Concierge Confidential (28 page)

First I tried to call. “Hi, may I speak with Bonnie?”

“Who is this?” the reservationist asked.

“It's Michael Fazio.”

“Does she know you?”

“Oh, absolutely!” I said.

“I'll tell her you called.”

I waited a day and called again. “Hi, is Bonnie there? It's Michael Fazio.”

“May I ask what this is regarding?”

“Oh, she knows me. I'm friends with Robert and I know her from Nick & Toni's in New York.” It was kind of amateurish, but it was my only link to her. It wasn't really about me name-dropping. It was more like me showing to her that I was vetted, because her friend is my friend so she doesn't have to worry. I
get
it. I'm one of you!

I guess she didn't think I got it, or that I was one of you. She didn't call back.

I tried my next trick: sending her flowers.

This time she called, but she wasn't being all warm and fuzzy. “The flowers were very sweet—what do you need?”

“Are you there right now?” I said. “I'll be over. Just wait for me. I'll be right over.” I tried to keep it light and breezy, as if my Hamptons concierge career didn't depend on it.

I ran over there and gave her my spiel of who I wanted to be sending her way. “There are fifteen-thousand-square-foot oceanfront homes that are empty. This guy's going to be renting them for a hundred thousand a week. These are really rich people. You have nothing to worry about. These are going to be high-profile people, too. They're not going to want to bother anybody. I get your vibe, completely.”

The entire time I was talking, she sat there literally making faces. “Where are these houses? The owners are going to let you put some stranger in their
house
?
What?
”

“I know it might sound crazy but that's only because no one's ever done it before,” I insisted.

“I can't promise you anything, but just call me. Ask for me if you need something.”

One month in, and there were no bookings. Andrew wasn't really finding any houses, either. Apparently there weren't as many people interested in renting homes for $100,000 a week as he had thought—and apparently there weren't as many homes sitting around and getting salty and run-down, either. At least not owned by people who wanted to convert them into quasi-hotels.

Fortunately, Andrew himself had a very flagship kind of home himself. It looked like South Fork, with big gates, his Ferrari parked out in view, and horses roaming around this beautiful grassy knoll. While we stayed in the staff home—Abbie and I alternated between the Hamptons and New York—we found out that Andrew enjoyed pot. He would crash there with us, popping out joints and wine like it was a frat party. He was also hiring people to be house attendants, even though there weren't any houses yet. He was running things as if we actually had customers.

Eventually, Andrew managed to get some traction. “I've got the Honigs coming to stay,” he told me. I'd heard of the Honigs;
everyone
had heard of the Honigs, which is why I'm not referring to them by their actual name. “I'm thinking they'll be influencers who'll then go back and spread the word to everybody that we're really the thing to do this summer. Can you get an itinerary ready for them?”

“Absolutely.” I started planning an itinerary—but everything was difficult because the Hamptons was very closed. The golf club that everyone wants to play at, for example, is private. I was making my rounds, but what I was describing was totally a foreign concept to everyone. I was forced to try and sell the credibility of the whole thing. “Of course you haven't heard of this. It's very off the radar. Nobody knows about it. It's exclusive.”

Sometimes that got me somewhere. When it didn't, I said, “It's the Honigs. I'm not supposed to tell you, but it's the Honigs who are going to be staying in one of our homes this weekend.” That
always
worked. I even let Bonnie know, because I was positive she was friendly with them.

“They're coming?” she said. “He didn't call me.”

I knew that since it was the Honigs, I could make the ultimate reservation with her: eight people for nine on a Saturday night—when they only had one table that held eight people. I pulled out all stops. They got the golf, they got the vineyards, they got first-class treatment every step of the way. Hampton Estates was firing on all cylinders.

The Sunday after the Honigs came and went, I got a phone call. “Hi, may I speak with Michael Fazio?”

“This is Michael Fazio,” I said.

“Hi, Michael. It's Steph calling from Nick & Toni's. I have a message from Bonnie.”

“Is something the matter?”

“She just wants you to know that you don't have to deceive her to get reservations. She really didn't appreciate being tricked. You should've just told her what you needed in the first place.”

“Wait,
what
? What happened?”

“I don't know. That's what she told me to say.”

“Is she there? Can I talk with her?”

“No, she definitely is
not
here to talk with you at the moment.”

I was
horrified
. I couldn't think of what had gone wrong. I wracked my brain trying to think of every other time I had a reservation go awry. Did they show up with only four people? Did they not even bother to show up at all?

I practically started stalking Bonnie, doing everything I could to get her on the phone. Nick & Toni's was closed the following day, and all I could do was obsess about how I had “tricked” her. It was such a blunt message that I was completely confused.

Finally, I managed to get her on the line. “Bonnie, I understand there was some sort of problem. What happened?”

“What happened was, those weren't the Honigs!”

“What? They
were
the Honigs! I swear to God they were the Honigs!”

“No they weren't, honey. It was some guy who happened to be named Honig, and his buddies.”

I hadn't even considered that. It was a house, a big price tag, and the Hamptons—of
course
it was going to be
the
Honigs. But it was only
a
Honig. “I'm dumbfounded. I am so sorry. But I wasn't
lying
!”

“No, I know. But you can't do that. You have to really know next time.”

The fact of the matter was, she was absolutely right. If my job is to be a connector, I have to be damn sure that I knew who I was connecting to what—especially at a place like Nick & Toni's, where they were trying hard to cultivate a certain vibe.

By the end of the summer, we had no clients, no houses, and no realistic chance of returning to the project the following year. Abbie and I returned to New York, focusing on what it was that we did best.

GOING TO THE COUNTRY

The expression “The Hamptons” is a bit misleading, in the same way that being from “New York” can mean Manhattan, or it can mean one of the boroughs, or it can even mean upstate. Coming from New York City, Southampton is the closest. It tends to attract old money and newbies all at the same time. It's where the Paris Hilton bars are. It's where the share houses are. Because it's the first one, you think you've hit gold when you get there.

Next comes Bridgehampton, which is just a bunch of rich white people who golf. East Hampton isn't technically the farthest of the Hamptons, but it's far enough. You don't want to go past it. That's where you'll find Steven Spielberg, David Letterman, and Jerry Seinfeld.

The flashy nightlife is almost always in Southampton. Most of the “Hamptons” places that you read about are in Southampton. It's great—on the surface. Yet it's also where the
Jersey Shore
cast would be seen. On the other hand, you're going to see Gwyneth Paltrow when you get to East Hampton. You might not see her in a nightclub, but you will see her at a charity dinner at somebody's house.

There's this idea that Hamptons life is really glitzy, like going to some trendy hotel and dressing up for stylish restaurants. The media treats it as though it were Palm Beach, where everything is polished. In reality, it's the opposite. If you go to most places in Louboutins and a beaded cocktail dress you'll be completely out of place. It's not like Los Angeles, where people
try
to look sloppy. It's a weekend community and the hippest and most famous people treat it that way. All those things that people fantasize about
are
happening. They're just not happening with neon signs on them.

As with any community, there are subliminal ways to gauge someone's status. If someone has a phone number that starts with the 324 prefix, you know that they're the real deal and have been there forever. It's the equivalent of having a 212 area code in New York; 324 is almost always “south of the highway,” which is where the most expensive homes are.

Another status symbol is the number of beach stickers you have on your car. You need to have a sticker that says you're a Hamptonite to park at the beach. The fancier the car, the more beach stickers it tends to have on it. They wind up accumulating like tree rings.

When people want to size you up directly, they won't ask if you rent or own like in most other places. Instead, they'll make comments like “I can't stand the summer here” or “Are you year-round?”, which are based on the idea that the renters are tarnishing their quaint little town.

The Hamptons is like a gated community—without the gates. The only gate is a knowledge gate. If you're in the “right” place, everyone is approachable and even friendly. Anything that Guild Hall puts on will always attract the right crowd. ARF, the animal charity, always attracts the right crowd. There are two gay events that are very celebrity-studded. One is for the Center, which is the Gay and Lesbian Center in New York City. The other is the Empire State Pride Agenda, which is on the beach and always gets a big celebrity clientele. The East Hampton film festival is a pretty obvious place to go see people.

If you're cool enough to know that you should be at a Guild Hall event and you run into a Billy Joel, it's very easy to strike up a conversation. Provided you're not gushing over his music, the event itself will provide something to talk about. Everybody's approachable because of this sense of guilt-by-association. You're there, so you must be okay.

In the Hamptons, rich people give their homes to be used for these big charity fund-raisers. The funny thing is, no one says that they're going to the Amaryllis Farm Equine Rescue event. Instead, they're “going to Steven's tonight” because the party is at Steven Klein's house. But it's not like Steven invited them to some exclusive event. Anyone can get out a checkbook, write out a donation—tax-deductible—and be welcomed in. I feel like a trespasser many times because I'm walking through somebody's house. Granted, they often have undercover security or an area closed off. But it's still kind of weird to take a pee in Steven Spielberg's home.

Unlike in a club, there are no bodyguards and no VIP sections at these events because everyone is ostensibly a VIP. Don't drop money to visit a club where no one will be, or where you can't approach the people who are there. Drop money to send those poor horses to the Amaryllis Farm, and your hand will be reaching over Madonna's to get a shrimp off the table.

17.

Good Housekeeping

The Abigail Michaels plan was that each time we got a new building, we were going to do the same thing that we did with our first one. We had that system figured out, and we knew both how many people we needed and what kind of people they needed to be. This ended up being a total mistake, because every building isn't the same—and not every group of tenants is the same.

Our first building was mostly populated by rich kids (read: up to age thirty-five), whose parents picked out their apartments for them. The parents asserted that they liked to come to the city, that it was nice for them to have a great place to stay, and that their children
needed
a three-bedroom so Mommy and Daddy could keep some things there and never have to unpack. Our services were used so frequently that the building became a total cash cow.

Because these kids moved straight from college to their fancy apartments, they never learned how to handle everyday chores—and thanks to Abigail Michaels, they never had to. We had a girl whose mother booked a car service for her every morning to get to work. One couldn't expect her to take the subway; there's a
reason
why it's underground.

Abbie and I thought we had discovered gold with our first building, so we took on a bunch of others as soon as we could. We didn't realize that new buildings are often
empty
buildings. We started our operations in places with five hundred apartments—but it takes a long time before five hundred apartments fill up, even in Manhattan. On the flip side, everybody and their brother was getting into the real estate business because of the housing boom—but the technical knowledge was not always there. In one of our new buildings, the giant glass doors didn't really meet correctly. In the winter, it was literally colder and
windier
inside because those doors created a vacuum of cold cyclonic air. The developer never thought of important things like that. He also didn't think that they should vent the heat all the way back to our space, which meant that there was condensation on our little aluminum countertop. We sat in our coats, trying to help the six residents through our chattering teeth. Abbie and I brought in so many space heaters that fuses would blow.

It was catastrophe after catastrophe. Another building had a major, disgusting rat problem. Rats are a very common sight on the New York City subway tracks. They know that people can't get to them down there, so they're utterly unafraid. We had the same situation in the building. The rats just walked around in our space, looking in the garbage cans for anything good. If we shooed them they'd simply back away a few feet. It was more like they were politely getting out of our way rather than being actually intimidated.