Upper Cut: Highlights of My Hollywood Life

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.

Carrie White’s astonishing career took off in the early 1960s when women still wore white gloves and bouffants and there was no such thing as a credit card and reached its peak in the tumult and chaos of the 1970s and 1980s when she was sought after by every ingÉnue, leading lady, power broker, one hit wonder, and screen legend who craved a new look.

Carrie’s story is vibrant social history as seen through the lens of a woman who was at the center of it all. As the “First Lady of Hairdressing,” Carrie collaborated with Richard Avedon on shoots for Vogue, partied with Jim Morrison, styled Sharon Tate’s hair before her wedding to Roman Polanski, and got high with Jimmy Hendrix. She has counted Jennifer Jones, Betsy Bloomingdale, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, and Camille Cosby amongst her favorite clients. But behind the scenes, 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 professional life and her relationships, and today, the name Carrie White is once again on the door of one of Beverly Hills most respected salons.

An unflinching portrayal of addiction and recovery, Upper Cut proves that even in Hollywood, sometimes you have to fight for your happy ending.