I was all about my thoughts, my work, my inspiration. I was always in hair.
Hairdressers are a wonderful breed. You work one-on-one with another human being and the object is to make them feel so much better and to look at themselves with a twinkle in their eye.
Realizing our society as it is, without theology dogmatically telling us how we should react to it, and being humane toward that society, that is all that we're sure of.
I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me, 'Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin.'
It was my mother's idea. Her feeling was that I didn't have the intelligence to pick a trade myself.
I came home after a year and although my profession was only hairdressing, I knew I could change it.
I got a telegraph from my mother who said that my step-father had had a heart attack, come home and earn a living. So I went back to England and the only thing I knew to earn any cash was through hairdressing.
So I was shampooing at 14. But I've always thought that had I the opportunity for an education, I would have been an architect. There's no question about it.
For nine years I worked to change what was hairdressing then into a geometric art form with color, perm without setting which had never been done before.