CELEB HOTELIER BALAZS HAS KNACK FOR STORYTELLING
HIP hotelier André Balazs does not talk so much as purr and, as befits one of the world’s most successful hoteliers, his tanned features are almost as smooth as his manner.
We meet in the plush opulence of the Chiltern Firehouse, one of Balazs’s string of mega-cool boutique hotels, and the first thing he wants to know is if my tea is drinkable. It is, I tell him.
“Are you sure,” he asks, voice dripping like syrup from a spoon. “Is it really good?” When another customer arrives with a small fluffy dog, Balazs insists it should eat steak tartare and a uniformed man appears bearing an ornate golden bowl, placed with a flourish on the carpet.
Staff at the Chiltern Firehouse are used to catering for every whim. Madonna has stayed here, David Cameron has eaten in the restaurant and Bradley Cooper has been spotted in the secret smoking area (accessed through a mirrored door in the loo).
Balazs is the man behind it all. He runs some of the most ludicrously hip establishments in existence – the Mercer in New York, Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, the Standard in several cities and, of course, the Chiltern Firehouse in London, which opened on a sleepy Marylebone street in 2014. He is here today to promote its glossy new cookbook, which is filled with recipes from in-house chef Nuno Mendes and a foreword from regular Stephen Fry. A third of the pages are taken up with cocktails as he takes mixology “very seriously”. Balazs is 60 but looks younger, and he flirts like a 21-year-old. His former flames are said to include Kylie Minogue, Naomi Campbell and US comedian Chelsea Handler. According to reports, he is in a longterm on-off relationship with Uma Thurman. I’ve been asked by his publicist not to focus too much on celebrities but, honestly, it’s hard to keep him on track. A lot of his anecdotes start with “Jay Z once said to me…” or “Brett Easton Ellis, who has been a friend of mine for 30 years…”
Donald Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka once interned for Balazs, as a student. She was “very smart and level-headed. Both she and her husband, Jared [Kushner], are great people,” he says.
“Donald, I don’t know that well. The funniest encounter I had with him? I was dating a very wellknown beautiful person [Balazs won’t tell me who]. He came up to me – he made a bee-line across the room when we were at a cocktail party – and he went like this…” Balazs squeezes my shoulder.
“And whispered into my ear, ‘Good job’.?”
He bursts out laughing. “So I don’t know what the f--- that means for the United States.” Does he think Trump will be a good president? There is a pause. “He’s a terrific entrepreneur.” For a while, Balazs was intrigued by the idea of a career in politics – he was a scholar at Cornell University and did a master’s in journalism at Columbia. He compares the running of hotels to a political campaign and calls his chief operating officer his “chief of staff”.
Indeed, the appeal of a Balazs hotel lies in its unique blend of comfort and discretion. Two years ago, surveillance footage of Beyoncé Knowles’s sister Solange lashing out at her brother-in-law Jay Z in the lift of a Standard Hotel in New York was leaked to the press.
The employee who took it was sacked within three hours of the film being made public.
“That was awful,” says Balazs, his smile slipping. “Awful.”
Otherwise, he is fairly relaxed about the excessive habits of the rich and famous. Lindsay Lohan ran up a £37 000 (R599 428) unpaid bill at Chateau Marmont and Johnny Depp was recently in the news for spending a rumoured £24 000 a month on wine. “As long as things are consensual and you don’t disturb anyone else, everything’s OK,” Balazs says, genially.
He does concede the whole celebrity thing can, on occasion, be “a huge problem”. John Kerry, the former US secretary of state, once arrived at the Chiltern Firehouse with “eight black SUVs”.
“The police couldn’t move them, I couldn’t move them,” he says.
“When Bill Clinton shows up and DJs here with 12 cars outside, it’s good but it’s terrible…”
Yes, that’s right. The former US president once performed an impromptu DJ set here, a few feet from where we are sitting.
“It was spectacular,” Balazs recalls. “He would pull out album covers and say, ‘Oh, this is the French version of that Tina Turner song, because on the American version, they censored the graphics.
“He knew everything! It was mindblowing. He played for 35 minutes. We couldn’t get him out of here.”
Balazs is the son of Hungarian immigrants. His father was a doctor and his mother, Eva, a psychoanalyst who emigrated to Sweden.
Balazs’s parents later left Sweden for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Balazs was born.
In her spare time, his mother was a gifted jazz pianist – and when she moved in with her son, he made her sign a contract agreeing to play twice a week in the Standard Hotel on New York’s High Line. It was his way of ensuring she kept her faculties sharp. “And now, she has a whole fan club!”
Balazs was married to Katie Ford, the former CEO of Ford Models, for 19 years and has two grown-up daughters. So is he dating Uma Thurman, or…?
A smile twitches at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t talk about my private life in the same way I’d never talk about anyone else’s private life. ”–