A cut above: Toni & Guy guru leaves £163 million

Few can boast a career that leads to professional encounters with everyone from Gregory Peck to the Rolling Stones.

even fewer have the commercial genius of Toni Mascolo, the hairdressing entrepreneur whose stylistic creations included Dusty Springfield’s signature ‘beehive’ and whose business acumen led him to co-found the Toni & Guy empire, which now has 475 salons worldwide.

For I can disclose that Mascolo, who was 75 when he died, bequeathed a staggering £163 million — testimony to his genius with spreadsheets and willingness to embrace business innovation as much as to his dexterity with a pair of scissors.

The will, drawn up three months before his death in December 2017, and only just published, records that the entire amount is to be held in trust for the benefit of his widow, Pauline, and their three children, daughter Sasha and sons Christian and Pierre.

Remarkably, this does not represent the sum total of Mascolo’s worldly goods.

The will emphasises that his property and wealth in his native Italy are excluded from its provisions.

All of this was beyond Mascolo’s most vivid dreams while growing up in modest circumstances near Naples — a fact noted in the subtitle to his memoir: The Rags To Riches Story Of Toni & Guy.

At his mother’s suggestion, the family moved to South London when Toni was 14 and still known by his baptismal name, Guiseppe.

Despite speaking no english on arrival, within five years he was living and working in the west end, returning to his parents’ home when his mother died aged just 45, leaving his father heartbroken and unable to work.

The following year, Toni and his brother Gaetano — renaming himself ‘Guy’ — rented a room in a run- down part of South London, promising customers ‘Florentine elegance and Roman flair’.

They never looked back, pioneering unisex salons and Japanese ‘samurai scissors’, and launching their own styling products.

They were helped by Pauline, one of their former assistants, whom Toni married in 1970, and later by Sasha and Christian.