The wig designer Paul Huntley opened the gate to his Upper West Side town house the other day and trilled, “This is what I call Merchant-Ivory Land.” Inside were mahogany-panelled walls, Tiffany lamps, and a Dutch-tiled fireplace. Huntley, who is eighty-seven, wore a black turtleneck and tortoiseshell glasses. “Giovanna, we’re descending,” he called out to his associate, before entering the studio in his basement. They were preparing to ship forty ballerina wigs out to Seattle, for a new musical based on Degas’s “Little Dancer.” Behind Huntley’s desk was his Wall of Fame: shelves of wooden heads, custom-sized for the stars Huntley has bewigged over the decades, from Rex Harrison (whose head still bore his hairpiece from “My Fair Lady”) to Jennifer Lopez.

Huntley began his career in the fifties, working for a theatrical wig-maker in London. “I was very fortunate, because it was that period when the very famous actors like Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and Gielgud—all those knights—were around,” Huntley said. In the sixties, he assisted on Olivier’s controversial blackface version of “Othello” (the hair, Huntley said, was “very crinkly”) and on “Cleopatra,” constructing Elizabeth Taylor’s jewelled braids. “It was monumental, because she had thirty wigs,” he recalled. Later, Taylor asked him, “Do you do personal wigs? Because I have a dear friend who’s a comic in New York, and he wears one of the worst wigs I’ve ever seen.” She introduced Huntley to Mike Nichols, who had lost all his hair when he was four, from a defective whooping-cough inoculation, and Huntley wound up making his hairpieces and fake eyebrows for years.

Wig-making, Huntley said, is an intimate collaboration. Marlene Dietrich’s touring cabaret act, in the seventies, required fourteen identical blond wigs, which she would mail back to Huntley for upkeep. After working on several films with Bette Davis, Huntley offered to help with her personal appearances—he had noticed the synthetic store-bought wigs she wore on talk shows. “I used to say to her, ‘Why do you wear these terrible wigs?’ ” he recalled. “And she said, ‘All I do is I put them in Woolite, and I shake them out and put them on the line.’ I said, ‘Yes, but they look like very bad, cheap wigs.’ ” He moved to New York in 1972, when Nichols brought him over to work on a revival of “Uncle Vanya.” He went on to design Angela Lansbury’s orange buns in “Sweeney Todd,” Patti LuPone’s ice-blond updo in “Evita,” the eighties-punk fur for “Cats” (“All those wigs were made with yak hair,” Huntley said), and Glenn Close’s black-and-white tangle for “101 Dalmatians.” (Huntley is written into Close’s contracts.)

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But there was one iconic look that went uncredited: the wavy reddish bob that Dustin Hoffman wore in “Tootsie,” in 1982. “He had very definite ideas of what he wanted it to look like,” Huntley recalled. They experimented over a period of months: blond, straight, long, short. “What he did not want: it must not look like drag,” Huntley said. Finally, they settled on auburn—Huntley’s suggestion—with thick bangs to cover the tape that Hoffman used to arch his eyebrows. Hoffman, Huntley recalled, promised that he would be listed in the credits, but, when Huntley saw the final film, his name was absent. “I got grumpy and thought, Well, there you go.” (He ribbed Hoffman about it later, when he designed the actor’s thinning hair for “Death of a Salesman.”)

Even in hair, there are second chances. A Broadway musical of “Tootsie” opens this month, at the Marquis, and Huntley designed the wigs. He grabbed a box containing two of them—Tootsie wears eight during the show—and caught a car to a midtown costume studio for a fitting. Tootsie’s look has been modernized for Broadway: thinner glasses, no more bangs. Santino Fontana, who plays the title character (a struggling actor who creates a matronly alter ego named Dorothy to land a role), walked in wearing a flannel shirt and a backward baseball cap. Huntley placed the first wig on Fontana’s head and adjusted it with hairpins. Fontana disappeared behind a curtain and emerged, busty in a blue dress. The costume designer, William Ivey Long, assessed the hemline: “I see too much kneecap.”

Huntley combed a lock behind Fontana’s ear; an assistant clipped on earrings. “I haven’t had that many shows where I’ve worn a wig,” Fontana said, looking in the mirror. “But I love the way it instantly transforms you. It’s a necessity. Dorothy doesn’t work without the right hair.” ♦