Dawn Carmichael stands at attention, holding two plates of almond-crusted sea
bass with Moroccan salsa. The blonde former Starbucks barista is dressed in
a blue suit and white shirt, with a crisply folded napkin draped over her
left arm. She’s lined up with three other servers in the cavernous kitchen
of the Starkey Mansion, a prim Georgian-style home in downtown Denver,
Colorado.
When they get the signal – two taps on the kitchen door – the group will march
into the dining room, greet their 12 dinner guests and begin their first
public performance of the Ballet of Service.
This choreographed dance builds to a plate-juggling climax in which the
servers appear to suspend the plates in mid-air. It is one of the toughest
training exercises here at Butler Boot Camp. Four times a year, aspiring
butlers from around America converge for boot camp training at the Starkey
International Institute for Household Management. Their aim: to become
masters at the care and feeding of the rich.
For eight weeks the students cook, clean, polish, dust, wash and fold. They
learn how long it takes to clean a 45,000 square foot mansion (20 to 30
hours depending on the art and antiques), where to find 1,020-thread-count
sheets (Kreiss. com) and how to order Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice
cream at midnight if your employer is on a yacht in the Mediterranean (a
British concierge service).
They design “stationery wardrobes” of envelopes and letterheads to reflect the
owner’s wealth and social standing. They are taught that sable stoles should
never be stored in a cedar closet (it dries them out), and that Bentleys
should never, ever be run through the car wash.
Mary Louise Starkey, a chipper dynamo of a woman, is the creator of Butler
Boot Camp. One day in the 1980s an acquaintance called looking for someone
to clean his house. Starkey needed the money, since she had just divorced
and was struggling to raise two sons. She took the job and, spotting a
business opportunity, started a cleaning service. Within weeks she was
flooded with work.
When she later started a placement company for maids and nannies, a Middle
Eastern prince who was studying in Denver called wanting a butler. She
looked around town for butler agencies and couldn’t find one. So she decided
to start her own.
She quickly realised, however, that the rich were changing. The Old Money
families with their white-gloved balding butlers were gone. In their place
was a new generation of young, self-made entrepreneurs and finance types who
worked round the clock and built tech-loaded mansions. They didn’t want
butlers. They wanted a chief operating officer for My Life Inc.
Starkey had discovered Richistan, the land of the New Rich. I stumbled on it
myself three years ago walking along the docks of Fort Lauderdale’s Bahia
Mar marina during an annual yacht convention.
As I stared out over the hundreds of mega-yachts – most 150ft or more, flying
Caribbean flags emblazoned with fruit – a boat owner from Texas said to me:
“You look at all these boats and you’d think everyone’s making loads of
money. It’s like it’s a different country.”
The words stuck with me. Today’s rich had formed their own virtual country.
They were, in fact, wealthier than most nations. By 2004 the richest 1% of
Americans were earning about $1.35 trillion a year – greater than the total
national incomes of France, Italy or Canada.
And with their huge numbers, they had built a self-contained world unto
themselves, complete with their own healthcare system (concierge doctors),
travel network (NetJets, destination clubs), separate economy (dou-ble-digit
income gains and double-digit inflation), and language (“Who’s your
household manager?”). They didn’t just hire gardening crews, they hired
“personal arborists”.
The rich weren’t just getting richer, they were becoming financial foreigners,
creating their own country within a country, their own society within a
society, and their economy within an economy. They were creating Richistan.
When I set out to explore this new country, I discovered a new culture of
wealth that’s vastly different from Old Money. Before the late 1980s, the
rich lived in a small, quiet enclave of like-minded people. They went to
many of the same schools, belonged to the same clubs, had similar values and
often married into each other’s families. It was more like a village than a
country.
In the late 1980s the rich began to change. Soaring financial markets ushered
in a new group of Wall Streeters, corporate raiders and tech pioneers. The
number of American billionaires jumped from 13 in 1982 to 67 in 1989. By
2000, with the bull market in full swing, the trickle turned into a tidal
wave, and the population of US millionaires more than tripled to 8m people –
similar to the population of Sweden or Austria.
The rich became Richistanis – members of a distinct new generation of wealth.
Richistanis didn’t inherit their wealth but rose up through the ranks of the
middle class or upper middle class to make it on their own. Paris Hilton
aside, only 3% of today’s multimillionaires are celebrities and fewer than
10% inherited their money.
They’re also much younger than previous generations of rich people. “Before
the 1990s, most of the wealthy I knew were retired, they were in their
sixties or seventies,” says Peter Scaturro, former CEO of US Trust, the
wealth management firm. “Now they’re in their thirties and forties. They
have a lot of runway left in front of them.”
As Starkey discovered, these New Rich don’t want a traditional butler. They
need a guy (or more often a woman) who can get things done and manage their
increasingly complicated homes.
She can oversee the pool cleaners and landscapers, the home-theatre installer
and dog groomer. She can manage a house budget of $2m a year and detail
every item on an Excel spreadsheet. She is a computer geek who can programme
the lights on the smart-home system, network the computers at the Montana
ranch and reset the home-alarm system from a laptop miles away. She is a
travel agent who could book the next flight to Paris and get a prime room at
the George V. And she is a leader who can oversee a team of grumpy maids,
crazy chefs, erudite nannies and surly security guards.
By the end of Butler Boot Camp, Starkey’s aspiring butlers will be masters at
pampering the privileged. The rich, they learn, like their shampoo bottles
and toothpaste tubes always filled to the top. If their employers have four
homes, chances are they’ll want their dresser drawers and bath-room cabinets
arranged exactly the same in every house, so they don’t have to search for
their socks or pills.
And they learn that the rich live in constant fear of germs. “They’re health
freaks,” says Raymond Champion, Starkey’s chief instructor. “These people
are very successful and guess what, they want to live for ever. These are
very germ-ori-ented people. Get used to it. Germs are huge in this world.”
Starkey students pay more than $12,000 for Boot Camp. While that may sound
steep, the payoff is even bigger. Butlering has become one of the
fastest-growing jobs in the United States. With so many Richistanis needing
so many butlers, demand and pay are soaring. A good Starkey graduate can
start at $80,000 to $120,000 a year – not to mention free room and board at
the mansion.
The story of the butler boom is the story of all that has changed about
American wealth over the past 15 years. It’s not just a tale of more rich
people needing more butlers, though that’s a big part of it. It’s also the
story of a new culture of wealth emerging in America, driven by a new kind
of rich person.
Just as new butlers need training, so do the New Rich. Most of today’s
Richistanis are not used to having servants. They’re used to doing things
themselves, and they’re uncomfortable with the stuffy formalities that often
come with hiring house staff.
Take the case of Bob, a real-estate tycoon and ranch owner in the Far West.
Bob, his wife and two kids live on 800 acres of land with 10,000 square feet
of living space. They have a main house, art studio, hunting cabin and other
buildings scattered around the property.
To manage it all, Bob hired six house staff. Getting used to living with all
those strangers took time.
“It’s bizarre,” he says. “It’s not as glamorous as it sounds to have a house
staff. You have all these people touching everything from your underwear to
your medicine. It’s not really our preference.”
The reason he hired all that help was to give him and his wife more time with
their kids. Since they run their own business, they’re not home much and
wanted to spend their free time with their two sons, rather than cooking,
cleaning or mowing the lawn.
“When we’re home, we wanted to do nothing but spend time with our boys. We
don’t do any household chores, we don’t fix anything, we don’t clean
anything. Our goal was to spend 55 hours a week with our kids, which we have
now achieved.”
Yet Bob quickly discovered that managing a house staff has its own headaches.
“Suddenly there’s all this funky politics going on in your house. Like the
housekeeper might be nice to us, but she’s threatening the other employees.
So we had to get rid of that housekeeper.”
His first household manager was even worse. A former actress who specialised
in formal entertainment, she aspired to work in a house that threw lavish
parties for prominent guests. Instead, she got Bob and his family, whose
idea of a good time is a moun-tain-bike ride around the ranch followed by a
big salad. Most nights after dinner, they read to the kids or watch 1940s
comedies on DVD. Bob rarely wears a suit, drives a six-year-old car and
seldom throws parties. The household manager was disappointed.
“We weren’t the rich, famous people she was hoping for,” Bob says.
She tried to convert them, anyway. Every Friday night she presented a formal
dinner for the family. Bob, his wife and two sons would sit down at the
dinner table and the household manager would serve them from silver
platters. She even bought an expensive steam press to smooth the napkins
into perfect triangles.
“During one of these dinners my wife and I turned to each other and said,
‘What’s the deal? Does she think this is how we’re supposed to live?’” One
time, Bob’s wife insisted that the household manager call her by her first
name. Her response? “Yes, Mrs . . .”
Eventually, Bob got fed up and hired a new household manager, a former bank
worker who runs the house the way Bob likes it – like a business.
“With my household manager we have everything on Excel spreadsheets,” Bob
says. “I get summary reports on the weekend and e - m a i l s throughout the
day. All the credit cards and checks run on Quicken and we run our home like
a business, with a consolidated P&L and everything.”
He also likes the fact that his household manager seems to enjoy service.
“We’ve had plenty of surly people work for us, and you can tell they resent
it. Our crew now, they understand that we’re just normal people and that we
have them there so we can spend time with our kids. I think they respect
that.”
Yet Bob still has moments when he wonders how his life got so complicated.
Aside from his six staff – the household manager, cleaning woman, assistant,
landscaper and her two labourers – he estimates that he has about 200
specialist workers who regularly come to the house.
“I just learnt that we have a potassium expert because we grow grapes,” he
says. “I never thought I’d have a soil doctor. And we have this woman who
comes in to do faux French finishes on our cabinets. And a special guy who
comes in to fix our French faucets. It turns out you can’t just call A1
plumbing to fix an Etoile faucet.
“I get e-mails during the day saying ‘Please approve $8,000 payment for
aerator for the north pond’. Our grocery list is done on an Excel
spreadsheet. We even have another Excel spreadsheet for our pool
temperatures. That’s pretty strange.”
He sums up his new life with a story about a mouse: “The other day we saw a
mouse in the house. Before, I would have just got a broom and got rid of the
thing. But now it’s different. I e-mailed the household manager. He called a
pest-control firm, and the pest-control firm caught the mouse.
“Then the household manager directed two other staff members to dispose of the
mouse. That’s five people to catch a mouse, instead of a broom. It all
seemed normal at the time. But then I thought about it, and I wondered, how
did our lives get like this?”
© Robert L Frank 2007
Extracted from Richistan by Robert Frank to be published by Piatkus Books
on July 2 at £12.99. Copies can be ordered for £11.69 including postage from
The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
They don't clean anything, fix anything...yet they spend 55 hours with the kids, doing what? I pity the kids
Michael, Dublin, Ireland
5 people and a more costly, over complicated process to catch a mouse... makes you wonder how did he get so rich???
Also, I wonder how much time the mouse event took out of his allocated child time?
Still, nice to be able to afford it.
Ronnie, Cheltenham, England
Is that what it is?
Oh ! Good Lord !
Really ! A Book on this ?
People buy such books ?
What a World ?
Really!
ian, singapore, singapore