When she graduated from Hollywood High School in 1961, Carrie White did her hair up in a bubblegum-pink beehive. She had learned, she wrote in her memoir, that “if I could get my hair right, my life would work better.”

After attending beauty school, she developed a reputation for getting other people’s hair right. And soon she was coloring, snipping and shaping the heads of Tinseltown’s superstars — Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando among them.