Jim Markham was in his hair salon in Albuquerque, N.M., on the morning of Aug. 9, 1969 when a news broadcast announced that actress Sharon Tate and four friends had been brutally murdered at her hillside home in Los Angeles.
Markham, like many, recognized Tate’s name immediately. But it was word of the violent death of celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, one of the other four killed by members of the Manson Family cult, that hit hardest.
“He was my mentor, my creative mentor,” says Markham, who at 74 is the founder and CEO of ColorProof Color Care Authority, the latest of five hair products companies he’s started or headed in his career. “So yeah, it was a big shock.”
As the 50th anniversary of the Manson murders arrives this week, Markham talked in his office at the Color Proof headquarters in Newport Beach about his friend and mentor, how he took over Sebring International after its founder’s death, and providing a small bit of help on director Quentin Tarantino’s new film, “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,” in which Emile Hirsch plays Sebring.
Markham grew up rough and tumble in Farmington, N.M. By 15 he was married with a kid, and to support his very young family he started barbering, $1.50 for a haircut, $2 for a flattop. He was good, too, winning contests around the Southwest, and a silver medal at the Hair Olympics in Cincinnati in 1967.
One day around then he saw an article in Playboy, a staple of barbershops in those days, that had sketches of Jay Sebring’s ideas for improving the looks — and haircuts — of a handful of celebrity men.
“So I called him and I asked him if he had a technique and he had a product line,” Markham recalls. “He said he did, and I said I wanted to distribute this product.
“And I said, ‘If your technique is not as good as mine, we’ll use mine,’” he says, and laughs. “That’s pretty bold for a kid from New Mexico.”
Instead of hanging up on the brash unknown from Albuquerque, Sebring invited him to L.A., saying, “We’ll see how it compares.” When Markham got to Sebring’s salon in Hollywood he found actor Van Johnson in a styling chair, recruited by Sebring for the hair showdown.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you cut one half with the razor and I’ll cut the other half with the shears,’” Markham says. “We did, and we both recognized his side was better than my side.”
Markham says he’d agreed to pay $1,000 to face off with Sebring on opposite sides of what turned out to a celebrity’s head. That money then went toward his fee to open a Sebring franchise in Albuquerque. “And that’s how we got started,” Markham says.
Tragedy brings opportunity
Over the next couple of years they continued to work together — “We were trying to take over the planet,” Markham says — hanging out when Markham flew his private plane to Los Angeles every few months, or Sebring came to New Mexico for visits.
“Besides his immense talent with doing hair, which he had, it was fantastic, he was a very charming guy,” Markham says. “Dressed well. Little guy, 125 pounds, 5-feet-6. Always had the greatest wardrobe. Knew all the women, knew all the ladies. I mean, everybody liked Jay.”
Markham digs through his scrapbooks and pulls out a yellowed clipping from the July 24, 1969 edition of the Albuquerque News. Accompanying the story about Sebring visiting Markham’s salon is a photo of the mentor cutting the protégé’s hair. Markham says he also cut Sebring’s hair that day, giving him what would end up being his last haircut.
Markham says he and Sebring had talked about him taking over the company if something ever happened to him. A month after the murders he was in Los Angeles, living temporarily in Sebring’s house, the former home of actress Jean Harlow, and lining up funds to buy the business and Sebring’s black Porsche 911 Sportomatic, too.
“My life was turned upside down in a very exciting way, also scary way,” he says. “I was cutting a lot of haircuts in Albuquerque at $5 a haircut, and started cutting hair at $50 a haircut. It was a big transition, you know, from regular people to Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen.
“I wasn’t afraid of my technical ability, because I knew I had that, but could I fit in? You know sometimes you can do the greatest job in the world and they don’t like you, or you don’t connect with them.”
Things worked out fine, Markham says. The celebrity clientele liked him and his work. Actor Paul Newman became a friend and mentor. Others, like actor Peter Lawford, also invested with him when in the early ’70s he left the Sebring International company and founded a line called Markham Products.
Hollywood comes calling
After Markham Products, he launched and sold two more companies — ABBA Pure and Natural, and PureOlogy Serious Colour Care — before starting Color Proof, which is where he was one day when several of Tarantino’s production crew called to ask if he could consult on the authenticity of Sebring’s salon and products.
“They came here and they wanted to see what I had, and I’ve got a lot,” he says. “I’ve got a bunch of stuff.”
He showed them what a Sebring salon looked like, and the long, wide Filipino shears he and Sebring used. In his office still is a display of vintage Sebring shampoo and conditioner bottles, hairspray and brushes, even a bottle of Crepe Bandit, the perfume named after Sebring’s dog, still in it’s package.
“This is all Sebring,” he says, picking up a faded but unused can of Sebring hairspray. “This was made in 1966. That’s probably the oldest can of hairspray on the planet.”
Markham and his wife Cheryl flew to the Cannes Film Festival to see “Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood” but got shut out when long lines and issues with screenings of Tarantino’s film limited access. They finally saw it at a preview just before its July 25 opening. And when they did?
“All that ended up on the cutting room floor,” Markham says of the Sebring salon and products he’d helped the crew design. “You can’t control that.”
He was more disappointed that Sebring wasn’t given more respect in the story.
“I was a little underwhelmed that they didn’t give Sebring much credit,” he says. “And I didn’t like the way he was (portrayed) like a houseboy or something.”
Sebring revolutionized the way men thought about the care and cutting of their hair, Markham says, another peer — hair legend Vidal Sassoon, who’d hosted Sebring and Tate as his London flat not long before their deaths — shared.
“He said, ‘You know, Jay did for men what I did for women’ — this is Vidal telling me in Beverly Hills for dinner,” Markham says. “I said yes he did. He started this thing with the daily shampooing and conditioner for men, that was Jay. He started the shaping, the cut that I did for 40 years, but he started it.
“He was the man. He was the one I give credit to because I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for him.”
