Every five years Joe Rueve, a Chicago hairdresser, likes to have a heart-to-heart with his female clients.
But last year Rueve sold the place to John Vaillancourt, a stylist from New York with a flair for color. Vaillancourt ran a different kind of ship–more businesslike, he’d say; more despotic, others would say. Rueve worked for Vaillancourt awhile, then left. And Vaillancourt filed a $2.5 million lawsuit that accuses Rueve of trying to defraud him and steal his customers.
The owner of Canned Ego, Glenby International, operated salons in lots of department stores, and in 1979 Rueve put in for a transfer to Chicago. “I had a sister living there, and I loved the hustle-bustle,” he says. He asked to be placed at either I. Magnin or Bonwit Teller; he got Carson Pirie Scott–“this place on the third floor with no windows,” says Rueve. “The clientele was almost all black. It’s kind of hard to break into that market when you’re white and not used to doing that kind of hair. I was lost.”
They signed a lease with an option to buy. Then the partnership fell apart, and Rueve, who wanted to go ahead on his own, needed to raise some $300,000 to buy and rehabilitate the building. He turned to a brother-in-law and to his father. “My dad took out a second mortgage on his house, unbeknownst to my mother,” says Rueve. “We finished work on the building–the labor was all sweat equity by me and some friends–and we began. I was one chair in 3,000 feet of space.”
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Aside from the sign, the salon did nothing to call attention to itself. “When hype is good, you buy into it too much, and when it’s bad–well, it’s bad,” Rueve says. “I also wanted my place to be one you had to be referred to, so that if you found out about it you would have a sense of being part of a circle.” Rueve’s clients seemed pleased by how he sailed beneath the fashion radar. “The shop was always kind of quiet,” says Judith Kirshner, dean of architecture and arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It didn’t have that buzz, that frantic quality that you find elsewhere.”
Before people started dying. “Harry Helgeson came to me one day and said, ‘I have HIV,’” says Rueve. “He wanted to know if I knew what that meant. He educated me. Marty Thompson didn’t let anyone see him when he came down with the disease. But soon they were both gone.”
In April of last year a developer contacted Rueve on behalf of John Vaillancourt, a hairdresser from New York searching for a salon to buy. “Name your price,” said Vaillancourt. Rueve talked it over with his wife. Rueve felt he was at his professional peak, personally grossing $5,000 a week in appointments, but he was tired of being in charge. The hair business is precarious, its customers loyal to their stylists, not to their salons. “When a hairdresser goes home at night your assets go out the door,” says Rueve. He wanted to spend more time with his two young sons, and he decided to sell.
