Reporting from New York — Times sure have changed for Manhattan's super-rich.
It used to be when James Whitmore, hair colorist to the pampered chic, hadn't seen a client for awhile it was because she'd extended a trip abroad or was caught up redecorating a second home.
But now -- with America's economy imploding and Wall Street bankers the prime suspects -- there's no telling why a woman-of-means goes AWOL from her beauty regimen.
After Whitmore hadn't heard from an elderly client of 30 years, he called her only to learn that her husband, a financial advisor, was in jail. He'd robbed a suburban bank at knifepoint. Actually, it was at plastic-knife point, but he still made off with $5,900. A witness recognized the getaway car, a silver Lexus, and police eventually arrested him at his office in Rockefeller Center.
"Her husband didn't tell her they were having money problems," Whitmore says.
There'd also been a death in the family and a suicide, Whitmore explains, but it was the collapse of the husband's personal finances -- and the stock market -- that drove him to crime.
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. "You go out of your way."
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. "There is no one more grounded than James or able to deal with loss or fear of it. 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 during what some call the Great Recession, he is again a bystander while an entitled world goes haywire. Bernard L. Madoff's astonishing Ponzi scheme cleaned out a whole swath of affluent and philanthropic New York, and those he didn't topple were felled by fear of what could have been.
This time even Whitmore has experienced the fallout. He too lost a bonus and two-week vacation, and ended up changing salons.
