By George W. Jarecke

For the Fashion Issue, I have been asked to describe the life of a fuzzy lawyer--not one who is fuzzy-minded but fuzzy-faced. There is a long history of fuzzy-faced people in my family--see the picture of great-great grandpa George Cole. Until me, there was no history of lawyers in my family. My legal career has traveled a difficult road, blocked by one obstacle after another, all occasioned by my facial hair.

I first grew my beard and moustache in 1975, when I was a student in the creative writing department of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of North Carolina. Every male except Alex Albright and a poet whom I remember only as Tim Who Hails From New Orleans had a beard or a moustache. At that, Alex had shoulder-length hair, and Tim was weird. It was 1975; we were writers; facial hair was expected. When Fam Brownlee shaved his beard one day, we were all--including Fam--shocked to discover that he had no chin. He grew it (the beard, not the chin) back immediately.

After finishing my MFA, I taught in the English Department at Auburn University in Alabama. Though it was the Deep South, and the university had recently had a mandatory R.O.T.C. program, everyone had facial hair of some sort. The writers, sure, the poet and the novelist, but also the lit guys. My boss had a full beard. His boss was bearded. Actually it wasn’t just the English Department; everyone in the School of Arts and Sciences had a beard except the dean, and he could have had one if he’d wanted. I was right at home.

But I wasn’t on tenure track, so after six years I had to find something else to do. Like everyone else I knew, I went to law school, back at North Carolina.

Virtually nobody was fuzzy there. It was the early .’80s, and I ran into a wall of very tall, clean-cut, khaki-pantsed, baseball hat-wearing fraternity boys who bore on their cheeks only the irritated redness caused by the daily shave. Sure, there was the occasional bearded Yankee or radical, people who were likely to work for the public good or leave the law altogether, but the rule was boys with names like Battle, Dorsett, Blount, and Cameron, last names of people who had been governors and judges, boys whose fathers ran the prominent North Carolina law firms.

They didn’t know what to make of me. It was a little like high school; I was back in the nerd group again, with Malcolm Griggs and Mark Finkelstein. I wasn’t asked to play golf.

My grades were pretty good, and I had lots of interviews with North Carolina firms for summer jobs, but for a maddeningly long time no offers. When I expressed my frustration to a fellow student, he suggested, none too timidly, “Maybe it’s the beard? Maybe it’s time to lose it?”

I was shocked. Could it be that a firm would hold my facial hair against me? I was positive that I interviewed well; I was in my late twenties, had been teaching, and if nothing else, could be sociably entertaining. If I could baby-sit a room full of restless eighteen-year-olds, I could manage a few middle-aged white guys. Maybe it was the beard.

People in my family are stubborn on issues that don’t matter, and I was stubborn about this beard. It was a matter of principle. I kept it. I also finally got a job for the summer with a mid-sized firm in Greensboro, N.C. I worked hard, wrote a brief to the Court of Appeals that was well-received, wearing not only my beard but a chip on my shoulder, I didn’t expect to get a permanent offer of employment.

There were four clerks, and it was widely understood that there were only two jobs available. The other three guys included two clean-cut boys rated much higher in their classes than I was in mine and another fellow so clean-cut that he was bald, and he was as well the son of a Methodist minister. I didn’t have a chance. But I had my beard and my principles.

On my last day, I was called to see the partner in charge of the summer clerks. He looked at me very solemnly--too solemnly. I thought, here we go. He said, “You probably know we only have two positions, and four clerks. And we’d like to offer you one of those positions.”

In my surprise a part of me was a little disappointed: I had lost my chance to feel self-righteous about having been wrongfully wronged. Instead I would be gainfully employed.

Although the firm seemed enlightened-- it had hired me, hadn’t it?-- it turned out to be passive-aggressive in a southern kind of way. Everyone treated me warily: still no one invited me to play golf; neither the litigators nor the transactional groups seemed to want me; and the other person who had received an offer, the bald son of the Methodist minister, was clearly the firm’s favorite. He played golf, and I proofread prospectuses till 2 a.m. He was always strolling around with the partners, everyone with an easy grin on his face; I was left to work in my office with no one to talk to.

One might have made the argument that my isolation was unrelated to facial hair. After all, two of the partners had moustaches. But a large number of this firm’s partners were ex-military, and these two fellows had been in the Navy. Moustaches were OK in that context.

One day I was walking down the street with one of our senior partners (U.S.A.F., Ret.), and he introduced me to a colleague, a prominent lawyer and ex-judge. The man gazed at my beard in horror and then ignored me. But his first name was Beverly, so who was he to cast stones?

Eventually I gave up and left the firm and the town. My wife and I moved to Delaware, where I took a job with AIG, a very conservative financial services and insurance institution. I’d learned my lesson: I shaved my beard and moustache before the interview.

Yet there was one last time that facial hair brought me to grief. Soon I was prospering at AIG with a general counsel who was actually a couple of months younger than me. He was Italian and had a moustache. When one of my direct reports (who was surly and disrespectful) tried to grow a beard, it was scraggy and uneven. I decided to show him how to do it and grew mine back, about five years after having shaved it. To my horror, it came in white.

When our president (the now recently-embattled ex-CEO of Mass Mutual, Bob O’Connell) saw it, he laughed, pointed at the General Counsel, and said, “Hey Robert, with that beard, Jarecke looks even older than you do!” Robert was not amused. I shaved it off again. It had come in all white, anyway.

Having moved to the west coast and made my survey of King County lawyers, I’m pleased to report no such rampant discrimination, humiliation, and isolation. Perhaps my generation of bearded lawyers has paved the way for the younger folks. At least I’d like to think that’s it. n