Behind the Beauty Beds

Class of 1992, with Principal Stephanie Roberts being carried by her students

I did not set out to become the founder of a beauty college. I was pushed.

After being sacked from my position as head teacher at a renowned beauty college in Perth, I had two choices: retreat into the safety of another job, or trust the stubborn little voice that said I could build something of my own.

Years later, I would write about that sacking in When One Door Closed. At the time, I had no idea where the door I was opening would lead.

It was the nineties, when beauty salons seemed to bloom in grey, white and baby pink. At 53 Dundas Court, Phillip, I found premises with dusky-pink blinds, grey carpet and white walls already waiting for my white beauty beds and equipment. It felt less like choosing a building than recognising one.

There was an established and very polished beauty school in the next court, but I wasn’t interested in becoming a smaller copy of anyone else.

My business-school tutor had told me I would need startup capital of $100,000.

I had $10,000.

With it, I arranged two immaculate rows of twelve beauty beds and worktables.

That was nearly everything.

Then Ondina walked through the front door. She was one of Canberra’s best-known salon owners, while I was on my hands and knees cleaning the floor in blue drainpipe jeans and an oversized shirt, sleeves rolled up and hair falling into my eyes.

After introducing herself, she looked around and said, “I’m glad someone with class has finally arrived in the beauty industry.” I glanced at my dusty knees and wondered what on earth she could see. Whatever it was, we clicked. In time she became a friend, and over the years she employed many of my girls.

Still, I was waiting for my first student.

Then a young journalist appeared, and suddenly those pristine white beds were prominent on the front page of The Canberra Times. A new beauty college had come to town, Stephanie Roberts’ International Beauty Training College.

The telephone began ringing.

And ringing.

I called my sister down from Melbourne to help take enrolments.

Just like that, we were off.

We worked hard and expected our students to do the same. But somewhere along the way, something else happened.

The college developed a personality of its own.

A College Full of Stories

There was always music spilling through the college, threading its way between the hum of conversation and the clatter of equipment. Elvis might burst from the speakers while the girls pushed back their chairs and practised their rock-and-roll steps between lessons. They grabbed one another as dance partners, white uniforms flashing and shoes tapping against the floor as they twirled between the treatment beds, laughing before hurrying back to class.

The rooms rang with laughter and ambition, friendships formed over practical work, and every so often an ordinary lesson tipped into disaster.

Young Trudy considered herself the class expert in eyebrow waxing. I lay back and trusted her confidence, until the strip came away and part of my eyebrow came with it. For one stunned second, the room seemed to stop. I slipped out the back door for a private cry, pressed my fingers to the bare patch, then returned with my dignity rearranged. I relied rather heavily on an eyebrow pencil until it grew back. Her classmates made sure she listened to instructions much more carefully after that.

Chris became part of college life too, although for quite some time the girls didn’t realise who he was.

Every day, my ever-patient husband came quietly through the back door to collect the mountain of used towels we left piled near the workroom and take them to the laundromat. The students were nearly all young women and, during practical classes, were frequently in various states of undress. Chris would come in, gather up the towels, chat and joke with whoever was there, and quietly disappear again.

The girls simply assumed he was the laundry man.

“Isn’t that laundry man lovely?” they would say.

Chris apparently saw no reason to correct them.

Then one day, while he was collecting the towels, I called after him, “Love, will you pick up some steak for dinner?”

Tracey heard me.

That was the end of the laundry man.

The news travelled through the college at remarkable speed.

“HE’S HER HUSBAND!”

Suddenly, whenever Chris appeared through the back door, girls who had barely noticed the friendly laundry man before were grabbing for towels and covering themselves.

Chris, of course, just kept collecting the washing.

And then came Tanya.

I had decided that even my determination to do everything myself had its limits. With showers, toilets, treatment rooms, wax pots and mountains of towels, the college needed a cleaner.

I interviewed thirteen people before Tanya walked in. She was about twenty, her hair pulled back in a simple pigtail, and introduced herself with characteristic directness.

“Hi, I’m Tanya. And I’m autistic.”

Then she told me why she was perfect for the job.

“Being autistic means I can focus on one thing and do it really well. My thing is cleaning.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. Tanya soon ruled those treatment rooms with an iron mop. Any student foolish enough to leave a dirty wax pot behind was likely to hear her bellow, “Oi! If you lot leave those wax pots dirty, I’ll be madder than a cut snake!”

Tanya became far more than our cleaner. She became part of the college family, and eventually I found myself helping organise her wedding to Lang, complete with Tyler and Bert as her bridesmen and enough last-minute dresses, suits, facials, manicures and general commotion to take over the college. Tanya surveyed herself in her wedding dress and announced that Lang would think she looked like a wedding cake and might want to eat her.

There is much more to Tanya’s story, which I later told in And Then Came Tanya, but from the day she walked through my door, she was unmistakably Tanya, and the college would not have been quite the same without her.

Our older clients brought another kind of magic. Every Thursday, ninety-three-year-old Martha settled onto the couch, closed her eyes and drifted peacefully to sleep while the students carried on with their work around her. When she woke, she sat up and inspected the result with great seriousness. Then she would turn to us and demand, “Where is my Prince Charming, then?” It was the same question every Thursday, and although we all knew it was coming, we laughed with her every time.

Matilda, whom we called Waltzing Matilda, was eighty-five when she began coming to us. A professional dancer, she swept in wearing beautiful dresses, ready to have her makeup done for another night out. She would settle in front of the mirror while we applied her makeup, adding colour to her cheeks and carefully shadowing her eyes. When we finished, she would study her reflection, pleased with the transformation and ready to go dancing. Then came her other ritual: tea and one of the special biscuits I sourced from a bakery for clients over seventy. She danced on through the years until she died at ninety-three.

Then there was eighteen-year-old Jenny, and the day I thought I was dealing with a burst appendix.

She was doubled over with cramps, both arms wrapped around her stomach, her face tightened with pain. Believing her appendix had burst, I got her to hospital as quickly as I could. Then came the waiting: bright lights, clipped footsteps, doors opening and closing. At last, a doctor returned with news I certainly wasn’t expecting.

He looked at me and said, “Your girl is pregnant, Stephanie, and about to deliver.”

For a moment, I could hardly take in what he was saying. Her mother hurried in, and before long there was a healthy baby boy.

Jenny had been pregnant for eight and a half months without knowing it.

What made it even more extraordinary was that none of us had noticed either. This was a beauty college, where students spent practical lessons in various states of undress while practising treatments on one another. We saw Jenny every day, and none of us had noticed any sign that she was pregnant. She simply didn’t look pregnant. We were later told that she had carried the baby towards her back, which helped explain why there had been no obvious bump.

I had taken a student to hospital with suspected appendicitis and somehow ended up in the middle of a birth. Just when I thought I had seen everything at the college, something else came along to prove me wrong.

Our world reached far beyond treatment rooms, wax pots and examinations. Each year, the college filled with the rustle of costumes, the gleam of makeup and the excited last-minute fuss of getting ready for Mardi Gras. The girls dressed and preened in front of the mirrors, while Bert and Tyler stood at the head of our exuberant gang, surrounded by clients and friends from Canberra’s LGBTQ community. Those colourful days would eventually become another story, The Last Ride with Pride.

Friendships flourished in those rooms, and occasionally so did romance.

Henry was a Harley-Davidson bikie and the only man I ever trained. I admit I was apprehensive when he first approached me, but he was adamant. He had plans to open a unisex salon in Sydney and knew exactly what he wanted to do.

Then Eileen came to see me about enrolling. My classes were full and initially I had no place for her, but when a couple of students pulled out, I offered her one. She told me very little about herself, except for one comment that struck me as rather strange. She wanted to change careers, she said, even though her present job paid her a lot of money.

I didn’t know then that Eileen was a widow with four children to support and was working in one of Canberra’s legal brothels.

She joined the class.

And that was where she met Henry.

Somewhere between the beauty beds, practical lessons and everything else that went on in that college, the Harley-Davidson bikie and the widowed mother of four fell in love.

Their story became my own real-life Pretty Woman.

But unlike the film, their story didn’t end when the credits rolled. Henry and Eileen went on to build a life together and opened the unisex salon in Sydney that Henry had talked about when he first came to me for training.

They are still running it today.

Romance wasn’t finished with us yet.

Des arrived at the college after losing his wife and giving up the university teaching career he had loved. I persuaded him to come back to the classroom and teach anatomy and physiology to twenty-four beauty students ranging in age from sixteen to sixty-two. On his first day, they tested him mercilessly, but Des, standing beside Rastus, our much-decorated skeleton, met every awkward question with such calm humour that by the end of the lesson he had won them completely.

What none of us knew was that sitting near the window was Mary, my sixty-two-year-old student. Over that year, an easy friendship between teacher and student quietly became something more. As their friendship grew, I watched Des begin to come alive again after the loss of his wife. Eventually they fell in love and left Canberra together for Perth, where Mary’s family lived.

I later told their full story in The Anatomy Teacher, but at the time I simply had the pleasure of watching another completely unexpected love story unfold inside my college.

Around all these stories, ordinary college life carried on. Lives unfolded around the beauty beds, the warm wax pots and the endless cups of tea, with the soundtrack of the nineties playing behind us. Students leaned over their work in concentration; someone laughed from the next room; a kettle clicked off; the telephone rang again. The college was certainly a place where people learned a profession. But day by day, it became much more than that.

The Daughters I Never Had

I had two sons. Later I would have five grandsons. And with ten nephews as well, girls had been rather noticeably absent from my family.

Perhaps that was partly why I became so attached to my students. They became the daughters I never had. I trained them for careers, certainly, but over the years I also became involved in their lives: their loves, disappointments, challenges, ridiculous moments and triumphs. Perhaps too involved sometimes. But a school built around care was never going to stop at the classroom door.

Along the way, I was named Telstra Business Woman of the Year. I was deeply honoured, but the award never felt like mine alone. Too many people had helped fill those rooms with life. And when I eventually retired, it was the people I missed.

Even now, I meet former students at the Beauty Expo in Sydney or visit their successful businesses along the coast and back towards Canberra, and I feel the same fierce pride I felt when the first call came in from someone wanting to enrol. They didn’t simply reproduce what I taught them. They created businesses with their own signatures, just as I had hoped.

But when I look back now, it isn’t the award, the qualifications or even those first twenty-four white beauty beds that come to me first.

It’s the people.
Trudy and my missing eyebrow.
Chris, the unsuspected husband everyone thought was the laundry man.
Martha waiting for Prince Charming.
Waltzing Matilda dressed for another night of dancing.
Tanya ruling the treatment rooms and threatening anyone who left a dirty wax pot behind.
Jenny arriving at hospital with what I thought was appendicitis and leaving with a baby.
Bert and Tyler preparing for Mardi Gras.
Henry and Eileen falling in love between the beauty beds.
Des finding his way back to teaching, and finding Mary along the way.

The students dancing between lessons, the clients who became friends, the romances that began and the lives that changed while all of us were busy getting on with the business of running a beauty college.

And these are only a few of the stories.

I ran that college and student salon for years. Hundreds of young women came through its doors, along with clients, teachers, friends and some unforgettable characters.

There were disasters, romances, tears, practical jokes, extraordinary coincidences and moments that even now make me wonder how on earth we ever got any work done. Perhaps that’s why, all these years later, I still have so much to write about.

I began the college with $10,000 and a lot of nerve.

I thought I was building a school.

I didn’t realise I was also collecting stories.

—

This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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