Truth serum would be wasted on Ron Weber.
The Chicago hairstylist was the king of unvarnished assessments.
There was the time he told a fiftyish matron unready to part with jet black hair: “Time to say good-bye to darkness, my old friend.”
His take on a client with excessive fashion accessories?
“You look like a circus in a phone booth, bitch!”
Mr. Weber used the word as a term of endearment, like when he called former WMAQ-Channel 5 Political Editor Carol Marin after seeing her on the evening news and said “Bitch, you had a piece of hair standing up on TV tonight. Can you not look in the mirror?” Or, when Marin would cook and invite Mr. Weber to join her family for dinner, he casually proclaimed, “Bitch, this needs more salt.”
“He was just the funniest person in the whole world, but he could lay you out,” recalled friend Randy McGhee.
Marin directed former WMAQ colleague Lisa Parker to visit Mr. Weber shortly after she started at the station.
“I was brand new and had a sterile hair cut, and Carol swept out of her office and just said ‘No. You are way too cute for that haircut. I’ve made an appointment with Ron for you and you are not allowed to cancel,” recalled Parker, who became a longtime client and friend.
Annual Christmas cards featuring a nearly nude Mr. Weber artfully adorned with a few sprigs of holly, or a tiny bit of Santa Claus’ red velvet, became an anticipated part of the holiday season for clients.
“He had a strut walking down the street like nobody and just a look: big fur coat, long blond hair, muscles, tight black T-shirt, tight jeans, unlaced work boots,” McGhee said. “Every day was a performance when he got dressed.”
Marin said that Mr. Weber came off as buff, tough and over the top, but he was a compassionate, caring person and a loyal friend underneath.
Mr. Weber died Dec. 1 from metastasized melanoma. He was 80.
Mr. Weber worked for McGhee at her salon, Magnifique, near State and Division, for more than a decade beginning in the early ’70s. He later worked at Timothy Paul at 100 E. Delaware Place. In recent years he cut hair from his home in Lincoln Park or made house calls.
Born Jan. 6, 1945, Mr. Weber grew up in Roseland. He was one of three brothers.
He had a passion for dancing at sock hops and would stand in line to get on a television show filmed in Chicago called “Jim Lounsbury’s Record Hop” that was akin to “American Bandstand.”
Mr. Weber was a sophomore at Fenger High School in November of 1961 when his mother, Sonya Weber, a singer at Chicago night clubs and piano bars, died in a house fire.
Mr. Weber had just stepped off a bus home from school with his younger brother Rick when they saw smoke, dropped their backpacks and ran.
“We were the first ones there,” Rick Weber recalled. Both boys entered the house but were beaten back by flames and smoke. Firefighters carried their mother’s body out minutes later.
“Ron was close to my mom. She was a sweet lady. We never talked about it after that,” recalled Rick Weber. “My dad said ‘I’m not moving back there,’ and we left the neighborhood and ended up in Pullman.”
Mr. Weber, who was gay, was diagnosed as HIV positive in the ’90s. He asked Marin to, in the event he died, look after his dog — a white golden retriever named Dylan he acquired after admiring a similar dog owned by actress Nicolette Sheridan. Mr. Weber maintained a strict health routine and owned two more dogs of the same breed after Dylan died.
In recent weeks, a circle of friends brought meals to his home and visited him at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
“He told one nurse ‘Your hair looks ridiculous!’ but the nurses loved him, too,” McGhee said. “He was telling them how in the ’80s he traveled as the personal stylist for the adult film star, Seka, which is a true story.”
A celebration of life is being planned.
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