Vidal Sassoon’s tough life

Vidal Sassoon may do hair, but he’s one tough guy, said Chrissy Iley in the London Telegraph. The legendary hairdresser, 83, is today worth some $150 million, but he was born into abject poverty in Great Britain. His father, a Jewish Greek immigrant, left his family at the beginning of the Great Depression, so Vidal, his brother, and their mom wound up in a tenement. “The only toilet for four families was outside. You froze in January. You would hope that someone had just been to keep the seat warm.”

Eventually his mother had to hand them over to a Jewish orphanage. His brother, who died of a heart attack in his 40s, never got over the abandonment. “He was always asking, ‘Why was I put in an orphanage?’ I never asked that. I knew she couldn’t help it. I accepted the situation. He did not.”

Sassoon demonstrated the same toughness in 1948, when he volunteered to fight for the newly created state of Israel. “When you think of 2,000 years of being put down and suddenly you are a nation rising, it was a wonderful feeling,” he says. “There were only 600,000 people defending the country against five armies, so everyone had something to do.’’ He says he would have no self-respect if he’d sat the war out. “Somebody had to be one of those somebodies.”

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