OK, you're a kid who has nothing better to do than to watch episodes of '
Leave It to Beaver" with your friends just to see the name
Florence Bush scroll past. Think of six
Beavis and Butthead types giggling at the word
bush.
Luckily I grew up and got a life, but for some odd reason I just remember that this lady was the hairstylist for a lot of the shows I used to watch.
Florence Bush worked almost exclusively on TV shows as the main hairstylist, making people like Mrs. Cleaver look very Mom-like and Ward look dapper. She ventured into movies only three times, one of the three happened to be the movie Psycho in 1960. Florence is the woman who helped Janet Leigh look so enticing and Anthony Perkins look so, well, psycho. Florence happened to be in the right place at the right time. She did a lot of work on the original TV show "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", and Mr. Hitchcock remembered her work after he had cast his movie, so Florence was hired as the main hairstylist.
Ms. Bush apparently was pretty good at making people look insane, as she also did stints on the old Boris Karloff TV series Thriller. Her big start came in 1955, when she was the main hairstylist for the very popular series Gunsmoke. Apparently there's not much between an insane person's hairdo and a windblown cowpoke's coif.
Unfortunately, not much is known about Florence. Most of the above information came from the IMDb and snippets from old TV shows scattered all over the web. Nobody knows when she was born or when or if she died. She was older when she began working on the TV series, so it is probable that she passed on years ago.
Florence Bush worked on the following shows:
- Meanest Men in the West, The (1967) (TV) (hair stylist)
- The Raiders (1963) (hair stylist)
- "McHale's Navy" (1962) TV Series (hair stylist)
- "The Virginian" (1962) TV Series (hair stylist)
- Gunfight in Black Horse Canyon (1961) (TV) (hair stylist)
- "Checkmate" (1960) TV Series (hair stylist)
- "Thriller" (1960) TV Series (hair stylist)
- Psycho (1960) (hair stylist)
- "Overland Trail" (1960) TV Series (hair stylist)
- "Shotgun Slade" (1959) TV Series (hair stylist)
- "Leave It to Beaver" (1957) TV Series (hair stylist)
- "M Squad" (1957) TV Series (hair stylist)
- "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (1955) TV Series (hair stylist)
- "Gunsmoke" (1955) TV Series (hair stylist) (1965)