Gene Shacove, the Beverly Hills stylist who helped invent the celebrity hairdresser and was the inspiration for the movie "Shampoo," died Wednesday of a thoracic aneurysm and subsequent kidney failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 72.
Shacove made friends with world-famous personalities, often becoming their longtime stylist and confidant, an association that granted him a fairy-tale social life.
As he had nearly every weekend for 30 years, Shacove visited his close friend Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion for a Labor Day party before he fell ill late that night.
Shacove gained fame as a model for the libidinous hairstylist Warren Beatty portrayed in "Shampoo," a 1975 movie satire of the era's morals and mores. Shacove's friendships with Beatty and screenwriter Robert Towne helped launch the fictionalized account of his love- and fame-laden life.
"He was, in fact, the only rooster in a very beautiful henhouse," said Towne, who stayed for a few days with Shacove to study his lifestyle and mannerisms for "Shampoo." Hefner recalled that Shacove, a Los Angeles native who married many times but was more often single, "got into hairstyling because he thought it would be a wonderful way to meet girls." Clients of both genders poured into his spacious salon.
"He was the first superstar hairdresser and in many ways a mentor to the industry," said Steve Casciola, publisher of Salon City Star Magazine, a West Hollywood-based beauty periodical. Shacove's skill and his starry lifestyle paved the way for current stylists such as Jose Eber and Frederick Fekkai, who became as famous as their Hollywood clientele.
Hefner, who hosted an after-funeral memorial at the mansion Friday, echoed many when he described his longtime friend as "the life of the party" and "good company."
"The mansion was kind of his second home," said Hefner, who was also a client. "He has done my hair here at the mansion for almost all of those three decades, and he has not charged me a penny for it. And he's one of the top hairstylists."
For the last 11 years, Shacove worked one or two days a week at the John Amato Hair Studio in Beverly Hills, where he attended to regular clients such as George Hamilton and Jill St. John.
"Gene was very artistic and always current with everything--his clothes, his look, to working out at the gym," said Amato. "For his age, he was very young."
