Concierge Confidential (23 page)

“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 attaché 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 decided 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
.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

“Your letter says that you provide dinner reservations,” he reminded me. “So where are they?”

Every request that he had—and it was almost always restaurants, restaurants, and restaurants—was the most impossible reservation to get. Riding high on Abbie's depiction of him, I often threw out that he was Chloë Sevigny's manager. I had to beg, borrow, and bribe to make sure that he got what he wanted. I was learning the difference between charging for a service and hoping to get a tip for it. I couldn't really tell him I had failed.

With Alan, no news was good news—a concept I hate. There were never any sign of gratitude; not even a five-dollar gift card for his housewares store or some rank scented candle that they couldn't sell. But then Alan did start calling me with the wonderful icebreaker of “I have some feedback for you.” He took it upon himself to start giving me feedback so that I'd be better trained.

“Is everything all right?” I said.

“When I got to the restaurant, you told me that it was at eight thirty and they had eight fifteen—but I'm not gonna bother you about that. They sat me at a table, and it wasn't the best table—
just so you know
.” He was trying to be my buddy in some quasi-bromantic way, but it felt like he was scratching a chalkboard. Always, the underlying message was that I would never be allowed to step foot in these places, so he was scoping out the place for me. It was very noblesse oblige of him.

After about a month, Alan appeared at the hotel and introduced himself to me. He had the exact vibe of Jason Alexander—or to be more exact, Jason Alexander as George on
Seinfeld
. He was just this little man, physically and spiritually, and a total nebbish. Even though we were about the same height, I could tell that
his
size was an issue for him—and he was compensating for it in the worst way. It was the obese, homely girl who constantly mentions that she's “done some modeling.”

Now my brain began to play a montage. I did a mental recap of all the great restaurants that I had gotten him into, telling them how impressive he was and singing his praises. I felt like I needed to go back and apologize—and I worried how I was going to continue with this.

“
You're
Chloë Sevigny's manager?” I eventually asked him.

“Her business manager,” he told me. “Well, technically, I'm her accountant.”

He was wielding his way through the New York social hierarchy like a killer, and I was the one who'd been sharpening his knives. He lived for being seated next to Heidi Klum at the Zac Posen show at Fashion Week—but fashion wasn't his craft. It was just a matter of place-dropping being the new name-dropping.