A Beauty Salon Barometer of Trial

It is another day of cuts, color and commentary here at Salon Cristophe--yes, the Cristophe of Air Force One haircut fame--but the clientele no longer is impressed by a presidential sex scandal that has dragged on for more than a year.

The gaggle of news crews staked out across the street at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel in hopes of catching a glimpse of a certain former White House intern bemuses these professional women. The ongoing spectacle on Capitol Hill disgusts them.

A corporate manager who was getting her nails done calls the impeachment trial “purely partisan politics.” A hotel caterer in for a manicure and hair coloring dismisses charges that the president committed high crimes and misdemeanors as “a farce.” And a computer specialist who came for a trim complains that the House Republicans who are prosecuting President Clinton in a Senate trial just seem stuck on sex--despite their assertions to the contrary.

“I think that what he did was sleazy,” said Cheryl LaMar, 30, who calls herself politically independent. “But it’s a private matter, and the state doesn’t really have a lot of business asking about these things.”

Beauty Parlor Reality Check

In a city that runs on politics, beauty parlors offer a reality check. It is here, in nail boutiques and hair salons, that the rights and wrongs of the gender wars are debated and dissected every day. By now, the beauticians and their customers have combed through every conceivable knot in Clinton’s relationship with former intern Monica S. Lewinsky and the ensuing political drama.

Months of passionate GOP efforts to portray this as a grave constitutional crisis involving perjury, obstruction of justice and betrayal of public trust have influenced some opinions. But an informal salon survey demonstrates why Republicans are finding it difficult to convince the country that the alleged crimes of the twice-elected Democratic president warrant booting him from office. Most denizens of the capital’s beauty industry, like much of the public, think the scandal is less about the unbending rule of law than about the fickle rules of sex and partisan alliance.

“It had to do with an extramarital affair. . . ,” said Denise Parker, 47, a government employee. “We should have left it at that.”

To be sure, some hairdressers were leery of speaking their minds on impeachment for fear of alienating customers who hold opposing views. Cristophe, for instance, who gave Clinton an unexpectedly controversial cut on a runway at Los Angeles International Airport six years ago, smiled and declined comment.

But in most cases, mere mention of the I-word was enough to set off spirited discussion.

At The Last Tangle in Washington, where Denise Parker was waiting for her lacquered nails to dry, the consensus in a roomful of decidedly pro-Clinton women was that the impeachment prosecution of the president should be cut short.

“We’d like it to go away, very badly. It’s getting the whole country nowhere,” said Heather Kaye-Jacobs, 47, a management consultant who was waiting under a dryer for her hair to set.

Next to her, 34-year-old Ingrid Houston, a nail technician, said: “Everybody who sits here, they talk about President Clinton and Monica and how much they hate it. I would like to see them [members of Congress] have the same energy about welfare, Social Security, decent education, helping to get weapons and drugs off the streets. All those issues are really important.”

At Greatlengths, another downtown salon, Clinton fans and foes were said to be split “about 50-50.”

Meredith Hoydilla, 29, an international marketer who described her politics as middle of the road, said that she is glad Clinton “is finally having to pay for his mistakes. He’s gotten away with far too much. I think he’s abused power. I’m personally offended that he would lie to our faces.”

But Hoydilla said she is not sure whether the president should lose his job.

At another salon called Bubbles, manager Jamie Simon summed up a year’s worth of Clinton-Lewinsky-impeachment dish about as well as any blow-dried talking head might on television.

“It is such a partisan issue. It really is. The Republicans talk about lying under oath. The Democrats say [Clinton] was backed into a corner and lied about having a sexual affair.”

And Simon’s customers? “The majority of them don’t think it’s an impeachable offense. Not at all.”

Some stylists, not American-born, took a longer view of impeachment and its role in American democracy. At Zahira’s Hair Salon in the Watergate Hotel, Zahira Aziz marveled at the constitutionally choreographed power struggle unfolding before her via live bulletins on CNN.

‘Without One Drop of Blood Being Shed’

“What they are doing to our president is unheard of anywhere else in the world, without one drop of blood being shed,” said Aziz, an Afghan immigrant who has cut the hair of Presidents Reagan and Bush and has autographed photos on the wall to prove it. (But no, she did not cut Lewinsky’s hair when the besieged former intern lived at the Watergate.)

Though she voted for Clinton in 1996, Aziz said that she will be satisfied no matter how the impeachment trial is resolved. For her, the outcome will not be a nail-biter. “It would be lawfully done, and you have to accept the law.”