Here Heads Get a Second Chance

Entering the room, you are caught off guard by the grisly display of 40 to 50 disembodied human heads carefully arranged on wooden shelves.

Hannibal Lecter’s recreation room perhaps?

Nope. You’ve entered the second-floor workroom of the Hollywood Wax Museum. The heads are wax replicas of Hollywood stars and celebrities unfortunate enough to have slipped in the public standing.

A small sampling of who resides in this hall of the discarded includes Alan Ladd (star of the classic western “Shane�), Sidney Poitier, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Peter Lorre, Elvis Presley (mutton-chop sideburns so out of hand that he resembles the Wolfman more than the King) and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (foam rubber under her face has expanded so much that she’s bug-eyed).

There’s also . . . well, stay tuned.

It is here that the heads reside in temporary retirement, eventually to find new life as hotter personalities.

“We save and recycle everything,� said Ken Horn, curator and chief wax artist of the museum.

To demonstrate, he picked up the head of ‘40s film star Errol Flynn.

“No one knows who he is anymore, but that’s OK. When Antonio Banderas’ ‘Zorro’ comes out, we’ll reincarnate him.�

That will be the eventual fate, too, of Humphrey Bogart (head so large a body to fit it would be 7 feet tall), Danny Thomas, Johnny Carson, Robert Redford (wax is so yellow, he looks like he has a bad case of jaundice), Bob Hope (if it weren’t for his ski-jump nose he would be unrecognizable), John Travolta (complexion is too waxy looking, and bears no resemblance to the heftier “Pulp Fiction� character), Geronimo, Burt Reynolds, Charles Bronson (looks too young) and Frank Sinatra (“Old Blue Eyes� has brown eyes).

It may sound cruel, it may sound judgmental, but the hard truth, Horn says, is that “people come to Hollywood to see stars. Unfortunately the stars are not as visible as they once were. So we provide them. We compete directly with the Movieland Wax Museum and Universal Studios for guests, so it’s important for our visitors to recognize the celebrities on display or they won’t come back.�

New heads cost $3,000 a pop. They’re cast from a composite of paraffin and beeswax, colored by melted crayons. Oil-based paints are then applied to add additional contour to the face and help personalize the features.

So it makes sense to recycle the heads whenever possible. The key, said Horn, “is to find a head with matching eye color and a similar width between the eyes.�

If these line up, the artist can sculpt and paint the face to achieve the desired look.

And so it was with the head of Dwight D. Eisenhower, which no longer belongs to the former leader of the free world.

The head now resides in the Chamber of Horrors as Ron Perlman, whose claim to fame is the role of Vincent from the TV series “Beauty and the Beast.�

With 225 exhibits on display and no room for expansion, the museum is already considering whom to move to the second-floor workroom for retooling.

Red Skelton is definitely a candidate.

“I grew up watching his show,� Horn said. “It surprises me to overhear my fellow baby boomers ask, ‘Who’s that guy?’ Even his recent passing hasn’t done much to boost people’s awareness.�

Well, always room for one more.

Including Adolf Hitler, who you would assume remains well-known enough for the main show.

Sure, people recognize Hitler, Horn says. He was brought upstairs because the museum staff got tired of cleaning spit off him.