Gareth Gallagher was shellshocked. And smelling, barely, of gin and tonic.
The 42-year-old planner was standing in the midst of a multi-million-dollar event he’d organized, stunned by a spat together with his prime client over their drink — specifically, serving a G&T with just two ice cubes relatively than three.
“They threw the drink at me for getting it fallacious,” he recalls, stunned.
That “Mommie Dearest” moment was the low point of an already barrel-scraping bash.
The three-week-long family reunion — a likelihood for an ultra-wealthy family to return together right because the pandemic ended — had required Gallagher to corral a twenty-strong team. It was like a real-life episode of Succession, complete with dysfunction.
They were coordinating all the things from private planes to penthouse stays for multiple guests across ten or more hotels.
He needed so many helping hands, Gallagher says, because everyone attending was at loggerheads.
“It was a family reunion yet none of them spoke to at least one one other, so that you grow to be the punch bag for all of them, trapped on this narcissistic, dysfunctional family,” he says.
It’s a situation that Nicole Braghin and Arianna Grijalba would recognize all too well — they’re the Miami-based planners hired and fired by billionaire Nelson Peltz in only eight days.
He’d tapped them for his actress daughter Nicola’s wedding to Brooklyn Beckham in April last yr but their quick-fire departure was reportedly sparked by a squabble over Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton’s RSVP. (The difficulty: why was he still on the guest list, despite having declined?)
The party-planning duo and activist investor Peltz are actually locked in competing lawsuits: he’s suing them for the $159,000 deposit he paid while the pair has fired back with a countersuit that seeks $50,000 in damages. The tussle continues.
That unseemly public spat serves as a reminder that the air-kissing world of party planning isn’t as carefree and glamorous because it strains to seem.
Gallagher’s latest memoir, “Eventually Gareth”, is aimed toward making that time, too.
Gallagher, who runs EVT Media, whose clients include Google, Levi’s and Apple, and splits his time between LA and London — he was born in England — desires to dispel the myths across the industry.
“It was really vital for me to get the darker side across,” Gallaher confesses, “From the surface, all the things looks great, but there’s a lot dysfunction.”
Gallagher knows that first-hand: he’s experienced multiple addictions over his two-decade profession — to sex, drink and medicines — but is now proudly in recovery.
Substance abuse is commonplace in his field, he warns, even while on the clock.
“I’d say 99.9% of individuals have worked under the influence. It’s the one approach to function in an industry built around excess, a high-energy, highly strung environment where you’re working twenty-four hours a day.”
It wasn’t cocaine-induced paranoia, though, that made him think he was being followed.
That was five years ago, when he was living and dealing in Latest York, and en path to a 12-step meeting.
As he walked out of his apartment, he spotted a person in a white baseball cap lurking over the road.
The white-capped stranger was there again on the subway, a couple of minutes later.
Then Gallagher quickly got on and off again as a test. Sure enough, the person did the identical thing.
Panicky, he confided in the lady sitting next to him, a stranger. “She said ‘I’ll walk with you and act like you recognize me.’ She was an angel sent from above.”
It wasn’t the top once he’d shaken off that tail, though. Once he arrived, he was unsettled by the brand new member of the meeting, an oddly quiet woman.
“No one knew her and she or he’d not said her name,” he recalls — and sure enough, it turned out she was also a snoop.
Each of them, he continues, had been hired by a disgruntled former corporate client keen to reclaim monies they believed he owed them, in addition to wreck his popularity; thankfully, he had an excellent enough lawyer to forestall that occuring.
It was more intimidating when he was threatened with blackmail by a hotelier whom he reported to the property’s owners for running a prostitution ring from the five-star hotel’s bar.
Gallagher, then deep in his alcoholism, had overindulged at that very same drinking den the night before; withdraw your grievance, the GM thundered via an intermediary, or I’ll send footage of you to your clients.
Gallagher was undeterred; he ‘fessed as much as his own shortcomings and the manager eventually was caught in separate, also illegal, wrongdoing.
Gallagher’s steely resolve was vital in one other nightmareish scenario when a client in Asia decided to check him and his team in a grueling, bizarre way.
“She tried to maintain us all through the night, moving tables across the conference room. We ended up walking off the job after 11 hours.”
One other stressful think about his profession: planners are sometimes used to maintain clients’ secrets.
That may involve skimming off money in a company setting — say, padding prices from vendors and pocketing the difference or upgrading to top quality relatively than business – or easy personal indiscretions.
In a single instance, Gallagher needed to take care of each: while running a significant sales incentive for a pharma company in Latest York, a senior executive from overseas instructed him to increase his stay, adding five extra days at the top in a flowery suite.
Bill it to the firm as a part of the conference, he told Gallagher.
This exec planned to remain on with a colleague, his mistress, once his wife had returned home.
The MD’s dishonesty was detected, and the firm queried Gallagher and his team.
A number of days later, the chief drove his automotive right into a tree at high speed and died.
“I’m ashamed to say I used to be related to it, however it was considered one of my darkest times, after I was using cocaine to get through it,” Gallagher says now.
A lot of the issues Gallagher’s parried, though, revolve more around pettiness than true life-and-death.
Take the client who spent $700 per head on a marriage, but nickel-and-dimed him on the price of a calligrapher for the menus — higher to print them at Kinko’s, they insisted.
Forget bridezillas, nonetheless: the true divas are the performers, especially boldfaced names hired to sing a couple of hits for several million at a personal bash.
Often, he says, they’ll take umbrage at requests, hissy-fitting in response to easy asks. “We had it with Elton John, when a client asked him to sing a Kylie Minogue song,” Gallagher recalls; his response was a threat to tug out — hardly John’s first tantrum — putting the entire event in danger.
Nothing beats the rider, though, that Gallagher received when he booked DJ Steve Aoki for an event in Singapore, arriving by private jet.
The necessities reached Spinal Tap levels of absurdity.
“He desired to be met right off the plane with an extra-hot venti Starbucks latte. I just went up against him and said ‘Listen, dude, come on’.” He pauses, laughing. “The more you give, the more people want.”
