Concierge Confidential (5 page)

Dolores Robinson had a much bigger agency compared to Glennis's; it wasn't just about one family, an editor, and a few DPs. Not only that, but Dolores had more razzle-dazzle and worked with a broader spectrum of people. She networked, lunched, and partied with Hollywood's elite. Her call sheet was a list of every major studio head. She had people like Ron Howard and Larry David as neighbors of her Maple Drive office. She
had
a Maple Drive office, for God's sake! She had garnered Wesley Snipes his first major $8 million payout for
Demolition Man,
and her name was
always
in the trade publications. She knew everyone—and everyone knew
her.

I knew who she was because a couple of months back I saw an article honoring her in the
Hollywood Reporter.
I had done my trick of cutting the article out and sending it to her with a little note: “Congratulations! What an amazing feature.”

One day I saw an ad in the trades for an associate manager. The title was enough to grab my attention, but the Maple Drive address jogged my memory. When I confirmed that it was indeed Dolores Robinson who was looking for an associate manager, I called her right up. Even if my name wasn't instantly recognized, the flattering note I sent with the article a few weeks prior made it easy for me to talk my way past the nervous receptionist and Dolores took my call. The call led to an interview and the interview led to the new job. Now I was Dolores's new associate manager (read: assistant).

The thing with Dolores was that she was like a pet wolf. She was very smart and very warm—and you knew she could turn on you in a second. There was nobody I was more afraid of than her, but I knew enough to never let that show. Nor did I have an attitude about it. If you don't own your confidence, that pet wolf will growl and bite you. If you fake it and you come on really strong, it'll kill you. But if you really convince yourself in every fiber of your being that you can tame the wolf, you're cool, and everything's fine. With Dolores, being cool meant having business taken care of, making sure everything was in order, and being tuned in to her.

She never sensed my fear. She never growled and attacked me. I watched how the interns approached her. Dolores sat in her office with her chair turned around, facing away from the door. “Dolores?” the intern meekly asked. “Do you have a second?”

The chair spun around so fast she should have gotten whiplash. “Can't you see I'm busy?”

“I'm sorry…”

“Are you blind? I am trying to read! How am I ever going to finish this script?”

The next time it was a phone message. Instead of saying anything, the intern went into Dolores's office as unobtrusively as possible and gingerly placed a message on the desk.

Dolores wouldn't even touch it. “What is this?” she yelled.

“Uh … it's a phone message.”

“From
whom
? What do they want?”

“Kevin Parker had a question for you. He was returning your call from this afternoon.”

“So what did you tell him? Hello? I asked you a question! What am I supposed to do here?” The intern just stood there, because no matter what the girl said, it would just be adding fuel to the fire. I could tell that Dolores knew she was being mean, just like I could tell that her intention was to educate and encourage the intern to have more of a backbone. But the only thing that happened is that the poor girl sheepishly bowed her head and walked out of the office.

As the intern walked past my desk near tears—again—I pulled her aside. “Hey, watch me. Deal with her like I do.”

The girl nodded, still terrified.

I strode right up to Dolores. “There's a call on line three and they wanted to make sure that you read the script.
I
read it. Here are the notes I made for you.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I'll take the call. Where are the notes?”

“Right here,” I replied, handing them to her. “I'll put the call right through.”

“Do me a favor,” she said. “The television trade show for syndication is going to be in Vegas next week. Call Diane at Warner Bros. and see if you can get me on one of their morning planes.”

“Sure.”

She was testing me. Dolores had a way of seizing opportunities, and the Warner Bros. jet was an opportunity.

But still: The Warner Bros. jet?
Really?
I didn't even know Diane, but Dolores did. Shouldn't she be the one calling? Especially if she was kind of inviting herself. This was going to require stepping out of my comfort zone and letting go of my own personal hang-ups about pushing the envelope.

I went back to my desk and called up Diane. I had witnessed enough of Dolores in action that I was able to conjure up her warm, positive, and familiar delivery. “Hey Diane, it's Michael from Dolores's. You guys are sending planes on Thursday, aren't you?”

“It's looking that way, but I'm not sure who's confirmed,” Diane said.

“
I'll
be taking the bus,” I said, pausing for her little chuckle, “but Dolores was hoping to get out in the morning. Not sure when you do your seating plan, but Dolores will be traveling alone if you have a spare seat.”

“I'm probably going to have space if she can leave pretty early. Give Ms. D a kiss from me.”

“Thanks so much!” I said, writing down the info. How easy was that? My tone was upbeat and I kept the conversation short. I asked specifically for what I needed, and I got exactly what I had asked for without any emotional obstacles. Warner Bros. had a beautiful, comfortable private jet for entertainment industry big shots—like Dolores. Rather than wait for an invitation that might never come, why not simply ask?

I knew that she flew on the Warner Bros.' private jet all the time, even though she was simply a talent manager. What did she belong on the Warner Bros.' private jet for? I had thought it was because she was such a powerful person and because she was so feared. But now I wondered if she was just good at getting in there when she saw an opportunity. I hadn't been afraid to ask and I knew
how
to ask. Just like that, Dolores was on a flight.

When she was on those flights, she wasn't the Dolores I witnessed with the interns. She was upbeat, positive, and never overstayed her welcome. She abided by the rules and wasn't a bother. She didn't show up with a camera crew or eating smelly food on the plane.
She took up a seat but she didn't take up space
. Finding opportunities was a skill that she learned and perfected—and one that she taught me.

THE APPROACH

You have to have nerve to get people to do things for you. It doesn't mean you have to be obnoxious and pushy or assert some kind of authority. You do have to be bluntly honest and say exactly what you want. “Can I get a discount?” “What's the chance of getting to try a suite?” It's off-putting and people never do things like that. How do you respond to that sort of a question?

As a concierge I'm in a lucky position, because I'm on both the giving and the taking sides. People ask me and they usually ask me incorrectly. It's my job to get them what they want anyway—and I never ask on their behalf the way they've asked me. Otherwise, I'd never get what my clients want and I'd be out of a job.

Before you ask for what you want, you have to establish some commonality. “I'm in your world now; what's it look like?… What's the climate over there?… So can you do this for me?” It's set-up, and then the kill, and it's important to use just enough jargon to appear like an insider. At a hotel, for instance, the conversation would be something like, “What's your room rate?… What's your occupancy rate?… What's rack rate on a suite?… You know, I found it online for a hundred dollars less.” That leads up to the point where I can simply ask if I can have the room for a hundred dollars less. “Is there any chance that you can do better?” is so vague that it won't work.

Be honest
. Everybody can respect that. It's not about turning the tables and making the other person feel funny because of your bluntness. It's more like putting it out there and seeing what happens. Nine times out of ten you'll get
something
because you were honest.
Ten times out of ten
you'll get “let me see what I can do,” because
nobody
in a service position wants to say no. It's all in the delivery. It's as simple as being in a department store and asking, “Is this going to go on sale tomorrow?” Ask verbatim but without an attitude of entitlement.

Being honest also means not trying to be everyone's best friend. You don't want to call a restaurant saying, “Hi, who's this?… How are you?… Oh, you know, Crystal is
such
a pretty name. Does your mother do meth?” It's completely irrelevant and palpably phony, especially to someone in a service position. But if you're like, “Hey Crystal, it's Michael. Are you guys slammed tonight?” it's a sense of familiarity and a respect for their position. Just because someone is serving you does not mean they are your servant. Quite the contrary.

You're not entitled to service; you
want
service. Fancy people often think that asking correctly is too much work. “Besides, isn't that just their job?” The funny thing is, that never translates. It's
your
job to win the case, Ms. Attorney. You don't win all of them, do you? Yes, it's the person's job to provide service. But there's a difference between them doing their job at the minimum and them going the extra mile—which is
not
their job. That's the definition of “extra”: getting something you're not otherwise entitled to. But that extra mile
is
what you want out of them.

The only way to do that is to motivate. Money can be the motivator, as with tipping. It can also be pride, or acknowledgment. But you won't get it by asserting power and you won't get it by patronizing phony friendships. The waiter isn't there to be your friend; he's there to serve you food. He's busy and doesn't need the small talk. It doesn't matter that his name is cute or is the same as your brother's—he knows where you're going with that.

No matter what technique, remember that the mission isn't complete when they say yes. Once you get what you want, you have to let them know that you're glad they gave it to you. It's as simple as sending a note to let them know how great everything was. “Keep my contact information. I'd love the opportunity to return the favor if there's anything I can do for you.”

And no, you can't have a discount.

As I started putting in fourteen-hour days with Dolores, I started to develop a comfort level with her. “Man,” I said, “the snapshot thing is really powerful”

She giggled. “Yeah. It
is
a nice touch, isn't it?” It was in the days before MySpace.

Dolores would always carry a disposable camera around. She knew who the big players were even if she didn't really
know
them that well … yet. She would flash that warm smile and extend a confident handshake. “Look how handsome you are,” she'd tell the target. “I don't have any pictures of us.”

Before it felt weird, he'd have his arm around her and the picture was snapped. When she got the film developed, she would mail the picture of the two of them together. The little Post-it would say “How cute are you???”

“Does it ever
not
work?” I asked her.

“No, because I do it right. Remember to keep it short and keep it amusing, just like when you're talking to someone on the phone. Everyone is an egomaniac. No one wants to hear about
me
. It's always about you, you, you.”

It was also always you, you, you at the agency. I was the one who Wesley Snipes called to pick him up from the courthouse when the cops impounded his motorcycle. I was the one who had to go to Jason Patric's house to pick up the mail—and let out his pet pig. When Dolores's contact lens rolled back in her eye, I was so methodical in getting it out that you would've thought that I was an optician or an ophthalmologist. (Whichever is the appropriate option, that's the one I had to pretend to be.)

I was so tuned in to all the Dolores cues that I learned nothing was said as an accident. If she said something like, “I'm going to start eating oatmeal in the mornings before I go to the gym,” that meant I should make sure that there was a tray from room service waiting at her door by 7
A.M.
To be safe, I would also need to make sure that a treadmill was reserved at 8
A.M.
It didn't matter that she was in Cannes, which was a nine-hour time difference from Los Angeles. I woke up in the middle of the night to call her hotel to make sure that she got what she wanted. It wasn't as if she were being demanding. She couldn't be demanding, because I would never let it get to that point. For me it was about service, and to me service was about competency and taking cues.

Unfortunately, it wasn't my job to write and produce the movies that the client was going to be in, so I had to be good covering my piece of the process. If Wesley Snipes needed to be woken up at 6:00
A.M.
in New York, which was 3:00
A.M.
in L.A., I did it. In a way, I was more reliable than an alarm clock.

It worked both ways. I could've called the hotel and told them I needed a wake-up call for Wesley's room. But I honestly didn't trust them. I'd rather wake up at three and call Wesley myself, so I would be absolutely positive that it got taken care of.

And because I was so reliable, I was the poor soul who had to handle Rosie Perez.

Everything with her was an incident, and every day with her there was something.

Every. Single. Day.

“Hi, Michael,” she said on the phone with her gilded accent. “Yeah, I didn't get my pages for tomorrow.”