A CUT ABOVE; BARBER PROVIDES SLICE OF HISTORY.

Byline: Yvette Cabrera Daily News Staff Writer

Have a seat in Joe Olivo's barbershop chair. Close your eyes, let the scissors do their work and listen to the story of the barber who set a razor to Bugsy Siegel and gave Frank Sinatra his slick 'do.

Joseph Olivo is 93 years old, marching toward his 94th birthday Saturday. No. Better put, he's 93 years young and still clipping away three days a week at the Trojan Hairstyling shop in Encino.

He's a barber by trade and tradition who hails from a family rich with five generations of barbers.

After 80 years in the business, Olivo has developed a talent for storytelling that keeps his clients coming back.

``He's indescribable,'' said Steve Pollack of West Hills. ``When he talks to you, tears come to his eyes. He's just so warm.''

Olivo was working at his friend Harry Drucker's barbershop - located behind the swanky Jerry Rothchild's men's apparel shop in Beverly Hills - where legendary mobster Siegel would get a shave.

``Bugsy would come in and he'd start talking to everybody,'' Olivo said, spinning a tale. ``A good-looking guy, but he was a little bit on the nutty side. That's why they called him Bugsy.

``I used to sweat my eyebrows away every time Harry shaved him,'' Olivo said.

``There was a glass window in the barbershop that looked out onto Beverly Drive and there would be a Cadillac with two men smoking cigars parked where they could spot us.

``We didn't know who they were, but they looked like a bunch of hoods,'' Olivo said. ``You didn't know who was going to go in and start firing, but when you shaved those guys you had that in mind.''

Drucker always shaved Siegel, but once, when Drucker was out, Olivo was given the honor.

``It was scary, but I didn't care. If it comes, it comes,'' Olivo said. ``They were good tippers.''

Celebrities and family

His was the era of big-band music - the 1940s and '50s when bandleaders like Harry James, Paul Whiteman and Hal McIntyre would play at the Palladium and stay at the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, where Olivo later ran a barbershop in the basement.

It was there, in that two-chair shop, that Olivo's son, Fred, then 13, would visit his father after school only to find him playing gin rummy with legendary crooner Frank Sinatra and big-band leader Tommy Dorsey.

``He would tell me, Sit down, keep quiet. And then when they left he would say, Now don't tell your mother. Remember, mum's the word,'' said Fred Olivo. Fred, now 70, followed in his father's footsteps and is semiretired. He, too, works three days a week.

The parade of celebrities who came through his shop amazes Joe Olivo - from the original Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, to trumpeter Ziggy Elman.

``I was flabbergasted,'' said Olivo, who posed with many of the stars and keeps their photos carefully preserved in an album at home.

But for all the stars he met in the heyday of big-band music, these days it's the ordinary citizens of the San Fernando Valley who draw Olivo back to work.

``I talk to them, they talk to me; I tell them my troubles, they tell me their troubles,'' said Olivo, who lives in Sherman Oaks.

Armed with a counter full of pampering items like bay rum, talcum powder and after-shave lotions, Olivo can spend as long as an hour with a client.

``I take pride in my work, I don't rush anybody,'' said Olivo.

His love for his work results in $25 tips for $25 haircuts and produces customers like Ray Franzalia of Studio City who has visited Olivo's chair for 51 years.

``He's a hell of a good barber,'' said Franzalia, 91, and a former lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. ``I followed him all around everywhere, to where he is right now. He's one of the best shavers I've ever had.''

Sunshine brought him West

In 1904, the year Olivo was born in New York City, Americans got around in steam and electric cars. Theodore Roosevelt was president and the first official speed limits were set at 20 mph on country roads.

Olivo's father, who immigrated to New York from Italy just months before Olivo was born, owned the Olivo Barbershop on the lower east side, on Third Street, where Olivo would watch his father work after school. One day, his father asked whether he wanted to be a barber.

``I said, Yes, dad, and he says, Well, get up here and start soaping the beards.'' So Olivo dropped out of school after eighth grade to become a full-time barber.

He made the rounds in New York, including a stint at the underground Terminal Building of the subway system. There, Olivo and four dozen other barbers, dressed in spiffy white uniforms, would work 13-hour shifts.

It was the sunshine that brought him out West in 1937. Already married and with two children, he stumbled across his big break when he ran into a former New York client during lunch hour on Hollywood Boulevard.

``It was Jack Clark, the manager of the Hollywood Plaza Hotel and he gave me the shop at the Plaza,'' said Olivo. ``It's unbelievable. I guess it was meant to be.''

Today, just shy of his 94th birthday, Olivo is as active as ever. He rises at 5 a.m. every day to walk, mow his back yard, play gin rummy at a Burbank senior-citizens center and takes trips to Las Vegas with his son every few months.

``He has the mind of a 50-year-old and the body of a 94-year-old,'' said Pollack, a client for 22 years. ``He seems to have a real lust for life.''

Olivo just may be the oldest working barber in the state, though there is no way to verify that, according to Nancy Hardaker of the state Consumer Affairs Department.

``But my gut feeling is that probably he is, and I give him credit for still getting out there,'' said Hardaker.

Olivo vows never to retire. ``I have to die in the chair,'' said Olivo, whose wife died of cancer in 1991. ``That's the only way I'll quit.''

And with a life that he describes as ``a storybook,'' it's hard to imagine that anybody would want to close the last chapter.

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3 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- color) Joe Olivo, 93, who works at the Trojan Hairstyling shop in Encino, clowns around with his son, Fred, 70, also a barber.

(2 -- color) Joe Oliva, who will turn 94 on Saturday, gives a shave to Ray Franzalia, who has been a regular visitor to Oliva's chair for 51 years.

Michael Owen Baker/Daily News

(3) Barber Joe Olivo, center, poses with trumpeter Ziggy Elman and crooner Frank Sinatra, both clients.