Hair colorist at the split ends of Manhattan’s rich

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.

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 firms 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 who once bragged about spending sprees 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 to appear less indulgent. They stretch the limits between appointments from four to six or, heaven forbid, eight weeks.

So deeply felt is the loathing toward a former beacon of the high life who had the nerve to swindle fellow millionaires that not a single colorist would agree, at least publicly, to bleach the blond and reviled Ruth Madoff.

On a recent Friday before a holiday weekend, Whitmore is at his station in Midtown Manhattan painting pitch-black dye onto the head of Anne Maltz, who has had him repeat this process every two weeks since she became prematurely gray at 26. She is now 53.

As he attacks her roots, he explains how surprised he is that so many of his clients are relieved that he’s left the posh salon atop Bergdorf Goodman, a sanctuary of mauve walls and fantastic views above Fifth Avenue.

It’s not that Whitmore’s clients find Bergdorf’s unappealing. “You have to realize, the expensive jewelry counter is right in front of the elevators,” Whitmore says. “And you know something, that’s temptation.”

Whitmore relocated this spring to the equally luxe Pierre Michel Salon a few blocks east on 57th Street, a 40-year survivor of economic ups and downs with an entrance on the street.

Maltz is peering intently back at Whitmore through the mirror in front of her as he talks.

“Oh, James, I’m not walking into Bergdorf’s anymore,” she says. An attorney who lives in Brooklyn, Maltz doesn’t consider herself among the materially obsessed. But she explains, “I just don’t want to be tempted.”

Maltz says she is seeing fewer of Whitmore’s other regulars during her appointments, and when she does, “they’re talking a lot more about money, but not the way they used to.”

The wife of a successful New York contractor confessed to Maltz that she’d finally used a gift certificate she had tucked away in a drawer: “Her husband didn’t want her running through all the cash.”

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.

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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