SYDNEY GUILAROFF, 89,
STYLIST TO STARS, IS DEAD
His son Jon said the cause was pneumonia.
Movie stars had hair before Mr. Guilaroff came along, and there were presumably studio hairdressers, too.
But there was a reason that he was the first to receive screen credits and a reason that Greta Garbo, Greer Garson, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Hedy Lamarr, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Lena Horne, Grace Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Kathryn Grayson, Ann-Margret, Marilyn Monroe and myriad other stars would not dream of making a movie—or sometimes a move—without Mr. Guilaroff.
He was at once a master craftsman—a wizard with scissors—and an acknowledged artist, one with such an instinctive eye for the possibilities of beauty that he could look at a face and instantly see it transformed—by a curl, a flip, a wave, a daring cut or a bit of color.
As the chief stylist at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the studio’s golden years from 1934 to the late 1970’s, he was the man behind the hairdos in more than a thousand movies.
Among them were “Ben-Hur,” “Quo Vadis,” “Camille,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “Some Like It Hot,” “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” and what he called his greatest challenge, the 1938 production of “Marie Antoinette,” which required 2,000 court wigs (some with actual birds in cages), lesser wigs for 3,000 extras and Norma Shearer’s monumental bejeweled and feathered artists’ball creation.
A man with an enormous talent for friendship who both gave and inspired loyalty, Mr. Guilaroff (pronounced GIL-er-ahf ) not only did actresses’hair; by his own account he shared their private moments of triumph and disaster: the man Grace Kelly summoned to Monaco to style her hair for her wedding to Prince Ranier; the man who sat with the bedridden Joan Crawford the night she won an Oscar for “Mildred Pierce”; the “surrogate father” to whom Elizabeth Taylor turned for comfort when her husband Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash and the friend a distraught Marilyn Monroe called the night she died in August 1962.
Along the way, Mr. Guilaroff heard so many secrets it was all he could do to hold them in until he disgorged them in his memoirs, “Crowning Glories,” an as-told-to tell-all told to Cathy Griffin and published by General Publishing Group last year.
Well, maybe he did not tell all the all, but his accounts of his long-term affairs with Greta Garbo and Ava Gardner should be enough to establish Mr. Guilaroff as one of Hollywood’s great lovers, even if neither actress is around to verify the details.
Even before Miss Colbert discovered the 21-year-old “Mr. Sydney” in 1928 at Antoine’s, the elegant Saks Fifth Avenue salon in Manhattan, and walked out with the bangs and bob that would be her trademark for the rest of her life, Mr. Guilaroff had inadvertently changed the shape of women’s hair and made his mark on the movies.
Five years earlier, when he was a 16-year-old apprentice stylist at the old McAlpin Hotel in New York City, as he later recalled it, he created a national hairstyle rage known as the “shingle” for a walk-in client he did not realize at the time was the silent screen star Louise Brooks.
For all his natural talent and later acclaim, Mr. Guilaroff became a hairdresser by accident. A native of London who grew up in Canada, first in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and later in Montreal, he had a decidedly artistic bent as a child and a flair for playing the piano and for painting. But he dreamed of becoming an architect before a family financial squeeze led him to leave home at 13 and seek employment in New York.
So poor that he sometimes slept on park benches, he held a series of menial jobs before he landed at the McAlpin salon as a handyman, picking up his trade almost by osmosis and proving so adept that by the time he was 17 he was at Antoine’s. Within a few years, he had his own salon at Bonwit Teller.
Miss Colbert’s raves made him a favorite in the New York theater world, and drew such clients as Libby Holman, Ginger Rogers and Clare Boothe Luce. But it was Miss Crawford’s insistence on coming to New York for a Guilaroff styling before every picture that led Louis B. Mayer to take him to Hollywood in 1934.
A favorite of directors as well as actors, Mr. Guilaroff was tapped for two appearances on the screen, once in person as Geraldine Page’s hairdresser in “Sweet Bird of Youth,” and once by inference when “Blackie’s,” the name of the salon that is the setting of Clare Boothe Luce’s play “The Women,” “which was based on an actual incident involving a former Guilaroff client, was changed to “Sydney’s” for the movie version.
Although Mr. Guilaroff ’s movie clients included virtually all the major male stars of the era, women were clearly his forte.
Despite all his love of women, and theirs for him, he never married. Yet, as the sixth of seven children, including five older sisters, he longed for family life and saw no reason that his single status should keep him from being a father.
So in 1938, at the age of 31, the man who had revolutionized the nation’s hairstyles blithely made legal history by becoming the first never-married man in the United States who was allowed to adopt a child, a year-old son he named Jon, after Joan Crawford. Three years later, he adopted a second son, named Eugene for Mr. Guilaroff’s father.
As Jon recalled it, Mr. Guilaroff was a doting father who made it a point to have dinner with his sons every night and who provided them a special childhood bonus: Hollywood’s greatest stylist gave them haircuts.
Besides Jon, of Santa Monica, Calif., and Eugene, of Alvagon, Ky., Mr. Guilaroff is survived by two sisters, Rita Loadman of Winnipeg and Eva Feldman of Montreal.
June 1, 1997