Shampoo (Persky-Bright Vista, Rubeeker Films, Columbia, 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies last night (Monday, January 29) that I hadn’t seen since its initial release in the late 1970’s (it came out in 1975 but I didn’t catch up with it until a year later) and my husband Charles had never seen it at all. It was Shampoo, a 1975 vehicle for Warren Beatty (he not only starred but co-wrote it with Robert Towne as well) as George Roundy (as in “randy,” meaning always horny), a Hollywood hairdresser who rides a Triumph motorcycle (get it?) as his principal vehicle, and when he isn’t cutting hair he’s screwing a lot of women. We first see him in bed – albeit in a dimly lit scene (Hal Ashby is the director and Laszlo Kovacs the cinematographer) – with Felicia Karpf (Lee Grant in an Academy Award-winning performance; she was 51 when she made this film and she regarded her Oscar as belated release from having been blacklisted in 1951 for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee against her then-husband, Arnold Manoff). She’s banging her head against the headboard of the bed and asks George to put a hand over her head to brace her as they fuck. Then the phone rings and George goes off to meet the caller, his sort-of girlfriend, aspiring actress Jill (Goldie Hawn), who’s been offered a three-week shoot in Egypt by director Johnny Pope (played by real-life producer Tony Bill), who wants her personally as well as professionally. Felicia is married to Lester Karpf (Jack Warden), who has a mistress on the side who’s also a sometimes girlfriend of George: Jackie Shawn (Julie Christie, who had a real-life affair with Beatty even though that didn’t stop him from going after Goldie Hawn; this film has a definite art-imitates-life attitude about it, made at a time when Beatty was one of Hollywood’s leading cocksmen).

George’s messy life comes to a head on the night of the November 1968 Presidential election; Lester is hosting a watch party for fellow 1-percent supporters of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in a private room above a posh restaurant. The film adds complications, including George’s desire to open his own salon and get from under the thumb of his immediate supervisor, Norman (Jay Robinson, still cast as a screaming queen 22 years after his film debut as a Production Code-sanitized version of the Roman Emperor Caligula in The Robe). There’s a great scene in which George meets a banker to seek a loan to start his salon, and the banker doesn’t even come close to understanding George’s business plan (to the effect he has one). The banker asks George if he has references, and George says, “I do Barbara Rush” – meaning he does her hair. Shampoo suffers from one semi-major flaw: we never actually see George shampooing anybody or practicing any other form of hairdressing, so we have to take it on faith that he’s as good as the script says he is. The closest we get to a mea culpa or an explanation for What Makes George Run comes towards the end of the film, in which George confesses, “Let's face it, I fucked 'em all. I mean, that's what I do. That's why I went to beauty school. I mean, they're always there and I – I just can't I – I, you know, I – I don't know what I'm apologizing for. So, sometimes I fuck 'em. I go into that shop and they're so great lookin', you know, and I – I’m doing their hair and they feel great and they smell great. Or, I could be out on the street, you know, and I could just stop at a stoplight or go into an elevator or – I – it's a beautiful girl – I – I don't know – I mean, that's it! It makes my day. I mean, it makes me feel like I'm gonna live forever.” Aside from the striking similarity between Beatty’s lines and Donald Trump’s infamous confession to Access Hollywood reporter Billy Bush in 2006 that he couldn’t stop himself from coming on to attractive women, kissing them and feeling them up because “when you’re a star, they’ll let you do anything,” in today’s world we generally don’t like or appreciate men who treat women like that, and that’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned.

Shampoo is a good movie but it seems awfully dated; it wasn’t the randy masterpiece Charles was expecting (after the film he admitted that he’d thought it would be more of a comedy because Goldie Hawn was in it) and it wasn’t the rule-breaking movie I remembered from 1976 either. The film’s lowest point comes when George drops by Lester’s and Felicia’s home and neither of them are there, but their daughter Lorna (Carrie Fisher in her first noticeable performance, suggesting a road-not-taken for her before George Lucas took her to that galaxy far, far away and made her Princess Leia in the Star Wars sequence) is and she blatantly says to George, “You wanna fuck?” (Maybe she just wanted to experience what her mom thought was so hot.) Throughout the film George is frequently asked if he’s Gay – which reminded me of the account Steve McQueen’s first wife Neile gave in her memoir in which she said their marriage broke up when someone published a rumor that McQueen was Gay, and he went on a campaign to seduce any remotely attractive woman he could get his hands on just to prove he wasn’t. George’s sexual capabilities also reminded me of Gore Vidal’s critique of Henry Miller’s novels, in which he said he marveled that Miller never once had his protagonist not be able to get it up. George goes from fucking Felicia to fucking Jill without any opportunity to rest up in between. Shampoo does its best to turn Warren Beatty into an irresistible sex object, dressing him in skin-tight jeans (his ass looks great in them, though he doesn’t seem to have that big a basket) and an ornate belt with a giant buckle that suggests he’d have been good casting (at least visually, if not vocally) for an Elvis Presley biopic if one had been made right after his death. But overall it’s a movie that doesn’t hold up all that well, and the final shot – George standing on a bluff and watching the two most significant women walk out on him (Jackie in a car with Lester, who’s told her he’s going to divorce Felicia, marry her and take her to Mexico; and Jill with Johnny Pope and that acting gig in Egypt) – is supposed to make us think he’s learned something and grown from his experience, but it’s hard for us to believe he’s anything but the same overgrown adolescent he was at the start of the film. Also, though I didn’t spot her, Charles thought he saw Warren Beatty’s real-life sister, Shirley MacLaine, doing a cameo as one of the customers in George’s salon.