Last Thursday, as stylist Roi Barnard deftly trimmed Judith Turner’s reddish-blond locks, he told the story of the macho man who years ago came to him for a haircut at his eponymous salon, Salon Roi.
The customer had clutched a photo of John Wayne. “Cut my hair like that,” he commanded.
Roi knew this was impossible. John Wayne had plenty of hair. This man had hardly any.
Another stylist might have created the world’s biggest comb-over. Not Roi. He said, “Why are you worried about your hair when you have the most beautiful blue eyes?”
The customer narrowed those eyes, fixed them on Roi and growled: “I’ve never had a man say that to me.”
“Well,” Roi told him, “you can’t say that again.”
The blue-eyed, John Wayne wannabe — “We became friends,” Roi said — had visited Salon Roi’s original location on Connecticut Avenue at Calvert Street NW in Washington. That was where Roi and his then-partner, Charles Stinson, commissioned the mural of Marilyn Monroe by artist John Bailey that gazes down on pedestrians and motorists.
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But after more than 50 years in Woodley Park — and 15 years after he sold the business to Daiva Kasteckaite — Roi was at a different Salon Roi, in a condo building called the Elizabeth on North Park Avenue in Chevy Chase, Md.
Battered by the coronavirus pandemic, Daiva had chosen to leave Marilyn behind. Daiva said she could no longer afford the rent in Woodley Park.
As Roi shaped Judith’s hair, he talked about the early days of the old salon, originally called Charles the First.
“Of course, Woodley Park didn’t know what to do with us,” Roi said. “In walked these two guys with fur coats and a gold Rolls-Royce and two Lhasa apsos. Who were these two druggies who moved into Woodley Park? We were high, but not on drugs. We were high on life.”
And Roi, a gay man from North Carolina, was especially high on Marilyn Monroe. For as long as he could remember, she had been his spirit diva. Now Roi no longer works near Marilyn’s benevolent gaze. Does he miss her?
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“I can tell you, she’s never far from my head,” he said. “She lives in my head. She always has, since I was 12 years old.”
Daiva opened the Chevy Chase salon as a satellite location in 2019. Now it is the only location. All the Woodley Park stylists but one — a woman who rented a chair, as the expression goes — had chosen to move with Daiva to Maryland. Salon Roi employs 17 people, 18 if you count Daiva.
Daiva is proud she’d kept the work family together through the pandemic, but now it means expanding into the space next door in Chevy Chase. Until the pandemic, there had been a dry cleaner business there. But then people had stopped wearing office clothes because there was no office to go to.
Roi is 83. He lives in Delaware and takes the train to D.C., staying with Judith and her husband, Lester, while he works in the salon.
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“I gave all her children their first haircuts,” Roi said. He’s been cutting Judith’s hair since 1970.
“I’ve had a lot of hairstyles in 50 years,” she said. “I used to go in and say, ‘What do you want to do today, Roi?’”
This was Roi’s first day cutting hair in Chevy Chase. The white walls were bare, but soon large paintings of Marilyn would be hung.
“It’s just beginning here,” Roi said. “It’s going to be fine.”
On the old salon’s last day — after the scissors had been sheathed, the last of the hair clippings swept — Daiva took the staff across the street to Macintyre’s bar.
“I saw tears,” she said. “A lot of people, even myself, was very sensitive. I put in a lot of work there.”
But they would survive. Said Daiva: “To me, people are more important than the building.” Besides, if they really want to see the Marilyn mural, they can drive by it. The building’s owners tell me they have no plans to remove the mural.
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As Roi blow-dried Judith’s hair, he reminisced about the original Salon Roi.
“I never thought of it as a beauty shop,” he said. “I thought of it as my home. You visit my home and if we like each other, I’ll cut your hair.”
And then he said: “I will ride out the rest of my days doing what I love. Which is not doing hair.”
Doing hair, Roi said, is just a way to be close to what he really loves: people.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.
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