Habla el peluquero de Romney

The New York Times:

Nobody has a more complicated and intimate relationship with Mr. Romney’s hair than the man who has styled it for more than two decades, a barrel-chested, bald Italian immigrant named Leon de Magistris.

For years, Mr. de Magistris said in an interview, he has tried to persuade Mr. Romney, 64, to loosen up his look by tousling his meticulous mane.

“I will tell him to mess it up a little bit,” said Mr. de Magistris, 69. “I said to him, ‘Let it be more natural.’ ”

The suggestion has not gone over well. “He wants a look that is very controlled,” Mr. de Magistris said. “He is a very controlled man. The hair goes with the man.”

Mr. Romney’s is a restrained, classic look: short at the neck, neat on the sides and swept back off the forehead. “It is not something stylish,” Mr. de Magistris noted. “It is clean and conservative.”

The cut is so recognizable that men in this well-heeled suburb of Boston ask for it by name. “The Mitt,” they whisper to Mr. de Magistris from the red vinyl chairs in his upscale salon, Leon & Co., a few blocks from the sprawling home where Mr. Romney raised his family.

Mr. de Magistris, who gave Mr. Romney a $70 trim three weeks ago, agreed to share some of the secrets behind his most famous client’s coiffure in between haircuts the other day.

No, he said, Mr. Romney does not color his hair. Any such artificial enhancement, Mr. de Magistris said, “is not — what do you call it? — in his DNA.”

Despite holding its shape under all but the most extreme conditions, it is gel and mousse-free. “I don’t put any product in there,” he avowed.

And there is this: Sometimes, during long spells on the campaign trail, Mr. Romney trims his own hair, much to the dismay of his stylist. “It doesn’t make me happy,” Mr. de Magistris said, “but what can I do?”

Despite his reservations about Mr. Romney’s ultraconservative look, Mr. de Magistris is extremely protective of the former Massachusetts governor.

A few weeks ago, when he tuned in to watch a Republican presidential debate, he was startled to see that somebody else had cut Mr. Romney’s hair.

“It was just O.K.,” Mr. de Magistris said. “It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great.”

He paused. “It was not as nice as it would have been if I’d done it,” he concluded.

Mr. de Magistris began cutting Mr. Romney’s hair at the suggestion of the governor’s wife, Ann, a longtime client. Before that, Mr. de Magistris said, Mrs. Romney had occasionally trimmed her husband’s hair at home, despite the family’s growing wealth from Bain Capital, the private equity business that Mr. Romney founded and ran.

Mr. Romney quickly took to Mr. de Magistris: between snips, the men bonded over their passion for politics and their large broods of sons (Mr. Romney has five; Mr. de Magistris has four).

“We talk about everything but hair,” Mr. de Magistris said.