When she graduated from Hollywood Excessive Faculty in 1961, Carrie White did her hair up in a bubblegum-pink beehive. She had realized, she wrote in her memoir, that “if I might get my hair proper, my life would work higher.”
After attending magnificence faculty, she developed a repute for getting different folks’s hair proper. And shortly she was coloring, snipping and shaping the heads of Tinseltown’s superstars — Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando amongst them.
The media known as Ms. White the “first woman of hairdressing.” Seated in her chair in her Beverly Hills salon had been A-listers as disparate as Jimi Hendrix, Nancy Reagan, Sharon Tate and Lucille Ball; her work on Elvis Presley ensured that his followers’ eyes had been targeted as a lot on his jet-black pompadour as on his gyrating hips.
By the late Nineteen Sixties, her salon was one steady occasion scene.
“Generally I reduce hair on curler skates, in spandex pants, with a gram of coke in my again pocket,” she recalled to Los Angeles journal in 2019. In these heady occasions, Ms. White was a star herself, even showing on an episode of the sport present “To Inform the Reality.” United Airways sought her out to create a coiffure for its flight attendants: She got here up with a modish bob.
However the occasion didn’t final. Ms. White’s life spiraled downward from drug and alcohol dependancy, a horrific descent she described in her memoir, “Higher Reduce: Highlights of My Hollywood Life” (2011), which is being made right into a film starring Julia Fox.
After some years within the depths, Ms. White managed to get into restoration and keep there. Whilst she resumed her hairstyling enterprise with an entire new era of stars, together with Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock, she was a proud, not-at-all-anonymous member of Alcoholics Nameless. She devoted herself to talking publicly across the nation about dependancy and remained sober for the remainder of her life — 38 extra years.
Ms. White died on Might 3 at her residence in Los Angeles. She was 78. Her household mentioned the trigger was most cancers.
When Ms. White broke into the world of hairdressing, it was dominated by males — Vidal Sassoon, Jon Peters, Gene Shacove and others. One other standard male hair stylist was Richard Alcala, who was Ms. White’s third husband and who served as one of many inspirations for Warren Beatty’s rakish hairdresser in “Shampoo” (1975). Ms. White was a technical adviser on that movie.
Along with styling stars for his or her private lives, Ms. White sculpted many for the flicks. Notable creations included the iron pageboy for Louise Fletcher’s portrayal of Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and the orange locks for David Bowie in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (1976).
“Doing hair gave me validation,” she advised The New York Occasions in 2011. “It was applause on the hour, and I wanted it on the hour.”
She was born Carole Douglas Enwright on Aug. 25, 1943, in Los Angeles. Her mom, Grace (Cloakey) Enwright, an illustrator for the flicks, named her after the actress Carole Lombard. Her father, George Enwright, left when she was a toddler.
As a lady, she wrote in her memoir, she was sexually assaulted by her mom’s boyfriend, and for a time she was raised by a foster mom. In a traditional Hollywood reinvention story, she began calling herself Carrie in highschool and later, after marriage, legally modified her identify to Carrie White.
She grew up in Pacoima, a predominantly Black and Hispanic part of Los Angeles, then moved to Beverly Hills. At Hollywood Excessive, lots of her classmates had been rich and polished. She concluded {that a} key to success, other than shopping for an entire new wardrobe, can be to vary what she known as her “stacked pachuca hairdo adorned with spit curls on either side,” a remnant of her adolescence in Pacoima.
“The Hollywood Excessive hairdo had a reputation: the Flip,” she wrote. “I might research the women’ hair, imagining how they get it to twist up on the underside. And I wanted to chop bangs, clean bangs that swooped to 1 aspect, not like my mom’s Forties movie-star bangs.”
After highschool, she attended the Hollywood salon of the Lapin Brothers magnificence faculty from 1961 to 1963.
She opened her personal salon within the mid-Nineteen Sixties. One in every of her early shoppers was James Galanos, the style designer. He advisable Ms. White to the well-connected actress Jennifer Jones, whose former husbands included David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind” and different large footage. Celebrities had been quickly swarming her salon, making it a spot to see and be seen.
“A few of the actresses would get their hair accomplished earlier than they received to the salon, it was such a scene,” Ms. White advised Los Angeles journal. She recalled the day in 1968 when Mr. Beatty got here in with Julie Christie — to the mortification of Joan Collins, with whom he had had a relationship, and who was sitting beneath the dryer in rollers.
Ms. White spent lots of her nights at Flipper’s Curler Boogie Palace, perfecting her curler skating and staying in form by doing laps. She collaborated with vogue photographers like Richard Avedon on Vogue photograph shoots and Melvin Sokolsky on shoots for Harper’s Bazaar.
After dependancy ruined her life and profession, she step by step labored her means again. She re-earned her hairdressing license, made amends with mates, styled shoppers privately and opened a salon once more in 2005. Writing her memoir turned remedy, however the first draft took 11 years and ran 1,300 pages. Slicing it, she advised The Occasions, was excruciating, “like slicing the blue threads out of a Chanel go well with.”
She closed her salon in 2017 and labored out of Farré Salon in Beverly Hills, the place she maintained a stylish clientele till the coronavirus pandemic pressured her to cease.
However even earlier than then, she had develop into disenchanted with what she noticed as a slackening in Hollywood’s glamour quotient.
“Everybody appears like everybody else,” she advised The Occasions. “It’s tragic.”
Ms. White was married 3 times. Her transient marriage in 1962 to Jordan Schwartz, a fellow magnificence faculty scholar, was annulled. She married Frederick White, a contractor, in 1964; they divorced in 1968. She married Mr. Alcala in 1970; they separated a number of years later, although they by no means divorced. He died in 1988.
Her companion for the final a number of years was Alex Holt, an educational tutor. They just lately collaborated on a coming-of-age horror novel known as “Disposable Teenagers,” which has not but been printed however is being shopped for a restricted tv collection.
Along with Mr. Holt, Ms. White is survived by a daughter, Tyler Browne, from her first marriage; a son, Adam White, and daughter, Daisy Carlson, from her second; and two daughters, Aloma and Pitita Alcala, from her third. She can also be survived by 10 grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.
Aloma and Pitita Alcala mentioned that that they had just lately got here throughout one in every of their mom’s speeches for Alcoholics Nameless, and that it appeared most becoming.
“Once I die,” Ms. White had mentioned, “I wish to be cremated and put right into a disco ball and handed round to the tune ‘Final Dance,’ by Donna Summer time.”
