Barber sculpted the stars' locks

The La Quinta barber considered them and hundreds of Hollywood celebrities his regular clients.

“I never got star-struck or nervous,” Jaloma, 78, said last week at his Bermuda Dunes home. “My biggest concern was not the star, but the haircut.”

For about 40 years, Jaloma worked in Hollywood as the barber to the stars and later as an assistant director for television shows and movies.

He left Hollywood in 1996, but never gave up his early interest in the field of “sculpting hair,” as he calls it, and now works at the Old Fashion Barber Shop in La Quinta.

Jaloma's career as a barber began when a fellow soldier in the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division spotted the scissors, combs and hand clipper that the man from El Paso, Texas, received from his father. The soldier had asked Jaloma to style his hair for a date.

The soldier's haircut was not perfect, but it was enough to grab the attention of others, and soon, Jaloma was giving haircuts to officers in the latrine of Fort Ord in Salinas.

Before he had enlisted in the Army in 1948, Jaloma told his family he was interested in learning how to style hair after watching local barbers work at a strip mall that his father owned.

Jaloma left the Army in December 1950 and went to the American Barber College in Los Angeles. He specialized in the traditional scissors, comb and razor cuts.

In 1951, he went for a job interview at 5151 Marathon St. in Los Angeles. It turned out to be the office address for Wally Westmore, head of makeup at Paramount Studios.

He went up to the fourth floor of the studios and ended up cutting the hair of actor Tony Curtis for the movie “The Prince Who Was a Thief.” The studio hired Jaloma after that.

Jaloma worked as a barber for Paramount Studios and Columbia Pictures from 1951 to 1963. His job was to style actors for movies as requested by the producers. Sometimes, he would style the actors' toupees, because some of them were actually balding, Jaloma said.

In 1963, Jaloma became an assistant director at Columbia Pictures and worked on movies like “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner” (1967) and television shows like “Bewitched” and “Battlestar Galactica.”

He continued to do the hair of his famous clients privately at their homes. Sometimes, he traveled to the desert at the request of clients Howard Hughes and Presley.

Jaloma retired from show business in 1996, after he started having heart problems, and moved to a Bermuda Dunes home he purchased the year before with his wife Nohora, now 52.

Jaloma said his wife, children and grandchildren are his priority now, but he also enjoys being a barber on the side. He returned to the field in 1997 at a barbershop in Old Town La Quinta.

“Being a barber was always a trade that I always liked,” Jaloma said. “I liked being creative.”

That's where Jaloma met fellow barber Oscar Chavez, 34, of Indio, who opened the Old Fashion Barber Shop two and a half years ago.

Jaloma does a great job and has plenty of customers, Chavez said.

“He is just good with people, and he is good at what he does,” Chavez said. “Ramiro knows everything.”

What a barber remembers

Longtime barber Ramiro Jaloma worked with plenty of stars back in the day. Here's what he had to say about some of them.

Humphrey Bogart “Every time I took care of him, he treated me really like a friend, not like a barber.”

James Stewart “He was such a gentleman and such a nice man.”

Ronald Reagan “He liked his hair very conservative, clean-cut and businessman-like, except when he was in a western movie.”

Elvis Presley “…a very nice guy and he would call me ‘chief' all the time.”

James Dean “He was an odd introvert and…a concentrated actor.”

Dean Martin “Dean liked a clean haircut that looked business, but he didn't like it looking like it just looked like he got a haircut.”

Cary Grant “To the epitome, he was a gentleman. He had that English suaveness about him that made the ladies go crazy.”