Upper Cut - Paperback

by Carrie White (Author)

Shampoo meets You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again in a rollicking and riveting memoir from the woman who for decades styled Hollywood's most celebrated players.

I was living a hairdresser's dream. I was making my mark in this all-male field. My appointment book was filled with more and more celebrities. And I was becoming competition for my heroes...

Behind the scenes of every Hollywood photo shoot, TV appearance, and party in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, there was Carrie White. As the "First Lady of Hairdressing," Carrie collaborated with Richard Avedon on shoots for Vogue, partied with Jim Morrison, gave Sharon Tate her California signature style, and got high with Jimi Hendrix. She has counted Jennifer Jones, Betsy Bloomingdale, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, and Camille Cosby among her favorite clients.

But behind the glamorous facade, Carrie's world was in perpetual disarray and always had been. After her father abandoned the family when she was still a child, she was sexually abused by her domineering stepfather, and her alcoholic mother was unstable and unreliable. Carrie was sipping cocktails before her tenth birthday, and had had five children and three husbands before her twenty-eighth. She fueled the frenetic pace of her professional life with a steady diet of champagne and vodka, diet pills, cocaine, and heroin, until she eventually lost her home, her car, her career--and nearly her children. But she battled her way back, getting sober, rebuilding her relationships and her reputation as a hairdresser, and the name Carrie White was back on the door of one of Beverly Hills's most respected salons. An unflinching portrayal of addiction and recovery, Upper Cut proves that even in Hollywood, sometimes you have to fight for a happy ending.

Author Biography

Carrie White was born and raised in Southern California. A celebrity hairdresser with a career that spanned more than forty-five years, she has styled everyone from Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor to Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, In Style, Allure, Vanity Fair, and Ladies Home Journal. She is the author of Upper Cut: Highlights of My Hollywood Life which is being made into a movie starring Julia Fox. White died in 2022 at the age of seventy-eight.