Hair colorist at the split ends of Manhattan's rich

But by the 1990s, both the beauty business and the conversation had evolved. "No topic was off limits," says Whitmore, rolling his eyes. "I heard about clients' sex lives, their investments . . . you name it."

And, he adds, "you asked for things."

After he found out that a client was married to the deputy baseball commissioner, Whitmore, a Mets fan, asked for tickets to the games. Pretty soon he didn't have to ask. Clients offered -- tickets to the theater, dinner at hot restaurants. His client whose husband robbed a bank this year bought him a watch every Christmas.

The wider the money spigot opened and the more America confused plastic credit cards with cash, the more women felt free to change hair colors the way his mother used to change lipsticks. At the best salons, it cost them, but no matter. On a busy day, Whitmore saw 22 women.

In addition to spending $200 a month on a haircut, a typical client came every two to three weeks for basic color for $160, and then back again for highlights for $400. If a woman was fussy, she'd return two or three times a week to get a highlight on a single patch of hair just right. Female executives were dashing in every morning and dropping $60 to have their hair washed and blown dry before work. Ladies of leisure did less dashing and more staggering -- under the weight of jewelry and shopping bags and $20,000 "it" bags.

"I mean, who spends that on a handbag when there's hunger in the world?" Whitmore says.

He is less judgmental than that sounds because he understands what it's like to be caught up in the high life. He recalls years when he didn't even think about wearing $600 Commes des Garcons pants while mixing peroxide or after work drinking martinis with important clients at Elaine's on the Upper East Side. He eventually took a break from hair salons to become a personal assistant to singer Roberta Flack.

Until one day he realized "the limousine wasn't coming for me. I had to get myself back into the realm of reality." Life itself was also sobering. He nursed a beloved partner until his death and watched his West Village neighborhood convulse after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Over the years he got over the glitz. Now when he's not working, he's upstate on a farm he has set up to rescue animals. Though Whitmore gave up the high life willingly, he watches as his clients have theirs wrenched away.

"The vacations were endless, the building of homes was endless. . . . There was no bottom in sight, and even the office girls were coming to Bergdorf's," 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.

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geraldine.baum@latimes.com