly silent. Mainly smooth and frictionless. Unmatronly. Unknowable. Unreachable.■

Photographs: Getty, Mathew Brady