Gersh Kuntzman

The Klipette is unmistakable: This unique contraption, which looks like a drill bit, consists of two concentric carbon steel cylinders held together by a simple screw. Hold it inside your nostril and turn the bottom, and voilà, nose hairs disappear without discomfort.

It is simplicity, it is precision, it is perfection itself.

If you haven’t seen a Klipette, you’ve definitely seen the ads for them, all featuring a smiling man sticking a Klipette up his nose. (“So easy and safe!” the ad reads. “No pulling, no irritation, no infection.”)

Before the invention of the Klipette, men had to either go to a barber or guide a pair of scissors up their nose with one hand and snip with the other. The former was an unnecessary expense while the latter was messy, imprecise and undignified. The Klipette revolutionized this chore, and took care of ear hair to boot.

Yet there’s something bigger at work here, something more important than a mere nose hair clipper, something that explains Elsa Bauml’s tears. The story of how a quirky tool was invented in a garage in New Jersey and then built into an international icon of hygiene is nothing less than the story of America itself, condensed down into those two nostril-width cylinders of hair-clipping steel.

Adolf Hitler set the story in motion.

Anton Bauml and his future wife escaped from Germany to America in 1938. But they were no common refugees. Elsa’s relatives included two knights of the British Empire and an uncle named Henry Morgenthau Jr., who just happened to be the secretary of the Treasury at the time.

Anton’s family was no less prosperous, having owned a bookstore where composer Richard Wagner shopped (and sometimes didn’t pay his bills). In fact, the great anti-Semite once showed up at the Bauml store with his German shepherd and his cane and slapped Anton across the face after he got into a fight with Wagner’s son, Siegfried.

“I’m just giving you back what you gave my son,” Wagner told him.

But coming to America meant closing the doors on the Old World, the Wagner stories and the knighthoods — things that meant nothing in America. Besides, America would open other doors.

Elsa was working as a masseuse in New York when a customer told her about the Klipette, which had been invented a few years earlier by a Mr. Clark in New Jersey. The naked man on the massage table had bought the company from Clark and now wanted to sell. Would Anton Bauml be interested?

Would he! Not only was Anton’s business failing, but he was so broke that in a low moment he’d sold a letter that Wagner had written to his father — a family heirloom in which the composer apologized for not paying a bill — to the New York Public Library for $25.

“We took a chance,” Elsa said. “We didn’t have any money, so he sold us the company for $1,200 — $100 a month for a year. I think he wanted to do a mitzvah [a nice thing] for two poor refugees.”

For Anton, owning the company that made the Klipette was more than just a business venture. “My husband was a well-groomed man,” Elsa says. “He always resented that the barber would have to clip his nose hair. He thought this was a great product because people could do it at home cheaply and safely.”

Although the Klipette had been around for a few years, it had failed to capture the vast market in postwar America for a safe, reliable nose hair grooming tool.

The Baumls changed that, taking out ads in magazines such as National Geographic and Parade, which always featured a smiling man and the warning “Don’t pull hair from nose, [it] may cause fatal infection.” Later, Elsa Bauml expanded the company by selling the Klipette wholesale to barbershop supply outfits.

Millions were sold. Billions of nose hairs were safely clipped.

“It was a revolutionary product,” says Arthur Marks, owner of Cutiecut, a distributor of beauty products. (“If it’s a scissors, I sell it.”) “Klipette was the first and the best.”

The Klipette was alone in noses for decades, quietly going about its business of making men appear civilized. When competitors finally arrived, they were knockoffs of the most shameless kind. One, a black plastic model called Groom Mate, went so far as to copy the Klipette’s revolutionary cylinder-within-a-cylinder design.

“Naturally we looked to Klipette for inspiration,” admits Mark Bellm, vice president of PHR Systems, which started making the Groom Mate in 1989. “First we checked to see if they had a patent — it had expired — so we, uh, used their principle.”

Bellm realized that this country was big enough for two nose hair clippers. He now sells his product for $8.95 — “including postage and handling,” he says. (The latter prompted my question: “For the love of God, what is handling?” Bellm paused for a second and gave an honest answer: “You know, I don’t really know what handling is.”)

Bellm claims his product is better than the Klipette, but Elsa Bauml knows a cheap copy when she sees it.

“He stole our design and thinks he’s better,” Bauml said the other day, tearing up again.

But she’s not crying over her competitors. As she holds up a Klipette for the last time, she is not holding a mere grooming device, but the physical embodiment of her life in America, a symbolic totem of one great American family’s journey from the prosperity of Old World gentility to the bootstrap prosperity of New World gumption.

She is not just crying over a lost nose hair clipper.

“Now, it’s all gone,” she says.

Political suicide? No, it’s just Kenny Kramer, the real-life inspiration for the erratic next-door neighbor on “Seinfeld.” While the TV Kramer never ran for mayor, this one says he’s serious about joining the crowd hoping to succeed Rudy Giuliani as mayor of America’s largest city.

“I’ve listened to all the other candidates,” Kramer said the other day from his fabled apartment, “and it’s all the same shit. Maybe it’s a different flavor, different color, different-smelling shit, but it’s still crap: humorless, idealess and clueless. They’re politicians. It just comes out of their mouths. Their brains aren’t involved at all.”

In political profiles like this one, now would be the time to declare, “This fledgling campaign has electrified the city.” In reality, the only people excited about Kramer at this point are pot smokers and a few odd stragglers. Granted, the local media has reason to be excited about anything but the coming mayoral contest. It may be the city’s first post-Giuliani mayoral race, but those in the running — four dull career Democrats and an astoundingly boring Republican billionaire — are putting the town to sleep.

Enter Kramer.

This only-in-America story started as all such made-for-TV stories start: with a reporter looking for a sound bite from a celebrity. In this case, Kramer was asked if he’d consider running for mayor because term-limited Giuliani cannot. Kramer, breaking the unspoken rule of celebrity sound bites, actually took the question seriously.

“If Jesse Ventura can be governor, why can’t I be mayor?” he said. He was heard on 1,500 radio stations around the world, and the next thing Kramer knew, the Libertarian Party (full disclosure: This is a party that once ran Howard Stern for governor) was asking him to be its standard-bearer (fuller disclosure: This is something that obscure parties do in New York, such as when the Green Party ran “Grandpa” Al Lewis — of “Munsters” fame — for governor).

Kramer checked out the Libertarian philosophy — decriminalize drugs, preserve individual rights and let the free market do the rest — and joined the party. “They’re very smart people,” he said of Libertarians. “Some tend to overintellectualize, but they’re smart.”

A party member for a mere three weeks, Kramer — who has spent the past few years making a good living conducting “reality tours” of “Seinfeld” locations — nevertheless won the Libertarian nomination in April. He beat the only other candidate, None of the Above, in a 20-5 vote.

“It would’ve been really humiliating to lose,” Kramer said. “Imagine having to call None of the Above to congratulate him on running such a good campaign.”

With the Libertarian Party nomination sealed up, reporters seized on that thin veneer of legitimacy to herald Kramer’s chances in the November election. This is certainly easy enough; there’s always some campaign “expert” willing to say anything — even that Kramer actually has a chance to win.

“New York’s mayoral race is a mess right now,” political guru Doug Friedline, who ran Ventura’s successful run in Minnesota, told the New York Daily News. Kramer “has a chance.” (Coincidentally, Friedline has since signed on to run Kramer’s campaign.)

Actually he does not have a chance. Hell would have to freeze over, spin on the head of a needle, graduate from college and sing Tibetan folk songs in a pretty pink dress before Kenny Kramer would even have a shot of becoming New York’s 108th mayor. But it’s still a great story. The “Seinfeld” Kramer may have sold perfume that smelled like the beach, gone to acting classes with a midget sidekick and smoked Cubans, but the real Kramer sold glow-in-the-dark disco jewelry and did voice-overs for X-rated CD-ROMs.

And then there’s the weed. Kramer credits his copious marijuana use for instilling in him the Libertarian philosophy that nourishes his campaign.

“I was such a pothead that I made a beanbag chair out of my marijuana seeds in just three months,” said Kramer. “But my campaign is a walk-in closet. I own up to everything I did — the drugs, the sex. I was at the forefront of the sexual revolution and I enjoyed every bit of it. Those other guys make such a fuss if someone smoked pot. Well, I smoked a lot in my day and I’ve been to Amsterdam, too.”

Although he doesn’t toke anymore, some things never change: At his campaign stop at the pot march last month, Kramer made his standard pitch for drug legalization, vowing that if he became mayor, he would immediately direct the police commissioner to deemphasize drug arrests.

“If I can just get all the pot smokers to vote for me, I’ll win easily,” Kramer said at the rally. “The only problem is that they can never remember to vote.”

Since then, Kramer has been setting up his fundraising committee while his “issues committee” has been hammering out themes on which the one-time comedian can run.

“I have a take on education that is different than the other candidates,” Kramer said. “No one is talking about parental involvement. You can’t just drop the kids off at school. Parents should get a report card, too.

“I said that on the radio the other night,” he continued, “and two days later, I heard Freddy Ferrer [one of the Democratic mayoral hopefuls] say the same thing. So somebody is obviously paying attention to me.”

For now, the campaign is being waged through seemingly nonstop radio, TV and magazine interviews conducted from Kramer’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment, the same apartment that was across the hall from “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David’s. (Seinfeld himself lived uptown, so it was David’s refrigerator that was always getting raided.)

Recalling those days, David recently told the New York Times that he could not, in good conscience, endorse the fictional Kramer, but he offered his unqualified support for his longtime friend.

“I actually do think he’d be good for New York,” David said. “He can’t keep a secret, so he’d have a very open government. He’s a very honest person. He’s funny. He’s actually very sensible about many things.”

Despite David’s kind words, Kramer had only sympathy for his friend, whose chosen profession has forced him to give up that apartment across the hall. “With all his money, he still has to live in California,” Kramer said. “Poor guy.”

Spoken like a true New York mayor.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about such requests. In the past, the patent office has approved holiday-themed trademarks such as “Santa’s Elf” clothing, “St. Nick’s” beer, “Santa Claws” apparel and “Merry Christmas” tree ornaments. Someone even trademarked “a red-tipped nose on any fanciful deer-like animal.” Damn lawyers.

But by law, whenever a company attempts to trademark a name of a person, the government must ask for written proof that the person consents to having his name trademarked. In other words, if I want to set up a company called “Michael Jordan Sweat Socks,” I need to demonstrate that Michael Jordan consents to letting me use his name to sell socks (even though we all know that he does).

“Unless it’s someone known to be dead, like Napoleon, the government requires consent,” said trademark attorney Andrew Goldstein.

But when Father Christmas applied to trademark “Santa Claus,” the U.S. government did not request consent from the man some know as Kris Kringle. In other words, the government has finally put into the public record what Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, atheists, cynics and UPS workers have known all along: There is no Santa Claus.

“We do not believe Santa Claus is a living person, no,” said Brigid Quinn, a spokeswoman for the Patent and Trademark Office. Quinn admitted that the government’s sudden decision to invalidate the beliefs of millions of Americans (including some children, too) would “sadden” many people.

“When I was 6, my brother told me there was no Santa Claus,” Quinn said. “I was upset.”

The opposite of upset is Stephen Bottomley, the British entrepreneur who stole the “Santa Claus” trademark right out from under America’s nose — a victory that the British papers naturally hailed. (“Brit Nets Santa From Americans,” cheered the Mirror.)

“It’s a fantastic [trade] mark to have,” Bottomley said. “I can’t believe no one in America had thought of this.”

Trademark lawyers ridicule the notion of trademarking Santa. For one thing, generic terms such as “Big Burger” or “Super Absorbent” are ultimately meaningless as trademarks unless they’re used for specific purposes (sort of like Apple’s trademarking of the term “Macintosh” years back).

But lawyers can do anything they want. A few years back, a greeting card manufacturer got a cease-and-desist letter from the owners of the “red-tipped nose on any fanciful deer-like animal” trademark. The trademark owners objected to something on one of the company’s holiday cards: a fanciful, deerlike animal that resembled a character often called “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

“We could’ve fought it,” said Goldstein, who represented the card company. “You can’t trademark images of a red-nosed reindeer or Santa Claus. They’re part of the public domain.”

Bottomley could face the same argument if anyone ever challenges him in court.

“You can’t use federal trademarking to divest people of rights they’ve enjoyed for years,” added lawyer Mitchell Stabbe. “I don’t want to sound like a Grinch, but this won’t hold up.”

Grinch? Did you say “Grinch”?

“I know, I know, ‘Grinch’ is trademarked,” Stabbe sighed.