Message In A Shampoo Bottle
New York Times
August 18, 2002
By Mary Tannen
I have interviewed many celebrity hairstylists in my day, but this would be
my first dead one. I figured it would be challenging but not impossible, since
the initial contact had come from him — or at least, from his products, which
had come to me through an intermediary: black packages with red lettering. I
held the shampoo like a talisman, noting the cross surmounted by a circle, the
Egyptian ankh, sacred symbol of life.
Up until Aug. 9, 1969, the name beneath the ankh had stood for Jay Sebring,
the No. 1 haircutter to the stars, the guy who came out of beauty school and
invented a whole new way of cutting men’s hair. Who went into a white-coated
profession dressed in hip-hugger jeans and chambray shirts. Who studied martial
arts with Bruce Lee and raced sports cars with Paul Newman. Before Aug. 9, 1969,
it was a name known only in select circles; afterward it was known everywhere,
as the name of the man who was butchered with Sharon Tate and three others in
the notorious Manson murders.
Now, here was the name again, on a bottle of shampoo, where it had been
leading a parallel existence for more than 30 years. To look at it, you would
not have known that the events of that heinous night had ever occurred. I felt
like Jay Sebring was calling me on a mission: to restore the name to the man, to
devictimize the victim.
Where to begin?
It didn’t take the deductive powers of a Philip Marlowe to call the toll-free
number on the side of the package. Right away I got lucky. Nancy Papin,
executive vice president of Sebring Products, answered the phone. Her husband,
Robert, had been distributing the products for two years before Sebring died.
They now own the company. The products go to about 2,500 shops across the United
States. Not only that, there is a certified Sebring method that is still being
taught and followed. Nancy gave me a number in Houston.
Mike Guessfeld picked up. He had the soft voice of a well-raised Southern
boy, and didn’t stint on the “Yes, ma’am”’s and “No, ma’am”’s. Guided by the
phantom hand of Sebring, he has been cutting hair for over 30 years. He learned
the Sebring method from the two hottest barbers in New Orleans, who had once
sought out Steve McQueen on location, hoping to cut his hair and establish their
reputations. But when they saw McQueen, it was clear that he didn’t need a
haircut. In fact, they were so blown away by how good his hair looked that they
went to Los Angeles to meet the man who cut it. They learned the technique and
opened a Jay Sebring franchise in the Big Easy.
One of my favorite Web sites — www.findagrave.com — listed Jay Sebring, born
Oct. 10, 1933, and revealed a simple headstone in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery,
Southfield, Mich., for Thomas J. Kummer. The accompanying head shot could have
been that of a movie star, a three-quarter profile with half the face in shadow.
The expression was thoughtful, even moody. The hair was impeccable. The man who
had renamed himself after an auto race in Florida, who had scored big in
Hollywood, had been carried back to where he started. I was not certain he would
be pleased.
It had been years since I’d been to the City of Angels. Because Sebring had
driven a Mustang Cobra, I thought I should, too, but Hertz could offer only a
Toyota Camry, so I took it and immediately drove to Benedict Canyon, to what had
become known as the Sharon Tate house, although she and her husband, Roman
Polanski, were renting it at the time she died. The low, rambling ranch house
was gone, replaced by one of those mutant behemoths that seem to be spreading
across the country. Farther up the canyon, I turned on Easton, looking for
Sebring’s Tudor, once owned by Jean Harlow. It had the head of John Barrymore
carved into the rafters, secret ways to get out of the house in a hurry,
sprinklers over the windows to make it look as if it were raining outside.
I gunned the Camry up the steep, narrow road, trying to imagine Sebring and
Tate roaring up in the Cobra on their first date. According to Larry Geller,
Elvis’s memoir-writing hairstylist, who originally worked for Sebring, it was
Gene Shacove, then the hottest women’s hairstylist in Los Angeles, who first
told Sebring about Tate. They were at the Luau, a restaurant next door to
Shacove’s salon. Geller says: “Gene was telling us how beautiful this new
starlet was, and Jay started pounding the table, saying: ‘I’m going to get her.
I’m going to get her.’”
Sebring asked Joe Hyams, at that time the West Coast bureau chief and
columnist for The New York Herald Tribune, to introduce him. Hyams arranged an
interview with Tate at Frascati’s, a restaurant on the Sunset Strip. Hyams says:
“As I was finishing the interview, Jay came in and sat down next to Sharon.
After a while I left. The next day I called Jay to see how it went, and she
answered the phone, so I assumed it went well.”
It was in Sebring’s house that Jean Harlow’s husband had committed suicide,
about two months after they married. Geller remembers that when Sebring bought
it, he showed him the bathroom where the body had been found, and said, “When I
go, the whole world’s going to know about it.”
Is it the manner of Sebring’s death that casts a Gothic shadow over his life,
or was it always there? I longed to see the half-timbered house but was foiled
once again. I stopped the car and looked up to where the house should have been.
The California sun blinded and confused. The vegetation obscured. Frustrated, I
turned back to Beverly Hills and the salon of Joe Torrenueva at Camden and
Wilshire.
Torrenueva went to work at Sebring’s right out of beauty school. He was 18;
Sebring was in his mid-20’s but already a star with his own shop on Fairfax in
West Hollywood. The shop had three doors, one to the main salon, one to the
private room where Sebring and Torrenueva worked and one to the office on the
second floor. It would be 3:15 p.m. Torrenueva would be finishing with a client
and taking the next one. Over in the other chair, waiting since 3 o’clock, would
be Henry Fonda, looking at his watch. In the meantime, Torrenueva would have
heard the Cobra pulling in at 2:50. At 3:20 Sebring would rush in from the
outside with his cutting tools, muttering that it was crazy out there on the
set, he couldn’t get away...
“I idolized him,” Torrenueva said. Sebring took him along when he went to Las
Vegas every three weeks to cut hair — Sinatra’s, Sammy Davis Jr.’s, the casino
owners’. Sebring would fill him in on the clients: “These guys are from the
Purple Gang in Detroit. Just keep quiet and cut. You’ll be O.K.”
After the killings, the police and the F.B.I. went to see Torrenueva. He got
a call from a client in Las Vegas: “Joe, I know you’re worried. Listen, you’re a
good guy, you never hurt no one. No one’s gonna hurt you.”
Torrenueva, half Puerto Rican and half Filipino, showed me his scrapbook with
photos of Sebring and the celebrities, many of whom now come to Torrenueva. He’s
small, with a complexion as clear and fine as a baby’s, short dark hair just
touched with silver. I felt that if he were cutting my hair and looking into the
mirror instead of my eyes, the words would flow; instead they stumbled and
halted.
“Sharon Tate was his girlfriend for a long time,” he said. “To me he always
loved her. There was a mystique about him. He was very shy, except with close
friends. He was guarded. He had a lot of things going on that were just ready to
click.”
In the pauses and non sequiturs, I sensed the restlessness, the discontent,
that haunted Sebring. Torrenueva — married since 19, a father and grandfather —
seemed to be still puzzling over Sebring’s state of mind. The handshake from
this soft-spoken man was a surprise but made sense. The power was in his hands.
A block away, on Rodeo Drive, I headed into DBL Realtors. (When pursuing the
deceased, it pays to play the hunches.) I described my mission to the young
receptionist. Would anyone there know what happened to the Tate house? The
receptionist suppressed a smile. There was someone who worked there but was out;
she claims she rented the house to Sharon Tate. I left the number of my hotel.
There are still three doors to the shop on Fairfax, and it is still a salon,
only now it serves women. A beautician was escorting an elderly client to the
door — red-tinted hair back-combed and lacquered to last two weeks. Blotting the
vision from my mind, I tried to recall the stories about the way it had been.
Larry Geller: “One afternoon, I had just graduated from beauty school, and I saw
this stained-glass window with an Egyptian ankh on the door. My first thought
was that it was a beauty salon, but it was wood-paneled inside. Jay was on a
ladder hanging a plant. He said this was something new, hair architecture for
men. I started the next day. They shampooed. No one had ever shampooed men
before. The problem was how to dry the hair. You couldn’t put men under those
helmets. Heat lamps were slow. Then someone heard about a hand-held plastic
contraption from Europe. They began blow-drying hair, and selling the dryers to
clients at cost.” Geller adds with a laugh, “We were artistes, not
businessmen.”
Hyams once arrived on his motorcycle. While cutting his hair, Sebring asked
if Hyams would show him how to ride the bike. So Sebring appeared at Hyams’s
house off Coldwater Canyon on a Saturday morning. Hyams said, “He was wearing
full-tailored black leather, down to the black helmet and sunglasses.” Sebring
rode up and down the street, and then asked if he could borrow the bike for the
weekend. “I got a call an hour later,” Hyams continued. “He had had an accident
on the first turn.” The motorcycle was pretty badly banged up, and Sebring said
he couldn’t afford to pay to have it fixed; would Hyams take free haircuts in
exchange? At the time barbers charged around $1.50 for a haircut, and Sebring’s
went for $25. “Henry Fonda would be there when I went in; there’d be starlets
shampooing hair. It was the hottest place in Hollywood in the afternoon. There
was gossip, coffee, pretty girls and the haircuts were damned good. It was worth
the few hundred dollars in damage to get the bike repaired.”
Around the corner from Fairfax is Fred Segal, a fashion mecca then and now.
At that time, Fred Segal’s big idea was to tailor bluejeans. Sebring,
recognizing a fellow visionary, bought the hip-hugger straight-bottom jeans and
faded blue chambray shirts, and sent his staff to get them, too. Within six
months, all of Hollywood was coming in. As I drifted around, looking at the
artistically ripped, dyed and wrinkled street clothes for millionaires, I
imagined Sebring coming by for some tight-fitting bell-bottoms to wear out to
the many clubs he frequented at night: the Daisy, the Factory, the Candy Store.
He was friend and barber to Warren Beatty, and some say he was, with Shacove,
the inspiration for the frenetic hairdresser Beatty played in “Shampoo.”
Back at the hotel there was a message from a realtor, Elaine Young, and three
numbers. I called, and she gave me a private number to call her back. She was
clearly rattled that I found her by just walking in off the street. “I was his
best friend!” she exclaimed. She was married to Gig Young and used to go with
him when he had his hair cut, to gossip and see the stars.
“Jay was very good-looking. He was crazy about Sharon. The biggest mistake he
ever made was not marrying her. She left him and went to Europe and married
Roman, who treated her like dirt.”
Polanski never returned to the house in the canyon. The owner of the house
moved in and stayed for years. “He said the house had good vibes.” It sold not
long ago to a developer who tore it down to build an 18,000-square-foot house
that just sold for about $8 million.
The week before the murders, Young had been to see Tate. Tate wanted to
redecorate a room for the baby she was expecting in a month and asked for
Young’s advice. “Jay was half staying there with her,” Young said. “Anyone could
walk in and out.” Young was in the car when she heard the news on the radio. “I
was devastated.” She was still a little shaken at the coincidence of my finding
her, but over the years she’s come to accept that her real estate karma leads to
strange places: “I sold the O.J. place to O.J.”
Before heading out to the airport, I stopped on Rodeo Drive to check out the
clothes at Theodore, just as I did in the summer of ’69, when I purchased a
string bikini in purple panne velvet. Yes, I was in Los Angeles then, cooling
off in turquoise pools high above the city, breathing in the blood-warm air
heavy with jasmine, eucalpytus and sweet-smelling herb. I was riding on the
Marrakesh Express with Crosby, Stills and Nash, and although I didn’t know
Sebring, I was living in a world already altered by him. As Geller says: “Jay
was on top of Mount Everest. I would love to watch him style hair — what he
could do with scissors. Every movie I see from the 60’s, that was our work. We
created the look of the 60’s.”
Until I’d made my journey guided by a ghost, I had known only the name of the
victim of the man with the crazy eyes. Now I understood how much of what I had
been seeing that summer had been shaped by Sebring’s spirit, and how much the
name lives on. The bottle of shampoo only begins to tell the story.
