One of my clients wanted to get backstage at a famous country singer’s concert. I didn’t approach his people with any expectations. “I would be excited,” I said, “if they could just go to the stage door and somebody there would have their name.” Not a big deal. What ended up happening is that the singer came out, brought them into his dressing room, and it became this whole big thing—which I would never have gotten if I made such a bold request to begin with. I kept it real, and things ended up happening. It works that way more often than you’d think.
Another trick is to read celebrity magazines like In Touch and People, as well as all the celebrity blogs. They constantly name-drop what restaurants a celebrity ate at and what hotels they were staying in. There’s nothing wrong with calling the restaurant or calling the hotel, especially if you don’t ask them to break their code of silence and confirm a certain person was there. Very often, you’ll get someone on the phone who wants to show off. You could even get somebody who is actually friends with your targeted celeb. If you’re compelling and real, getting them to do you a minor favor would be just that—a minor favor.
It’s very important to validate whomever you’re speaking to by knowing their name, and not just their title. In any bookstore there are agent directories. Thanks to the Internet, all of this information is readily available online as well. Because of the unfortunately named WhoRepresents.com (aka WhorePresents.com), IMDb.com, and IBDB.com, you can easily find everyone who a given star has ever worked with.
The Hollywood Creative Directory has not only agency listings, but also film production credits, production companies, and listings where you can see people’s titles. If you look up Columbia Pictures, you can then drill into what actors have deals at Columbia Pictures, who’s the director of development, who’s the production coordinator—and you can kind of aim your contact request at the right level. If somebody’s represented by the real-life equivalent of Ari Gold (i.e., the Ari Emanuels of this world), you’re never going to get the agent on the line. But look to see if they have a production deal somewhere. Look at who their director of creative development is; that’s probably somebody who’s a little more eager to be nice. Having contact with celebrities seems more exciting than it really is. Being able to make that connection for you might be one of the few chances that contact will have to seem like a big shot.
Let’s suppose you have a name but you can’t get their exact phone number. In that case, my favorite thing to do is to use the prefix and dial randomly. Most companies have a bunch of phone numbers formatted something like “555-9xxx.” Try dialing a random sequence, like 555-9865. “John Geiger speaking,” they’ll say.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was trying to get Leslie.”
“Leslie who?”
“Leslie Langford. What extension did I dial?”
“She’s at extension 3499.” Then they’ll transfer you, but even if they won’t, they’ll have given you the extension. But again: Make sure you have something specific and legitimate to ask Leslie. Respect the system and her role in it.
* * *
13.
The Great Escape
Eric Stepansky was a frequent guest at the hotel. He owned a commercial lighting company and was wealthier than God. He also happened to be a very nice guy who treated Abbie and me like we were his pet charity. “Is it supposed to rain tomorrow?” he asked me one day, walking by the desk on his way out.
“Let me look,” I said, flipping open the paper. “No, it looks like it’s going to be good tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” he said, passing me a hundred-dollar bill.
Whenever he made some dinner reservation with Abbie in the morning, he would give her a hundred-dollar tip. By the time I got there, she’d have a “confirmed” card for him—and when he came by to pick up that confirmation from me, he’s give me a hundred dollars as well.
Eric’s company eventually bought a corporate apartment, and he stopped staying as a guest at the hotel. But he would still pop in every so often. If he wanted a reservation at a place like Daniel or if he wanted to see a hot show on Broadway, he would simply ask us—and we always took care of it immediately.
“I don’t want to come here every time to give you money,” he finally told Abbie. “Can I just give you a check once a month, and then I know that you’re going to take care of me?”
“What do you want to do?” she asked me when I came in to work. “Should we do it?”
One of the things I admired most about Abbie was how hard she worked to provide for her son Ali. She scrimped and saved to pay for his tuition to the ultra-elite Allen-Stevenson School. It was the kind of place where his classmates were the sons of Goldman Sachs chairmen—while she was making do in a one-bedroom apartment. I knew that every little bit of money helped.
“Well, yeah,” I said to her. “Why shouldn’t we take Eric’s money? Who cares that he’s not at the hotel? We’re still providing him a service.”
“How are we going to deal with him on tickets?” she asked. “We can’t put it to the room. There isn’t a room.”
“Maybe we could get a credit card machine ourselves,” I said. “Or PayPal. I’m sure we can figure something out.”
“Fine. Let’s just charge him two hundred dollars a month,” she said. “We’ll split it.”
A couple of weeks later another of our favorite patrons was staying at the hotel. Kevin was a very frequent, very rich guest. He loved Abbie and me because we always covered for him when he brought his mistresses by the hotel. One week it would a girlfriend, and the next the wife; but we always acted as if we hadn’t seen him in forever.
“You know I only stay at InterContinental hotels,” Kevin told me, “but I don’t have the same relationship with the concierge in London as I do with you and Abbie. You and Abbie are the best. The next time I’m there, can I just call you and have you take care of things for me?”
“Of course!” I told him.
“I’m not going to do it unless you let me give you something.”
“All right,” I said. “Whatever you think is fair.”
“Do you share everything with Abbie?”
“Something like this, we definitely would. She’s here at the desk sometimes and I’m here at the desk other times. To make sure that you’re never disappointed, we can just split it. We’ll make an arrangement so someone will always be around to take care of you.”
“Terrific. How much should I pay you?”
I shrugged. I felt so awkward. I liked and respected Kevin; despite his libido, he otherwise was a class act who always treated us well. I didn’t feel comfortable putting a price on myself with someone like that. “I don’t know…”
“Just give me a number.”
“Five hundred?”
“Perfect.” He counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills, and threw me a hundred dollars extra as a tip.
After a few weeks of this, I got to talking with Abbie. “You know, we should think about just charging people. Why should we be embarrassed? We’re really good at what we do. We should come up with an official fee, and maybe even start telling people proactively.”
“Like who? What kind of people?”
“Like our big high rollers. There’s a lot of people like Eric and Kevin. If they’re not at the hotel and they live in Atlanta or whatever, we can still do stuff for them.”
“Yeah, that sounds great. Why not?”
Abbie has a very broad perspective on things; she likes to see the big picture. But I have to analyze things. That night I went home and wrote up a spreadsheet of fifty of the high rollers that she and I had a relationship with. These were people who I thought we could approach and would actually be receptive to what was, effectively, a novel concept. If each of them gave us $500 a month, that would mean $25,000—cash. That wasn’t even counting what they’d be booking, and the tips and commissions that would generate.
I knew right away who our first target would be. Zinovy Dimitriov was basically an atta
ché to hugely wealthy people, and could be a bit imposing. He handled people like Saudi princes and Russian oil czars. He would travel five-star, while his clients stayed in places like the penthouse at the Waldorf Towers. It was clear that he had a high-stakes job and there was zero tolerance for anything less than perfection.
Facing away from the guests, Abbie made the call while I intercepted anyone approaching the desk. We had such different styles; whereas I was all business, she was queen of schmoozing the client. It sounded like she was talking to her long lost best friend rather than making a pitch. Finally, I heard her tell Zinovy about what we were looking to do.
When she got off the phone with him, her face said it all. “He’s completely into it,” she told me. “He needs a private boat for his client to go back and forth between Venice and Nice for ten days. He asked if we could gather the information for him by tomorrow.”
Abbie was picturing herself on the boat with the clients. I started thinking about where in the world (literally!) we’d begin looking for this boat and how many cabins he wanted. What size crew did we need? Did they want a chef? What about a dock? What if there were no docks available in Nice? How do we arrange payment for the boat? Who are the clients, anyway? Are they Russian mafia, doing a drug deal? I called Zinovy back and gathered the info. Their idea of a “private boat” was more like a small cruise ship.
Abbie and I got to work, and the task was as difficult as I had anticipated. The Internet wasn’t a worldwide source yet; it was still at the point where people would tell you to put “www” when they gave you the URL. We looked online for hours. Then we talked to yacht dealers, until we realized that they were all representing the same five or six boats. We knew we could do better (read: make more of a commission) if we could get directly to the owners’ primary representatives. It got to the point where Abbie was calling fishing villages overseas, speaking to them in Italian and asking if they knew anyone who knew anyone that dealt with yacht owners directly. The best we could come up with were these miniature cruise ships that ran about $300,000 a week. If we hadn’t gone directly to the owner’s rep, it would have been $330,000! We knew Zinovy would never go for that; it was just ridiculous, even with the “reduced” price. But we couldn’t find anything else, no matter how resourceful we tried to be.
Wanting to show him something, we printed up the pictures of the crazy mini–cruise ships and left them for Zinovy to look at. “Maybe I didn’t understand exactly what you wanted,” I said, sliding the pics across the desk to him, “I’m sure there are less extravagant options if we go with something smaller.”
He looked them over briefly. “Perfect,” he told me. “See if this one is available.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Of course. I was going to say that one. That was my favorite.”
“How are we going to work the commission?” he asked me.
It dawned on me that Zinovy’s position was similar to that of a concierge on some level. My commissions usually came from theater tickets. His commissions came from $300,000 private yacht charters.
Dare I go there? It seemed safe enough. “Should we just split everything down the middle?” I asked him.
“That’s fine,” he agreed.
Now I was empowered. “It sleeps twelve,” I explained, “and there’s additional room for the crew of ten. The chef will send sample menus. The three hundred thousand includes fuel and slip fees. We got it directly from the owner’s rep so it’s about thirty thousand less than what the others were asking. Are we going with that price?” I said, wondering if he himself was going to upcharge his clients.
“That works,” Zinovy agreed.
That $15,000 wasn’t just a huge bonus: it was the gasoline on a fire. Now I really thought that we had an actual business going. The two of us needed a name for ourselves, instead of just being Abbie and Michael from the InterContinental Hotel.
We both agreed that we needed to aim for something that sounded very distinguished, like “Golden Keys International,” “International VIP Services,” or “Concierge International VIP.” But names like that were also very affected, and didn’t really sit well with me. They were cheesy and sounded like an escort service.
I started playing around with our respective initials. “ABMF Enterprises”? Too generic. “F-BAM!” was just absurd. Then I thought of things like “Michaelcierge”—and then I realized these were all awful as well.
“Well, you know people like us,” I reminded Abbie. “Why are we trying to mask ourselves? This isn’t going to be some big corporation. This is more like our own lemonade stand. Why don’t we just say ‘Abbie and Michael, at your service’?” Then I played with our middle names, but Helene Patrick made no sense. But “Abigail Michaels”…?
It was a little bit of a cheat—“Abbie” wasn’t technically short for “Abigail”; Abbie was actually her full name. But Abigail Michaels sounds like a very well-heeled society matron. She’s somebody that might have gone to school in the U.K. or at the Sorbonne, speaks nine languages, and lives on Park Avenue. Abbie liked it because her name was first. I liked it because it sounded anonymous enough to get away with it at the hotel; we weren’t exactly prepared to quit our jobs yet.
When I’d worked in Dolores’s office, I really liked that she brought a seriousness to the entertainment industry. She didn’t have some trendy or crazy font for her letterhead; it looked like it came out of a legal office. I just ripped off her idea, and wrote out our new name across the page, manually spacing it out for effect in Garamond:
ABIGAIL MICHAELS
We next got a new phone number and forwarded all our business calls to the hotel. Since the last of our four phone lines never lit up at the concierge desk, that was the number we forwarded to. When it rang we knew that it must be an Abigail Michaels client calling.
The thing was, Abbie had been at the hotel for seventeen years. The hotel was her career. I was a different story. After seven years, I was addicted to the cash but still wondering what the hell I was doing with a goddamn name tag on. I started to impress upon Abbie that we needed to get the hell out—and that this was our own golden key, so to speak. I was so taken with the light at the end of the tunnel that a few days later I almost snapped.
Abbie hung up the phone, glowing. “Do you know who I just made a reservation for?” she said. “The head of White & Case. Their kid goes to school with Ale.”
All these fancy parents would call Abbie at work and ask her to get them into restaurants. It drove me crazy. They had entire staffs at their disposal. If these people were so important, they should have been able to get their own reservations. It seemed disrespectful to treat her like she was their assistant when their children were peers at school. “Why are you doing it for free for him, and for all these other parents?” I asked her. “He’s a major lawyer. Do you think you can go to him for free legal advice? If you slipped and fell in the lobby of the hotel, would he pro bono your representation? All those people who call here from the school, you should just stop. No more professional courtesy. That’s a goldmine of potential clients. Do you think any of them wouldn’t be able to afford us, anyway? Five hundred dollars a month? That’s nothing to them.”
She nodded, but I could tell that she wasn’t totally convinced so I didn’t mention it again for a while. To my surprise, it was Abbie who brought it up a few weeks later. “Okay,” she said. “I got the nerve up and spoke to someone last night at a parent-teacher event. I think this is the perfect family. They own a national housewares chain, and the guy I spoke with manages Chloë Sevigny. His name is Alan Chiles.”
It was all actually starting to happen. We made an appointment with the family’s personal financial advisers, a firm by the name of Ferro Capital. My ambition wasn’t simply to get $500 per month for taking care of Alan. I wanted to go to Ferro and ask for $5,000 a month—for all their clients. If they had five hundred clients, that boiled down to only ten dollars per client. That was nothing.
Abbie and I de
cided on the services we would be offering and I put together a PowerPoint presentation for our big meeting. I was expecting to come into a huge, luxe office building. Instead, when Abbie and I arrived at Ferro, it looked like we were paying a visit to a State Farm. The place was completely vanilla, down to the generic industrial carpet.
The head of Ferro, Ken Nolan, took us into his office and proceeded to tell us a little about the company and who they represented. “We represent the Chiles family,” he told us.
That was it. He couldn’t tell us a lot about the company because there wasn’t a lot to tell. Obviously Ferro represented a huge amount of wealth, enough that they could call themselves Ferro Capital. But it was basically four sets of in-laws with four bank accounts. My fantasy of servicing five hundred clients went out the window.
A couple of days after the presentation, Ken phoned to let us know that they were interested. “But we can only pay nine hundred and fifty dollars a month,” he told us, “and we would like to pay it quarterly.”
“That’s fine,” Abbie and I said in unison.
“Terrific. Bill us in three months. I’m assuming you have some sort of standard agreement form?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll get that right over to you.”
The fact that they wouldn’t even be paying us in advance should have been my first clue. The wind might have been let out of my sails, but at least we got an account. I wrote up a contract in my best legalese—“heretofore”; “the party of the first part”; “we agree whereby”—and sent it over to them.
The ink wasn’t dry before Alan Chiles started to call us. “So you’re the new assistant!” he told me.
It was exactly the kind of thing that I despised about working at the hotel, and what I was attempting to get away from. I wanted to be a wheeler-dealer, not the guy who has to come to attention when fancy people snap their fingers. But from that point on, that’s who I was for Alan. As soon as Bon Appétit and/or New York hit the newsstand, Alan was on the phone wanting the latest hot restaurant. “I heard Fiamma was good,” he’d say, as if he had been in a conversation—and not reading about it in a periodical like all the other amateur foodies in the city. “I want to go there tonight.”
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