A Life, Loving Locks
To drive down any major street in Los Angeles is to bypass hidden history — often.
Head north on Doheny Drive towards Sunset in West Hollywood, for instance, and you'll pass 882 N. Doheny, a midcentury apartment complex — unadorned, nondescript. Inside apartment no. 3, nearly 50 years ago, a young hairdresser named Jimie Morrissey was standing in front of a vanity mirror, his hands touching the blond locks of the world's most famous movie star, if one who had seen better days and was living on her own after a well-publicized divorce.
When Jimie tells this story today in his West Hollywood studio apartment jammed with Louis XIV furniture, paintings of male nudes and a large mirror with a frame dating from 1884 that once hung in Marion Davies’ beach house, his own tone is breathy, whispered. He looks upward, staring vacantly, as though he is somehow back in that apartment on Doheny in 1962.
As Jimie set her hair, he listened as Marilyn Monroe spoke in low tones. Gloria Lovell, Frank Sinatra's secretary and a next-door neighbor of Marilyn’s, was also in the room. At that time Marilyn occasionally dated Sinatra, but the attraction was stronger for him than for her.
"You know, Gloria," Marilyn said, "I’m having dinner with … that man tonight.”
"You are?" Gloria asked.
"Yes. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow."
Marilyn was talking in code, of course, about a Kennedy.
Jimie met Marilyn about eight months before she died of an overdose of barbiturates. At that point, she was addicted to pills and drinking heavily — mostly champagne. Marilyn had stashed a crowbar outside of her apartment in case she had locked herself out and needed Jimie to open a window to get in. One evening when Jimie had stayed over at Gloria's after an intimate dinner, he heard someone entering her apartment and awoke to find Marilyn, disheveled and drunk, staggering towards him as he lay on the couch. Marilyn’s eyes welled up with tears as she saw his shocked reaction to her condition and whispered, “Oh, Jimie, I never wanted you to see me like this.”
He is silent after he repeats that quote. The moment, it seems, is still raw for him.
You've likely never heard of Jimie Morrissey, though his hands have touched the manes of more famous men and women in Los Angeles than we can count — Marilyn's included. Long before celebrity hairstylists like Frederic Fekkai or Sally Hershberger judged hairstyle reality shows and juggled A-list clients, there were men like Jimie, who began his career at 17 in Florida and became famous for his mastery of coloring. Eartha Kitt was a devoted client, as was Sunset Boulevard’s Gloria Swanson. Name any on-screen siren or television sensation from days long past — Farrah, Zsa Zsa, Charo — and he's likely got a story to tell. Jimie is truly one of the last of his generation. He turns 82 next week (Sylvia Barnhart, Marilyn's hairdresser earlier in her career, died in February).