Charle's Grodin's Toupee

Here’s the thing about toupees: we never notice them unless they are bad and unconvincing. I subsequently find myself thinking a lot about the regrettable hairpieces of John Travolta an awful lot. 

The Grease star began to lose his hair a few decades back and rather than accepting balding as an unfortunate if often inevitable component of the aging process, Travolta instead chose to hide his shame with an endless series of toupees that unfortunately highlight and underline what they’re supposed to hide. 

It does not help that Travolta has a weakness for playing roles he’s way too old for. In the past five years alone Travolta played characters decades younger than himself in Gotti, Speed Kills and The Poison Rose. 

So I suppose it speaks well of the late Charles Grodin’s hair-pieces that up until a few weeks ago I never wasted a moment of time thinking about the authenticity of the Midnight Run cult hero’s hair. 

I suppose I might have known that Grodin wore a toupee because he mentioned it in one of his books, or his daughter referenced it in her memoir. But there’s a difference between vaguely knowing something to be true and being confronted with unmistakable, incontrovertible proof. 

Then I wrote about The Lonely Guy for My World of Flops and Charles Grodin Month and I was struck by how different he looks without a toupee. 

In The Lonely Guy, Grodin somewhat confusingly plays a man who is infinitely lonelier and sadder than the titular solitary gent, a balding, depressive sad sack who has ferns instead of friends and cut-outs of celebrities in place of a love life. 

With The Lonely Guy, Grodin really leans into looking old and sad and exhausted. So it makes perfect sense that a guy like that, who has more or less given up on life and feels no need to impress anyone, would forego wearing a hairpiece. 

Going without a toupee lent Grodin’s performance in The Lonely Guy a sense of authenticity and verisimilitude. It was 100 percent the correct choice for the movie and the role. 

Unfortunately knowing what Grodin looks like without a toupee has made it damn near impossible to see him in a movie where he is wearing a rug without thinking way too much about his hair, or lack thereof. 

When I saw Clifford, for example, I was struck by how bold and big his hairpiece in it is, by the way it doesn’t just deny the reality of Charles Grodin’s thinning hair but instead angrily insists that he has a thick, full, gorgeous head of hair. 

This suits Grodin’s character, who is excessively concerned with appearances and putting on the best possible front, regardless of reality. So it makes sense that a guy like that would want the world to think he had the full head of hair of a substantially younger man. 

Grodin played a lot of characters like that, unhappy, neurotic men who want to be loved and validated and respected. Insecure men like that would probably not choose to go bald gracefully, if at all. 

But Grodin was also a bona fide, name above the title, household name movie star for decades and that comes with certain expectations, like a full head of hair.

It was a little distracting seeing Grodin without his toupee in The Lonely Guy but I quickly got used to it. Now it’s a little distracting seeing Grodin wear a hairpiece in pretty much every other movie he’s ever made. 

It’s not easy getting older. It’s particularly not easy getting older in an appearance and youth-obsessed world like Hollywood, though it is immeasurably easier for men than it is for women. So men like Grodin do what they need to do to preserve at least the illusion of youth. I don’t begrudge them that in the least but it can be tough, if not impossible, to believe in an illusion as minor and ultimately insignificant as Grodin’s decades-long follicular deception once you’ve seen the truth in all of its decaying, all too human glory. 

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