The Lucky Barbers

When he was in the U.S. last summer, British Cinemagnate Joseph Arthur Rank remarked: "I want to teach English women to look as well as American women." Last week he was busy on a deal to give the job to Hollywood's famed House of Westmore. Under the terms, Rank would make and distribute Westmore cosmetics in Britain. In return, the Westmores would do their best to make Britain's movie queens look just like Hollywood.

No one was better qualified to apply the glamor than the Westmore brothers, Perc (rhymes with nurse), 41, Wally, 39, Bud, 27, and Frank, 22 (now in the Coast Guard). Between them they have personally made up 90% of Hollywood's stars, trained nearly 75% of Hollywood's make-up artists.

The Westmores came by their skill honestly. Their father was a London wigmaker and hairdresser. He was also an iron disciplinarian: he once chained Perc to his wigmaker's bench. In 1909 he packed up his family and set sail for Montreal. There he got a job in a beauty shop. The pay was low, so at night he added to it by glamorizing Montreal's ladies of the evening.

Slip of the Razor. Eventually, the Westmores landed in Hollywood. There, in 1920, Perc broke into the movies by rescuing Film Star Adolph Menjou from the effects of a hasty razor stroke. Menjou had inadvertently shaved off half his mustache just before he was to appear in The Three Musketeers. Young Perc, a beauty-shop apprentice, fixed up the mishap so expertly that he and his father were hired on the spot.

By 1924 Perc, both leader and goad of the brothers, was make-up man for First National (later Warner Bros.), where he has stayed ever since. There he has quietly revolutionized makeup. First he invented the panchromatic base, a tan cream which would evenly reflect all lights, thus keep faces or lips from fading out. Then came the "hair lace wig," which added years of professional life to balding oldsters like Bing Crosby, Charles Boyer, Jack Benny and Fred Astaire, and molded rubber faces for Frankenstein's monster & Mr. Hyde. He also devised a foolproof method for other make-up men to use. He catalogued all women's faces in five basic types, i.e., Claudette Colbert has a "diamond" face, Ann Sheridan a "square" face, etc. The same technique is applied in making up all faces of the same type. For these things, Perc became the highest-paid make-up artist in the world, getting $50,000 a year from Warner Bros. (At Paramount, Wally gets $35,000.)

Slip of the Hand. But when Perc and his brothers branched out into the beauty business in 1933, in a pink-brocaded, chromium and black-glass salon on Sunset Boulevard, their, hand slipped. None had any business sense. The House of Westmore almost folded before they hired a businessman, S. Willard Isaacs, former owner of a local beauty-shop chain, to run it. He still runs the House of Westmore. Last year it grossed $2,225,000 from the sale of Westmore products, $300,000 more from the salon, paid the brothers both salaries and handsome dividends.

Through their pending deal with Rank, the Westmores hope to take a long step toward becoming the world's biggest sellers of cosmetics. But even the present size of the business leaves Perc a little dumbfounded. Said he: "This is all pretty silly. We're really just a bunch of lucky barbers."

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