The weddings of the 1 percent
All the neuroses and financial squabbles of the rich come out around one very special moment, said Xochitl Gonzalez in The Atlantic: The day their daughters get married.
SUNDAY MORNINGS, FOR wedding planners, are reserved for prayer. Not because it’s a particularly pious profession but because that’s the day when clients who were married on Saturday figure out if they’re happy or not. Should they choose unhappiness, Sunday is when they decide whom to blame. And Monday is when the emails come.
Will the email be full of joy and praise? Or will it be one of complaint? Back when I was a luxury-wedding planner in New York City, my business partner and I once got an email from a bride, written as she helicoptered off to her honeymoon, saying that her wedding had been a “transcendent experience.” A call from the bride’s mother directly followed. “Repeat after me,” she said. “I am bad at my job. I should never do this job again.” Sometimes the clients just need to vent. Sometimes they threaten to sue.
The work of a luxury-wedding planner is only partly about the planning.
Yes, you help the couple plan what you hope will be a stunning event—but your main job is to be a professional wedding friend. You’re the person who cares if the bow on the favor has swallow or inverse tails, or if the maid of honor is being a passive-aggressive bitch when none of the bride’s other friends wants to talk about it anymore. The family is paying you to care as much as they do.
When I became a wedding planner, no one in my own family could comprehend my utility. My grandparents, who raised me, had what was called a “football wedding.” They rented the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and piled tinfoil-wrapped heroes on a table. People would shout out what sandwich they wanted, and another guest would toss it across the room. “How complicated could a wedding be?” they wondered. Had I chosen to be a professional mud wrestler, I do not think it could have confounded them more.
Whenever one of our events was featured in a bridal magazine, I would bring it to family occasions and show it off the way other people might show off pictures of their babies. Unfortunately, this only added to the confusion. “Don’t they realize they could have bought a house with all of this money?” I would have to explain that my clients didn’t need a house. They already had one. They probably had several.
A few years after the recession, I did a lavish wedding on Long Island. The bride was stressing about putting a custom lining on her invitations that would add another couple thousand to the already large stationery bill. She and the groom had been given a seven-figure sum to spend both on their wedding and on buying and decorating their new home, and the bride had a thing for midcentury-modern furniture. Was the liner worth more than a Wassily chair?
She went back and forth, back and forth. I couldn’t say a thing, but finally her mother reached her limit: “We’re rich!” she cried out in exasperation. “Get the liners!”
Months later, the same mother, while admiring the tent we had spent days erecting for the reception, said, in total seriousness, “I hate that it’s only being used for one night. I wish we could find some homeless people to stay here when we’re done.”
IONCE GOT a call from a woman in a panic: Her daughter was getting married in a few weeks and she needed my partner and me to save this wedding. She offered no further details over the phone, insisting that we come uptown to her apartment so she could properly convey the scale of the conundrum. Right before she hung up the phone she whispered, “By the way, I’m very, very rich.”
And she was! She lived in one of those opulent places with an elevator that opened up into the apartment itself, because that’s how sprawling it was. A maid in a uniform greeted us and escorted us down a long, art-lined hallway and into the library, where the mother of the bride was waiting.
She explained the dilemma. Her daughter was embarrassed by her family’s wealth, and had been living as a closeted rich person for years—her friends had no idea. The bride had refused to let her mother have anything to do with the wedding, because if her mom got involved, the jig would be up. Everyone would see she’d just been cosplaying poverty. And so, armed with information from the internet and her mother’s checkbook, the young woman had gone off and planned what she imagined was an “average wedding.”
With the event just weeks away, the mother had started poking around and realized, This is terrible! Her daughter didn’t just have conflicted ideas about her own privilege. She also had bad taste—or at least unfortunate notions of what the “average” bride wants at her wedding: things like jam jars for wineglasses, picnic tables for seating, a limited bar.
Her daughter could pretend all she wanted, the mother said, but their friends and family knew that they were rich and were expecting a nice affair. After much argument, they compromised: They would hire a wedding planner. And the only wedding planner in all of New York they could agree on was me, probably because while many of my competitors were specializing in opulence, I had cornered the market in “understated luxury.”
The mother insisted that we meet right away because the bride was planning to reach out and hire us the next day, and
the mother wanted me to be clear on how it was going to work. My job, in addition to making sure the wedding was not an embarrassment, was to say yes to everything the daughter asked for. If the bride questioned what something cost, I was to say it was “already included in the contract.” The mother didn’t care how expensive anything was; she would cover it secretly. Did this sound crazy? Absolutely. Did I need the money? Yes.
I was amazed by how well the strategy worked. “You could serve these baby lamb chops,” I would say, to which the bride would reply, “But is that going to be more expensive than pigs in a blanket?” and I would assure her, as I had been hired to do, that everything was in the contract.
They say that there are no accidents, but the daughter, in town for wedding things, logged on to her mother’s computer and saw our email exchanges (“For Christ’s sake,” the mother wrote, “why can’t you be my daughter?” The mother said she’d grown up poor like me but, unlike me, had married well. “Marry rich!” she would tell me. “It’s so fun!”) She insisted, quite understandably, that I be fired immediately.
The mother, it turned out, couldn’t bring herself to fire me. We’d had a blast together upgrading the bride’s budgetconscious, twee affair into a jewel box of an event, and we weren’t ready to quit. Instead, we came up with a ruse—even more elaborate than the first—to get us through the wedding day.
I had one of my employees pretend to work for the caterer, and—I’m not particularly proud of this—we introduced the bride and this woman, assuring her that I was no longer involved. Except that I absolutely was. And nothing the bride and this woman talked about held any water, because the only thing that mattered was what happened between me and her mother. And what was happening was a lot. We ordered custom furniture to maximize the space in the room. We brought in an enhanced cooling system. We had the floor refinished so no one would trip.
On the day of the event, after straightening every fork and folding every hemstitched linen napkin, I made myself invisible. I left everything in the trusted hands of a few of my staff members, who were disguised as waiters. I posted myself in a restaurant a few blocks away and fielded the mother’s hysterical texts: “She’s going to find out! She’s going to find out what we’ve been doing!”
I assured her that this charade would soon be behind us. But I didn’t realize the reason she was certain her daughter would find out was that she was going to get drunk and tell her. Halfway through the reception, she pulled the bride aside and confessed the entire scheme. At the end of the night, my phone buzzed one last time: “She knows everything. This is goodbye!”
MICHAEL WAISER IS among the most expensive caterers in the country—“stupid expensive,”
I’ve heard people call him. The prices start at $550 per person for dishes like foraged mushrooms under a quail egg and shaved black truffles. Nonetheless, Waiser told me, “We are always gonna be the help. I’m probably the most expensive help there is. But I’m the help, right? And I think that you have to remember that.”
I was used to my wealthy clients thinking they could bend reality to their will, but I got truly taken advantage of only once. The bride called us to say that she and her younger sister were both getting married in the same year at the same venue. For what seemed like obvious reasons, she did not want to work with the same planner as her baby sibling. I quoted her our rates and there was silence.
Her sister’s planner, she said then, was cheaper—something like $12,000 less. To which I replied: Good for your sister!
We nevertheless agreed to meet, and by the end of our coffee date, I could see by the needy look in her eyes that she wanted me to be her wedding best friend—the one person who didn’t care about what her sister was doing with her wedding; the one person who didn’t care that her sister was getting married, period.
Her mother called: They loved me, but the issue was that the other planner cost less. Again I said: Good for you; they were welcome to use that planner for both events. But they wanted me. Eventually, they signed the contract and sent in the first of several deposits.
Two weeks before the wedding, we called to remind them that the final payment of $10,000 hadn’t come in yet. They said the check was in the mail. Two days before we left to begin setting up, we tried to charge their card on file, but it was no longer valid. When we rang, they told us they would give us a check when we arrived.
Three days into the tent installation, when we would ask for payment, the mother or father would say they would go to the house right away and get it. Each time, they would get distracted. On the day of the wedding, we still hadn’t been paid and debated what to do. It is easier to get a divorce than to quit a wedding. I know because I successfully did the former but never the latter. Obviously, we would show up. When we asked the father for the check, he barked at us: How dare we harass him on his daughter’s wedding day?
But the day after, when we arrived to break down the party, the family was nowhere to be found. No check, no credit-card number. We made the trip back to New York bathed in shame. Thirteen years in the business, and we’d been played by multimillionaires.
That Sunday we prayed extra hard, but on Monday the bride’s father reached out. He had made a list of minor infractions that he believed entitled him to withhold our last payment. Napkins not up to snuff, lights flickering in the restroom trailer. I called him and said this was simply not right. We had done what we were hired to do. But he had decided, it seemed clear to me, that if the little sister’s wedding planner was taking less, I would have to take less as well, contract be damned. Go ahead and fight me, he said. “I’ll have so much fun spending my money suing you.”
You might not be surprised to hear that after the mother of my fake-poor bride told me it was farewell forever, it wasn’t quite. I got some emails, the occasional text. The strange part about it is, although I believed the bride had every right to be upset, I never felt guilty for what we did. And I suspect that her mother didn’t, either. Our bond had nothing to do with how she felt about her daughter, and everything to do with how she felt about her money: just fine. She not only didn’t mind having it; she didn’t mind spending it.
Adapted from an article that originally appeared in The Atlantic. Used with permission.