When John Frieda started at Leonard Lewis’s Mayfair salon, his fellow apprentice, Robert Shipton, noticed that he was different straight away. “We’d both just started driving,” he remembers now. “But while I had a Mini; John had a four-door Mercedes. At 17!” The privately educated son of an Ealing hairdresser who wanted him to go into accountancy, or perhaps be a doctor, Frieda was not your average hairdresser. “He was the most focused human being I’ve ever known in my life,” says Shipton. “His whole thing was that he had to be the best, and if that meant not being a part of the junior crowd, that’s how he was.”
And he was the best – even as the new boy. The apprentice who paid the utmost attention to every crease as he folded towels – and even bought a small oven to warm them for his clients after a final cold rinse at the backwash – was quickly noticed by Lewis. After being promoted to the role of his assistant, before long Frieda was standing in for Lewis on the shoots that ran late into the night, often working with the legendary make-up artist Barbara Daly and a whole coterie of stellar photographers, including Clive Arrowsmith and Barry Lategan. “He got very good at session work,” says Shipton. “We used to go to Vogue House at 7 at night and do a shoot. The amount of alcohol consumed… I don’t know how anything got done! But it was creative – a mad time that’s hard to explain today. But still, John would take his work so seriously he would even go along to witness the retouching, because he wanted the hair to be perfect.”
In the ’70s, he stepped out from Leonard’s shadow to become a star in his own right. He opened his own salon in 1976, gave Joanna Lumley the “Purdey” cut that same year, then married the pop star Lulu in 1977, with whom he had his first son, Jordan. (The marriage ended in 1991.) At the New Cavendish Street salon he opened in 1979, the chairs were quickly filled by fashion royalty and actual royalty. “The clients adored him,” says Shipton. “He trained up Nicky Clarke, and they were like two peas in a pod with their hairdressing.” (Years later, the pair would fall out when Clarke opened his eponymous salon a few streets away, but they later reconciled.)
When John turned 38, his attention turned to the products he was using. “He had some products in the salon that he’d started making, but they weren’t professionally packaged or named or anything, and so he asked me if I would help him out,” says Gail Federici, who became Frieda’s business partner and brand co-founder. “And I said, ‘I have an idea for a frizz product for my hair. What do you think about working on that as well as your products?’ He said, ‘Fine.’”
That easygoing “fine” was typical of all their interactions over the years, between first launching Frizz Ease – a styling product that smoothed away the fuzz and fluff – and eventually selling it to the cosmetics conglomerate Kao in 2002 for $450 million. “He was always open to new ideas,” says Federici, who describes him as “calm”, “elegant” and “funny”. “It was an amazing, amazing ride, because we had really smart people working with us, and we got along so well… Even at the worst of times we could laugh at ourselves and then work our way through it. The respect that everybody had for each other, and the loyalty… it was really special.”
It’s easy to take the success of Frizz Ease for granted now, when pharmacy and department store shelves are crammed with legions of haircare and hair styling products. But back then, it was groundbreaking. “There were whole ranges of skincare for dry skin, oily skin, combination skin, but haircare companies only had shampoos for a hair type, not a complete range handling all the different characteristics of a specific hair type,” says Federici. “This was answering a massive need in a way no one had done before.”
Federici and Frieda’s strategy was to divide and conquer. “He was definitely the frontman, while also being very involved. He was in all the finance and business meetings. But he’s a hairdresser, and so while he didn’t love going out and doing TV shows, he was good at it – good with people – and so he spent a lot of time on the road doing press. Once I went to New Orleans with him, we found a model in a shopping mall and he did her hair on TV. Afterwards we’d go into the drugstores, and I’d say, ‘By the way, do you have that new product? Frizz Ease?’ And they’d say, ‘Since that English guy went on TV we’ve had a run on the store.’ John was magic, absolute magic.”
Julietta Dexter, co-founder of The Communications Store and his PR for almost three decades, who was introduced to him by ’s then beauty director Kathy Phillips, was in awe of his innate understanding of how PR works. “I’ve never, in all the work I’ve ever done, had such a hard taskmaster,” says Dexter. She admired his incredible attention to detail, along with his belief that it is often the tiny touches that change the game. “On one press trip to Antigua, he thought nothing of getting up at 4 in the morning, knocking on my door, and the two of us going to dress all the loungers by the pool in bougainvillea, to delight all the editors when they woke up.”
And yet, press was never something he courted for himself. “He’d say, ‘There is only one reason for coverage, and the coverage is for business. Unless you can explain to me what the business goal is, we’re not doing it,’” Dexter remembers. I had my own experience of this when I asked him why there was no book about John, knowing he had an archive of material stashed in a garage that could easily warrant its own exhibition at the V&A, or a bestselling autobiography. He replied: “But why would I do that?” None of which prevented him from heaping praise on those he worked with, and he would happily talk about the legacy of his old master, Leonard. He wanted the credit to travel backwards.
And forwards. While some in the world of hairdressing prefer the glory to reflect on the name above the door, Frieda was famous for discovering, nurturing and celebrating new talent. Sally Hershberger, famous for her era-defining Meg Ryan haircut, partnered with him on her salon in Melrose Place (it had a swimming pool in a courtyard) in the mid-’90s; Serge Normant, whose clients were Julia Roberts and Sarah Jessica Parker, ran the New York salons.
Nicola Clarke, the colourist who brought her clients Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow with her when she joined his Aldford Street salon, remembers at least a decade’s worth of conversations with him about whether she should set up a new salon in her own name. Finally, Clarke says, Frieda “sent me to see a really incredible woman who I didn’t know was actually a therapist, and he did it to help me understand that I was capable of running a salon as an individual”. It was the push she needed, but she set some ground rules: “I said to John, ‘If I want your advice, I know you will be there for me, but don’t come in and start changing things around just because you’re over from Ibiza or whatever. That’s not how it’s going to work.’ And he let me and Avery [Agnelli, John’s wife] and the design team get on with it. When we’d finished, I remember him saying, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done without actually being involved in it.’”
The admiration cut both ways: “I was in a meeting once with his lawyer, and we were talking about the film , and he said, ‘I’m John’s consigliere.’ And I said, ‘Well if you’re his consigliere, then I’m fucking Al Pacino.’ And John sat there and said, ‘Yeah, that’s right Nicola, that’s right.’ Because no one’s going to look after John or do for John like I will, and like he does for me.” Some of the staff at the Aldford Street salon have been with him for 36 years, notes Clarke. One of his final acts was to crown Cetera Lamb – who he’d known since she was a 15-year-old apprentice – with the coveted creative director position.
The warmth and love for his staff wasn’t always there – he had learnt it as he grew up himself. “He wasn’t very tactile,” says Shipton, of their very early days. “He was a closed book.” But then came periods in India spent learning to meditate, and a passion for reading – “War and Peace, back to front,” says Dexter. A year spent in hospital at the age of five became, half a century on, the inspiration for the charity he set up, Hair Raising, which saw him lead hairdressers around Ibiza on bicycles to raise more than £2million for Great Ormond Street. The man who was so shy he occasionally struggled to say hello to clients – Clarke remembers marching him across the salon floor: “John stop the flounce and go and say hello to this person” – became, in Shipton’s words, someone who “just wanted to help everybody else, because he was at the point now where he could”.
He was ill for a long time, and met it with everything he had in him. In June, Dexter organised a party to celebrate 50 years of the Aldford Street salon. He walked in to find half a century of his work on the walls – the famous portrait of model Penelope Tree with a bird’s nest in her hair among them – and later told Dexter it was one of the best days of his life. “He’d been writing down, in handwriting, everybody he wanted there,” says Dexter. “Then he’d check: Did you call her? Is she coming?”
I was there, somewhere in the throng, pushing through to say hello. When he saw me, with the warmest of hugs, he said: “Let’s go downstairs and take a picture.” And I felt the same frisson everyone felt whenever they sat in those chairs to get their hair done, and he walked in.
What will those closest to him miss the most? “His tenderness,” Clarke says, without hesitation. “How much he loved his family. When you’re part of his orbit, you’re in his family.” Dexter agrees. “He loved his incredible life, and he loved his family so much.” (As well as Jordan, Frieda had two children with Agnelli, Leyla Luna and Jackson, and last year proudly and happily walked his step-daughter Azzi down the aisle at her wedding to Franki Lagrange.) In April this year, he came to stay with Dexter and her husband Mungo in the countryside, and looked at her. “Juju, do you think we should cut your hair?” In 27 years, he had never offered, and she had never asked. “So we sat on my terrace,” she says, “and he cut my hair.”