You wanted to scream, ‘I am not an animal!’ : And That’s Why Redheads Get Gray Singing the Blues

Before I knew Jane Platman’s name, I knew how she felt about Bozo the Clown.

Platman, a legal secretary who lives in Tarzana, informed me as she whizzed past recently on Corbin Avenue. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

Platman has personalized plates on her tomato-colored Rabbit that reveal she has RED HAYR.

And the unspeakable Bozo owes us all.

“When I was younger, I hated it,” Platman said, when I had tracked her down.

The titian 2% of the population has a unique life cycle that involves weeping a lot when you’re young and you’re the sole target on the playground with a red flag on your head. Things get better. As every red-headed woman without a full beard eventually discovers, there are guys out there with an almost fetishistic appreciation of hair the color of burning apricots.

Eventually, you start smiling as you shampoo.

Dating well is the best revenge.

But Platman was remembering the bad times, back when she was the only one in the third grade who had ever wondered why adults can use Clairol and third-graders can’t.

“Kids want to be like everybody else, and when you’re a redhead you’re unique,” she said. “Later on you appreciate that uniqueness. It usually takes until you’re about 20.”

In fact, being copper-tressed was the least of Platman’s schoolyard problems. She was small, a condition that was reflected in her maiden name. “People had more fun with that,” said Platman, who still winces when she hears “Chicken Little.”

Having red hair is something that happens to Irish people a lot, but that’s not how she got it.

“My father was Irish, but, actually, the red hair comes from the Jewish side of the family--from my grandfather, who was a singer in the Yiddish theater in New York,” she said. “My father was Black Irish.”

If red hair is not exactly a curse, it is a mixed blessing. For one thing, your offspring have a greater than average chance of getting it. You know how gorgeous their locks are, but they’re not going to know it until their junior year in college. Meanwhile, they’re going to have to learn how to clean their hair brushes without bursting into tears.

Red-haired parents remember what it was like to be small, pale and freckled. It was like “The Elephant Man.” You wanted to scream, “I am not animal! I am a redhead!” So you do what you can to ease your progeny’s inevitable pain.

Everybody teaches his or her kids not to read in the dark and not to snort at the table. But the parents of small redheads also have to teach them that the best way to stop the sting of the epithet “carrottop” is to snap, “That’s so dumb! The tops of carrots are green!”

And “K-Mart” is a particularly effective comeback when some small brute lobs, “Where did you get hair like Bozo the Clown?”

Platman has a daughter with hair that Susan Hayward would have envied, Jennifer Joseph. Jennifer is 14, however, and does not see why she should have to deal simultaneously with junior high school and taunts of “barbecue-head.”

“I’d rather be blond,” Jennifer said.

“Mostly old ladies like my hair, like ‘Ohhhh, yer hair is SO beautiful!’ ” she said, doing a wicked impression of an octogenarian Valley girl.

Jennifer is comforted somewhat by her lack of freckles. “I got lucky,” she said.

Like many of her hair-color cohort, Jennifer doesn’t find male redheads particularly attractive. (Their tendency to have “major freckles” puts her off.)

This disloyalty to one’s own is fairly common. Once I interviewed entrants in an all-auburn beauty pageant (you never saw so many turquoise bathing suits in your life). I asked a flame-haired young woman from Granada Hills if she dated flame-haired men.

“No, I go out with short, dark guys with mustaches,” she said. “He’s adorable,” she added.

Stephen Douglas, a 31-year-old musician who lives in Corona del Mar, hates Bozo, too.

“I wanted to have a good self-image, but I just couldn’t imagine the prettiest girl in the class closing her eyes and her dream guy having red eyebrows and freckles on the back of his hands,” Douglas said.

But Douglas fought back. In 1982 he founded Redheads International, a titian support group that now has almost 15,000 members. For $25 a year you can subscribe to his quarterly newsletter, Redheader. It’s full of stuff that even most redheads don’t know. For example, in Australia, we’re called “blueys” because our reputed hair-trigger tempers allegedly get us into brawls, or “blues.”

The organization hasn’t changed Douglas’ luck. He said the headiest compliment he ever got was, “You’re really good-looking--for a redhead.”

Jane Platman probably thought she knew it all, but she just found out the worst thing about being a redhead. It doesn’t happen when you’re 8. It happens later, when, like Platman, you’re “almost 38.” You long for someone to call you, “carrottop.”

Nobody gets license plates that say GRAY HAYR.