Tante Alice’s day began with a visit from her hairdresser. Each day, while sitting at her art deco dressing table, she would have her hair done up in a netted bun. Her hairdresser, Clovis, would go to Tante Alice’s sprawling, antique-filled flat before setting off to work at Beirut’s Saint Georges Hotel, which had a popular hair salon. Clovis had an imposing character, a long face and stern expression, not to mention one of those historical names that the Christian Lebanese, in deference to the French mandate forces, gave to their children in the first half of the 20th century. (Other popular names included Charles de Gaulle and Jeanne d’Arc.)

Before Naïm Abboud left for work, he would often sit and watch Clovis do his aunt’s hair. One morning, Clovis suggested the teenager come and work with him at the Saint Georges. Naïm had grown uneasy with his colleagues at the salon where he was currently working. The staff there were mostly older hairdressers who flirted with him unabashedly. Still very young and uncomfortable with anything that had to do with sex—all the more so since his only experience had been violent and brutal—he seized the offer to work at the Saint Georges as the perfect way out.

Then the Middle East’s most iconic hotel, the Saint Georges was the place to see and be seen. Political coups were set in motion there, oil deals negotiated and strategic alliances formed. As the journalist Said K. Aburish wrote in Beirut Spy, his book about the Saint Georges’ bar and the political dealings that took place there, “Beirut was the center of the Middle East, so the undisputed center of Beirut was the Saint Georges Hotel.” The Saint Georges was made all the more inviting, writes Aburish, by the fact that “almost every participant in the affairs of the hotel, right down to the most humble employee, was moved by something beyond mere duty.”

Madame Boueiri, an astute Lebanese woman who kept a room at the hotel throughout the year, owned the Saint Georges’ hair salon. She found Naïm’s French and good manners impressive and adopted him instantly. At first, as in his previous job and owing to his young age, he wasn’t allowed to style women’s hair; he had to watch and learn from more senior hairdressers. By watching others, however, he realized that some clients weren’t getting the best results. One day he mustered up the courage to ask May Moussa, a regular at the salon, if she would let him style her hair just this once. The wife of the director of the Casino du Liban liked to help young people, especially if they had talent, and she agreed.

At that time, many Lebanese women wanted to look like the French actress Brigitte Bardot, who had been introduced to the world in the 1957 film And God Created Woman. Naïm gave Moussa the Bardot look, and from then on, his career took off. Moussa wasn’t just any client. At the casino, Moussa hosted European royalty, US presidents and many singers who gave concerts in its Las Vegas–style playhouse. Until 1964, the casino also served as the setting for the Miss Europe beauty pageant (with famous French hairdressers flown in for the occasion).

Moussa told her high society friends about Naïm and they came knocking. As she was often photographed in magazines, even more women would come to the salon asking for the young prodigy. “Despite being shy, we all felt he would go far,” says a long-time client. The “Brigitte Bardot of the Orient,” as Moussa was sometimes called, would open other doors for Naïm as well: She offered him styling jobs with Dior models and the Miss Europe beauty contestants.

Because the Saint Georges was also the hotel of choice for anyone passing through Beirut, a variety of celebrities came into the salon. Nahla Abdel Wahab, the wife of musician Mohamed Abdel Wahab, who composed many songs for the Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum, became a loyal client. There were actresses too. Jayne Mansfield, who had opted to stay at the newly opened Phoenicia Hotel, still came to the Saint Georges to get her hair done. And Anita Ekberg, Federico Fellini’s femme fatale in La Dolce Vita, was coiffed by Naïm before setting out for dinner at the fashionable Le Chandelier.

Not only celebrities came to the Saint Georges, however. Cosmopolitan and liberated Beirut proved a magnet for exiled politicians and their wives as they fled authoritarian regimes back home. Narriman [Sadek], whose former husband King Farouk of Egypt had been deposed by [Gamal Abdel] Nasser in 1952, had since remarried and began to spend a lot of time in Lebanon. She kept a room at the Saint Georges and visited Naïm regularly. He even created special bangs for the former queen that curled in front of the ear and which he poetically called la mêche amoureuse (the enamored hair bang).

Another famous exile at the hotel was the Iraqi singer Affifa Iskandar, sometimes known as “The Umm Kulthum of Iraq,” who had been close to the royal court of the young King Faisal II of Iraq before he and his relatives were brutally murdered in the 1958 coup. Iskandar’s popularity was such, however, that the fierce Abd al-Karim Qasim, the Iraqi dictator who had replaced the monarchy, sent emissaries to the Saint Georges to plead with her to return. According to Aburish in Beirut Spy, she held an “exalted position among her compatriots” from the Saint Georges Hotel. Naïm, however, remembers a sad lady, “who used to cry all the time.”

The Saint Georges hair salon became so popular that the manager, Jean Bertolet, had to put chairs in the corridors to keep people comfortable while waiting. India Abdini, May Moussa’s sister, remembers Naïm in those days. “He combined two characteristics that don’t usually go together,” she says. “He had a steely determination yet managed to be extremely kind.”

Around that time, Moussa, showing once again that she had her protégé’s interests at heart, offered Naïm a trip to Paris to learn from the great French hairdressers. The local press wrote about the journey and joked that he had packed labneh (Lebanese strained yogurt) and olives in his suitcase. He hadn’t, but the article made plain that he’d gained a reputation, albeit with a whiff of condescension—he was still very young, only 17 at that time. In Paris, Naïm stayed in a hotel on rue Pasquier, near the Madeleine church. On one occasion an Algerian man helped him find his way back to the hotel. When they entered the lobby together, the receptionist hurled insults at the Algerian, betraying an unabashed racist streak that shocked Naïm, who knew little of the troubles France then faced across the Mediterranean.

In the late ’50s, along with Alexandre de Paris, sisters Maria and Rosy Carita dominated Parisian haute coiffure with their beautiful chignons. Despite an introduction by the Lebanese beauty May Arida (“No one can do your hair like Naïm, and he is so quick—oh là là”), the two were rather cold when Naïm called on them. He toured their salon and that was it. On the other hand, he barely needed Moussa’s introduction to meet Claude Maxime. The bubbly lady who’d started off her career with Jacques Dessange and styled Brigitte Bardot herself welcomed the teenager warmly and told him where he could buy hair accessories in Paris. In the next few years, at Moussa’s invitation, Maxime would travel several times to Lebanon to style the Miss Europe beauty pageant taking place at the casino. There, she would meet Naïm again and the two became good friends.

Since opening in 1959, the casino had become a popular concert hall for visiting singers and performers. In January 1963, the day before his concert, the so-called French Elvis, Johnny Hallyday, was banned from performing by the conservative politician Kamal Jumblatt. (Jumblatt had also tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the Twist from spreading to Lebanon’s nightclubs.) Moussa consoled Hallyday by giving him a silver handgun and touring him around the country. The French rocker visited Byblos, dined at the casino’s nightclub, the Baccarat, and even managed a stop at the Saint Georges for a haircut by Naïm. The next day, the Lebanese daily L’Orient reported how a dozen hysterical fans had descended on the salon clamoring for a lock of Johnny’s blond hair.

Women didn’t just want a piece of the visiting rock star, however, they also wanted Naïm. “Naïm is a real artist. He would put hairpieces, pearls and ribbons in our hair. We looked like Christmas trees, but very chic Christmas trees,” says Liliane Fattal-Arida. Mrs. Parker, a rich American woman, thought the world of the Lebanese hairdresser. She suggested Naïm move to New York. Her proposal received backing a few weeks later in a letter penned by Eva Curtis, manager of the Les Elles salon on Madison Avenue. Ms. Curtis offered him a job at $120 a week. It was a tempting offer, but he lacked the confidence; he couldn’t speak English and, anyway, too much was happening in Beirut for him to seriously contemplate leaving everything behind.

Now wealthy enough to lead the life he pleased, the young man decided it was time to move out from Tante Alice’s flat. He must have been about 19 when he rented a furnished apartment amongst the modernist buildings and trendy cafés in the neighborhood of Hamra. It was just a stepping stone for the penthouse he would soon come to rent in the bourgeois neighborhood of Badaro, not too far from where he grew up. He also bought himself a black Jaguar (in monthly installments) and started a collection of oriental antiques, perhaps as a way to recreate the environment he had seen and liked in his grandmother’s and aunt’s houses. Sarkis, the Armenian antique dealer at the Saint Georges, whom he saw every day on his way to work, advised Naïm on his first purchases of opaline glass flasks and lamps.

As Naïm’s career bloomed, the young man stumbled on a small article reporting the murder of the man who had sexually abused him in his youth. It was a shocking discovery and one that put a definitive end to a sad chapter of his childhood and adolescence.

In 1975, Naïm told the press that honey blond was out. It was all about auburn. “The girl to follow is Georgina Rizk,” he explained, referring to the Lebanese beauty queen who had been elected Miss Universe four years earlier. The attractive redhead regularly posed in the Lebanese press with Naïm’s hairstyle creations. Her incredible rise to fame, and her later marriage to a Palestine Liberation Organization fighter, seemed to be a kind of metaphor for the country itself. Despite its international reputation for cosmopolitan glamour, Lebanon had fallen under the spell of a dangerous liaison.

In 1969, the Palestinian fighters who had been expelled from Jordan converged on Lebanon. Here, under the terms of the Cairo Agreement, they could regroup in the decrepit refugee camps and arm themselves. In effect, Lebanon was turning into a launch pad from which to fight Israel. The Palestinian cause divided the nation. While many Lebanese people supported the struggle, others vehemently opposed it as a violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty. The divisions mostly fell along religious lines, and the tension grew to an explosive pitch. An influential Saudi princess warned Naïm that it was time to “forget Lebanon.”

Like most of his compatriots, he didn’t take the warnings seriously. He directly witnessed more warning signs than the average Lebanese person, but he still wanted to believe that everything would turn out all right. En route to Kuwait, where he’d been hired to style a wedding, he remembered seeing a curious-looking man wearing a wig; questioned by airport security, the man said he worked for the Red Crescent. But when Naïm saw him again on the plane, the man had a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. “He and his friends told us the plane was filled with bombs. We landed in Kuwait and after a few long hours, they freed the women and children.” Naïm tried to sneak out with them, but they stopped him.

“Everyone on the plane knew who I was, including the hostage takers. I was in a complete panic, I felt I was about to have a heart attack.” At 6 a.m. the following day, the hijackers took pity on him and told him he could leave. Convinced they would shoot him in the back, Naïm refused to exit the aircraft. Luckily, negotiations had taken place and the rest of the passengers were soon freed. May Arida, whose husband was in the airline business, helped him return to Lebanon. He wasn’t the only one who came back. Five days later, the hijackers stopped by the salon asking for money. “I didn’t have any, so I offered to take care of their girlfriends’ and sisters’ hair.”

A few months later, four armed robbers attacked the salon. Revolvers in hand, they threatened the terrified clients. Sabah [the late Lebanese pop star], who was at the salon that day, hid in the toilets. Another client, Racil Chalhoub, who had been going to Naïm’s since she was 15, found refuge in the small room where towels were being washed. To escape the robbers’ attention, she threw her jewelry in the used coffee cups next to the sink. Naïm was less fortunate. He handed over all his chains and the Boucheron watch inscribed with his name, which the Kuwaiti princess and poet Souad Moubarak al Sabah had given him. The other clients obliged as well. Two days later the police traced the stolen jewelry and the robbers back to the neighborhood of Hamra. They were working for one of the myriad political factions operating in Lebanon at the time.

Following the incident, several competing militias in the country offered to post bodyguards at the entrance of the salon. Naïm refused, declaring that his salon was no cabaret. When war officially broke out in 1975, Naïm was in the thick of it. He was passing through the neighborhood of Furn al Shebak on his way back from Damascus, where he had been shopping for antiques, when an attack on Christian leader Pierre Gemayel led to a violent retaliation against Palestinians traveling in a bus nearby. The attack on the bus marked the beginning of the long and complicated Lebanese civil war. It would last 15 years. The hotel neighborhood was Beirut’s first to ignite as Christian militias battled pro-Palestinian forces in what quickly became known as “the Battle of the Hotels.” The salon, which was just up the hill, was ransacked.

Naïm heard stories of clients’ hairpieces being sold on the streets. And that wasn’t all. He couldn’t get to his house located in Badaro, close to the military hospital and the dangerous Green Line, which now severed Beirut into Christian and Muslim zones. Naïm soon heard that the building’s guard, an affable Sudanese man, had been shot trying to protect it. “I realized then that life wasn’t only about scissors and hairpins.”
—
This article is an abridged and edited excerpt from Naïm: A Brush with History (Darya Press, 2013).