The Element (23 page)

In the first week, they took in only fifty pounds, but after two years they had built the business to a point where they could move to the “right” end of Bond Street and compete with the top salons.

“London was a fascinating place in the sixties. There was this incredible energy. We were not going to do things the way our parents did. I was always looking for different ways of doing things. Everything was changing: our music, clothes, and art. So it was clear to me that there could be something different for hair.”

And then one day, something caught his eye that was to transform his vision and the whole field of hairdressing. “One Saturday, one of the guys was drying a client’s hair and just using a brush and drier without any rollers. I thought about it over the weekend, and on the Monday I asked him why he had dried her hair like that. He said he’d been in a hurry and didn’t want to wait for her to come out of the dryer. ‘Hurry or not,’ I said, ‘you’ve discovered something, and we are going to work on this.’ For us, that’s how blow drying started.”

Vidal Sassoon was to create a revolution in cutting and styling hair that changed the industry and the way that women looked around the world.

“I always had shapes in my head. I remember cutting Grace Cruddington’s hair into the ‘five point haircut’ and flying to Paris with her in 1964. I wanted to actually show it to the magazine editors. I knew we’d got something but you had to see it, see the way it moved and swung. It was all about scissors. Our motto was ‘eliminate the superfluous.’ We made pages and pages in
Elle
magazine. They’d been going to feature curls but they loved what we’d done. That led on to more photo sessions and tours. Then in 1965, I was invited to do a show in New York and about five newspapers covered it. They gave us the front page of the beauty section in the
New York Times
the following day. The papers and magazines were full of pictures of our new geometric cuts. We’d done it! We’d brought America ‘the bob.’ ”

He opened the first Sassoon school in London in 1967. Now they are all over the world. “My philosophy has always been to share knowledge. Our academy and education centers are filled with energy. That’s what helps young people to push the boundaries of their creativity. I tell them, if you have a good idea, go for it, do it your way. Take good advice, make sure it is good advice, then do it your way. We’ve been around for a long time and to me ‘longevity is a fleeting moment that lasts forever.’ ”

Vidal Sassoon created a new look and a whole new approach to fashion and style. He not only took the opportunities that he saw, he created a million more in the way he responded to them.

Perhaps the most important attitude for cultivating good fortune is a strong sense of perseverance. Many of the people in this book faced considerable constraints in finding the Element and managed to do it through sheer, dogged determination. None more so than Brad Zdanivsky.

At nineteen, Brad knew that he loved to climb. He’d been climbing trees and boulders since he was a kid and had moved on to scale some of the highest peaks in Canada. Then, while returning home from a long drive after a funeral, he fell asleep at the wheel of his car and plunged nearly two hundred feet off a cliff.

The accident left him a quadriplegic, but he remained a rock climber in his heart. Even as he waited at the bottom of the cliff for help to arrive, knowing that he couldn’t move, he recalls wondering if it were possible for a quadriplegic to climb. After eight months of rehab, he began to talk to fellow climbers about designing some kind of gear that would get him back onto a mountain. With the help of several people, including his father, he created a device with two large wheels at the top and a smaller one on the bottom. Seated in this rig, he uses a pulley system with his shoulders and thumbs that allows him to scale about a foot at a time. The technique is excruciatingly slow, but Zdanivsky’s persistence has been rewarded. Before his injury, his goal had been to climb the two-thousand-foot Stawamus Chief, one of the largest granite monoliths in the world. In July 2005, he reached that goal.

We all shape the circumstances and realities of our own lives, and we can also transform them. People who find their Element are more likely to evolve a clearer sense of their life’s ambitions and set a course for achieving them. They know that passion and aptitude are essential. They know too that our attitudes to events and to ourselves are crucial in determining whether or not we find and live our lives in the Element.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Somebody Help Me

AFTER I CAUGHT POLIO, I went to a special school for the physically handicapped. This was standard procedure back then in Britain; the education authorities removed any children with disabilities from mainstream state schools and sent them to one of these special schools. So I found myself from the age of five traveling by special bus every day from our working-class area of Liverpool across the city to a small school in a relatively affluent area. The Margaret Beavan School had about a hundred or so pupils aged from five to fifteen with various sorts of disability, including polio, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, asthma, and, in the case of one of my best friends there, hydrocephalus.

We weren’t especially conscious of each other’s disabilities, though many of us wore braces, used crutches, or were in wheelchairs. In that setting, the nature of anyone’s disability was more or less irrelevant. Like most kids, we formed our friendships based on people’s personalities. One of my classmates had cerebral palsy and severe spasticity. He couldn’t use his hands and spoke with tremendous difficulty. The only way he could write was by gripping a pencil between his toes and arching his leg over the desk. For all of that, he was a funny and entertaining guy once you got used to his strained efforts at speaking and could understand what he was actually saying. I enjoyed my time at the school and had all the childhood excitements and frustrations that I knew my brothers and sister were having at their “normal” schools. If anything, I seemed to like my school more than they liked theirs.

One day when I was ten, a visitor appeared in the classroom. He was a well-dressed man with a kind face and an educated voice. He spent some time talking to the teacher, who seemed to me to take him very seriously. Then he wandered around the desks talking to the kids. I suppose there were about a dozen of us in the room. I remember speaking with him for a little while, and that he left soon afterward.

A day or so later, I received a message to go to the headmaster’s office. I knocked on the large paneled door, and a voice called me in. Sitting next to the head teacher was the man who’d come into my classroom. He was introduced to me as Mr. Strafford. I learned later that he was Charles Strafford, a member of a distinguished group of public officials in the United Kingdom, Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. The government had appointed these senior educators to report independently on the quality of schools around the country. Mr. Strafford had particular responsibility for special schools in the northwest of England, including Liverpool.

We had a short conversation during which Mr. Strafford asked me some general questions about how I was getting on at the school and about my interests and family. A few days later, I received another message to go to the headmaster’s study. This time I wound up in another room and met a different man who asked me a series of questions in what I later understood was a general IQ test. I remember this vividly because I made a mistake during the test that really irritated me. The man read a series of statements and asked me to comment on them. One of them was this: “Scientists in America have discovered a skull which they believe belonged to Christopher Columbus when he was fourteen.” He asked me what I thought of that, and I said that it could not have been Christopher Columbus’s skull because he didn’t go to America when he was fourteen.

The moment I left the room, I realized what a stupid answer that was and turned to knock on the door to tell the man that I knew the real flaw in the statement. I heard him speaking to someone else, though, and decided not to interrupt. The next day I saw him crossing the playground and was about to accost him with the answer. But I worried that he would assume that I’d spoken with my dad overnight and that he’d told me the real answer. I decided it was a waste of time to correct things. Fifty years later, I’m still annoyed about this. I know; I should get over it.

My error turned out to be insignificant to whatever the testers were looking for in me. Shortly afterward, the school moved me to a different class of children who were several years older than me. Apparently, Mr. Strafford had spoken with the head teacher about me and said that he saw a particular spark of intelligence that the school wasn’t developing as fully as they could. He thought the school could challenge me more and that I had the potential to pass a test known at the time as the eleven-plus examination.

In Britain back then, high school education took place in two different types of school: secondary modern schools and grammar schools. The grammar schools offered a more prestigious, academic education, and they were the primary routes to professional careers and universities. Secondary modern schools offered a more practical education for kids to take up manual and blue-collar jobs. The whole system was a deliberate piece of social engineering designed to provide the workforce needed for the industrial economy in the UK. The eleven-plus was a series of IQ tests developed to identify the academic aptitudes needed for a grammar school education. Passing the eleven-plus was, for working-class kids, the best path to a professional career and an escape from a possible lifetime of manual work.

The teacher in my new class was the redoubtable Miss York. She was a small woman in her forties, kind but with a reputation for being intellectually rigorous and demanding. Some of the teachers at the school had relatively low expectations of what we kids were likely to achieve in our lives. I think they saw the purpose of “special education” mainly as pastoral. Miss York did not. She expected of her “special” pupils what she would expect of any others: that they work hard, learn, and do their absolute best. Miss York coached me relentlessly in math, English, history, and a variety of other subjects. Periodically she would give me past eleven-plus exams to practice on, encouraging me to excel at these. She remains one of the most impressive teachers I have ever met.

Eventually, with a group of other children from my school and other special schools in the area, I sat down to take the actual eleven-plus exam. For weeks afterward, Miss York, Mr. Strafford, my parents, and I waited anxiously for the brown envelope from the Liverpool Education Committee to arrive with the potentially life-changing result of the test. One morning in the early summer of 1961, we heard the letterbox clatter, and my mother ran to the front door. Tense with excitement, she carried the letter into the small kitchen where we were having breakfast and handed it to me to open. With a deep breath, I took out the small folded piece of paper inside the envelope with its typed message. I had passed.

We could hardly believe it. The house erupted in wild excitement. I was the first member of my family to pass this test, and the only pupil at the school who passed it that year. From that moment on, my life moved in a completely new direction. I received a scholarship to the Liverpool Collegiate School, one of the best in the city. In one leap, I moved from the special school into the upper ends of mainstream state education. There, I began to develop the interests and capacities that have shaped the rest of my life.

Charles Strafford became a close friend of my family and a frequent visitor to our packed, usually frenetic family home in Liverpool. He was a sophisticated, urbane man with a passion for helping people find the chances they deserved. A professional educator with a love of literature and classical music, he played the timpani, sang in choirs, and conducted music ensembles in Merseyside. He had a refined taste for good wines and brandies and lived in a finely furnished town house in northern England. He’d served as a major during World War II and had been part of the Normandy campaign. He kept a second home in Ranville in the Calvados region of northern France, where he had become a key figure in the local French community. Ranville now boasts a road named after him, the allée Charles Strafford. I visited him there in my university days, and he introduced me to local society and to the pleasures of French cuisine and calvados apple brandy, for which I am equally grateful.

For me, Charles Strafford was a window into another world. Through hands-on, practical assistance, he facilitated my early journey from the back row of special education to what has become a lifelong passion for full-scale educational reform. He was an inspirational role model for seeing the potential in other people and for creating opportunities for them to show what they can really do. Aside from my parents, he was my first true mentor and taught me the invaluable role mentors play in helping us reach our Element.