Gibson isn’t the only out-of-town act with a following. Jennifer Aniston’s colorist, Michael Canalé, has been traveling to D.C. from L.A. for five days every month since the Reagan administration. Three hundred devoted clients book with him a year in advance. As soon as Canalé arrives in town, he sets up at a big dining table at the Roche Salon, where he moves from foiled head to foiled head, doing up to 40 women a day, mostly blonds, with a few brunettes thrown in for good measure, at around $300 apiece. “It’s almost like a little ballet,” he says. What keeps the corps in line is the avoidance of controversial topics. “We never ask about politics,” he states bluntly. “The groups that I do keep it in the voting booth.”
It’s a sentiment echoed at many of the city’s top salons. Despite toeing party lines on the nightly news, Washingtonians are bipartisan when it comes to beauty parlors. Still, as the staff at George realized three years ago, it’s impossible to completely control the salon environment, or what leaks out of it. In 2006 it was reported that a scuffle occurred there between longtime frenemies Pelosi and California Representative Jane Harman over appointing Harman head of the House intelligence committee. Ozturk insists the incident never happened and that, even with Harman’s more recent scandal (she reportedly was heard on a wiretap trading favors in a case involving pro-Israel lobbyists, but the Justice Department says she is not under investigation), the two are still cordial, at least in the confines of his space. “Usually they have the same hairdresser and they sit next to each other, so when we read it we were shocked,” he says of the 2006 item before summing up with a practical assessment of his salon’s culture. “[All of our clients] see each other with wet hair. They have to be nice!”
