A Battle Plan for Spiffy Looks : Home Front: Hollywood hairdresser offers beauty tips to 250 Marine wives and servicewomen at Camp Pendleton--a personal thank-you for Desert Storm effort.
Among the 250 Marine wives at Camp Pendleton who filled the banquet room--some with husbands still in Saudi Arabia--he was the hero of the day, this veteran of hair-to-hair combat.
Microphone in hand and a military video crew in tow, he skillfully played the room and worked the crowd, talking of battle strategy and execution, of admitting one’s weaknesses and playing to one’s strengths.
This was a home-front reception that would have made Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf proud--the applause, the shrieks, the oohs and aahhs and hoots and hollers due a military giant.
But this was a combat veteran of a different sort: celebrity hair stylist Jose Eber, the man who gets testimonials from Cher and Elizabeth Taylor and Farrah Fawcett and goodness knows who else, who is now drumming up a decidedly more mainstream clientele for his growing salon business.
So on Monday, the French-born Eber--distinctive for his signature, beaver-trimmed cowboy hat and waist-length braid of auburn hair, came to Camp Pendleton, a kind of thank-you to military wives and servicewomen for their sacrifices during the Persian Gulf War.
He talked of looking sexy and feeling good, and his entourage looked the part: his half-dozen beautiful assistants who for 90 minutes would make over a few lucky ones. There was the angular blond with the buzz cut who could pass as a James Bond villain, the Victoria Principal brunette, and the hard-buffed fellow in jeans and T-shirt who explained to a knot of women how he dries his own wild, shoulder-length mane.
On stage, Eber directed his assistants as they gave freebie haircuts to a couple of women Marines. They posed for the “before” pictures. “Don’t smile,” he instructed them. “I want you looking real unhappy. It makes me look better.”
For the next hour, they were the only ones in the room who couldn’t see how they were being transformed. Afterward, they looked stunning--even in their combat boots.
“I wouldn’t have recognized you,” a friend told Cpl. Kris Norred, who spent months in Saudi Arabia as a mechanic and who would go a week or longer there between shampoos. On Monday, she wondered what her husband would think now.
Walking through the lunch room, Eber playfully swept his fingers through women’s hairdos as if they were his own, tousling them up while suggesting how they could be saved.
Let it go longer here, cut it there. Layer it, but don’t mix-and-match short hair with long hair. Pretty face? Frame it. Fat face? Sweep your hair up and away.
He pinched one woman’s full cheeks. “Full-faced,” he said tactfully.
He held another woman’s face by her chin. “Beautiful. Beautiful. Don’t do anything at all. It’s perfect.” She cooed.
To another woman, he offered: “Your hair is toooo done.” He messed it up and walked off, smiling.
He offered to give a couple of people in the audience a free haircut, on stage. Fifty hands shot up. “I’m looking,” he said, “for someone who really looks bad. I like a challenge.” Still, 50 hands shot up.
He picked one woman with collar-length, cocker spaniel-like hair. With four or five merciless snips, Eber’s assistant lopped off eight or nine inches. The woman’s mouth dropped open in surprise and her eyes bulged. Thirty minutes later, she looked chic and smart--at least after she stopped gawking at herself in the hand-held mirror and quit chewing gum.
He picked the second woman--a bit older with a basic, football-helmet perm and, after she was made over, she almost skipped off stage like some teen-ager before planting a big kiss on Eber’s cheek.
“Before, my hair was basic-blah,” said Anne Severy, the secretary to the commanding officer of the naval hospital at Camp Pendleton. “Now, it’s upbeat!”
Said a friend: “Looks like Elizabeth Taylor’s.”
One table of women talked of their next joint mission. “We’re going to rent a limousine and drive up to Beverly Hills so we can all get done,” Ana Maria Wright said.
Sherri Hollifield, who lost 50 pounds during her husband’s deployment to Saudi Arabia, said she wants to finish her own make over with an Eber cut. “My hair’s flat and dull,” she said. “I want it short and full.”
Another woman said she wanted her hair cut short--but her husband wanted her hair long. “Get a wig,” Eber advised.
One table of women continually called out to get Eber’s attention, and finally he walked over to them. “Are you the desperate ones?” he asked. Answered a woman several tables away, “We’re all desperate!”
