Split ends

After Whitmore hadn’t heard from an elderly client of 30 years,he called her only to learn that her husband,a financial adviser,was in jail. He’d robbed a suburban bank at knifepoint. “Her husband didn’t tell her they were having money problems,” Whitmore says.

Whitmore,59,tells this story without a trace of sarcasm. He is someone who has spent a career blurring the line between work and friendship.

“When you do something as long as I do and you’ve known people for as long as I have,you care about them,” he says.

But Whitmore is also someone who believes “that life can still go on when the Dow dips below 10,000,” says Thomas Collier,a friend and former assistant. “ And that’s so much what it’s about in salons these days.”

For more than three decades,from his listening station before the mirrors and next to the sinks in the best Manhattan hair salons,Whitmore has witnessed the wealthy as they faltered and bounced back. Now,he is again a bystander as Bernard L.Madoff’s astonishing Ponzi scheme cleaned out a whole swath of affluent and philanthropic New York.

More affecting has been a change in the mood in the fancy salons where Whitmore spends his days sluicing rivers of hair dye onto the heads of investment bankers’ wives,lawyers from white-shoe companies and editors of glossy magazines that are disappearing at an astounding rate.

The orgy of shopping is over,and the conversation has shifted to a sort of proletarian chic. Women now boast about how they’ve combined phone and online services to save money. They turn up at the salon in town cars instead of limousines. They stretch the limits between appointments from four to six or,heaven forbid,eight weeks.

Whitmore relocated this spring to the equally luxe Pierre Michel Salon a few blocks east on 57th Street. Out of concern for clients who lost their fortunes,Pierre Michel’s owners refused to allow Ruth Madoff to come into the salon for an appointment,even after hours. When fellow colorist Giselle mentioned to Whitmore that Madoff was looking for a colorist who would go to her apartment,his first reaction was “Oh,poor Ruth,I’ll do it.”

But in “20 seconds I realized she isn’t ‘poor Ruth’ by any means and really,it’s stolen money she’s offering,and why is she worrying about her roots,anyway?”

Whitmore says this in earnest,but with an edge of humour.

When he was starting out in the early 1970s,Whitmore as a salon assistant spent his days bent over sinks shampooing and sweeping hair off the floor. His first job was at the trendy Henri Bendel. In those days,women who lived on Sutton Place and Park Avenue didn’t want to be seen getting their hair dyed or eyebrows plucked. They also rarely exchanged more than a few niceties with their colorist.

But by the 1990s,both the beauty business and the conversation had evolved. Says Whitmore,rolling his eyes,“I heard about clients’ sex lives,their investments … you name it.”

Now although Whitmore has given up the high life willingly,he watches as his clients have theirs wrenched away.

“There was no bottom in sight,” Whitmore says. “It was all about ‘charge it and pay it off later.’ Now that’s over.”

But prosperous women tell their hairdressers that they’d rather go without eating than stop dyeing their hair. Of course,they’ve never been forced to go without eating.

“Coming to me is a release,” Whitmore explains. “A woman leaves here feeling right again,even for five minutes.”

It’s a semblance of what used to be.