CELEBRITY HAIR STYLIST SHAPED THE HEADS OF HOLLYWOOD’S TOP STARS
When she graduated from Hollywood High School in California in 1961, Carrie White did her hair up in a bubblegum-pink beehive. She had learned, she wrote in her memoir, that “if I could get my hair right, my life would work better.”
After attending beauty school, she developed a reputation for getting other people’s hair right. And soon she was coloring, snipping and shaping the heads of Tinseltown’s superstars — Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando among them.
The media called White the “first lady of hairdressing.” Seated in her chair in her Beverly Hills salon were A-listers as disparate as Jimi Hendrix, Nancy Reagan, Sharon Tate and Lucille Ball; her work on Elvis Presley ensured that his fans’ eyes were focused as much on his jet-black pompadour as on his gyrating hips.
By the late 1960s, her salon was one continuous party scene.
“Sometimes I cut hair on roller skates, in spandex pants, with a gram of coke in my back pocket,” she told Los Angeles magazine in 2019. In those heady times, White was a star herself, even appearing on an episode of the game show “To Tell the Truth.” United Airlines sought her out to create a hairstyle for its flight attendants: She came up with a modish bob.
But the party didn’t last. White’s life spiraled downward from drug and alcohol addiction, a horrific descent she described in her memoir, “Upper Cut: Highlights of My Hollywood Life” (2011), which is being made into a movie starring Julia Fox.
After some years in the depths, White managed to get into recovery and stay there. Even as she resumed her hairstyling business with a whole new generation of stars, including Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock, she was a proud, not-at-all-anonymous member of Alcoholics Anonymous. She devoted herself to speaking publicly around the country about addiction and remained sober for the rest of her life — 38 more years.
White died May 3 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 78. Her family said the cause was cancer.
When White broke into the world of hairdressing, it was dominated by men — Vidal Sassoon, Jon Peters, Gene Shacove and others. Another popular male hairstylist was Richard Alcala, who was White’s third husband and who was one of the inspirations for Warren Beatty’s rakish hairdresser “Shampoo” (1975). White was a technical adviser on that film.
In addition to styling stars for their personal lives, White sculpted many for the movies. 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).
She was born Carole Douglas Enwright on Aug. 25, 1943, in Los Angeles. Her mother, Grace (Cloakey) Enwright, an illustrator for the movies, named her after actor Carole Lombard. Her father, George Enwright, left when she was a toddler.
She started calling herself Carrie in high school and later, after marriage, legally changed her name to Carrie White.
She grew up in Pacoima, a predominantly Black and
Latino section of Los Angeles, then moved to Beverly Hills.
After high school, she attended the Hollywood salon of the Lapin Brothers beauty school from 1961 to 1963.
She opened her own salon in the mid-1960s. One of her early clients was fashion designer James Galanos. He recommended White to wellconnected actor Jennifer Jones, whose former husbands included movie producer David O. Selznick. Celebrities were soon swarming her salon, making it a place to see and be seen.
After addiction ruined her life and career, she gradually worked her way back. She re-earned her hairdressing license, made amends with friends, styled clients privately and opened a salon again in 2005.
She closed her salon in 2017 and worked out of Farré Salon in Beverly Hills, where she maintained a trendy cliin entele until the coronavirus pandemic forced her to stop.
White was married three times. Her brief marriage in 1962 to Jordan Schwartz, a fellow beauty school student, was annulled. She married Frederick White, a contractor, in 1964; they divorced in 1968. She married Alcala in 1970; they separated several years later, although they never divorced. He died in 1988.
Her companion for the past several years was Alex Holt, an academic tutor. They recently collaborated on a horror novel called “Disposable Teens,” which has not yet been published but is being shopped for a limited television series.
In addition to Holt, 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.