Rose Evansky was already a successful Mayfair hairdresser when she introduced the blow-drying technique that is now used in salons around the world. She had seen a barber in Brook Street using a hand dryer and brush to dry-style men’s hair and wondered if it would work on the wet hair of her female clients.
One Friday lunchtime a Mrs Hay came in for her regular appointment and, as Evansky recalled: “I picked up a spiky plastic hairbrush and a hand dryer and started rolling a wet section of her hair around the brush, followed by warm air from the hand dryer held in my left hand . . . The more sections of wet hair I rolled over the brush, the easier it became, and soon part of Mrs Hay’s curly hair looked smooth, as if it had been brushed through from a set. Exciting!”
Even more exciting was the arrival a few minutes later of Clare Rendlesham, the fashion editor of Vogue, for her regular appointment. After seeing the technique in action Rendlesham rushed out, returning minutes later with Barbara Griggs, a writer on the Evening Standard, who promptly wrote a feature about the “blow wave”. It soon caught on. Albert, Rose’s husband and partner in the business, was furious because they had just spent £2,000 on new hood dryers. She recalled him saying in his thick cockney accent: “What do you fink we’re goin’ to do wiv ’em? Frow ’em aaht?”
Evansky was now hot property in the hairdressing world as women flocked to enjoy a blow dry. Vidal Sassoon invited her to open a salon in his name in New York, yet she was having none of it. “To be out there needed a touch more testosterone,” she said. Even before her blow-drying epiphany Evansky was one of the most influential hairdressers in London, styling public figures from Barbara Castle to Margaret Drabble and training influential hairdressers of the future, such as Leonard Lewis (Leonard of Mayfair, obituary December 2, 2016). He soon left her to join Sassoon and later turned a 16-year-old model called Lesley Hornby into Twiggy.
Yet in her own mind Evansky was forever rootless, saying that “when in Israel I felt English, and when in England I didn’t feel English at all”. Throughout her life she was haunted by memories of appalling sexual abuse, the deep trauma of rampant antisemitism in Germany and the ensuing Holocaust, overbearing parents, and two difficult marriages.
She was born Rosel Lerner in 1922 in an attic room in Worms, a town on the Rhine south of Frankfurt, and was followed a few years later by a brother, Heine (Harry). Her parents had fled antisemitism in Lodz, Poland, in 1919 in search of a better life. At one time her father, who had trained as a furrier, had served in the Polish army as a tailor to officers; he was now a cobbler.
Her first experience of sexual abuse was at the hands of their landlady’s nephew when she was four; a few years later her maternal aunt’s husband crept into her bed. In 1932 the family moved south to Ludwigshafen where she was educated at the Rheinschule and was raped by another uncle, an event she described in unsparing detail in her memoir. “Being Jewish in Nazi times was bad enough, but having to add Uncle Avrum to the list of my fears was a worry too far,” she wrote. At 13 she was sent to work as a maid for a Mrs Dreifuss, whose nephew also had “wandering hands”.
“I practised till late at night on anyone who’d let me get at their hair
She recalled being in Ludwigshafen in 1936 when Hitler visited. Intrigued, she crept out to see what all the excitement was about. “Necks stretched upwards and cheers burst from mouths,” she wrote of the euphoria. “It was the first time I realised that anti-Jewish propaganda and slogans written on walls were endorsed by the cheering crowds in front of me.”
In November 1938 her local synagogue was blown up. Soon afterwards her father was arrested and sent to Dachau. Frantic letters to distant relations around the world led to a couple from Dudley, in the West Midlands, agreeing to act as her guarantors. In July 1939, aged 17, Rose arrived in England on the Kindertransport speaking only German and Yiddish; eight weeks later Britain was at war with her homeland. After a few weeks she made her way to London where remnants of the family had started to arrive — although her father was again detained, this time interned by the British on the Isle of Man.
She found an apprenticeship at Cohen’s barbershop in Whitechapel, living off tips and picking up a smattering of English. “I worked and practised till late at night on anyone who’d let me get at their hair,” she said, soon graduating to doing perms. After a brief foray to High Wycombe, where she practised on the local vicar’s hair, the family settled in a tiny flat in Soho. A woman in their air-raid shelter found her work at an Italian hairdresser’s off Regent Street, where she became a stylist.
She met Albert Evansky, also a hairdresser, at a dance at the Astoria. They were married on Valentine’s Day 1943, an occasion overshadowed by her mother having just given birth again at 50 to a son named Jeffrey. The Evanskys opened a salon in Hendon at the height of the bitter 1947 winter when “women arrived to have their hair done armed with hot water bottles to hug or put their feet on”. The business moved into North Audley Street, in Mayfair, in the mid-1950s. The traumas of her past abuse and her inability to have sex (which led to countless doctors and therapists) overshadowed their marriage and they were eventually divorced.
Among the domestic upheavals the business somehow thrived. Fashion editors mentioned the Evansky name in their columns, while celebrities dropped by for stylings. Well-meaning friends of both sexes tried to enliven her love life, one of them even lending Rose her husband for an assignation in the back of her car. “He nearly succeeded . . . but in that split second before losing reason I considered that I’d be obliged to him . . . pulled away from him, switched on the engine and drove him to the station.”
“A friend lent her husband in an attempt to enliven Evansky’s love life
There was also the difficulty of separating a business in which she and her former husband were joint owners but whose clients came largely to see her. Many of those clients doubled as pseudo-therapists, offering words of advice or books to read. One Friday evening she left the business for good, leaving her former husband to explain her absence to the staff the next week.
Meanwhile, she had been seeing Denis Cannan, a playwright who to the deep dismay of her parents was a “goy”. Having given up her career, she went to live with him. They married in 1965 and lived in rural East Sussex surrounded by seven acres of land where “we had nine years of flattening bumps, creating a vegetable patch and feasting on what we grew”. Before long she was nursing him through alcoholism, another tale told in graphic detail in her memoir along with details of an affair he had and how she ambushed him and his mistress in their hotel room.
Eventually they returned to London, where she had some private hairdressing clients. Cannan died in 2011. She had no children from either marriage, though she is survived by two stepsons and a stepdaughter from her marriage to Cannan — the name under which she wrote her memoir In Paris We Sang (published in 2011 by Ashgrove Publishing), the title a reference to being reunited in France after the war with members of her family.
Postwar compensation from the German government enabled her and her parents to buy an apartment in Hove, East Sussex, to which they retired. Later she followed them to the town and began to recover her Jewish heritage. In the late 1990s she tracked down and visited relations in Israel yet never felt comfortable there. Returning to Worms and Ludwigshafen she retraced the steps of her youth, but with mixed feelings about those she met. “I asked myself: ‘What did they do in the war? How did they serve the Nazis? Did you or did you not participate in Hitler’s orgy?’ ”
In recent years she became something of a recluse. While women the world over were enjoying the ubiquitous blow dry, Rose — whether as Lerner, Evansky or Cannan — was unable to shake off her demons. “When will I say to the taxi driver ‘To the synagogue’, or ask for a stamp to Israel at the post office without my heart banging?” she wrote. “Hitler’s politics did a good job on me.”
Rose Evansky, hairstylist, was born on May 30, 1922. She died on November 21, 2016, aged 94
