Big hair days with Jacko

BY ALASTAIR PAULIN

For 20 years, Tommy Sims did hair and make-up for the stars, most famously Michael Jackson.

Now he owns a roast meal takeaway business in Motueka. <b>ALASTAIR PAULIN</b> tracks his course from the Hollywood Hills to High St.

Tommy Sims first met Michael Jackson in the late 1970s.

A rep from Jackson's production company called Sims out of the blue and asked if he wanted to help with some designs for the upcoming Destiny tour by the Jacksons. So he found himself hanging out with the rising young star, bouncing ideas back and forth and making sketches of hairstyles and wigs. He had just left high school.

It sounds like an abrupt entry into the world of Hollywood, celebrity and fashion, but Sims was no stranger to the scene. A third-generation Los Angeleno, he started modelling when he was six and by the time he was in high school knew he wanted to be a hairdresser. He loved to sing but had seen enough of the Hollywood life to adopt a maxim he repeats often: "Make me rich, not famous."

If that seemed unlikely on one level "I never thought I was going to make it as a hairdresser because I hated getting up and I hated going to work" Sims had talent and an eye for a niche. "I would go round to yard sales and buy old wigs and repair them and every drag queen in West Hollywood would buy them."

His hairdressing career took off when he went to work at the salon of Beverly Hills celebrity stylist Tovar. He was Tovar's assistant (like Madonna and Prince, Tovar only went by one name) and took over the celebrity clientele after Tovar died.

Among them was Bette Midler, who one day around 1980 asked Sims if he did make-up as well as hairdressing. "I don't know where the word `yes' came from," he laughs. She offered him a job doing hair and make-up on her upcoming tour and Sims was launched into a new career that would see him travelling around the globe, as part of the entourage of a range of stars of the show-biz world.

But first, he called every woman he knew and begged for lessons in the art of applying make-up.

He says now he had recognised that salon life was not for him. Still, as his own celebrity grew, he used it to charge $800 for a haircut. "When I came into a salon, I made sure my prices were higher than anyone else's. I wasn't looking to build a clientele."

The Bette Midler tour was a launching pad for him, and he became known for his wild hair designs. It was the 1980s, big hair was in, and Sims loved to work with artists like Midler who delighted in taking designs way over the top.

He was head-hunted to design for the Las Vegas showmen Siegfried and Roy, the camp German illusionists famous for their flamboyance and white tigers, and would fly out to Vegas to work two shows a night for them.

Looking through his thick scrapbook of photos and clippings that document his showbiz career, Sims points out a towering hairpiece he designed for a lead performer in Siegfried and Roy's show. It was constructed of three wigs, an elaborate necklace he bought at a boutique on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood and a "piece I found in Thailand".

"It's not the kind of make-up you wear on the street. It's completely over the top and that's what I love," he says.

Among the tours, salon guest gigs, work for hair product companies and celebrity clients including Farrah Fawcett, Raquel Welch and Kylie Minogue, his sporadic association with Michael Jackson was his longest and most fulfilling.

In Jackson, he found a willing collaborator for his theatrical visions. "Michael liked wild, the more wild the better," he says a driven performer who loved to be on stage and to entertain.

Sims' last work for Jackson was as the primary hair and make-up artist for the HIStory tour in 1996-97, which he calls "the most exciting thing I've ever done in my life". The 82-concert tour lasted a year, visited 58 cities in 35 countries on five continents, and was seen by more than 4.5 million people. "Michael's amped up, we're all amped up. We're going to see 150,000 people in Wembley Stadium today!"

Sims was Jackson's personal make-up artist and oversaw the make-up and hair team who were implementing his designs "keeping everything up, making sure everyone is doing your work perfectly".

A big part of his life on tour was shopping. Asked to describe a typical day, he laughs: "Shop, shop, shop, shop. Because who knows when you're going to get back there?

"I would go out and I'd find a piece of jewellery or a new jacket. Michael would say, `Where did you get that?"'

Sims would gift his find to Jackson until eventually he had to explain that he couldn't afford to hand over all his shopping, so instead it became part of his job to shop for Jackson. Once, he found himself flying back to Poland, the previous stop on the tour, to buy another jacket Jackson had admired.

He would accompany Jackson on shopping trips too, although "going out with Michael is not a pleasure; it's real work. You're stuck in the crowds, you can't move, security is very tight. You never know what fans are capable of doing. The fear that sets in when there's that many people is a real awakening."

That taste of the downside of fame was one of the factors behind Sims' eventual decision to move to New Zealand.

His house in the Hollywood Hills was on a private street, and yet Jackson fans would "congregate at the back of my drive and if I had the top down on the car, they'd put teddy bears, flowers, toys for Michael in the car".

He finds it incredible that he could be stalked just because of his association with Jackson. "I mean, really, I'm a make-up artist."

But he understands the passion Jackson inspired, calling him "one of the most amazing human beings I've met in my life", and admitting that Jackson was the only celebrity he felt starstruck around.

Sims grew up listening to Jackson songs like Ben and Going Back to Indiana but says that he didn't let his fandom influence his work or relationship with Jackson.

"Of course, I'd never show it because it's not professional and it makes everybody uncomfortable."

Sims first visited New Zealand with family in 1980. He returned here on the HIStory tour, and moved here permanently in 2000 with his long-time partner, lawyer Richard Hunt, whose parents, Sally and Robert Hunt, founded the luxury retreat Paratiho Lodge near Ngatimoti.

Once the lodge was completed, Sims and Hunt moved to their own house in the Little Sydney Valley near Riwaka, where there was plenty of room for Sims' growing menagerie. He had kept animals in Los Angeles but had to leave his three large macaw parrots behind they are now at Jackson's Neverland Ranch.

Sims had been with Hunt since he was 17 and says that when Hunt died in 2005, he wanted to get rid of everything that reminded him of their life together. He thought of moving back to Los Angeles but realised the city was the backdrop to their long partnership too. Thirteen months after Hunt's death, Robert Hunt who Sims refers to as "Dad" also died.

Sims says that when he and Richard Hunt moved to New Zealand, it had been to retire, but with his partner gone, he found himself getting bored. He worked at salons in Mapua and Nelson, and at a Motueka real estate office, but "I didn't enjoy it. I'm not an office person, I'm an artist."

In April this year he bought Coast Roast, a takeaway roast meal business on Motueka's High St. He and Hunt had been among the first customers when the previous owner opened the business in 2004 and became its "most regular customers".

Carving roast pork in an open-fronted shop on cold Motueka evenings doesn't seem like an obvious fit, although Sims cuts a dashing figure in his chef's whites and clearly loves the sociable, front-of-house side of the business. He knows lots of people in Motueka, remembers their names and asks after their families while slicing thick hunks of meat with an electric carving knife.

The business also supplies frozen roast meals all over the region. He bought a freezer truck and his driver delivers to people's homes, often stocking the freezer for elderly clients. Sims says their clients love the contact, travelling nurses are recommending their meals, and they are supplying some old age homes.

"I'm doing exactly what I want to do. I felt like in my last life it was all about money and publicity but here I'm in help mode. I'm now an entrenched member of the Motueka community and I've never been happier."

After a quarter-century of the jet-set life, does he not miss the glamour, the travel, the parties, shopping? Sims, who recently turned 50, admits he misses aspects of it but has no regrets. "That would be like saying, `Do you miss being 30?"'

He's at a stage of life to savour his experiences with the King of Pop. "My life with Michael Jackson was a gift."

- © Fairfax NZ News