The Golden Razor
The Golden Razor. William Gornik’s first shop, opened 1972.
William Gornik did not set out to become a barber. He wanted to be a Hollywood agent, and the whole story starts with a car, a road trip, and a friend who needed a ride.
Wheeling to Beverly Hills
He was born and raised outside Wheeling, West Virginia, and by his own account never had much formal training as a barber, despite his mother running her own beauty shop downtown. What he had instead was a 1963 Corvette Stingray and a friend named Larry, freshly graduated from West Virginia University with a job waiting at a CPA firm in Beverly Hills. “Let’s drive down,” William said. So they did, across the country on Route 66, the kind of drive he still calls something you could write a movie about.
A 1963 Corvette Stingray.
He dropped Larry at the CPA firm on La Cienega and Wilshire. Then, with no particular plan, he drove up Wilshire and pulled in front of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
The shop he wasn’t looking for
Inside the hotel was a barbershop. “The most incredible barber shop,” he says. “It was just elegant. It was first class.” He did not walk in to become a barber that day. He walked in because it was there, and it stayed with him. Not long after, he took a job down the street with William Morris, running mail, chasing the agent career he had actually come to California for.
The Beverly Wilshire was also where Florsheim, the Chicago shoe company, was putting in an elegant new shop of its own, competing head-on with Ferragamo for the American shoe trade. It lasted about five years before folding, but for a while it was one of the most elegant retail spaces in Beverly Hills, and its owner, Mr. Florsheim himself, had a regular barber there: an Italian craftsman named Jack Tamino, who ran the best clientele and the best tonsorial artists in the city.
A tap on the shoulder
William spent seven years around that world, taking care of an executive from Chicago named Bruce Rosette, a little older than William, who had taken a liking to him. One day, without warning, Rosette leaned over and asked a question that changed everything: “You want your own shop?”
The opening came from tragedy, not opportunity. Jack Tamino, the shop’s star barber, collapsed with a massive heart attack and died that same day, with his entourage of four barbers, two manicurists and a shoe-shine man still working around him. “Being at the right place at the right time was just incredible,” William says now, without softening how strange that sentence is to say out loud. “They needed me more than what I needed them.” He had never set out to own a barbershop. He just loved being around people, and the people around him kept opening doors he had not asked for.
Twenty-six, and it had a name
William took the shop. He named it The Golden Razor, and he owned it starting at twenty-six years old, in 1972. “The rest is history,” is how he puts it, which undersells a story that includes a 1963 Stingray, Route 66, a mailroom job at one of the most storied agencies in Hollywood, and a chance meeting that turned into a career nobody, least of all William, had planned.
The Golden Razor is not the name on the door today. But the standard that opened it, being in the room, being trusted, being ready when the door happened to open, is the same one this shop runs on now.
Read the fuller story of how that standard has carried forward on Our History.
Frequently asked questions
When did William Gornik open his first barbershop?
In 1972, at twenty-six years old. The shop was called The Golden Razor.
How did William Gornik get into barbering?
He came to California wanting to be a Hollywood talent agent and took a mailroom job at William Morris. Time spent around the Beverly Wilshire Hotel’s barbershop, and a chance connection to a well-known Beverly Hills barber, led him into the trade instead.
What was the name of William Gornik’s first shop?
The Golden Razor.