Snip, Snip

White House barber wars (II)

Sensitive Middle East negotiations? Jawboning over the congressional tax increases? It would seem that the White House had enough policymaking tasks on its hands. But last week another dispute was resolutely tackled. The issue: who gets to cut whose hair and where.

The crisis had seemed resolved the week before, when it was decided that White House Barber Milton Pitts would work alone in a basement shop in the West Wing, while White House Hair Stylists Yves and Nancy Graux would move to a new salon (to be refurbished at a cost of $9,000) in the Old Executive Office Building. Now those salon plans have been scrapped, and the Grauxes dismissed.

A taxpayer-subsidized salon proved an embarrassment to the Administration, but it was finally some hairsplitting uppityness by the Grauxes that prompted their dismissal: unhappy with being exiled from the White House, the couple questioned the proposed salon's legality in a letter to Senator James Abdnor, a South Dakota Republican.

White House Chief of Staff James Baker decreed that from now on only the President and Vice President will get their hair trimmed by Pitts in the West Wing. For White House staffers used to in-house cuts, this new inconvenience was surely the crudest snip of all.