Iconic hairdresser Kenneth Battelle, whose name was synonymous with the big helmets of hair that society dames wore for decades, died on Sunday at his home in Wappingers Falls, NY, two years after he cut his last head of hair. He was 86. Battelle, known as just Kenneth – no “Mr. Kenneth,” please — was the hairstylist of choice for both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. He was responsable, in fact, for Jackie’s iconic bouffant, which he created “to lengthen her head and balance her broad cheekbones.” He used some hair spray, but allowed a few wisps to fall away to make her look less “set.” For that he was nicknamed Secretary of Grooming. He began his career at the Starlet Beauty Bar, opposite the Greyhound bus station in Syracuse, New York, where prostitutes made up much of the clientele. His bob cut there became ragingly popular. From there he moved to New York, where he soon got a job with Helena Rubinstein. After opening his own salon in 1963, he was dubbed the first celebrity hairdresser, styling the hair of Brooke Astor, Lee Radziwill, Katharine Graham, Judy Garland and Audrey Hepburn among others. Lucille Ball called him “God.” In 1961, Vogue magazine said that “almost every famous female head in the world has gone or will go” to Kenneth. The New York Times noted: “His contribution to his craft — he insisted that it was neither a profession nor an art — was to persuade women to rely less on permanents, bleaches and hair spray in favor of a more romantic look. He advanced the use of rollers to create natural-looking waves,” often making his own rollers out of lucite when the size he wanted didn’t exist. “But Mr. Battelle never saw himself as anything more than a hard-working servant, a word he liked to use. ‘What I do,’ he said, ‘is only a shampoo away from being nothing.’” Says Wikipedia: “For a while Kenneth enjoyed the celebrity lifestyle, being considered equivalent to an A-list celebrity. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2003, Kenneth stated that although he used to enjoy attending social events, a headline in a mid-1960s issue of the New York Journal-American reading “Pickle Queen goes to Yacht Party With Hairdresser” upset him and led to his decision to avoid going out with his clients again.
Ray Harryhausen, the longtime master of stop-motion animation in the movies, died today at London’s Hammersmith Hospital, where he had been receiving treatment for about a week. He was 92. The cause of his death was not immediately known, but his passing was “gentle and quiet,” said his biographer and friend Tony Dalton. Harryhausen, the great-grandson of African explorer David Livingstone, is the wizard behind the amazing and exciting effects in 1955′s It Came from Beneath the Sea, 1963′s Jason and the Argonauts (
Allan Arbus, whose dozen appearances as the sarcastic psychiatrist Major Sidney Freedman on the ’1970s TV series M*A*S*H, died Friday at home in Los Angeles, according to his daughter, photographer Amy Arbus. He was 95. In addition to his many roles on TV and in movies – among them Matlock, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Cinderella Liberty, and Damien: Omen II – the New York City native had been a photographer during his service in the army. His wife, Diane Arbus, was perhaps the more famous photographer. Allan met Diane when he was an employee in the advertising department of her parents’ Fifth Avenue department store; they married in 1941 and formed a professional partnership. In the 2006 mostly fiction movie Fur, Diane was portrayed by Nicole Kidman and Allan by Modern Family‘s Ty Burrell.