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This is not the story of a sweet, smart, oft-maligned breed of dog, the sort of dog you would expect to find curled at the feet of an expat in 1930s Paris. A dog with a sometimes wry, sometimes goofy sense of humor; a dog who would rather do tricks than hunt rats, but will do just about anything to be with you.
No, this is the story of haircuts.
Consider: poodles did fine until the twentieth century. Those curly little brown and white or black and white dogs underfoot in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings? Those are poodles, nearly always. But the Germans wanted to use the original, standard size poodles as gun dogs and water retrievers, so they began shaving their pudelhunds’ back halves to reduce drag in water, while leaving balls of hair to keep the joints, brain, and vital organs warm. Give a human a pair of scissors and a docile, beautiful dog, and the urge to sculpt will be irresistible.
Poodle cuts grew artful. Leibniz wore a wig so extravagant, it was said to resemble a poodle asleep on his head. By the twentieth century, the aspirational feminine trifecta was the possession of furs, jewels, and a poodle—clutched in her arms like a muff or standing alongside her, complementing her outfit. The breed had taken so eagerly to social life that people forgot it was a hunting dog, an athlete game for outdoor adventure.
Then came the fake count and his Masterpiece, to complete the ruin.
Alexis Pulaski presented himself as a mysterious Russian count, yet ran a grooming shop, Poodles Inc., on West 52nd in Manhattan. There he offered a bouffant cut (the Mae West), a flattop (the Tom Collins), and a sailor clip, among others. For his own toy poodle, whom he named Pulaski’s Masterpiece, he developed what he called, with a straight face, a “rigid, masculine cut.” This, for a tiny, fluffily curled silver dog whose carrying case was designed to look like a deep picture frame, and whose wardrobe included PJs, a bathrobe, and a raincoat. For Masterpiece, Pulaski hired a bodyguard (the irony of that will come clear), a beautician, and a former lion tamer who taught tricks. “Are you a Communist?” the White Russian count would ask, and Masterpiece would vigorously shake his head no.
Masterpiece once led a parade of seventy poodles down Fifth Avenue. He was so famous, the Pakistani prince Ali Khan tried to buy him for $25,000 as a gift for his wife, film star Rita Hayworth. Pulaski said no. He worshipped that little dog—plus he needed Masterpiece to test all the products sold at Poodles Inc., including a Kennel No. 9 perfume.
Even bodyguards take time off, though, and in 1953, Masterpiece was abducted. As Pulaski put it, his voice heavy, “The greatest dog in the world had disappeared off the face of the earth.” A thirteen-state alarm was sounded. A witness recalled seeing a dark-haired woman in a red coat walk out of Poodles, Inc. with an unleashed toy poodle prancing along beside her. But no ransom note arrived, and Masterpiece was never found. Pulaski grieved for four years, turning his shop into a shrine with Masterpiece’s empty green velvet canopy bed as the altar.
Even sadder than his grief, in the long run, was the damage he had done. All the fuss poured onto poodles made these dogs—who had never asked to be primped—seem prissy. Elite, if you will. Want to understand what tore this country apart? The fate of the poodle is your fable. A smart dog who carries himself erect can seem haughty in a fancy cut, however practical its origins. The topiary precision suggests wealth and waste. The embrace by high-toned celebrity (Voltaire, Empress Josephine, Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, Billie Holiday, Oscar Hammerstein, John Steinbeck, Gertrude Stein, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Vincent Price, James Thurber, and Robin Williams) destroys mass appeal. In other words, just as the worshippers of academic culture made others wary of liberals, the poodle lovers ruined poodles’ prospects.
Obama agonized for months over which dog to give to his daughters. Why not one that was hypoallergenic, sweet, and nearly as smart as he was? Ah, but he refused to have a poodle in the White House because that would seem—what? Unmanly? Undemocratic? Did he even know they were hunting dogs? Did he ever stop to think that a puppycut standard poodle looks a lot like a Portuguese water dog and would have been far better suited, temperamentally, to the social demands of life at the White House?
Forgive the bitterness of my bias.
A search through old news articles turns up clues to the character assassination, with poodles representing submission (because they sat still for those silly hairdos) and silliness (because, the hairdos). Tony Blair was derided as George Bush’s poodle, Donald Trump as Putin’s poodle, and decades earlier, the French as the poodles of Germany. “The committee has its poodles,” noted a reporter. Sarcasm reigned: saying that someone proceeded “with all the tenacity of a Parisian poodle” surely meant the opposite. Al Smith, governor of New York in the 1920s, blamed society’s ills on “card playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, divorces.” As a descriptor, poodledom could dethrone anyone: “When you had a beer with him, you realized he was just a silly old poodle.” Wry self-deprecation—“It felt as if I were an unkempt poodle”—made the dog the epitome of maintenance. The stars of “poodle rock,” with their huge, frizzy mullets, were described as looking “like a distraught poodle.”
Today, people want the intelligence of the poodle without the hairdo, the grooming expense, the putative prissiness, and the vanity by proxy. So they muddle the poodle with other breeds, erasing its historic accomplishments by calling the hybrid a “doodle.”
I do understand the antipathy. When I was ten, my mother got us a miniature poodle puppy, and the first time we picked him up from a groomer, I refused to believe that slick, mustached thing they carried out was our dog. “That’s not Goobie!” I wailed, as sure as someone with Capgras syndrome who insists aliens have replaced her loved ones.
It was, alas, Goobie. Shaved into absurdity. Years later, when my husband and I adopted the first of many standard poodles, it took us four visits to convince the groomer to “just follow the lines of her body.” They would leave the ears long and stringy or shave only the face or—helpless to resist—end her tail in a puffball. Even that had semiotic history: the tail pouf was said to be a French mockery of the English lion.
What we wanted was the absence of signifiers. A dog who was simply herself. Animals, people, places, and things that are true to themselves, that live close to the earth, are not trendy—which means they do not go out of fashion. Or inspire scathing criticism. Or become symbols of something they never meant to project.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
