He cut Jackie Kennedy's hair. He witnessed Whitney Houston's final days. He moved among the most powerful women in the world-and kept their secrets.
In 1960, a seventeen-year-old Cuban refugee arrived in New York City speaking almost no English. Within a decade, Peter Lamas was styling Jackie Kennedy's hair-and listening as she shared her private suspicions about who killed her husband.
From Batista's Havana-where his father once shaved the throat of a man carrying a gun inside his own palace-to a Manhattan funeral home where he prepared Judy Garland for her final public appearance, Peter Lamas built a life that repeatedly placed him at the intersection of beauty, fame, and the private truths celebrities rarely reveal.
Over the next six decades, he would find himself in the rooms where history, glamour, and tragedy quietly overlapped. He was there when Vidal Sassoon gave Mia Farrow her iconic pixie cut for Rosemary's Baby. He spent time with Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, and Audrey Hepburn. He encountered Ernest Hemingway and Che Guevara in revolutionary Cuba. And decades later, he was inside Whitney Houston's hotel suite within minutes of her death.
Why did they trust him?
Because a stylist works in silence and intimacy-hands in your hair, close enough to whisper. In the chair, people talk. They reveal what they would never say anywhere else. Peter understood early that his scissors were more than a tool-they were a key.
Jackie Kennedy's Stylist is a memoir of reinvention across six decades and two countries-the story of a boy who learned to read a room before he could read the language, and who taught himself to belong in worlds that were never built for him.
Funny, candid, and deeply human, this is a front-row seat to the golden age of Hollywood glamour, New York high society, and the music industry at its most glittering-told by the man who was quietly always in the room.
Some people stand in the spotlight. Others are trusted with what happens just outside it.
Peter Lamas escaped Castro's Cuba in 1960 as a seventeen-year-old who spoke no English. Within a decade, he had become one of America's most sought-after hairstylists, trusted by Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, and Diana Ross. Peter was present for some of the most iconic moments in entertainment history - working alongside Vidal Sassoon when Mia Farrow got her famous pixie cut for Rosemary's Baby and later styling celebrities on their last days, including Judy Garland and being present the afternoon Whitney Houston died. His career spanned the Golden Age of Hollywood glamor and New York society, where he became a confidant to the powerful and famous. After decades in the beauty industry, Peter founded Lamas Beauty, building it into a multimillion-dollar natural products company sold through QVC and premium retailers worldwide. His transformation from Cuban refugee to celebrity stylist to successful entrepreneur embodies the complexity and possibility of the American Dream.Learn more at https: //PeterLamas.com
Jeff Nelson is a television producer, documentary filmmaker, and author. After studying at Yale and Stanford, he produced TV commercials and TV movies, and worked on Emmy-winning series including Cagney & Lacey.During the early internet era, he founded a pioneering educational media company that helped establish online learning platforms. He has written on topics ranging from handwriting analysis and litigation to diet, health, and plant-based nutrition.Jeff is the author of The Montecito Rules, a contemporary romance about class, community, and forbidden love among California's coastal elite - inspired by Jane Austen and reimagined for modern Montecito. He also wrote Fault Lines, a noir thriller drawn from his own experience producing in Mexico, in which a Hollywood producer's fight to save his doomed NBC mini-series pulls him into a deadly web of corruption and betrayal during the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. His latest novel, Lights, Camera, Roma - Mad Men meets Roman Holiday - follows a twenty-six-year-old American producer who lands in 1981 Rome with a suitcase of cash to shoot a sixty-second Coke spot and falls for the secret heir to one of Italy's most powerful families: a story of desire, power, and what it costs to choose love in a world where everything is arranged. Like Fault Lines, it's drawn from his own years producing abroad. Jeff brings his expertise in narrative structure and character development to help Peter tell his remarkable story with the intimacy and immediacy of lived experience.Learn more at: https: //JeffNelsonBooks.com
