The age of audacity
An ode to girls with bouffant hair
There was a brief moment in the early 60’s when girls carrying purses containing a rat tail comb and a can of Aqua Net and a Maybeline eyeliner pencil ruled. I can still see them walking down junior high school hallways in flats and knee-length skirts, a couple of textbooks pressed against their midsections, human confections of adolescent angst and sexuality. Atop their heads were teased poufs that had been swirled and tucked and pinned and spun and sprayed into glorious nimbostratus clouds. Sleepless nights had been endured wearing rollers with scalps pierced by bobby-pins and heads encased in yards and yards of toilet paper all in service of looking good. The sacrifice involved was palpable. They were 13 going on 21, and they carried it off because they meant it.
They were audacious. They were just kids – we were just kids, boys too – but just look at what they were able to do with a comb and some hairspray and an eyeliner pencil! The look didn’t belong to them of course. Brigette Bardot had poufed up her hair and tousled it to achieve that still-lying-in-bed come hither look, and Jackie Kennedy had perfected the refined bouffant for state dinners and that breathy televised tour of the White House. But they had nothing on the schoolgirls who flaunted it in the lunchroom and took it to the next step. The delicious thing was that it wasn’t allowed. It was an outlaw look in defiance of parents, preachers, teachers, anyone who wasn’t 13. Girls would ride the school bus looking like teenagers and emerge from the first-floor girls’ restroom before homeroom looking like Ronnie Spector.
Ronnie Spector, who died last week at age 78, was the apotheosis of adolescent audacity. Everything about her, from her towering bouffant to her thickly swooping black eyeliner to her tight skirts to her four-inch heels screamed look at me! And then she opened her mouth and our lives poured forth, all our hopes and our fears and our pain we didn’t know what to do with other than to conceal it with attitude. Her “Be My Baby” told our story:
The night we met I knew I needed you so
And if I had the chance I'd never let you go
So won't you say you love me
I'll make you so proud of me
We'll make 'em turn their heads every place we go.
Her husky mezzo-soprano sounded like a street corner in the darkness of our teenage souls, or what we thought of as darkness anyway. It was tinged with yearning and the perpetual tragedy of being ignored and forgotten and misunderstood and alone, with being 13:
Like walking in the rain (like walking in the rain)
And wishing on the stars (and wishing on the stars) up above
And being so in love.
Eternity was waiting all afternoon and night and the next morning until the bell rang between periods when you could catch a glimpse in the hall of the girl you had a crush on. Eternity was how long it took until your mother would allow you to wear lipstick to school in the 9th grade. Eternity was waiting for the phone to ring after they announced the Sadie Hawkins dance. Eternity was your entire freshman year. Eternity was the agony of breaking up. Eternity was wanting and not knowing what it was you wanted. Eternity was the time before your first kiss.
The girls on American Bandstand tried to look like Ronnie Spector so the girls in our junior high schools did too. Looking back at that time, it’s hard to believe there were only two years, 1963 and 1964, that we saw Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes on our black and white TV’s and heard them on our radios. In another two years, LIFE and LOOK would feature photographs of girls with long straight hair and bellbottoms and peasant blouses and leather sandals. The thumping wall of sound behind “Walking in the Rain” was replaced by finger cymbals and daisies. Audacity went away. A groovy “Be-in” took its place.
I know I wouldn’t have survived being 13 without girls and their bouffants and their racoon eyes and their flared skirts and their Keds and their saddle shoes, but most of all, their attitudes. They, and we, may have gotten most of it from Ronnie Spector, but she made it perfect.
I have always been amazed at how well that song held up over all these years. The production was great but Ronnie Spector made the song what it is. She had a voice for the ages.
Thanks for the article, Lucian. Well done and spot on as always.
That Wall of Sound was courtesy of her eventual husband, record producer Phil Spector. When they were married, Phil kept a coffin in the basement of their Beverly Hills mansion and told Ronnie he'd put her in it if she were ever unfaithful to him (although he was constantly unfaithful to her.) I knew Ronnie. She used to come to parties at my brother's home when he was an executive at Warner Bros Records. Phil would come, too, a tiny, skinny freak of a man in an elaborate suit, standing maybe five-four with lifts and accompanied by a bodyguard who looked lie an NFL center sewn into a suit with a bulge under his left armpit where the Glock nestled. When Phil arrived, Ronnie departed. She was afraid of him; she had good reason to be.