This is a true story, though some names have been changed.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Author’s Note
PREFACE
1. Almondgeddon
2. Lady Liberty
3. The Plane, the Plane
4. A Hell of a Town
5. In Between the Sheets
6. The Bad, the Bad, and the Ugly
7. Mrs. Kinezevich, in the Hotel Room,
with the Antique Russian Sword
8. Loose Lips
9. The Keymaster
10. On the Case
11. The Best Seat in the House
12. New York Loves You Back
13. The Great Escape
14. Feet of Clefs
15. Bands of Gold
16. Circle in the Sand
17. Good Housekeeping
18. Wake-up Calls
19. Get Up and Go
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Copyright
Preface
There’s service, and then there are servants.
The nobleman reclining on a chaise lounge and snapping his fingers is the picture of absurdity. Service is much more of a business-to-business transaction. Both parties come to the table with something that the other wants. And much like other business transactions, a little strategy—and simple human consideration—will yield the best possible outcome.
Recently, one of my clients needed help planning a big date. Jordan was contacted to be on the show The Millionaire Matchmaker and he wanted his television appearance to reflect his personality and who he was as a person. For a long time, I had been getting Jordan into all the hippest and coolest places in Manhattan. I was glad to do it. He did all the things that one would expect of a young millionaire and yet he wasn’t afraid to admit that it was all new to him. He didn’t feign indifference, as if everything was expected to happen as if by magic. He was grateful and he was appreciative. The result was a trail of good will and great energy that he left behind wherever he went. Jordan doesn’t have any servants, but he doesn’t need them. Instead, he has people delighted to give him good service wherever he goes.
We discussed what the ideal date would be. After eliminating his ideas of skydiving, throwing the opening pitch at a Yankee game, and hiring Shaq for a private game of 2-on-1, I helped convince him that a day trip to the Hamptons would be a more solid choice for a reality show date. His budget would accommodate just about anything.
I realized that a forty-minute helicopter ride to East Hampton would be much more fun than the usual two-and-a-half-hour drive from New York City. I also realized a brand-new helicopter would be even more impressive. I made it a point to hit the phones until I found a charter company who had a shiny Bell 407. They were based at Teterboro, forty-five minutes away. Jordan wouldn’t think to ask them to transport the helicopter to the Wall Street Heliport—and he didn’t need to. I took care of it. All he had to be aware of was that they would be departing from Wall Street at noon.
The helicopter interior could have been designed for James Bond himself. Jordan’s date looked to him for cues to what her reaction should be. She worried that she was supposed to act as if she was accustomed to being shuttled in a private helicopter. But Jordan made no attempt to stifle his ecstatic reaction, which made it okay for her to be awestruck, too.
When the couple landed in East Hampton they were picked up by limousine. They were then taken to the most picturesque vineyard in Long Island, Wolffer Estateö, where I’d planned a wine tasting right in between the rows of vines. I convinced East Hampton Gourmet that they should amend their no-delivery policy for Jordan, and he got a gorgeous lunch hand-delivered to the vineyard. Every piece was perfectly orchestrated.
The price tag for his day exceeded $10,000—but I made it feel like a million. That’s the difference between good service and outstanding service: you get more than you pay for. I didn’t need to make sure that the helicopter was the newest one in the fleet. It wasn’t necessary for me to personally go over the directions with the limo driver from the heliport to Wölffer. I made it a point to meet with the general manager of the vineyard to see exactly where Jordan’s table would be, and I personally supervised the packing of their lunch. Throughout the date, I took time out of my day and kept tabs on everything with the vineyard marketing director.
Jordan would never have thought of this level of attention to detail. People in service are better at providing it than clients are at asking for it. The best service means delivering what you wanted—and then delivering what you didn’t even know you wanted.
During the date, Jordan sent me a simple text: “It’s like a movie.” Turning a reality show into something out of Hollywood romance is a form of magic, and one I was more than happy to perform.
They say a good magician never reveals his secrets. But I’m about to.…
1.
Almondgeddon
You sell the sizzle, and not the steak.
There’s no apartment building more sizzling than The Setai Wall Street, which has the chutzpah to describe itself as “the world’s most privileged condominium”—and the reputation to back it up.
It’s as dark as a nightclub in the lobby, with Buddha Bar music playing in the background. It smells very exotic, too. You can’t really tell if it’s fresh gardenias, or if they have scented candles, but it definitely smells very nice—and very, very rich. The floor is covered with beautiful silk rugs, and the walls are adorned with gigantic tribal jewelry pieces framed in boxes that protrude almost a foot off the wall. You’d expect there to be some Playboy Playmate in a gorgeous nightgown, smoking a cigarette and dipping into caviar, lounging on the sofa in the lobby.
My concierge company had long since taken concierging outside of the hotel context and into luxury buildings, but there’s luxury and then there’s luxury. When it came to our relationships with buildings, we always got the “nice girl,” the Betty. We never got the fancy, sexy Veronica—and The Setai was definitely Veronica. Being a concierge is often about trying to get behind the velvet rope. Getting The Setai would be like jumping over the rope and parking ourselves there, so that we’re not on the other side constantly trying to push our way in. We’d be in a position to decide who gains access.
I wanted to send in a proposal when The Setai was first going to open, but it was hard to sit down and focus. Concierges do more before nine o’clock than most people do in a day. As my staff and I had our meeting, the discussions settled around:
Do organic tampons only come in one absorbency? (They do? Order a crate, then.)
Ms. Strauss wanted Ciao Bella to deliver a salad with grilled chicken to her apartment on Tuesdays and Fridays at noon—but Ciao Bella isn’t open for lunch, and they don’t deliver. Her “second choice” restaurant, Jacques, is also not open for lunch. Plan C?
Mr. Jaiswal was just inoculated when he climbed Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Are there inoculations specific to Rwanda for his next trip? (Yes—and how.)
Ms. Sheehan needs to be called. Someone needs to remind her that she can’t tell anyone where she got her $5,500 ticket for the premiere party for the new Sarah Jessica Parker movie. She also wants to get private typing lessons.
“I don’t remember the brand name,” Daria reads from a client email, “but I just returned from Moscow and I saw an air purifier in the window of an electronics store. It was really sleek looking and modern. Can you get one of those for me?”
Car service is a must for Robin, our jeweler, who will be carrying $100,000 worth of diamonds to Mr. Stadtmiller’s office. He’s “too busy” to go into the store; maybe the diamond studs aren’t for his wife? He also wants a second-hand television for $75 or less deliv
ered to his office—today.
There is a pop-up restaurant in Paris sponsored by Electrolux. You can only make reservations online, they are only open for a year—and they are totally booked. Does anyone have a vacuum cleaner connection? (Action item: make contact with the director of corporate communications for Electrolux in Milan.)
Who knows the best Jewish bakery in the Marais area of Paris?
Any ideas for a fifty-eight-year-old’s bachelorette party? Anyone?
But if my mind was in the countless requests we were working our way through, my heart was focused on finding time to write that business proposal for The Setai. It was the days of yore—2007—when Soho House still mattered and people fought for reservations at Spice Market. The market had yet to crash, and The Setai was going to be the new playground for all the hedge funders sick of Core Club.
I met countless times with their marketing people over the following months, and presented every possible scenario to get the account. I tried the deluxe plan: Four people on duty at all times! White gloves! International coverage for members! Then I suggested the economy plan: Two people covering fourteen hours a day between them, gloves optional.
No matter what I said, they weren’t biting. But apparently someone in the company thought enough about me to add me to their email list, and I kept track of everything that was going on in The Setai. I knew when the south elevator would be closed. I learned about March’s spa schedule. Regardless of the subject line of the email, I made sure to read the thing. One day I noticed that the emails had a new footer:
Enjoy,
Crystal Springs
Director of concierge services, Setai Club, Wall Street
Crystal Springs? Crystal Springs? I thought they would have had some really hot Scandinavian model or a real-life Bond Girl. But Crystal Springs sounded like an off-brand bottled water, or some teenage deodorant. I printed out the email and brought it over to my partner, Abbie Newman. She’s the “Abigail” in Abigail Michaels Concierge (except her full name isn’t really Abigail, but who cares). “Look at this!” I said. “Someone named Crystal Springs is the concierge at The Setai!”
“That name sounds familiar,” Abbie said. Abbie knew everyone and could out-schmooze anyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if she told me she used to sit down on Sundays to watch The Ed Sullivan Show with Howard Hughes. “I’ve either met her or I just bought a candle with that scent.”
“Let’s look her up online,” I suggested.
We found pictures of Ms. Springs, and I understood it immediately. She was pretty and she was only about thirty years old. I could laugh at her name, but at the end of the day she was doing The Setai—and I wasn’t.
* * *
PEOPLE YOU’D ASSUME WOULD MAKE GREAT CONCIERGES—BUT WON’T
The Party Girl Who Hangs Out at All the Hotspots. She might forget to put your name ahead of hers on the “list.” Hangovers can also hamper her service skills in the “early” morning hours before noon.
* * *
Out of the blue, I got a call from the club manager. He’d spent decades in the hotel industry; he wouldn’t even glance at something that didn’t bear five stars. “Michael? This is Toma Vaca.” At least that’s what his name sounded like, filtered through his thick French accent. “I want to know what is your idea on how you do Setai.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do your people come here or we call you?”
“There’s many ways we could do it,” I said, trying to decipher his idiom (which is part of the job, anyway). “We could have an on-site person, or you could call into our office remotely and we could handle requests that way.”
“Because Crystal, she tell me she is no more. She is gone!”
“Really?” She left The Setai?
“She done wonderful work, she taken really good care of the people, but she not happy and she got another job for a hedge fund company as their social director. I really, really want to do this, and can you give me a proposal?”
“Sure.”
“Can you have it in an hour?”
“Uh … No.” I hadn’t sent him proposals for months; most of the data I had was no longer relevant. So I spent the entire weekend working on two new tentative proposals. Toma Vaca took them to the owner and we got approved immediately.
“We want to do one of these,” Toma Vaca told me. “But I think it’s going to be the smaller one. Let’s have a meeting.”
Toma Vaca should have been an artist, because the picture he painted of The Setai’s clientele was exactly what I had suspected. Rock stars hobnobbing with hedge fund superstars—in other words, the kind of people who would suck the life out of you. The building was not only a luxe condo, but also a private membership club. It was clear that the residents would be using our services the most.
“So how many members do you have?” I asked him.
“Oh, we’re doing very well on the membership. The members, they like to have very nice. Very nice Porsche, they drive. Celebrities, they like to come. Oh, the luxury!” He wasn’t speaking English, and he wasn’t speaking French. He was speaking Keyword.
He couldn’t answer many basic questions, but it didn’t really throw me. Part of a concierge’s job is ascertaining what someone wants, even if they don’t have the vocabulary to explain what that thing is. Besides, I had an entire week before they wanted us to take over. I was used to delivering things “now, now, now!”
“All right, look,” I said. “I need Crystal to download everything to me. First, so I can understand if you’re making the right choice with this skeleton crew that we’re going to be putting in here. And second, I want to make sure for my own self that we didn’t underbid this.”
The next day, I had an appointment to see Crystal. I had seen her pictures online, and I had left the bathroom smelling like her, but I had yet to meet her. I brought along Daria, our VP of client services. She’d been in the concierge business even longer than I had.
The doorman pointed us to Crystal’s office, and we sat down and waited for her. The room itself, like most back-of-the-house office spaces, was pretty industrial and not at all elegant. I slowly looked around at the mess that was everywhere. Peeking out from under her desk was a pair of really expensive shoes. The combination of those two things should have warned me about what was coming, but I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Fifteen minutes later, Crystal arrived in a complete flurry. She had on a short little jacket, a pair of really slim pencil pants, and some cute ballet flats—and everything was clearly designer. Her gigantic Marc Jacobs bag could have served as a suitcase.
There wasn’t even a hello.
“I’m sorry!” she said, in a jittery voice. “I don’t know if I’m a very good trainer. Okay, let me tell you about the residents here first. Mrs. Armstrong. She’s just really, really nice, but her son’s kinda weird. Like, don’t look at him. Don’t shake his hand, because he’s got really weird boundary issues and stuff. I think he’s got ADD, but I don’t know. He’s probably like twenty-eight years old. So anyway, he’s really nice, but he doesn’t live here, but he’s a member.”
I waited for her to pause, so I could slow her down. But not only did she not pause, she didn’t seem to be breathing. Holy crap, I thought. She’s one of those people that can speak on both the exhale and the inhale!
“Mrs. Armstrong owns a really, really famous film company in London. I guess it’s kinda like Paramount Pictures, except it’s London, you know, they’re really, really big. And she has a handler and his name is Roger, and he’s really, really nice. He’s like the business manager, so when she starts to spend too much money, he’ll call you and tell you that you have to tell her that it’s time to stop, because he doesn’t want to do it.”
I didn’t look Daria in the eye because we both would have burst out in hysterics. She was furiously scribbling notes as Crystal talked, flipping pages in her notepad faster and faster.
“Oh!” Crystal said, snappin
g her fingers. “Mrs. Armstrong gets a fresh-squeezed orange juice and an almond croissant every morning at eight, but she likes the kind that’s not a rolled almond croissant, it’s like a pain au chocolat, except it’s like a flat croissant. It’s got almond paste. It’s different than a rolled almond croissant. At one time, I used to get them from room service at Cipriani Wall Street, but then they became very unreliable, because they found out the bellman was coming over to our property and he wasn’t allowed to, so they put an end to it.”
I watched Daria write down “Cipriani Wall Street,” and I watched her cross it out just as quickly. I could see a little bit why Crystal was so frazzled. She hadn’t been dealing with the Mrs. Armstrongs of the world for decades, like I had. That echelon of client is a bit out of touch with how things actually get done. Mrs. Armstrong is surely picturing the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons, delivering to her an almond croissant on a silver platter with, literally, hand-squeezed orange juice in a crystal goblet. And none of those gauche Valencia oranges, either.
It doesn’t mean Mrs. Armstrong is evil. She is the kind of woman who would call my company and say, “Oh, hello, dear. It would just be wonderful if every morning, by eight o’clock, I could have my almond croissant.” There’s nothing threatening about that. But that same person inevitably calls at 8:01, wondering, “Oh, darling, now you know that I did ask for it at eight.” In other words: It’s not really a request, it’s a command.
Now I started wondering where I was going to find these almond croissants for Mrs. Armstrong. It’s not like there was a Korean deli around the corner, and that wouldn’t have been good enough anyway. Was I going to have to pay somebody extra to go out and make sure that Mrs. Armstrong got her croissant, the flat kind (not the rolled kind!) with the almond paste?
The almond croissant was becoming an emergency. This was almondgeddon.
“Let me tell you a bit about our members and the parties,” Crystal continued. “Renée Zellweger’s a member and Molly Sims is a member, and they like are most likely to show up at the fashion events, or anything design oriented. But really the parties that have the biggest draws are when we do swimsuit and lingerie parties. Agent Provocateur is one of the companies that loves to throw parties here, and all the football players come for that. But of course you have to watch the lingerie models, because they will throw themselves at the football players. If people get drunk and they want to have sex in the bar, call the Ritz-Carlton to send a car for them and reserve them a room.”
Concierge Confidential Page 1
