Jay Sebring

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Jay Sebring , actually Thomas John Kummer (born October 10, 1933 in Birmingham , Alabama , † August 9, 1969 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American hairdresser who mainly worked as a style and type consultant in Hollywood film productions. In 1964 he discovered Bruce Lee, who was still relatively unknown at the time, for Hollywood. He gained notoriety as a murder victim of the Manson Family .

Life

Thomas John Kummer grew up with two siblings near Detroit . After high school , he served in the US Navy during the Korean War . He then went to Los Angeles and changed his name to "Jay" (after the first letter of his middle name) and "Sebring" (after the Sebring 12-hour race in Florida ).

Jay Sebring quickly made a name for himself in Hollywood for innovative styling and was soon one of the advisors to film actors Steve McQueen and Kirk Douglas . Sebring was responsible for the hairstyle on the set of the film Spartacus and for the film Two Bandits with Paul Newman and Robert Redford .

In 1964, Sebring met and fell in love with young ambitious actress Sharon Tate in Hollywood . But the relationship did not last long: Tate met the young director Roman Polański while filming Dance of the Vampires in 1966 , whom she eventually married. Nevertheless, Sebring remained close friends with the Tate-Polański couple.

Professionally things were looking up for the hair stylist. Sebring International was soon to be one of the hippest hair and styling salons on the west coast. At a Polański party, he met the young couple Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski , who were friends with Polański, in the summer of 1968 . Folger, heiress of a coffee company, later supported Sebring with investments and the marketing of its hair care products. Although Sebring never had the ambition to be an actor himself, he made a brief appearance in the 1960s on an episode of the television series Batman , in which he called himself "Mr. Oceanbring ”played himself.

The murder

On the evening of August 9, 1969, Jay Sebring visited a Mexican restaurant in Bel Air with Tate, Folger, and Frykowski . After dinner, the company went to Tate and Polanski's estate on Cielo Drive . Late that evening, three members of the Manson Family ( Susan Atkins , Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles Watson ) broke into Tate and Polański's (who was filming in London at the time) mansion and murdered Tate and her three guests, as well as the more accidentally one on the Plot present Steven Parent in a brutal way. Watson shot Sebring after he repeatedly called for the condition of Tate, who was eight months pregnant, to be considered. While Sebring lay dying on the floor, Watson stabbed him several times with a knife.

Sebring was buried on August 13, 1969 in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Southfield , Michigan .

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