By Scott Baldinger
“Merry Christmas, Dear Kenneth. You must have touched many heads in this book,” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis personally inscribed a copy of Allure, the oversized tome written by the noted fashion diva Diana Vreeland and edited by Onassis, both friends and steady clients of the legendary hair stylist, Kenneth Battelle, a.k.a. “Mr. Kenneth.” (Jackie even wore a Mr. Kenneth prepared coif to Dallas and back to Washington through the days before and after her husband’s assassination.)
The affectionate, clever note to Battelle was fitting: Mr. Kenneth was the innovative creator of the Jackie bouffant from the fifties onwards and of a generation of almost equally famous high society women – and the legion who imitated them — during the heyday of the shower cap and beyond, including Gloria Vanderbilt, Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, Babe Paley, Brooke Astor, Katherine Graham, Bunny Mellon, Lucille Ball, Kay Kendall, and just about everyone who was anyone –so long as they were female.
They were all so dependent on his skillful hands, which were busy working up to three years before his death in 2013 at age 84, that when Ball would enter Battelle’s Billy Baldwin-designed salon on East 54th Street, she would yell out “Where’s god?” (After the town house salon burned to the ground in 1990, Battelle eventually set up shop at the Waldorf Astoria.) The book with Jackie’s inscription is just one of 111 lots of paintings, decorative items, furniture, and other items belonging to Mr. Kenneth to be auctioned by Stair Galleries this July.
“Coddle, coddle, coddle” was Battelle’s motto towards his customers, and he was known as much for his kindness and consideration to clients, friends, and work associates as for his mastery of the vertically oriented “do.” According to Victoria Meekins, who started working for Battelle in 1972 and is still employed by his firm and executor of his will, “when a steady customer was down on her financial luck, he would often insist that they come in anyway. ‘I can’t have you go out on a job interview looking like THAT,’ he would say.” This relaxed, giving quality was evident in his country retreat in the Hudson Valley, from which the Stair lots have been culled.
Among the items from his Wappingers Falls home to be auctioned on Saturday, July 19th, which include a pair of bronze patinated metal figures of Russian Wolf Hounds (Lot 32) and a brass standing barber’s sink (Lot 21), is a poster after the painter Helen Frankenthaler (Lot 101), who no doubt had the best hair amongst the abstract expressionists of the time. Inscribed on the back “For Kenneth, from my fireplace to yours-! Be Well, HF,” Meekins believes the artwork was a gift. “She was a client and he enjoyed her and admired her work, and he amused her.” Works by Salvador Dali, Alexander Calder, Ernest Trova, and others available for sale predated Meekins employment there but were perhaps also gifts—from their grateful wives no doubt.
There’s also a Steinway piano (Lot 105), upon which, Meekins says, “he played very well. When he first came to New York in 1948 from Syracuse, New York, he supplemented his income at piano bars doing just that. Sometimes, at a dinner party with editors such as Babs Simpson of Vogue, they would encourage him to play. He had really beautiful hands, with very long fingers, and he could spread them really wide, so he was a natural at the instrument.”
Did he do your hair?
“Yes he cut my hair for a long time. It was a treat.”
 |
 |
 |