High Steaks: At lunch with Brisbane hairdresser to the stars Carole Haddad

Politicians, socialites and TV stars – Carole Haddad is hairdresser to Queensland’s elite. She is so beloved, many of her clients are willing to go to extreme lengths for her.

Celebrity hairdresser Carole Haddad at Rich and Rare, West End, having lunch with Kylie Lang. Picture: David Clark

Questioning if Carole Haddad is a drama queen is like asking if the Pope is Catholic.

Not that the celebrity hairdresser sweats the small stuff – she’s been through too much in her 58 years for that – but a drama queen in the sense that when it comes to performing, she reigns supreme.

Carole Haddad, aged 8, at her First Holy Communion, in Lebanon, in 1972. Photo: Supplied.

It’s one reason the nuns, who raised Carole from age four to 15 in a Maronite Catholic convent in Lebanon, were glad to see her move to Australia.

To use the current vernacular, she’s a lot.

We’re not five minutes into our lunch at Rich & Rare, an elegant restaurant in the gentrified part of West End, and Carole is attracting attention.

Perhaps people recognise her from the 2022 reality TV dating show My Mum Your Dad, or a new series called Ageless, which follows 11 Australians over 50 who have an unbridled zest for life. They might have seen her in The Courier-Mail, including last year when a terrifying ordeal threatened to end her award-winning career.

Or maybe it’s just her laugh – loud, long and climbing octaves. If Carole were a soprano, she’d shatter glass. Good thing we’re not having wine.

“Oh my god, if you see the convent where I grew up, you’ll go, ‘no way’, it’s a proper nunnery!” she shrieks.

“I was always a good girl but always a character – I excelled at drama, I got 10 out of 10 – but even the nuns said to me, ‘You need to live a big life somewhere, you gotta get out of here’.”

“Here” is the historic Ain Warka-Ghosta convent – and its school which began in the 1950s to take in poor and abandoned girls – in a village outside Beirut overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

Carole and younger sister Hayat were sent there after their hairdresser father Nicholas abruptly left the family and their mother Coline, a beautician, could look after only the two older children, Lorraine and Fadi.

Carole Haddad, aged 8, giving a speech at the convent in Lebanon where she was raised by nuns until age 15. Photo: Supplied.

“You’ve got to understand, this was Lebanon in the 1960s, very traditional, women couldn’t have babysitters,” Carole says, without any trace of bitterness.

“Mum could drop my older sister and brother to school on the way to work and they’d walk home. Me, I actually prayed for hours, and in between I was very loud.”

Carole squeals when our meals arrive. I think of the nuns.

“Look at this! – get out – oh my god, we love you,” she says to the waiter, who breaks into a wide smile.

First to land is my 250g petite tender – grain-fed wagyu from one of Gina Rinehart’s Hancock cattle stations in NSW. It comes sliced, and at $48 is the cheapest steak on the menu.

Carole’s 200g eye fillet, $52, is grass fed from Australia Meat Holdings’ central Queensland operation, and before she’s even taken a second bite, she carves off a generous chunk and forks it on to my plate.

“You’ve got to try this – it’s amazing, I knew it would be, I can tell,” she says.

“We could have done without those,” she nods, dismissing the fries. Not that they’re not good, but our complimentary sides of iceberg lettuce with shaved parmesan, and beans with goat curd and chilli are ample.

We go back to Beirut.

“One day my mum came to the convent and said, ‘OK, your dad rang and he’s in Australia’, and it was the middle of the (Lebanese civil) war, so in 1979 we all came to the airport of Brisbane and straight to Dalby – what a culture shock.”

Why Dalby, a sleepy town on Queensland’s Western Downs? “I think it was because my dad had relatives in Longreach who ran a fish and chip shop, and his brother George was a hairdresser in Brisbane City,” she says.

I later discover it was George Haddad who did my mother’s hair for her 1963 wedding, although I’ve not had the pleasure of sitting in a Haddad salon chair.

Carole continues: “When I arrived here I didn’t speak a word of English.”

“You still don’t,” I say, in a friendly dig at her broad Aussie accent.

“God I love you, Kylie,” she giggles. “You know, at school in Dalby (Our Lady of the Southern Cross College) I used to answer to my name and it was ‘Woggy’, but I didn’t know what it meant.”

Carole Haddad with daughter Pricilla Tarabay during Carole's cancer treatment in 2007. Photo: Supplied.

Carole Haddad with daughter Pricilla in 2002. Photo: Supplied.

During the holidays, Carole worked in her father’s salon – “mind you, he’s a true ‘Leb’, he never paid me, of course we don’t pay our children when they work!” – but he was dead against her following in his footsteps.

“He sacked me. I was just too loud, everywhere I go, and my father said, ‘you’ll never make it’, and I said, ‘watch me … I’m going to be No.1’.”

Since founding Corcorz Hair in 1997, Carole has amassed more than 450 awards, including the Australian Hair Fashion Awards’ Queensland Hairdresser of the Year in 2009.

Her clients include designer Camilla Franks, Health Minister Shannon Fentiman, comedian Gretel Killeen and TV personality Sandra Sully – as well as a host of Brisbane identities such as fashionista Di Cant and model agency boss Jodie Bache-McLean.

Carole’s worked behind the scenes too, at fashion weeks in New York, Paris, London, Sydney and her beloved Brisbane.

“I’ve got 600 clients on my books, and two part-time staff who’ve been with me for 27 years, but they all come for Carole,” she says, polishing off her meal at breakneck speed.

“I had a client for 40 years who’s just passed; I’m included in going to the hospital to say goodbye, I’m included in Christmases, that’s massively wow, that’s how I judge Carole.”

Trust in a two-way street.

Last January she slipped and fell down the stairs of her West End home – her salon is on the ground floor – and smashed both wrists.

“It was horrific,” she says. “I had to have five surgeries and get metal plates put in. I couldn’t use my hands for eight months. Who was there? My customers – they came to bathe me, I’m shocked.

“My family too, but my god, some of the people you wouldn’t think, they’re washing my ‘bits’, and the ones you really think would come and visit once a week, you never hear from again.

“So there’s a lot of reality when you get sick, and that’s why I treasure the people I have. Like, sorry Kylie, but if something happened to you, I’m there.

“I’m into battle for my people. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

In 2006 Carole was diagnosed with breast cancer and began treatment.

“This was the hardest time of my life,” she says. “They removed a 4.5cm tumour, and I went, ‘yay, I’ve survived’, then they told me there is an 80 per cent chance of it coming back, so I live by the beast every day and (that’s) why I live it by the heart.

“People can have an opinion, people don’t have to like me, I don’t care.”

There is something else.

“So I get out of cancer to go celebrate with my older sister (Lorraine was living in Lebanon at the time) and then she was murdered.”

Say what?

Celebrity hairdresser Carole Haddad at Rich and Rare, West End, having lunch with Kylie Lang West. Picture: David Clark

“She was murdered by a neighbour; she’d lent him money and when he couldn’t repay it, he snapped and attacked her with a garden axe,” Carole says.

“The cops said she fought for her life, she grabbed a kitchen knife and started stabbing him but he was going for her with that thing – it was stuck in her head when she was found.

“He’s in jail in Lebanon, and her body came back to us; she is buried in Mt Gravatt Cemetery.”

Carole’s younger sister Hayat is a stay-at-home mother in Melbourne and brother Fadi is a hairdresser, in the Brisbane suburb of Hamilton.

Lorraine, who was a diplomat and never married or had children, died at age 48, just days before Christmas in 2008.

“My mum fell apart,” Carole says. “It is the worst thing to lose a sibling but I couldn’t imagine to lose a child.”

Coline Haddad is now 95 and lives at Nazareth Residential Aged Care, Woolloongabba. She has advanced dementia and stage-four lung cancer.

“I visit her every day at 5.30pm; I love it,” says Carole, who until six years ago cared for her mother at home.

“She’s been non-verbal for about a year. I don’t walk in and she says, ‘hi my darling’. With dementia, every little stage it worsens, you grieve.

“It slaps you in the face when you start seeing your parents decline. No one tells you about it.

Carole Haddad’s father Nicholas

When I was a young girl, never once did I say to myself, ‘I’m going to be responsible for my parents’; we don’t think that way because we take advantage, don’t we?”

Carole also nursed her father in his final years.

“At his funeral (in 2014) everybody told me, ‘he was so proud of you’, but he never, ever told me.”

Coffee arrives and we’re running out of time to discuss one of Carole’s favourite subjects: men.

She brightens. “Oh yes, I’m definitely open to dating, but I just want everyone to know that I’m nearly 22,000 days old, I am going through menopause – just the pause, not the men – and I love to party,” says Carole, who doesn’t drink alcohol.

“I am not a person to go on Tinder – I’m not going to be flicked (swiped left), are you serious?”

Carole split from her former partner Ronnie Tarabay (a Newstead property developer) when she was 16 weeks’ pregnant with their only child Pricilla.

Pricilla Tarabay is now 23 and studying psychology. She also appeared on My Mum Your Dad, a dating show for which kids nominate their single parents and Carole describes as “lots of fun”.

“Obviously, I don’t care about the cameras because I’m not pretending. People say, ‘Aren’t you worried about putting yourself out there?’ What’s to put out there? It’s me!”

Not one to sit still, Carole, who recently gained her real estate licence, is “100 per cent available” for more TV.

“I think I’d be the best bachelorette ever. I’d love to be giving roses to all those men, imagine that! That’s a dream come true – the Golden Bachelorette!”

I wonder if this is what the nuns in Lebanon meant by “a big life”.

CAROLE HADDAD

STEAK: 200g eye fillet, pepper sauce, with iceberg lettuce and green beans. $52.

LOCATION: Rich & Rare Restaurant, West End.

CAROLE’S RATING: 9/10