How an Immigrant From Colombia Cha Cha Cha-ed His Way Into a Chic Set

In 1985, he was just another Beverly Hills hairdresser.

But now--three years, two restaurants, one art gallery and a clothing store later--Mario Tamayo is amassing a mini-empire at the “wrong” end of Melrose and attracting all the “right” people to it.

He has become the new buddy of movie stars and studio honchos and the social moth of the club and charity circuit. And he has been discovered by such national publications as Women’s Wear Daily, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Esquire.

Never heard of him? Rest easy. Though Tamayo is the name to drop at too-trendy spots like the underground club Ground Zero, it’s still far from a household word.

But what’s most intriguing about the 30-year-old Colombian immigrant, San Gabriel High School graduate and college dropout is not just what he’s done, but whom he knows and how he makes that work for him. In a city where contacts can be as crucial to a career as cash or clout, Tamayo is the consummate cultivator.

Over the years, he nurtured an eclectic network of self-consciously hip friends and clients culled from the music, film, art and fashion worlds. Today he finds himself at the center of a new social set that is on the cutting edge of the city’s creative community.

His success, then, is more than the average immigrant-made-good story. It’s a quintessential tale of making it in Los Angeles.

Tamayo’s ability to mix and match friends and clients is perhaps most visible at his flagship restaurant, Cha Cha Cha, a 70-seat shoe box opened with a shoestring budget at the graffiti-splattered corner of Melrose and Virgil avenues.

Good Food, Not Spectacular

There, the food is good but not spectacular; the furnishings are cast-offs; the prices are surprisingly modest. But a look around the room shows it’s filled with the famous and the far-out, the posh and the punk--everyone from Saudi Arabian tycoon Adnan Khashoggi to struggling musicians sporting Mohawks. Almost all are on a first-name basis with the owner.

“They all go to look at the others--that’s what makes it fun,” Tamayo explains. But others know the crowd doesn’t just happen. It takes work, said social butterfly and California Arts Council member Joan Quinn, who describes Tamayo as a “savvy social animal who always knows what makes each social group tick.”

Harry Segil, a La Brea Avenue furniture designer and habitue of the club scene, adds: “Mario likes to take distinctive cultural groups of people and introduce them to that element they would not normally know otherwise. He creates combinations that are new and strange. He gives us a theatrical experience.”

And always, Tamayo is the director, casting agent and set coordinator. He does it so smoothly that even his longtime friends are sometimes surprised by his connections.

“One day,” recalls artist Richard Duardo, a close friend, “I was sitting with Mario and just expressing out loud that I wanted to get to David Hockney and pitch him on a project we could do together. But David was too inaccessible. . . . Mario just picked up the phone and, an hour later, I was meeting with Hockney. Now that is the ultimate facilitator.”

It doesn’t hurt that Tamayo maintains cozy relations with the press, including associate publisher Dan Gershon of Details magazine--the New York-Los Angeles chronicle of what’s hot--and Los Angeles Herald Examiner society columnist Richard Rouillard.

Anne Crawford’s Companion

But his coziest media relationship is with Anne Crawford, the 31-year-old gossip columnist for LA Style magazine, who has been one of his biggest boosters in print and a constant companion for the last year. Through her, he has had entree to Establishment social events around Los Angeles. “It works really nicely for us, this combination of who I know and who she knows,” Tamayo says. “This is a very convenient thing.”

At first glance, Tamayo, with his boyish enthusiasm and goofy grin, appears to be a wet-behind-the-ears teen. He talks like one too, using words like groovy and yikes to excess.

But look closer: That drink he sips is sparkling water bottled under his own label. That cuff he’s tugging is on an ultra-hip WilliWear shirt. And that constantly changing hairstyle he’s smoothing is a much-watched fashion statement.

At parties, he goes to be seen. “When Mario makes an appearance, it’s like a grand gala arrival,” says Smoot Hull, guest services director for the downtown club Stock Exchange. “It’s the Mario Tamayo show.”

One of the best examples was his birthday party last February. Friends issued invitations with only five days’ notice. Then they changed the location at the last minute to a deserted downtown warehouse, where they served the barest minimum of food and drink.

Still, 500 people showed up, perhaps to prove they were hip enough to rate an invitation. The crowd included everyone from the wanna-be to the well-known--artist Hockney, Devo musician Jerry Cassale, actor Billy Wirth and fashion designer James Tarantino, to name a few. “Mario was like a little boy. He loved the attention,” hairdresser Victor Vidal says.

“My party was the place to be,” Tamayo boasts. “All the club owners were coming by and saying, ‘Well, no wonder no one’s coming by tonight. Because everyone who’s hip is here.’ ”

It wasn’t always so.

From Yonkers to San Gabriel

Raised in Bogota, Colombia, the third of six children, he came to the United States in 1965 at age 8 with his machinist father and seamstress mother. He lived for a decade in Yonkers, N. Y., before his family moved to San Gabriel.

In high school, Tamayo found he had a creative side. “Art was the one thing I really enjoyed doing,” he recalls, and he enrolled in day and night courses in ceramics, wood-working, jewelry-making, painting and printing. He considered a career as an architect.

He remembers always doing one thing better than anybody else: keeping “on the cutting edge” of trends. “I was always getting a crazy haircut or fighting with my Mom to be able to wear bell-bottoms,” Tamayo said. “I didn’t want to be traditional.”

After high school, he finished a year at East Los Angeles College. That summer he enrolled with friends in beauty school “because it sounded pretty silly and fun.” By 19, he had dropped out of college, gotten his hairdressing license and found work in Jon Peters’ Rodeo Drive salon.

His next eight years were a blur of bookings. Besides celebrity clients, Tamayo styled for magazine and fashion layouts, music videos and commercials. “I never hustled. The phones just kept ringing,” he says. At one point, he ran his own Melrose salon, Neo 80, and starred in a television commercial for Wella.

By 1985, he was on a first-name basis with Hollywood celebrities. But he also was bored. “I’d done every style I’d wanted to do or see or be around. . . . There was nothing really more challenging for me to do.” That November, he bid his friends goodby and decided to move to London to study film-making.

He never made it. On a New York stopover, he ate at a restaurant serving the new chic cuisine--Caribbean. “My friends said, ‘You know, this would be so perfect in L.A.’ And then one day I thought, ‘Maybe I should do that.’ ”

Mama: ‘Are You Crazy?’

The next day, he recruited his mother to help him. “I said, ‘Mama, I’m coming back to L.A. and I’m going to do a Caribbean restaurant and it’s going to be called Cha Cha Cha and it’s going to be at the corner of Virgil and Melrose.’ ”

“Are you crazy?” she replied. “That place is a dump.”

Tamayo had $30,000 in savings, relatively little money with which to start a business. He also had no business experience, which is why he signed up for a UCLA Extension course on restaurant management.

Though he didn’t even have a chef for his new restaurant, within weeks he had wooed Tibirio Prado, 25, the wunderkind who had starred at the Ivy for three years. Prado thought Cha Cha Cha was in the middle of nowhere. “I told him I thought he was a crazy dude. But he kept calling me, saying, ‘Oh, please. Oh, please,’ ” says Prado, who agreed to become a partner.

Tamayo claims he never worried whether Cha Cha Cha would attract the customers whose patronage can make or break a new restaurant: “The people I know are all talkers. They’re stylists, photographers, models and hairdressers. It’s their business to know what’s hot. So they tell everyone else. I know. I was there.”

On opening night, the restaurant was packed. Even once the trendoids and foodies left for newer thrills, it survived because it stayed on the word-of-mouth circuit. People kept coming simply because everyone else they knew did.

When the cash began to rumba in from Cha Cha Cha, friends told Tamayo to move out of his one-room Echo Park apartment and buy a showplace. They told him to replace his ’58 Olds, known for its constant breakdowns. Though he did get a Jeep Cherokee last spring, Tamayo has spared himself other extravagances of success; he lives in a pedestrian one-bedroom Silver Lake apartment.

Showplace for Artists

Instead, he took his profits, leased a $750-a-month storefront at Melrose and Heliotrope Place and slapped a few coats of paint on the walls. Within six months, he opened the Modern Objects art gallery with a small back room office for himself.

“I wasn’t making a quarter of a million dollars or anything, but I was making enough,” he says. “I didn’t need to hoard it up in a house or cars or clothes. I wanted to do something exciting.”

Years of getting to know L.A.’s struggling artists finally paid off when Tamayo went scouting for talent. “The blue-chip galleries will give a break to only one new artist a year, and that isn’t much chance for anybody,” he says. “So I intended my gallery to be for the young artists I saw working their life away in anonymity.”

The gallery’s opening show, a large group exhibit, sold out. Almost immediately, magazines like Artforum, Details and Women’s Wear Daily began tracking Modern Objects’ discoveries.

So did L.A.’s creative community, thanks to Tamayo’s self-promotion. For a show of nine photographers’ works, he mailed 3,000 invitations. Guests lined up around the block.

With two successful ventures under his belt, Tamayo stumbled on his third when a small restaurant around the corner from the gallery closed. He decided to open the pink-and-white Cafe Mambo for breakfast and lunch only. But the demand was so great from the many studio executives working nearby that he had to add dinner service last spring.

The whole venture cost just $30,000. “All I did was gut and repaint the walls.”

This summer, Tamayo--who is pursuing yet another sideline as a private art consultant--closed his gallery and opened a men’s clothing store in the same space and under the same name. Modern Objects will now sell custom and ready-to-wear fashions created by Tamayo and his friend, Jef Huereque, who has clothed magician David Copperfield and rock stars such as David Bowie, Lindsey Buckingham and members of the band Chicago.

While Tamayo surrounds himself with glitzy people, his ventures all have one thing in common: They embrace the philosophy that chic can come relatively cheap.

The average painting Tamayo sells is in the $400-$700 range; 90% of Cha Cha Cha entrees are under $10; the average custom-made suit at his clothing store will retail for under $500. “I wanted to put things in the 20- to 40-year-old crowd’s price range,” he explains. “They want to have quality, but they don’t want to have to spend a fortune.”

A Family-Run Operation

Tamayo himself can run his operations inexpensively because his overhead is low, in part because his family works for him. His mother supervises his business accounting; his retired father is general overseer (“If a bathroom falls apart, he can fix it,” Tamayo says). His sister, Flora, handles the computing. One brother works at Cha Cha Cha while another manages Cafe Mambo. Tamayo put a third brother through business school, telling him: “You’ve got to go because you’re the only one I know with the smarts . . . to handle the business I’ve created.”

Yet another member of his family will, no doubt, work at the supper club he hopes to open somewhere nearby before the year’s end.

Because of his high profile and high energy, Tamayo is often approached by people who want to invest in his ventures. But he is more than content to remain on his own. “I’m only 30. I figure I have time to make money later,” he says. “I like being my own boss now.”

If all else fails, he can always go back to hairdressing.

After all, he still has one client left: Don Johnson.