Having once caused a media storm by insulting Zsa Zsa Gabor on a chat show, Peter Cook reckoned he knew what the headline would be on his death: “Zsa Zsa man dies.” My equivalent of that – a short item on page 17 of the Petersfield Post, perhaps, below an item about a three-legged cat stuck up a tree – would be “Trump man dies.” Under this headline, it would read: “A local man, who once asked Donald Trump how he prepared his hair, has died.” If I was lucky, it might also add: “He was shot by a jealous husband.”
For the record, I was trying not to stare at Trump’s brushed-forward, combed-over hairstyle, the one that looks like a sunken apricot soufflé and was once described by The New York Times as “an elaborate structure best left to an architecture critic”. But I couldn’t help it. Before I could stop myself, I had blurted out something like: “For the love of God, man, why?”
“People always comment on it,” he replied. “But it’s not that bad, and it is mine – look.” He tugged on the front. “I mean, I get killed on it. I had an article where someone said it was a hairpiece, but you can see it isn’t.”
It was true, I could see. So I asked whether he used gel. “No, I use spray, actually. I’ll comb it wet then spray it so it doesn’t get blown away by the wind.”
Not exactly the uncovering of the Watergate scandal, is it? I mean, they don’t hand out Pulitzer Prizes for questions about hair preparation, do they? Yet there it is, my contribution to human knowledge. After it appeared in this newspaper two years ago, the exchange was picked up by most of the American TV news networks, then more or less went viral in cyberspace, from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires to – I don’t know, Hong Kong again.
