WITH THIS BLING
Wedding planners reveal wild demands of the ultra-rich
Celebrity wedding planner David Tutera had just put the finishing touches on an elegant Manhattan celebration at Gotham Hall several years ago.
He had auditioned and hired the violinists, sourced hundreds of Swarovski crystals and candelabras for the tablescape and dressed a towering chuppah with thousands of white rose petals.
Then, the day before the wedding, the high-society Manhattan bride dropped a bombshell: The groom was still married. Could Tutera find a fake rabbi to perform the ceremony?
The bride’s father, who was footing the bill, was refusing to be publicly humiliated by the news — and so they had a fake wedding.
“I had to get him dressed — it was a fast and furious casting call. He had to read the prayers and get the hell out of there before anyone could tell it was fake,” Tutera, who works out of Los Angeles, said of the high-six-figure affair.
Tiger queen
When celebrities and 1-percenters tie the knot, wedding planners often work overtime with a limitless budget — and find themselves trying to avoid stepping on land mines when they can’t make magic happen for clients who aren’t accustomed to being told no.
Such was the case with heiress Nicola Peltz, who tied the knot last spring with Brooklyn Beckham at a star-filled Palm Beach, Fla., affair. The final bill was estimated to be about $3 million.
In the wake of the big day, however, lay utter carnage, according to court filings in a lawsuit from put-upon planners Nicole Braghin and Arianna Grijalba, and a countersuit from the bride’s billionaire dad, Nelson Peltz, who wants his $159,000 deposit back — after tasking the duo with rescuing the shambles of an event just six weeks before the big day. The whole affair wound up so chaotic, Nelson is said to have wanted to call off the wedding, calling it a “s – – t show.”
Tutera said that while billionaires may have money to throw around to pay for pop star performances, canopies made from cherry blossoms and multiple custom Versace dresses, as Peltz demanded, it can often lead to headaches and pure chaos when it comes to getting the job done.
“Three decades of doing this, and I always say I think I’ve seen it all, and the answer is ‘No,’ ” Tutera told The Post. He can’t always pull rabbits out of hats — but he’ll try.
“My reply always to my clients is never ‘No,’ it’s, ‘Lets take a look at what’s possible and let’s redefine what’s possible based on what you want to spend on these crazy requests,’ ” he said.
Grand entrances are usually where some of the most eyebrowraising delusions of grandeur come in, Tutera said, recalling a Manhattan socialite bride marrying a real estate mogul who wanted to walk down the aisle with a leashed tiger at Cipriani 42nd Street.
“I said, ‘OK, we’ll look into this.’ And, obviously, that’s not going to happen, because we can’t control the tiger,” Tutera said.
In another instance, Tutera found himself having to do backflips to convince an Armenian bride that it wasn’t a good idea to enter her wedding ceremony with several hundred guests at Cipriani Downtown in Soho from a 70-foot-high trapeze.
“I said, ‘I don’t know if this is a great idea, because you’re wearing a ballgown. Are you part of a circus? I don’t think so.’ ”
Tutera made a deal with his client: If she took lessons at a trapeze school in Chelsea, she could potentially swing it.
“She took classes, and the day of the wedding, she went up there in her dress and she didn’t do it. She freaked out. She spent a fortune on the logistics, the permitting,” he said, noting, “I try to tell people it’s a bad idea, but they don’t listen.”
In another instance, Tutera said he found himself having to secure extra security for a former “The View” co-host’s 2004 nuptials at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Midtown when she named the location of the ceremony on air.
“She announced the day of her wedding, the time of her wedding, the location — I looked at her, I was like, ‘I can’t believe what you just created for all us.’ We had just a couple of days. She wanted a grand entrance, a really grand entrance, like she was the queen of England. We had to secure the NYPD. We had to secure a secondary security company to shut down Park Avenue,” Tutera, who typically plans weddings in the high six and seven figures, recalled. “What she wanted, she got.”
Call the cops
Kristin Banta, creative director at her namesake Los Angeles event-planning and design firm, whose soirées are typically priced in the six figures, sometimes seven, has been asked to request everything from half-naked angels atop golden ladders serving guests below edible cotton candy clouds, to a dragon (a costumed human walking around on stilts) spitting out fake flames, and a live hawk ring bearer — “all of which we made happen,” she told The Post.
“The goal is to somehow find ways in which to keep the event luxe while adding these quirky requests,” Banta said.
“It’s honestly more comfortable working with a hawk ring bearer or a couple wanting to enter on elephants than an untrained dog or infant carrying a diamond ring down the aisle — or anything on fire, in general,” she said of having to rein in overzealous asks.
“Our intention is to ensure each wedding looks completely different, that each is relevant to the couple and that we keep it classy and [devoid] of tigers.”