A styling star lands in Redondo

He was a kid from a small town north of San Diego called Fallbrook – the self-proclaimed “Avocado Capital of the World” – who happened to notice the only guy in town driving a Mercedes was a hairdresser. Parker had started producing shows for high school bands and upon graduation caught on as an image consultant for an MTV show. As he helped devise “looks” for bands he decided to find out a bit more about this hair business.

“It was the 1980s and it was all about bands and how they looked,” he said. “Hair and clothes and all that stuff was really important at that time in music, so I just decided to get some schooling…The first school that had an opening was Vidal Sassoon.”

A funny thing happened the very first time he cut a head of hair. It turned out perfectly. And then, as he cut another and another, the same thing kept happening. Parker was able to see how somebody’s hair should and could look best, each and every time. It was almost baffling.

“It was the first thing I ever did that came out perfect every time,” he recalled.

Parker liked cutting hair way more than he had ever imagined he would. Something about the experience was uniquely satisfying. It was about transformation.

“I remember it was awkward, the first one – it was weird removing something from somebody’s body,” he said. “But that is the power of it, too – changing the way somebody looks changes the way they feel about themselves. It changes everything about the person’s confidence level. Their energy is different. That was one of the things that drew me to continue doing it. I like making people happy and I like making things look good.”

Thus a star stylist was born. Parker proceeded to finish first in his class at Vidal Sassoon. His reputation spread quickly. By the age of 23, he’d already opened up his own salon, Parker Adams, in the heart of Beverly Hills. He was neighbors with several of the biggest talent agencies in the entertainment industry. Soon he became one of Hollywood’s go-to hairdressers, creating looks for characters on such shows as Friends, Melrose Place, and ER and helping devise the looks for more than 100 album covers as well as styling David Bowie for his famed Serious Moonlight tour.

It all happened so fast it left Parker’s head spinning.

“It was crazy, coming from a small avocado ranch community and all of a sudden two years later I own a salon in downtown Beverly Hills,” Parker said. “It was crazy, just like that, seeing my haircuts on TV every night…It was totally nuts. It would influence hair fashions for the whole world. A show like Friends, it showed in 60 or 70 countries and was rerun for decades.”

“I mean, I never meant to cut hair,” he said. “I just meant to know about it. There are still mornings I wake up and say to myself, ‘I’m a hairdresser?’”

The 1990s were particularly rabid in Hollywood and its environs. Parker was along for the ride. He was young and connected and living the highlife.

There were parties. He remembers being invited back to Iggy Pop’s house late one night in the Hollywood Hills. Parker walked in the front door and saw a guy standing on a couch urinating — with shaky precision – into a potted plant.

“I thought, ‘Man, Iggy is going to be mad when he sees this,’” Parker said. “All of sudden the guy turns and looks over his shoulder, and it was Iggy.”

Another time he was at dinner with David Bowie and his wife, Angela, at a restaurant that had crayons and paper table clothes. Parker was making big loops and apparently crossed over the middle to her part of the paper. She told him not to do it again, so he made a bigger loop.

“She reached into her purse and pulled out a gun and said, ‘Don’t draw on my side of the table,’” Parker said. “I guess she really meant it.”

Rodney Dangerfield stumbled into his salon at 10 a.m. one morning just long enough to retch. And then there were the midnight calls – stars who absolutely needed a haircut, pronto.

“There were lots of midnight haircuts,” he said. “Anne Heche, when she was dating Steve Martin, called to make an appointment for midnight….I remember getting right out of bed.”

He cut actor Matt LeBlanc’s hair long before Friends ever hit the air. LeBlanc was broke in those days, but his agent assured Parker that he was bound for great things. Parker cut his hair, free of charge, for three years. “All of a sudden Friends became phenomenal, the biggest thing on TV,” Parker said. “I’m still waiting for a check for all those years of free haircuts.”

He continued to style LeBlanc’s hair on the set for Friends – actually inventing his look, which was an influential step towards shorter hair after the wild-haired ‘80s – as well as actress Lisa Kudrow’s hair.

One day, he received an urgent call – Al Pacino needed a haircut ASAP. There were rules: no shampooing, no talking, and no looking the star in the eyes. It was one of the few times Parker was star-struck.

“I was standing there doing the hair cut and look up in the mirror to get a peek of how the shape is coming along, and it was like, ‘It’s Al Pacino! God, I’m cutting Al Pacino’s hair!’” Parker recalled. “I was standing there with my mouth open.”

Parker ran his salon for 10 years. In the 2000s, he left to work as a stylist in several other salons, keeping much of his clientele but unburdening himself of the pressure of maintaining a storefront. Three years ago, he met and married his wife – former fashion model Casey Ehlers – and decided to escape to the slower pace of Redondo Beach’s Riviera Village.

“I knew the only way it had a chance was to get out of Beverly Hills and out of Hollywood and come down here, where it’s more conducive to having a family and being healthy and having a normal life,” Parker said. “Instead of going to bars and nightclubs, we go for bike rides on the bike path…We walk down and get to see the ocean every morning. It’s just calming.”

He still works a few days a week at the Angus Mitchell Salon in Beverly Hills, but he’s also taken a chair at the Zaarour’s Salon Jason Patrick in the Village. “I thought it would be interesting to see if people down here would be interested in high-end Beverly Hills hair styling,” Parker said.

Ultimately, it’s never been about the Hollywood scene or the celebrities for Parker, anyway. Haircutting is an almost spiritual enterprise for him. He has clients who have been a part of his life for decades. It’s a unique, somewhat intimate bond.

“As an adult, if you think about it, you and your best friend might talk now and again over the phone or maybe you see them here and there for dinner or drinks,” Parker said. “But with me and a client, there’s no drink and no music. We just talk with each other, sometimes for an hour-and-a-half. It’s so rare. There is nothing to do but communicate one-on-one in a way we don’t communicate with people that are most important in our lives. Then you add the fact of touch, the physical contact, and it becomes not only conversationally deep, but it’s intimate. You learn early never to give up a secret.”

“I’ve been with clients through marriages, divorces, businesses opening, businesses failing, births, deaths…The entire gamut of life,” he added. “Clients really become your friends.”

That Parker’s connection with clients is so important to him isn’t coincidental to his success. Tom Brophy, who was Parker’s instructor at Vidal Sassoon and later went on to become the company’s art director (and who now operates his own salon in Beverly Hills), described Parker as “an excellent hairdresser.”

“I think what makes a good hairdresser is you listen, end of story,” Brophy said. “Everything else is secondary, because if you don’t listen you can be the best hairdresser on the planet and it doesn’t work because you haven’t listened.”

Parker, Brophy said, possesses this ability.

“Listening is so important because people tell you a lot of things,” Brophy said. “On that first level of consultation, you actually look at a person in terms of body language – are they confident? Are they shy? Are they boisterous? What are they wearing? The way you shake hands with someone tells a lot. All this happens in that initial contact, and then you listen, and that enables you to read a client’s feelings as best you can. You can’t read it 100 percent, but if you are listening, you are going to get a pretty good idea of what that person is about and then do the appropriate thing – not just the fashionable thing, but what is right for that client.”

“When I cut hair, I don’t get an idea right away this would look good, or that would look good,” Parker said. “The first thing I see is what looks wrong….It’s like a piece of the puzzle. Does that work? Or a color in a landscape painting – does that fit? I look for something I can change that would make an immediate difference in making an aesthetically more beautiful picture.”

It works. Longtime friend and colleague Giuseppe Franco – a famed Beverly Hills stylist who spoke briefly by phone on his way to cut Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hair – said that Parker still has a stellar reputation within the beauty industry.“He’s an excellent stylist and motivator and very loyal to his career,” Franco said.

Brophy said that Parker is known within the industry not so much for any famous cut but rather for an overall body of work.

“I don’t know if there is any particular haircut,” Brophy said. “I just think he does very beautiful hair, and I think that is a pretty nice thing to be known for.”

Scott Parker can be found at the Zaarour’s Salon Jason Patrick, 1211 S. PCH, in Redondo. He can be reached at 310-765-0315. ER