hairdresser

This honest and troubled memoir belongs to a genre one may shorthand as I-was-Sinatra’s-valet: how an ordinary day jobber encountered a star and found life glitteringly transformed. Here it’s a 21-year-old hairdresser, Suzi Fussey, living at home with her parents in Bromley, south-east London, and working at a salon in neighbouring (“posher”) Beckenham. One day in 1970 a customer, Mrs Jones, mentions her “artistic” son, David, who plays in a band; the following week, she brings in David’s wife, Angie, who wants a haircut…

The price of admission, as they say, is justified by the sight of legendary German actor Udo Kier in a Dynasty-era lime-green pantsuit, heels, sunglasses, a rakishly inclined hat and a More cigarette smouldering between his lips. In another of his arrestingly unpredictable career-swerves, Kier now teeters on a knife-edge between throwaway camp humour and sentimental sorrow, playing Pat Pitsenbarger, a character based on a real-life figure from director Todd Stephens’s Ohio home town.Pat is a retired hairdresser, now in a…