There’s something in a hat (besides a raccoon)

by David Benjamin

“Wide brimmed and narrow, some tall, some not, some fancy, some colorful, some plaid, some plain. She doted on changing hats at every opportunity. When she met the Prince, she was wearing one hat, when he asked her for a stroll, she excused herself, shortly to return wearing another, equally flattering.” 

— William Goldman, The Princess Bride

 

MADISON, Wis.—It’s hard to pin down exactly when I developed this affinity for hats.

It definitely occurred before the time I bought an authentic World War I doughboy’s helmet. I couldn’t resist. But then I couldn’t wear it. Its liner had long since rotted away, leaving no cushion from several bolts that dug into my head. Besides, there are precious few occasions suitable for perching an antique steel kettle above your brain. 

The first hat I recall was a replica of the coonskin cap worn by Davy Crockett in the Walt Disney TV series. Mine had a round stiff-rubber crown surrounded by a ring of nylon-pile fake fur. The tail looked as though it had been amputated from an actual dead raccoon, but this is doubtful. Considering the fashion, in 1955, for every schoolkid to sport his own personal Crockett cap, the demand for the real thing would have likely sent the Interior Department into, well, a tailspin.

Since those days, I’ve acquired another “coonskin” hat, although it’s not coonskin. I suspect fox. It’s a gift from Hotlips, found at a high-end department store in Tokyo before she married me. Made in Italy, it’s remarkably similar to the model Fess Parker wore on television. It has a full fur top, a real raccoon tail and a woolen band inside that unfolds to cover my ears. For a long time, I rarely wore it in public, embarrassed by its ostentation and implications. But lately, I’ve shed my inhibition, partly because it’s warm in winter, partly because lately the streets—especially in Madison—are full of folks in silly hats and, finally, because I’ve grown too old and surly to be embarrassed by almost anything. 

The only hat remark I hear, about once a week, is “Nice hat.”

After my original Crockett lid lost its cachet, I got the first hat to which I was emotionally attached, a baseball cap with the letter “B” and a label that mentioned someone named Roy Campanella. My grandfather bought it for me when I tried it on in the dime store. Too young then to be baseball-savvy, I had no idea who Roy Campanella was, or that the “B” stood for Brooklyn. But I bonded with the cap and wore it through several summers. Somehow, having a regular, habitual hat completed me.

Of course, in those days, everyone wore hats. Women’s hats were veritable confections of silk and velvet, tulle and organza, festooned with feathers and flowers, pearls and buckles, hung with nets and veiled with mystery. Mata Hari wore hats. Hedda Hopper made hats her trademark. Holly Golightly was naked without a chapeau so chic that men quailed and other women fumed. 

I spent my childhood watching TV cops in fedoras arresting thugs in watchcaps or matching wits with gangsters who could afford cashmere brims and gold-clasped hatbands. By and by, as the Sixties impended, hat culture became more inventive but also less obligatory. My dad, a sort of trendsetter in bareheadedness, almost never hid his hair, which was dark, lush and suggestive of Robert Mitchum. 

There is, I believe, a specific moment in history when hats became optional—even uncool—for businessmen, lawyers, senators, detectives and secret agents. The year was 1973. Until then, before the credits in each James Bond film, Sean Connery or George Lazenby—wearing a snap-brim fedora—strode into a series of moving dots that crystallize into a circle surrounded by the interior of a gun barrel. But when Roger Moore, making his Bond debut in Live and Let Die, turned and fired his trusty Walther PPK through the circle into the heart of the bad guy, Moore was hatless. No Bond ever again felt obliged to cover his head. Nor did any of us. Hats were, officially, fatally, passé.

However, there’s something in a hat that makes a statement. So, even as the gray-flannel fedora languished in the closet, the baseball cap was becoming a hallmark of virility. This vogue proved a mixed blessing, because it somehow encouraged grown men to do what my grandmother would not tolerate.

“Is your head cold?” she would ask.

“No.”

“Well, take off your hat in the house!”

For some reason, removing your baseball cap in the house, on an airplane, at the movies, in a four-star restaurant lost its page in the canon of etiquette and became a signal of male weakness and latent homosexuality. 

Since my Roy Campanella cap, which I never wore in the house. I’ve gone through a range of hats, bought in various places. I’ve never worn a straw boater, a trilby, a bowler, a porkpie, a Tam O’Shanter or one of those Three Musketeers jobs with the ostrich plume. But I’ve worn a series of fedoras, various skull caps and lots of baseball caps. I have a yarmulke somewhere. In recent years, I’ve gravitated toward those tweedy or herringbone flat caps that stevedores wore during the Depression. You can see them on every male head in scenes from Meet John Doe, Sullivan’s Travels, On the Waterfront and Cinderella Man. My latest favorite is a faithful copy of the flat cap worn by Sean Connery in The Untouchables.

Of course, besides the cop-show fedora and the Yankees baseball cap, the most fiercely American of all headgear is the cowboy hat, the ten-gallon Stetson, Gabby Hayes’ pushed-up brim, Mitchum’s flat-brimmed preacher’s hat in The Night of the Hunter, Clint Eastwood’s leather-band flat-top, or all those stained and battered lids that John Wayne went through in some eighty Western movies. 

The cowboy hat that sticks in my mind was the immaculate white (actually more of an ecru) device atop the Lone Ranger (Clayton Moore). The masked man always presented himself as mild-mannered and suave but every time he entered a saloon, something about him rankled at least one of the badasses at the bar. Maybe it was that pressed soft-gray shirt that looked like he’d just picked it up at One-Hour Martinizing. Maybe it was the dainty bandanna tied just-so above his collar. And then there was the hat—spotless and symmetrical, no sweat stains—balancing on his head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.

Whatever his beef, the pissed-off saddle tramp picked a fight with the Lone Ranger as soon as got inside the swinging doors. And I started worrying about that lovely hat. The bad guy always landed the first punch, which barely fazed our hero. But there went the hat! Off his head and outside camera range. I knew, of course, that the Lone Ranger would win. He always did. But afterward, there he stood, looming over the fallen thug, bareheaded. Where’s his hat? Did he lose it? Did someone take it? Is it sitting in a puddle of beer? Why doesn’t Tonto pick it up?!

My angst went unassuaged because the show would cut to a commercial. I had to fret through two minutes of Folger’s coffee, Stripe toothpaste, Philips Milk of Magnesia, Brylcreem and Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should.

Finally, there he was, astride his white stallion, his hat—unstained, undented and subtly rakish—tamped down on his unmussed coif. Why was I worried? 

I guess I believed that the Lone Ranger without his hat is like Samson without his hair. It wasn’t the mask that made the man. It was his ensemble, to which the topper was the topper. A hat has power.

“Hiyo, Silver! Away!”

Hey, wait! It’s windy out there on the lone prairie. Dammit, kemo sabe! Hold on to your hat!