Barber’s Steady Hand Bests Trials

Show-business personality Johnny Grant once phoned her from Vietnam to make an appointment. Another client is so loyal he drives in from Palm Springs every three weeks or so to keep his date with her. And actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr., on a transatlantic flight, sat next to a stranger who he learned was--like himself--one of her regulars.

Eleanor Rodriguez seems to have acquired an army of friends while cutting hair in Toluca Lake over the last 27 years.

Gaining acceptance in the community and financial success in a business dominated by men was a struggle from the outset. Her story is marked by frustration, prejudice and a lingering grief.

Born of Mexican-American parents 49 years ago in Santa Monica, the third of nine children, Eleanor Rodriguez got off to a shaky start in life. As a teen-ager, she landed a job at Bullock’s in Westwood, married at age 14 and at 15 bore a son.

On Her Own

Her husband, 10 years her senior, was an alcoholic, she said, and eventually they divorced after a seven-year separation. Meanwhile, Rodriguez raised her son alone.

She continued working at Bullock’s, attended night school at University High and earned her diploma. Then she set her sights on her next goal.

“I worked in the yarn department, and there was a beauty salon next to it,” Rodriguez recalled.

“I used to peek around the partition and watch them cut hair. I didn’t think I would want to cut women’s hair, but that’s how I got interested.”

In 1958, at age 22, Rodriguez enrolled in one of the two barber colleges in Los Angeles at the time.

“There were 42 students,” she remembered, “and I was the only female in the class.”

To complete the $500 course, Rodriguez was required to log 1,000 hours within one year. Despite working full-time at Bullock’s and caring for her son, she found the extra time.

Skid Row Adventures

As was the custom in those days, Rodriguez started her apprenticeship as a barber on Skid Row, at 5th and San Pedro streets, where a young woman barber attracted more than casual interest from the derelicts who shuffled past the shop.

“Most of the clients were from the mission,” she recalled, “and usually intoxicated or drying out.”

On her second day, an elderly drunk staggered toward her chair and plopped into it, demanding a shave. Rodriguez balked.

“Get to it,” her instructor insisted, and she did, her instruction manual in hand.

“The hotter the towel, the easier the shave,” she read, and proceeded to drop a scalding towel on the man’s face.

Predictably, “his feet went straight up in the air.”

Finally licensed at 23, with a 7-year-old son she worshiped, Rodriguez set out to put her training to practical use. But in 1959 most shops wouldn’t consider hiring a woman, she said, although no one flatly denied her employment because of her sex. When she applied for a job, she was told the position had been filled or that others were to be interviewed.

Assisted by the barber college, she eventually found employment in Toluca Lake. Still, the customers would motion toward one of her male colleagues, saying, “I’m waiting for him .”

One of Rodriguez’s first customers was an elderly attorney, a “real grouch,” she said, who thought she was a manicurist. He almost bolted from the chair when she placed the cloth around him.

Not only did he get his hair cut that day, he kept coming back--for years.

And there was the time she was mistaken for a hooker.

On days off, to supplement her income, Rodriguez cut hair at sanitariums, rest homes and St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica (although she donated her services in wards). Thus, word got around that she made house calls.

The Wrong Impression

A manicurist from Beverly Hills, who had a reputation for indiscriminate dating, got the wrong impression and recommended Rodriguez to a friend.

The friend phoned and asked for Rodriguez. She went.

When she rang the bell--at a penthouse in Brentwood--she was greeted by “a man who was my height and just as wide. And he was bald headed! He asked if I wanted a cocktail, coffee or soft drink.”

She declined. Displaying her barber equipment and making it clear why she had come, Rodriguez trimmed what little hair the man had, was paid double the fee and promptly left. But not before receiving a pat on the fanny.

Then there was the incident at the hospital.

Handed a list of barber-service requests at the nurses’ station, Rodriguez entered a private room where a heavily sedated patient presumably was awaiting a shave.

The man appeared dazed. But Rodriguez shrugged and started to go to work when a nun burst into the room.

“What are you doing?” she said. “You’re in the wrong room! That man just came out of heart surgery!”

The Worst Pain

But the most painful memories involve her son, Robert Estrada.

Just before Mother’s Day about seven years ago, Estrada--an Army helicopter pilot stationed in Germany--was making a tape cassette to send to his mother. He never completed it.

In the act of recording, he was murdered.

He had been married less than six months. An former boyfriend of Estrada’s wife was charged with the killing, but Rodriguez said she has no details about the outcome of the case.

One of her customers, a lawyer, assisted her for a while, but after a few months she stopped asking questions. “I decided not to pursue it any longer,” Rodriguez said. “Nothing will bring him back.”

Meanwhile, Rodriguez lives with what she calls the “beautiful memories” of her son, whose legacy, in a sense, is a prosperous barber business that has become more than a profession.

She has owned the business for 19 years at three locations and has been at her current address nine years. Her shop, Shear Pleasure, is staffed by eight women barbers, one of them a former Las Vegas showgirl. Regular clients number about 2,000. Almost all of the customers are men, many of them celebrities.

“It’s the biggest barber shop in the area,” Rodriguez said, “and the only one in the Valley that has all women barbers.

“I won’t cut women’s hair, but about three of the girls do. I want to keep it a man’s place. I do my best with men.”

Loyal Following

Some clients--among them actors Andy Griffith, Zimbalist and writer-producer Paul Henning, creator of “The Beverly Hillbillies”--have followed Rodriguez from shop to shop for more than two decades.

Griffith, in fact, once offered Rodriguez a $10,000 loan (which she declined) to help buy her first shop.

“She is wonderful--so intuitively bright,” Henning said. “She made it without the benefit of any sophisticated education.”

About four years ago more than 100 friends attended a surprise birthday party for Rodriguez at Lakeside Country Club, where an orchestra from NBC entertained.

“It was the village secret,” Rodriguez said. “Everybody who came in the shop seemed to know about it except me. It was the biggest tip I ever got.”