This is all very well and good, but I’m still bald. —Larry David, winning an Emmy in 1993
The only plus of Covid was the ascent of the Zoom interview. When you interview a person over Zoom, the conversation is immediately stripped of all artifice. You’re not in some hotel room buzzing with frazzled publicists. You’re not on your best behavior in a café. You’re just two people at home having a chat. And, from an interviewing standpoint, this means that you get to see glimpses of the person behind the persona. The backdrop they pick. The type of mug they voluntarily buy. A world of tiny details that you otherwise miss.
If it weren’t for Zoom interviews, I wouldn’t be able to tell you that Larry David is the sort of person who concludes Zoom interviews by slamming his laptop shut. Not pressing the Leave Meeting button like the rest of us. Not fixing himself with a rictus smile until he is certain that the call is over. No, as soon as he’s done, bang. Laptop shut. Call over. Move on. Incredible.
As we start the call, precisely on time, Larry David blinks onto my screen and—only pausing to wave off my nervous “How are you?” with a brusque “Not terrible”—begins to dissect my appearance.
“So, you got the beard,” he squints, very Larry Davidly. “I see that you’re trying to offset the bald a little bit. The beard offsets. The beard’s good. I mean, there’s no denying that the bald man always looks a little better with the beard. There’s no question about it, because it’s reversed. You have hair. It’s just, instead of hair on top and no hair on the face, you’ve reversed it.”
Straight away, I’m on the back foot. You see, Larry David is responsible for perhaps the greatest piece of baldness-related literature of the last century, a New York Times column from March 2000 entitled “Kiss My Head.” As any clued-up bald man will tell you, “Kiss My Head” is the Ten Commandments of androgenic alopecia. However, it also contains a paragraph that reads, “The bearded bald man annoys me. That’s not a proud bald man. That’s a bald guy who’s trying to enhance. He wants to deflect attention away from the head to the chin. It’s subtle, but the message is the same: I’m bald and I don’t like it.”
Now, clearly one of two things was happening here. The first is that Larry David logged on to Zoom, saw the meager flesh-colored scruff I call a beard, and immediately realized how rude it would be to launch into a violent anti-beard spiel.
The other is that, well, maybe times have changed. Larry David wrote “Kiss My Head” a quarter of a century ago, and society as a whole has softened on beards since then. Facial hair has become so ubiquitous over the last two decades that, as far back as 2013, The Guardian was asking the immortal question “Have we reached peak beard?” So perhaps Larry David has simply been around enough bearded bald men for it to have softened his prejudices a little.
“So, you got the beard. I see that you’re trying to offset the bald a little bit.”
But then again, if Larry David has not only adopted a pro-beard stance but also actively proclaims their benefits, it begs the question of why he has never grown one.
“I did!” he replies. “I did last year. It wasn’t really for appearances as much as laziness. I just didn’t want to shave. There’s a difference. Yours is obviously for appearance.”
I pause for a millisecond, still slightly afraid that Larry David now sees me as a cowardly bald man. Perhaps Larry senses this, because he leaps in to fill the silence with a disclaimer. “I don’t think any less of you for the beard, O.K.? I think it’s smart. I do. It’s just that, at this point for me, it doesn’t matter. First of all, I’m married, so what do I care that much? But also I started doing Curb with no beard, because no beard is funnier than beard. It’s just funnier. It’s a little more clownish. A beard gives you sort of this intellectual mien. The glasses help. They make me look a little smarter. Certainly people think I’m a lot smarter than I am. My whole life is really about keeping people from finding out how stupid I am.”
I’m pleased he brought up glasses, because one of my long-held theories is that Larry David’s glasses work as a kind of a beard equivalent. Like beards, a pair of glasses help to break up what can only be described as the bald man’s fundamental excess of skin. A bald man with glasses knows what he’s doing.
“I almost got the LASIK when Curb first came out,” Larry admits. “I was scheduled to get it back in 1999, two weeks before we were going to start filming. And then I thought, ‘Gee, do I want to do this without my glasses on?’ And I thought, ‘No, I don’t’. So I canceled it and I never thought about it again.”
Baring All
Larry David first discovered that he was going bald in his late 20s, during a game of softball. “It was a hot day and I took my cap off to scratch my head, and I noticed that I was scratching flesh, which had never happened before,” he explains. “There was always hair there. So I went home, I looked in the mirror, I saw what was going on, and that was when I really noticed it.”
I’m about to offer my condolences to Young Larry David, when he interjects. “But I mean all in all, given my personality, I thought I dealt with it a lot better than the average man.”
How so?
“First of all, I didn’t have a high opinion of myself anyway, so it’s not like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to become of me?’ I was a nothing. I was a zero, and you can’t be less than zero. So I didn’t feel like I was ever going to amount to anything,” he says matter-of-factly.
“I didn’t feel I would ever meet a woman. I didn’t feel I would ever be successful. And so, O.K., I just felt like baldness was just another layer to my horrible life. There’s a stoicism I have that allows me to accept bad news. Because in my life I’ve never expected good news. I’m not even trying to be flippant here, I’m just telling you my mindset. I don’t expect good things. My expectation is bad things and so when it comes, I’m ready for it. It’s not a surprise, O.K.? Good things are a surprise.”
I have to admit, at this point in the interview I am having a whale of a time. All the mothers I know, within 15 minutes of meeting any other mother, will start describing their grisly birth stories in as gory detail as possible. And while I would never compare baldness to childbirth, I do get a similarly cathartic rush from listening to men telling me how they lost their hair. Because, in both cases, the story really being told is: “This is how I deal with adversity.” And now we know how Larry David deals with adversity—with a fatalism that we could all do well to adopt.
“There’s a stoicism I have that allows me to accept bad news.”
I think he’s enjoying the conversation, too, because at this point he starts asking me questions.
“By the way, did you ever think about transplants?”
No, I tell him.
“I think you’re too late for transplants,” Larry says, visibly assessing the state of my head, “but they do great work with transplants now. Some people, you don’t even know. They’re on television and in the movies and you would never know. I see them.”
The thing that has always fascinated me about Larry David’s head is that he has shunned all traditional advice about how to be a bald man in the world. Contrary to all advice about keeping it trim, he lets his grow out like a wild-eyed biblical prophet, letting it curl and bounce out away from his scalp as if in a state of great alarm. This, it turns out, is unintentional—“I try to keep it flattened down, but it naturally goes out,” he explains—but he welcomes it as part of his job. Larry David is employed to be funny on television, and his haircut gives him what he calls a “Bonzo-the-clown quality.”
And this, too, turns out to be the real reason why he has chosen to shun the beard. “It doesn’t quite go with being a comedian,” he explains. “It puts you in a certain category.”
What category is that?
“The intellectual ruminator,” he replies, stroking an imaginary beard. “It’s not boyish. And you need a certain amount of boyishness and immaturity to be a comedian. If I showed up next season, for instance, and I had a beard, people would be thrown. I would not be as funny. Wouldn’t be nearly as funny. If you’re a comedian, we want to know who you are. You’re hiding with a beard. We don’t want somebody hiding. It’s like if you came out wearing a baseball cap. You come out onstage wearing a baseball cap. Why? Who are you? What are you doing? Why are you hiding? You need to reveal yourself. Reveal yourself. You can’t reveal yourself if you’re hiding with a beard or a hat.”
Does he know any wig wearers?
“I don’t know how you can walk around like that,” he scoffs. “I did a movie where I had to wear a wig [2013’s underrated Clear History, a movie he also wrote] and I hated it. Hated it. I couldn’t stand it.”
Was it itchy? “Yes. Yes. It just feels awful. Feels awful. Very uncomfortable.”
You sense that Larry David has given wigs a lot of thought. “But say I knew a wig guy,” he continues. “Say he goes to Costa Rica or something and nobody knows him there. Does he take it off and allow himself some freedom for this vacation? What if I also went to Costa Rica and all of a sudden I ran into this guy and he had the wig off and our eyes locked, and he went, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Oh my God, don’t tell anybody.’”
“My whole life is really about keeping people from finding out how stupid I am.”
Evidently, I am not shy about seeing Larry David as my bald role model. So I decide to throw the sentiment back at him. Does he have any bald heroes of his own?
“I guess these days you see less and less bald people,” he shrugs. “Everybody’s doing something about it.” You have no contemporaries. “Right,” he notes sadly. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
But then, struck by inspiration, he grins. “Gorbachev!” he announces. Any bald villains? “I can’t think of anybody offhand, except Putin of course.”
I’m glad his bald heroes and villains are so geographically specific, because I had recently been told an amazing bald fact. Throughout modern history, Russia has managed to precisely alternate between haired and bald leaders.
I mention this to Larry, and at first he is unconvinced. “Let’s see. In my lifetime, we had Khrushchev, followed by Andropov, and I think they both were bald,” Larry responds, trying to find a weak link in the theory. “No! There was Brezhnev! Brezhnev, hair; Andropov, no hair. Who followed him? Was that Gorbachev?”
No, because Gorbachev was also bald. Andropov was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko (who had hair), and then came Gorbachev. He was succeeded by Boris Yeltsin (hair) who was then succeeded by Vladimir Putin (bald), who has—at least at time of writing—remained in power ever since, apart from the four-year stint where he installed a puppet president in the form of Dmitry Medvedev (hair).
As an aside, after speaking to Larry, the world was rocked by a brief attempted coup on Putin’s leadership, spearheaded by his onetime confidant Yevgeny Prigozhin. The coup attracted a great deal of frenzied speculation at the time, despite that fact that, as any powerful Russian scalp connoisseur will be able to tell you, Prigozhin is also bald. Knowing that a bald-on-bald Russian presidential succession could never happen, since it might upset the fine-tuned balance of the universe as we know it, Prigozhin’s coup was always destined to end in failure. Next time, Russia, send a haired guy in to do the job instead. But I digress.
I’ve been having a tremendous amount of fun with Larry David, but our time is starting to come to an end and I only have two questions left to ask. The first is simple. If he could let people with hair know anything about the bald experience, what would it be?
“It’s not as bad as you think it is,” he replies, wisely.
Which is a lovely sentiment, but it is immediately undone by his answer to my next and final question. What does he enjoy about being bald?
Larry David hesitates. He opens his mouth to speak, but then stops. After some thought, he replies “I can’t say there’s anything I like about it.”
His answer slightly shocks me. There’s nothing? Nothing at all? Even I have discovered plenty of things I like about it. I’m unbothered by wind now. I’m in and out of a swimming-pool changing room in seconds. Is there really nothing? No physical sensation he enjoys about it?
“I mean it’s nice to rub your head, I guess,” Larry eventually replies before, like a rock tumbling down a mountain, his answer slowly begins to pick up speed. “Wait! I got it! Here’s what it is! I’m going to tell you what it is, O.K.?”
Tell me.
“It’s a woman rubbing my head. Oh, that’s good. Yeah. Yeah. A nice woman with a nice affectionate rub of your head. Yeah. That feels good.”
He’s onto something. I tell him that one of my biggest insecurities about going bald was never having anyone run their fingers through my hair again. But he’s right. There’s something remarkably intimate and tender about having your head stroked.
“Yeah!” he replies triumphantly. “It’s better. It’s great! That’s the best part about being bald.”
And with that Larry David slams his laptop shut.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL