The Way You Wear Your Hat – Listen Up, Hollywood, It’s Important

by Michael Walsh

I think we were all surprised and disappointed when Michael Mann’s $100 million ode to the midwestern bank robbers of the 1930s, Public Enemies, misfired at the box office, A Nightmare on Elm Street or no Donnie Brasco. After all, Captain Jack Sparrow meets Edith Piaf in Capone-era Chicago directed by the man who put De Niro and Pacino together for the first time at Kate Mantelini’s on Wilshire: what’s not to like?


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Many theories have been offered as to why the public made b.o. enemies of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd, but the real reason, I think, has yet to be articulated.  And it’s this: Mann, perhaps our greatest living director, taught his cast how to do everything – fight, handle firearms, rob banks, ogle Marion Cotillard…

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–  except the most important thing:  how to wear a hat like it’s a part of you, not a Page Six fashion accessory.  In other words, how to wear it like you mean it.

Here’s how not to do it:

johnny in hat

Johnny always looks great, but the hair sticking out from beneath the brim should never happen (and, in the film, it actually does happen).  In the old days, men wore their hair to make their hats look good, not the other way around.

By contrast, here’s the master, the Great Cagney, explaining the facts of life to Leo Gorcey of the Dead End Kids in Angels with Dirty Faces:

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Granted, no American male under the age of 70 really knows how to wear a hat, not the way the average schnook did in the period between the wars, and up until the Kennedy/Sinatra Administration.  For lots of reasons, almost none of them having to do with the myth that JFK didn’t wear a hat to his inauguration (see point 6), one day in the 1960s American men decided en masse to drop an item of apparel that for centuries had been considered as vital  to respectability as wearing trousers.

In retrospect, this was an early warning sign of the Decline of America.  For, once men stopped wearing hats, they also stopped being men, which meant they stopped driving the culture, which meant the country was now ruled by fears, worries, feelings and emotions — in other words, by The New York Times — instead of right reason, a whiff o’ the grape and a taste of the lash, with which feminized consequences we are now living.   Although, come to think of it, the Punahou Kid has worn a hat upon occasion:

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Now these mooks, on the other hand, knew how to wear hats:

Gangsters

Those are the Diamond brothers on the left, Legs (second in line) and his consumptive brother, Eddie; plus Fatty Walsh (no relation), and Salvatore Lucania, aka Lucky Luciano, all posing prettily for an arrest photograph.  No urban, ethnic thugs (the Diamonds and Walsh were Irish, Charlie Lucky was Italian) would have been caught dead without their hats on, and in fact one of the greatest of them all, the last of the fighting Jewish gangsters – Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz — was, in fact, caught dead with his hat on.

Here’s the Dutchman, still breathing, after he staggered out of the men’s room and collapsed at his private table in the Palace Chop House in Newark, N.J. on the evening of October 23, 1935, having just been ventilated by Charles “the Bug” Workman:

dutchman

Even near death, and soon to deliver his Jocyean valedictory monologue, the Dutchman knew how to wear a hat.

Another famous gangster, this one from Chicago by way of Brooklyn and the old Five Points gang in Manhattan, also looked great in a hat, even though he was big and fat and had a scar running across his face.  Which is why they called him Scarface:

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So what’s wrong with this picture?

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No rake, that’s what.  No tilt, no swagger, no signature.  No torpedo would ever have worn his lid this way, especially not a bank robber or an urban gangster caught up in some gunplay. You didn’t wear your hat as if it were a beanie with a propeller on it, or a party favor — something that was likely to fall off your noggin at any moment.  You wore it like you meant it.  Like your life depended on it.  You wore it with panache. Just as each of today’s gang-bangers seeks his own individual identity in his baggy clothing, his gold chains, even his choice of arms, so did his criminal counterparts back then.  As Sinatra once said: “Cock your hat – angles are attitudes.”

The old gangsters made a statement with the way they wore their hats.  My own personal hero, Owney Madden (somebody should write a novel about him!), always cocked his chapeau sharply to the left, a trait he passed on to his childhood buddy from Hell’s Kitchen, Georgie Ranft, a man later to win fame as Guino Rinaldo in the original Scarface and, later, infamy as the Dumbest Man in Show Business for all the great roles (Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, maybe even Casablanca) that he turned down.  In other words, this guy:

George Raft Scarface 032232

A good hat, a classic hat, a real hat – and if you want to buy one, go here: it’s where I buy all my hats, and you should, too – ought to fit a man’s head like a glove.  It should be made of fur felt, with a sculpted brim, a proper crease in the crown, an interior sweat band, an external band, and a button (attached to an anchored string on the band, which was meant to go through the buttonhole on your jacket on windy days to keep your hat from blowing not only off your head but down the road).  You should be able to wear it on the street, in the bar, in bed, in an open car, on the sideboard during a getaway, while firing a Colt Detective Special .38, or even seated at the typewriter.

You should never wear it indoors (unless you’re alone or in an all-male environment without the boss present), or in the presence of a lady, which is why we have the semiotics of hat etiquette, now as much of a lost art as cigarette etiquette.  Alas, the young actors – the ones with the workout bodies and the hairless chests – often look and act as if they’re playing dress-up with Grandpa’s old clothes.  Like this guy:

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As opposed to this guy:

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So come on, Hollywood – let’s get with the program.  If you’re going to make The Black Dahlia or Public Enemies or any picture set in this period, the least you can do is hire a coach who can teach all the young dudes that once upon a time a whole world of wonder, class, character, style and refinement — even among the bad guys — antedated the year of their births in the 1970s, when people looked like this:

rsd_folks1975

Forgive me for often thinking that we would all be much better off returning to Depression-era style, before the advent of the Flower Children, when men were men, and when a real man also knew what to do when in the presence of a lady.  Hint: it starts with taking off your hat.

[Ed. Note: Michael Walsh has assumed the role of Editor-In-Chief of  Andrew Breitbart's latest "Big" sibling, Big Journalism, which launches this coming Wednesday, Jan. 6th.]

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Posted Jan 3rd 2010 at 6:52 am in Celebrity News, Classic Hollywood, Culture, Featured Story, Film | 158 Comments