When it comes to my personal life, I don’t believe in security. I grew up on a farm. We never locked the door except on Christmas Day when we went to my grandparents’ house for dinner. (My mother had read an article that said cynical thieves lay in wait outside homes on Jesus’s birthday, looking to swoop in and sweep up.)
Later, my parents got robbed (not much, mostly furs), and now my mother’s house is like Fort Knox. You know the old saying: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.
But I remain unfazed, despite having had residences of mine broken into three times. Once I awoke to find a stranger in my bedroom, rifling through my desk, and I wrestled him for the camera. I won with a broken toe. Another time I was held at gunpoint by three assailants in the vestibule of my Perry Street home; after relinquishing my wallet, I gave chase, assisted the police in catching them, and received a letter of commendation from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
Still, I never lock the door.
But when it comes to events, I want the biggest, baddest team of security agents that money can buy. I want them to have wires in their ears, (licensed) guns in their socks, and fire in their bellies. Even now when I attend parties as a guest, I greet the guards, ask who is running the show, glance at the exits, and plan an emergency route out.
Sometimes you need them. Once at a fashion show I was running in Bryant Park, some weirdo backstage threatened to break my neck. I didn’t get mad or annoyed or engage with the idiot. (Most of the people backstage at fashion shows are idiots and have no business being there. The pros tend to come and go without a peep.) I just called “Security!”, pointed to my miscreant, and wallowed in schadenfreude as the loser was dragged kicking and screaming to the back door. (Well, that may be an exaggeration; certainly he was meaningfully escorted.)
The first time I ever hired a security firm was for a New York Fashion Week book party for famed (and now deceased) makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin, sponsored by Allure. This was a long time ago, before Fashion Week was such an overrun circus, but anyone who hosts even a tea party that week without security is a fool.
The editors at the magazine were determined to have a shindig. We printed two sets of invitations, wheat-pasted ads around the tents (yes, outdoor advertising for a party), and called every single invitee’s office a zillion times ’til we shook an R.S.V.P. from the trees.
A few days before the event, the phones started ringing like crazy. Soon responses swelled from 400 to about 1,200, exceeding by hundreds the legal amount allowed in our rented Paula Cooper gallery in SoHo. I was a bit panicky. Event designer Robert Isabell told me, “You need to call Chuck.”
Enter Chuck Garelick, security fixer, then with GSS Security Services, a firm I still highly recommend. After chastising me for not having called sooner, he wrangled me a permit to close an entire SoHo block, built me a giant paddock of police-style metal barricades, and rounded up 20 black-suited guys who followed his and my every order with efficiency and precision.
I wondered if it was overkill. “These fashion people are animals,” he told me, “and by advertising this party you have basically put up a sign saying ‘The zoo is open.’”
Soon I found myself in a scene from The Day of the Locust. When Janet Jackson arrived, the crowds prevented her limo from reaching the door. Chuck and his pals made a phalanx that wedged the crashers aside and in she came. Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista posed outside for pictures and were almost crushed. Cindy Crawford was mobbed as she tried to leave, so Chuck put her in the back of a police car, and the paparazzi shot her there trying to create a story about her being arrested. Chuck taught me that having private security was no excuse not to work closely with the cops.
Chuck and I had many adventures, which my editors and jurisprudence tell me there is no room for here. Now I’m opening an art gallery/event space in Westhampton called the Rook (it’s a castle, get it?), and of course I need Chuck. So it is lucky that he called to let me know he moved to Elite Investigations a couple of months ago. I feel safer already.
