Concierge Confidential (30 page)

Todd Nybakken was that type of guy. He lived in a very fancy building on Central Park South, where the apartments started at $4 million. He also had a complete hang-up when it came to hiring a housekeeper, to the point where I felt like a hostage negotiator trying to send someone in. “They're not going to break anything, are they?” he demanded. “Do they steal?”

Obviously he would never ask a maid to her face if she stole. But the concierge is so blessed that we are permitted to interact with the masters directly. “We only work with professionals,” I replied, trying to elevate his understanding. It wouldn't dawn on him that being a housekeeper can be a great job: It's not an enormous time commitment and if you took pride in your work you could do really well. You have a flexible schedule and you don't have to wake up that early. The pay is pretty good—good enough that you don't have to supplement it by stealing from rich people's drawers.

“Well, where are you finding these maids?” he said, as if we were throwing up random ads on Craigslist.

“They all come from reputable agencies, who often work with the same people for years. If there was
ever
any problem, we'd be sure to know about it.” I wished I was a doctor. No one went to their doctor and challenged them on their way to a cure. But in service, every conversation is one question away from an interrogation.

Todd's housekeeping calls—plural—went on for forty-five minutes at a time. “Do they have insurance? How long do they take? Do they bring their own supplies? Do they do other people in your building? I don't want anybody who does anybody else in the building!”

Because you don't want them to tell your neighbors that you have body parts in your freezer,
I thought.

“I really would feel comfortable with an in-writing breakdown of what they do,” he insisted.

After a week of back-and-forth, he was finally comfortable enough to trust our recommendation for a housekeeper. But before we could make that call, he made very, very, very specific instructions regarding his place. Some people just close one bedroom and tell the maid not to bother. For Todd, it reached a whole other level: “There are two stacks of papers on the brown desk with the white chair. The right-hand stack must not be touched, and by ‘right-handed' I mean from the perspective of the chair.” Todd also had a wet bar in his living room and, apparently, there was an Emmy award displayed on its shelves. “Under no circumstances are they to touch the Emmy!!!! Under no circumstances are they to
move
the Emmy!!!! Do not even clean that shelf.”

The day that the housekeeper was supposed to come, he called me in the morning to confirm that I got his instructions. “Did you tell her not to touch the Emmy?” he asked me.

“She knows not to touch the Emmy,” I told him.
Everyone
knew: the owner of the company knew, I knew, Abbie knew, Daria knew, the maid knew. We all got the memo—
literally
.

“Are you
sure
that the same maid who you told about not touching the Emmy is the same one who's coming to my house? Maybe one of them got sick.”

“Yes, I am sure.”

“Well, all right,” he said. “Just so long as you're
sure
.”

That afternoon, I got a call from Daria. “You're not going to believe what happened,” she told me. “Remember the Emmy guy?”

“Of course I remember the Emmy guy!”

“The maid got caught with the Emmy.”

“What?”
I said, starting to laugh. It was almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of
course
she forgot. He was so uncomfortable with the maid that he felt he had to spy on her. She was probably just trying to help him by finally cleaning his dusty Emmy.

“He'd come back to the apartment,” Daria went on, “and the housekeeper was standing on a chair, at the wet bar, holding the Emmy and dusting the shelf. He walked in on her red-handed. He probably thought she was giving some imaginary acceptance speech.” Now Daria started to laugh as well, but we were also a little scared.

“Don't worry. It's going to be fine.”

“It's going to be fine? This is his worst fear, realized.”

“Wait, so what happened? Did he tell her to leave?”

“Oh, no! He told
me
to call the maid service company. They paged the housekeeper and told her to get her out of the apartment
immediately
.”

Alarms were going off in the city: The maid had touched the Emmy. Mayor Bloomberg has been called, and Commissioner Gordon has lit the Bat-Signal. The Emmy has been touched.
This is not a drill.

“Let him know that we won't charge him,” I told Daria. “I'll eat the two hundred dollars or whatever it costs to clean his huge apartment. He's probably one of those people where you can just void the fee and he'll be fine … I
hope
he's one of those people.”

“That's not going to work,” she said. “He says that she damaged the statue.” He probably thought the maid germs were eating away at the area of rubbing.

“Well, what is he saying happened to it?” I asked her. “Is it chipped? Is it rotting?”

“It's
scratched
. He believes that she had jewelry on, and her ring left marks.”

Just to be on the safe side, we debriefed the housekeeper. “Walk me through it,” I told her. “What did you do, specifically? What kind of rag was it? Was it Pledge? Windex? Fantastik?”

“I didn't do anything!” she insisted. “I didn't drop anything. I was just cleaning the bar, and there was a bunch of shelves, and they were glass shelves, and they were dusty. I lifted it and was dusting under it, and that's when he came in. I didn't drop it. I only picked it up. He saw. He saw me. All I did was pick it up. I didn't drop it!”

The funny thing is, this poor housekeeper probably didn't even know what an Emmy
was
. To her, it was some tacky gold statue. She would've held a piece of Lladró pottery with more regard than his precious, allegedly damaged Emmy.

I couldn't call Todd back myself, since I would've gotten the company into a lot of legal hot water if I said the wrong thing. Abigail Michaels had represented that the maid wouldn't touch the Emmy and, goddamnit, she touched the Emmy. We were the ones ultimately responsible for any kind of damages—not the housekeeping company.

Out of curiosity, I searched online to find out what Todd had won the Emmy for—and I couldn't find his name on any site that listed past Emmy winners. He'd probably bought it at an auction. Maybe some former lover won it, and the statue was important to Todd because it was all that he had left.

Poor Daria was beside herself. “I don't know what to do,” she told me. “When he first called me, he said he was okay and that he understood that things happen. Now he's going on about how it's completely unacceptable, it is absolutely damaged, and how he's not going to sit by.”

“You know what?” I said. “He's not going to be happy unless we make this very official, so I'll contact the Emmy people.”

And I did. I reached out to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in Studio City. I told the story to many people, making my way up the chain until I could speak to someone in the Emmy repair department—the
nonexistent
Emmy repair department. I was telling it like a comic story. I didn't try to depict him as a lunatic, but as an absurd chain of events. I wanted them to be invested in helping me.

“You know what?” someone finally said. “Just send the statue to me. I'll take a look at it, and we can redip it. If it's that big of a deal, we'll just have it redipped.”

“Oh my God. How much is that going to cost?”

“I don't know. Let me see what I can do.”

Daria let Todd know that the Emmy was being taken care of through official Emmy channels. To be sure that he was mollified, we hired an air courier to ship it to Los Angeles. It required, literally, a courier coming to his apartment, putting the Emmy in a box, wrapping it in Styrofoam, and taking it directly to a waiting airplane. In other words, it was pretty much the same process that they use to handle human organs for transplant.

Our whole week was about the Emmy. Where's the Emmy? Did the Emmy get to Los Angeles? Now who's got it? Who signed for it? Has the Emmy dipper examined it and offered his appraisal of the damage?

After a week, Todd called Daria back. “This is
crazy,
” he told her with a straight face. “I didn't think it was going to take this long. I need it back by Tuesday because I'm having a dinner party. Enough is enough!”

The Emmy guy in Los Angeles was as nice as can be, but he wasn't sure when he'd get around to it. I just made an executive decision that Todd was the kind of person who was his own worst enemy. He was much more interested in having “his” Emmy treated with reverence and respect than in having it actually redipped. “Just tell him it's done,” I said to Daria, “and get them to reship it back to his house.”

I don't even know if it was ever taken out of the box. They simply returned it to our office, box and all. Part of me wanted to see if there was any damage, but I was certain after talking to the maid that absolutely nothing had happened to it. We messengered it to Todd's big Central Park South apartment in time for his dinner party—and we never heard a peep out of him again.

WEALTHY-TO-ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Fantastic
: Has replaced “terrific” and “fabulous.”

Bespoke
: Custom-made. It cries out “I'm special. This was made JUST for me.”

Bootblack
: Shoe shine or shoe repair.

Nothing precious
: “We don't want to spend too much.” You would never want to say, “We want something cheap.”

Plebey
: Rich people love to mix with “the people” from time to time. Plebey means “low brow,” like a diner or a bowling alley.

Salad
: Code for “nothing too expensive,” but it also implies “we're really tight with our money.” It's a big lady's term. “We want a really fantastic restaurant that does creative salads” means that if the entrées are thirty dollars, they'll just split a salad—but they want it to be gigantic and very filling with lots of stuff. There
are
places that specialize in just this, like the Cheesecake Factory and Planet Hollywood.

Artisanal
: Technically it means “handmade,” but it's a marketing term used to connote unique and special. It's such a new term that most computer software thinks it's a typo.

Girl
: Housekeeper. “My girl is
so
great at windows.”

Man
: Anyone within reach who looks like they can lift something heavier than a nine iron. “Ask the man to hang the picture.”

Boy
: A male who is needed to do something that doesn't require as much skill as hanging a picture. “The boy will collect my luggage.”

Cellular
: Rich people stick with the formal term “cellular” for their cell phones.

Nice to see you
: The new “nice to meet you.” This implies that one is so well traveled in social circles that they assume they've met everyone. It also provides insurance against saying “nice to meet you” to someone you have already met.

Marvelous
: You have to be seventy years old to use this term, but it's the right one if you enjoy a bespoke lifestyle.

18.

Wake-up Calls

Out of the blue, I got a call from Whoopi's right-hand man Tom. “Whoopi is doing a radio show,” he told me, “and she and I are moving to New York. I'm coming out there in a few weeks to look at apartments. Do you think you can get me a good rate at your hotel?”

“I'm not at the hotel anymore,” I told him. “I have my own company now. But I can definitely set you up.”

“Oh, that's great. What kind of business is it?”

“It's providing concierge service to luxury apartment buildings.”

“Really? Well, that sounds interesting. We should get together. It'd be great to reconnect.”

I got us some reservations at a really hip seafood restaurant. It was definitely the kind of place that I thought Tom would find impressive. It was cool in and of itself, but the TriBeCa vibe would make it seem even cooler after coming from L.A. I explained to him that, despite the help of Whoopi and all the other celebrities, the hotel business was still really hurting. It had seemed like the time to move on.

When dinner was over, I asked the waiter for the check. “There's no check,” he told me. “This is compliments of the owner. Thank you for referring so much business, and congratulations on your company.”

“Thank
you
so much!” I said, doing somersaults inside. They were doing me a favor by even seating us, so eating our bill was a double bonus—not to mention the fact that the waiter announced it to the whole table, instead of just taking me aside to let me know.

Tom looked at me, and he got this strange expression on his face. I had gotten him 50 percent off on his hotel room, and now I got a $200 dinner comped without even asking for it. He was witnessing the magic behind being a concierge.

From then on out, Tom and I spoke all the time. “What did you do today?” he'd ask. “Tell me about your job. This is
crazy
. How was this week? What happened?”

My wheeling and dealing really struck a chord with him, because he told me he wanted me to be a guest on Whoopi's show the week of its launch. Obviously I was thrilled at the opportunity—but terrified at the same time.

“Our producer is going to call you this afternoon,” Tom said. “He just wants to preinterview you.”