He didn't want to dye his hair or grow a beard. He had grown the pencil-thin mustache years before because he wanted a change. It made me villainous."ĭeford didn't think so. "They thought football announcers didn't wear these things," says Deford. An NBC executive approached Deford with a subtle hint: Could he, uh, well, maybe do something with the, you know. So Deford learned when he signed a contract with NBC-TV in the 1980s to do pregame commentary for National Football League games. " But put a pencil-thin mustache on him and wham! - instant target. You can't attack someone for his color, for his size. "I ought to get some group together and protest. "It's one of the last allowable stereotypes," says Deford, 59, in an interview from his home in Westport, Conn. It's so unfair, says Frank Deford, a sportswriter and commentator who has worn a pencil-thin mustache for about 20 years. That's what it's come to for the pencil-thin mustache. He pretends to a social station to which he's not entitled."Īppearing now in a theater near you is a pencil-thin mustache on the face of actor Matt Dillon, who plays a low-rent private detective named Pat Healy in "There's Something About Mary." According to press material from the studio, Dillon grew the mustache "to enhance Pat's smarmy traits." I think of a used-car salesman or an aluminum-siding salesman. "Part of what makes the mustache work for John Waters and his persona seems to signify the degradedness of this American version of this Edwardian style. "There's probably a trio of discourses, as we call them, of concerns I think the pencil-thin mustaches raises: Edwardian priggishness, effeteness and unctuousness," says Slocum. Hence, it suits Waters' ironic intent, says David Slocum, a professor of cinema studies at New York University. The spare fringe of a 'stache came to connote the cultural fringe - outlaws, men of uncertain sexuality, hustlers, poseurs. The Jimmy Buffett song of 1974 longs for the good old days, when a man in a pencil-thin mustache might solve mysteries with panache, as Chester Morris did in the "Boston Blackie" movies of the 1940s, as William Powell did in "The Thin Man." Somewhere along the line, though, the pencil-thin mustache fell from grace. The pencil-thin mustache could be dashing when it didn't connote vanity bordering on prissiness. Before them, John Gilbert wore one on the silent screen opposite Greta Garbo. Cook, author of "A History of Narrative Film." "In the 1930s and 1940s there was a style for this sort of mustache."Įrrol Flynn, Ronald Colman, William Powell and David Niven all wore versions in slightly varying thicknesses. "I thought immediately of the 1940s," says David A. Lemme get this right, they say: You're writing about the pencil-thin mustache? With a little nudging, film historians will think it over, offer insights. Having signified so many things over the years, the pencil-thin mustache can never signify nothing at all. To play sundry nuanced notes one needs a special instrument, one with a range enriched by time, one impossible to mute. "I wanted to be effete and low-class at the same time." "It's defacing something, and it's at the same time smart-ass," says Waters.
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