All this talk about cash catches the attention of a colorist at the next station while she methodically brushes white goop onto sections of hair and then wraps them in aluminum foil on the head of a client who is madly pecking away on her BlackBerry.
The colorist is Giselle -- no last name needed because she was already famous in fashionable circles but is now even more famous after a gossip column revealed she'd declined to see her client of 20 years, Ruth Madoff.
"Oh, no," Giselle moans to her distracted client, "not another one asking about Ruth. I mean, reporters want to know how she tipped. Is there no such thing as confidentiality?"
Out of concern for clients who lost their fortunes, Pierre Michel's owners refused to allow Madoff to come into the salon for an appointment, even after hours. When 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 came to my senses," he says. "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 this time with just an edge of humor.
A diminutive but sturdy man, Whitmore is dressed casually this morning in light gray slacks, a fitted dark gray T-shirt and a black apron to protect him from stains. In camouflage sneakers, he glides between his station and the salon dispensary, a supply closet of 28 shelves stuffed with tubes of dye, gloss and peroxide as well as small pots and squeeze bottles, all instruments of science -- or art, if you're a true believer in custom hair coloring.
When he was starting out in the early 1970s, Whitmore dressed with more flair. As a salon assistant who spent his days bent over sinks shampooing and holding a broom, sweeping hair off the floor, he wore gold shirts open to the navel.
Those were anxious times, for both Whitmore and New York. The city was crime-ridden and sliding toward bankruptcy, and though a million people were fleeing for the suburbs, Whitmore, a young gay man, was going the other way -- from a stultifying life on Long Island to a first job at trendy Henri Bendel.
Whitmore met Maltz's mother at Bendel's, where she had a standing appointment every Friday to have her hair done before going to lunch. Periodically, Sue Maltz would slip into the back room for an hour because back then, 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.
