Sorted for Anything

Clarissa is calling every pet shop in the northern hemisphere for a score of endangered chinchillas. James is trying to source a penthouse in Mogadishu featuring surround sound, and Annabelle von Trapp is regretting her pledge that securing Cirque du Soleil for a four-year-old’s birthday party this weekend would be “A piece of cake”. It’s four o’clock in the morning. They’ve been up for 36 hours. The phone rings. It’s the client. “But of course,” Annabelle purrs, “Everything’s under control.”

Step inside the lives of the fixers – hustlers, gofers, yes-men, can-dos – and the worlds of privilege they supply. Male or female, aged from eighteen to eighty (though tending towards the young side), based in any location and with contacts around the world, these people will tend to your smallest needs and most ridiculous requests from anywhere between £300 an hour to upwards of £20,000 a year. Their role is to make the unattainable reachable, to move mountains while seemingly not lifting a finger, to please the most spoilt of celebrities. Behind the scenes is a car crash – but the client sees only the seamless efficacy and effortless charm. Sourcing a supermodel to hang on the arm of a just-been-dumped director, or fifty grammes of uncut Bolivian cocaine? Right away, sir... Demands range from the abstract to the impossible: a client of LA’s Mint requested a private dinner with Bill Clinton – and got it – while another wanted to know the most suitable gift for an African tribal elder (answer: a flock of sheep). One driver was dispatched to find a pet shop with at least a hundred birds to buy. The billionaire customer then proceeded to free them all into the sky. For Jennifer Lopez’s birthday, Quintessentially were assigned to find a dozen albino peacocks with which she could celebrate the day. Follow the trail to any site of social decadence and you’ll find the roaming concierge. These renegade butlers and smiling magicians aren’t shackled to a single destination and are answerable to no one but the client. Even nightclubs are upgrading from the humble valet – New York’s Bungalow 8 even has a dedicated in-house concierge. The big players range from the global – Quintessentially now has 45 offices around the globe from Moscow to Buenos Aires, Canada to Mozambique – to the boutique Preferred Group, restricted to just thirty members worth over $100,000,000 each. A single client might necessitate fifteen services and twenty contacts in any given day. There are social, mass market and cottage concierges (most frequently found on the hedonism trail, from Ibiza to LA and South America’s most gilded enclaves). Front row seats at fashion shows, access to Playboy parties and private jets to Thomas Keller joints: these are the all-new keepers of the Golden Keys. The concierge is as much an aide as a status symbol. What developed from a credit card has become a phenomenon. Ever since American Express’s invitation-only Black Card launched with its dedicated concierge service back in 1999, a global gathering of bandits and hand-holders has sprung up to service the international elite’s ever-growing needs. With an inimitable knack for crises (whether arranging a top plastic surgeon in A&E or hiring fifteen off-duty policemen to patrol your villa party) and celebrations (P-Diddy’s garden transformed into a fairytale land; Groove Armada DJ, 22 synchronized swimmers flown from Moscow to perform at a pool party), they take care of all those everyday headaches along the way – be that managing air miles, hiring interpreters or ‘gift giving’ (not to be confused with the controversial gay sport of exposing yourself to fatal sexual diseases): showering your acquaintances with embroidered ostrich hold-alls before you leave. The most recent breed is the microconcierge, dedicated to just one person. Take Ibiza’s rave butlers – armed with

gthe poisons of hedonism, they’ll walk you into the nightclub, nurse your drinks and replenish your water and cigarettes at the afterparty, too. Nobody who isn’t either a backpacker or on a deathwish sets foot in Sao Paulo without a ‘driver’ to source flights, personal shamans or cocaine. Hell, they’ll even hold your hair back as you snort it, and then listen to your boring stories afterwards... Increasingly, they are delivering things that money can’t buy, for individuals who can buy anything: one agency darling speaks of the oligarch who requested the concierge’s sister for the night. Icon Ibiza’s service started after friends begged to rent the owners’ house, and increasingly fixers act as a consort, holiday companion and agony aunt to those isolated by their wealth. Long before Quintessentially was a twinkle in Ben Elliott’s eye, Alfredo Etchegaray, the sharpest fixer in South America, was a moving DeBretts Guide to Punta del Este – the jet-set resort that draws the cream of the continent’s elite. Every day a new architecturally awesome pied-a-mer is constructed; every night thousands of staff man dozens of A-list dinner parties; every hour Alfredo and his wife receive requests from celebrities needing guests to people their parties, invitations to openings, staff for their mansions and private jets. Naturally, there are requests of a more intimate nature – Charlie Chester, who runs Icon Ibiza with his wife, the DJ Jo Mills, was mortified when a friend caught him exiting a brothel at midnight. The group of International Football Federation CEOs he was taking care of had requested seven girls aged under 25 to spend time on their yacht, to be exchanged for seven new ones 24 hours later. However, the days of crystal meth on tap are over – ever since the infamous Quintessentially sting, when an undercover reporter commissioned thirty grammes of coke from a Cannes representative, concierges are warier. To get your rocks off today you’ll need to be well-known to the company, or enrolled with a smaller agency whose reputation isn’t such a big deal.