Charles Ross Dawson, artist, author, and hairstylist to the stars for some 30 years, exhibits his artwork, featuring entertainers from the 14th to the 16th centuries, at the Sage Room.
By Ward Lauren / Special to The Malibu Times
Malibuite Charles Ross Dawson, artist, author, hair stylist, ex-dancer, -singer, -sailor and seventh son of a sharecropper from the dust bowl of Oklahoma, hosted an intimate soiree at the Sage Room restaurant Sunday as a unique way to exhibit some of his latest paintings.
Consisting of 11 artworks, oils on board and pastels on paper, the exhibition was what Dawson said could be called, “My interpretation of entertainers from the 14th to the 16th centuries.” The paintings pictured jugglers, singers, dancers, actors, harlequins and clowns cavorting in a variety of colorful medieval settings.
Most of the approximately 60 guests at Sunday’s event were longtime friends, neighbors or working acquaintances of Dawson’s. Some had had their hair styled by Dawson time and again when he was in the business for some 30 years, among them actresses Sharon Gless and Lee Purcell.
“You see this wonderful color?” Gless said, indicating her short-clipped, blond-streaked hair, done especially for her recent role in a BBC-TV show. “There’s nobody I will let do this for me but Chuck. He’s retired now but he always tells me, ‘If you’re working, call me,’ and he takes care of me!”
Dawson, who won more than 50 trophies for hair design during his career, took care of an uncountable number of movie and television personalities through the years in his salon in Beverly Hills and later in his Charles Ross School of Hair Design at La Cienega and Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood.
Now “approaching 80,” Dawson first came to California during the Depression in 1937.
“We were Okies,” he said. “Came to California with a mattress on top of the car. Two families and 15 people. Spent two years driving up and down the coast picking fruit, bathing in irrigation ditches, staying alive.”
His father finally got a job with a dairy farm in Wasco. There Dawson’s father learned to clarify the water that was used on the farm, and before long became well known throughout the region as a water purifier. This led to his hiring by Union Pacific Railroad and a subsequent move to the small desert town of Las Vegas, Nev., then in its early stages of development, where the artesian well water with its high calcium content required a man of his skills.
“I was in seventh grade at the time,” Dawson said. “[I] went all through high school in Las Vegas. By the time I was 13, I was already at my full height of six-foot one and I was taking dance lessons part-time with Dick and Jean Loew. They got me some jobs and I signed with the Don Arden Dancers for musical comedy work. This was in the early ’40s.”
Dawson danced in shows at the nascent nightclubs that were springing up in the burgeoning city, starting at Hotel El Rancho Vegas, the first club on the Strip and the first to have a floorshow. A string of other engagements followed at clubs with names that now belong to the past-the Last Frontier, the Thunderbird, which became the Desert Inn, and the Tropicana, founded by the notorious Bugsy Siegel. There the Don Arden Dancers were featured behind the newest comedy team on the scene, two guys named Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
World War II interrupted Dawson’s dancing career while he spent three years in the U.S. Navy. Back in Las Vegas after his discharge, he went back to the nightclub circuit but found it was not quite the same as before the war.
“Things were slow everywhere,” he said. “TV was just getting started and the studios didn’t know how it was going to go between that and films, so there wasn’t much going on in the entertainment business.”
In 1949 Dawson returned to California to audition for “The Cisco Kid,” one of the first television series.
“In my early days on the farm I spent a lot of time on horseback,” he said, “so I had no trouble with the riding requirements for the role. Unfortunately, though, it seems I didn’t photograph old enough, so that finished that dream. I had to make a living so I used my G.I. Bill and went to beauty school to learn the art of hairdressing.”
While at the Marmello Beauty School in downtown Los Angeles, he entered a nationwide hair design contest and, somewhat to his surprise, he said, won at all levels: city, state and national. After graduation in 1951, Dawson entered another competition and won the California Gold Trophy, which was presented to him by dancer and actress Rita Moreno in a ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel.
Not long after opening his salon, Dawson was contracted by a group of major beauty supply manufacturers to tour the U.S. and Canada and teach hair design, styles, concepts and colors in a continuing lecture series. He continued this profitable sideline for 25 years. In between all his business activities he found time to attend the Otis Art Institute/Parsons School of Design (now known as the Otis College of Art and Design) near MacArthur Park where he studied painting and drawing in every medium. He put his art talents to use in writing and illustrating five books on hairstyle and design over the years.
In 1957, after working with one special model for two years, Dawson asked her to marry him.
“Diane is not only incredibly beautiful,” he said, “she’s got a real head on her shoulders. She became our business manager, got a real estate license and did very well. So now, thanks to her, we’re nicely retired.”
The Dawsons lived in Beverly Hills near his work for many years, eventually buying a Malibu Bay condo as a second home. In 1997 they moved to Malibu full-time in their present home on Seaview Drive in Trancas Canyon.
Dawson’s exhibition at the Sage Room will be on display through September. 28915 Pacific Coast Highway. 310.457.0711