Showman Spoony Singh brought Hollywood stars to life
It's not to everyone's taste, admittedly, but for the star-struck and celebrity watchers, a tour of America's tinsel town would be incomplete without a trip to Spoony Singh's Hollywood Wax Museum. A larger-than-life figure, with an unusual career to match his unusual name, he died last month at the age of 83. His family migrated to Canada from India in the early 1920s when he was just a toddler. A maverick go-getter even in his early years, Singh managed an amusement park and owned lumber mills before ending up in Los Angeles. Realizing that the real stars of tinsel town were scarce on Hollywood Boulevard, he decided to open a wax museum. It opened in 1966 and has been in business ever since. The bodies are made of fiberglass, incidentally, while wax is used only for the heads and hands. For Marilyn Monroe's statue, one of the all-time favorites, the head alone required four pounds of wax that was extracted from 56,000 bees. The museum also notes that it can take a team of sculptors, hair stylists, eye and teeth specialists, make-up artists, costume set designers, and special effects technicians up to three months and $25,000 to make just one wax figure.
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