The ‘Do-Right Woman Behind Shagadelic Stars

The ground rules for interviewing celebrities can be strict, and guard-dog publicists sometimes set down onerous conditions. “What’s your circulation? She has very little time and is hard to reach,” one well-meaning handler asserted recently, before getting into what her client “doesn’t want to talk about.”

Somehow, we passed all the pre-interview stipulations set down by Sally Hershberger’s PR machine, so here’s her story.

Sally who?

Sally Hershberger, 39, is a bona fide media darling. She’s not a movie star; in fact, she’s sort of a regular gal--but her work on the hair of high-profile, insanely famous, beautiful people is so darn good that she can call the shots like she’s one of them.

Take Jane Fonda’s entrance several weeks ago at the Academy Awards. The dress was nice, but the actress’ formerly long hair had been lopped off into a chic, soft shag that drew raves. A Hershberger. Then there’s Meg Ryan’s adorable layered ‘do. A Hershberger. Ditto for the taming of the once shrewish hair of Courtney Love.

In Los Angeles, where Hershberger counts Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder among her regulars, her name is on the door of a new 3,600-square-foot, Zenlike salon complete with a pool with floating gardenias, burning candles and loads of blond wood. It’s called Sally Hershberger at John Frieda, the analogy, according to Hershberger, being “kind of like Tom Ford and Gucci.”

The bicoastal Hershberger is what she calls “a visiting hairdresser” at the John Frieda salon in New York, where a couple of weeks ago she “performed” dozens of haircuts on the likes of Natasha Richardson and Love. She also worked her magical scissors on some regular folks who are enchanted enough by the cutter’s panache to dole out her going rate: $400 a haircut.

Hershberger got her start at 18 in California, when her mom, Virginia, gave her marching orders. “She said, ‘You have to do something,’ ” she recalls. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. When you’re 18, it’s much more about going out and having fun, and she didn’t care what I did as long as it was something.”

Cutting hair was not her first choice. “I really did not want to be a hairdresser. I always liked fashion, though,” says the stylist, who favors clean-lined designer clothes: Gucci leather pants, Prada platforms and a Jil Sander top. “And someone said, ‘Oh, you should go to beauty school.’ ”

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She ended up working under Arthur Johns, the then-big deal of the hair world. An early assignment to tour with Olivia Newton-John propelled her career. “The notoriety happened right away,” says Hershberger.

“[Newton-John] was like Madonna then, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun, you fly around the world.’ But I kept thinking this was a temporary thing. Then in the early ‘80s I met Herb Ritts. He was it in photography then. We hooked up, and I got interested in doing photography.” She took a hiatus from the hairdressing business for a few years to pursue a career in the field, but, she says, “I kept getting calls to do hair, and it was very tempting.”

Today she is the executive style director for the John Frieda company. Her alliance with Frieda--who is perhaps best known for his product Frizz-Ease, roundly thought of as nothing short of a miracle for unmanageable, frizzy hair--seemed fated.

Ten years before her agent (yes, mega-hairdressers have agents these days) suggested she meet him to talk business, their paths crossed in an ashram in India. “I was there talking about giving up hairdressing,” says Hershberger, who calls meditation her “medicine.”

A few years ago, the two created a product for blonds who color their hair to use in that in-between stage when the color becomes brassy or washed-out-looking. “We found an agent that would counteract the changes without ruining the hair,” says Hershberger. Sheer Blonde has won many fans among the unnaturally fair-haired set.

Though the stylist says she is enjoying the business these days, she is not completely comfortable with her celebrity status. “I don’t want to be the one that everybody writes about every week,” she says. “I’m just trying to be normal”--which may explain her publicist’s protective demeanor.

She is, however, aggressively seeking success, and part of this, she explains, is teaching the people who work for her how to put out a Hershberger-worthy haircut. “I train my assistants on my own hair and I torture them,” she says.

“I’ll vouch for that,” says Mark Anthony Townsend, one of her assistants in New York who now works at J.F. Lazartigue, a Madison Avenue salon where his cuts go for $160. “I’ve cut her hair several times just pouring sweat. She’s very tough and very technical, but a great person to learn from.”

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Underneath it all, Hershberger is realistic. “I know that not everybody can afford $400 for a haircut.” And even if they could, Hershberger maxes out at eight a day. “And I don’t want someone walking around with some insane cut that doesn’t look good on them. I wouldn’t do it, because it represents me.”

Her style for the stars, if there is one particular one, she says, “is glowy and fresh . . . a little sexy, but not in a Playboy way, in an androgynous way. Men and women die over Jane and die over Meg--their hair appeals to both sexes.”

But there is one thing you won’t get from Hershberger, even if you’ve got the bucks for one of her haircuts: idle chatter. “I hate when people talk when they are cutting my hair. I’m a quiet cutter, because I’m focusing.”