George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio and Michelle Obama are all rumoured to belong to LA's hippest private members club. Ben Hoyle meets Jeff Klein, the man behind the San Vicente Bungalows, where the A-list go to be themselves and privacy is king.
Once upon a time in West Hollywood there was a beyond seedy, all-male, drug-infested, clothing-optional motel that one man somehow envisaged as a discreet bolthole for some of the most powerful and famous people alive.
In January, after a refit costing $47.5 million , Jeff Klein quietly reopened the San Vicente Bungalows as a private club.
Since then, this cluster of 19th century railway workers' buildings near Sunset Boulevard has hosted an Oscar night mass sing-song led by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, a hatchet-burying summit between Steven Spielberg and the Netflix mogul Ted Sarandos, a cavalcade of superstar guests from the entertainment, sports and business worlds and a visit by at least one and possibly both of the Obamas.
With 1200 members, a waiting list of 7700 and an aggressive approach to privacy violations that extends to throwing out anyone who talks to the press about what goes on inside, the venue already has every claim to be the most exclusive club in the world.
How did Klein pull it off? Well, it helps that he has a lot of money, charm and a fabulous contacts book accrued over 15 years as owner-operator of the Sunset Tower, one of Los Angeles' most beloved hotels. But I think his real secret weapon is his endless capacity for disappointment.
Klein, 49, leads me past a pea-green al fresco bar, through a gorgeous courtyard filled with large palms and transplanted century-old Californian pepper trees, around a small, jade-tiled water feature and into a series of indoor-outdoor living rooms where I would happily spend the rest of 2019. The walls are decorated with dozens of black and white photos, taken by one of Andy Warhol's assistants, that evoke the edgy glamour of New York in the Studio 54 era. I turn to tell Klein how brilliant they look, only to see him dictating urgently into his phone: "The black and white photos are not all level. Can we get someone to come here and make sure they are, question mark."
The radiant smile returns as Klein, in jeans, a crisp white shirt and a grey blazer, ascends a narrow outdoor staircase lined with potted geraniums to a 50-seat cinema room.
He describes how the big studios push to get their films shown here for early Oscar previews, "because we have so many Academy members who are members". He recalls a triumphant recent screening of the 1973 film Paper Moon with a Q&A featuring the director, Peter Bogdanovich and its star, Tatum O'Neal, who apparently hadn't seen each other for decades, which went brilliantly because the "young film-makers [who are club members] are all obsessed with Bogdanovich, even more than with Quentin Tarantino".
He begins to talk about the comedy nights and musical performances, when he suddenly stops dead and scowls.
What is it? "A lightbulb." With weary exasperation Klein pulls out his phone for more dictation: "Why am I the only one who notices when lightbulbs are out, question mark. Can you please make sure housekeeping sweeps these rooms."
His anxious perfectionism can ruin a night out. "To have dinner with Jeff in the club or one of his hotels is a nightmare. It's almost like a very specific kind of Jeff Klein ADD [attention deficit disorder], where one eye is looking at you and the other is looking at a lampshade that's slightly off or an ashtray that hasn't been emptied. It's really unbearable for anyone who's with him," says Gabe Doppelt, a friend and former Vanity Fair journalist, now front-of-house at the Sunset Tower's Tower Bar.
We settle into a snug back room with a fireplace off one of the three bars. A barman, dressed in a uniform from the Milanese livery shop Mercatores, delivers drinks and nibbles.
Klein refuses to say who is and is not a San Vicente Bungalows member but Jennifer Aniston, Armie Hammer, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Mayer, Sir Mick Jagger, Evan Spiegel, Miranda Kerr, Sandra Bullock, Harry Styles, Chris Pine, Eddie Redmayne, Jennifer Lopez, Alex Rodriguez, Taylor Swift, Melanie Griffith and Dakota Johnson have all been photographed on their way in or out or been reported to have visited. The Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner and the singer Joe Jonas honeymooned there in May, according to the New York Post's gossip column, Page Six.
Actually becoming a member is superficially straightforward, but fiendishly difficult in practice. All you need is $6600 – a year ($2830if you're under 35), a photograph of yourself, a nomination from another member and a completed application form that features just three questions. What would your autobiography be called? What is your favourite restaurant and why? What would your unique contribution to SVB be?
Who gets in is determined by a secret committee of 12 VIPs from the art, Hollywood, tech and music worlds (Julia Roberts is rumoured to be one of them). It used to be 14 but two people were asked to stand down, "Mostly because they told people they were on the committee," says Klein. "They did it to be a big shot. It's disappointing."
What gets you turned down? "Being a douchebag. Everybody who's a member is interesting as a person and doing interesting things with their lives. A lot of very wealthy, powerful people apply and don't get in. You can get in if you're wealthy and powerful but it's usually if you've created Instagram or Snapchat or something."
There are strict rules about not bothering members or guests you don't know. Photography is banned. So is posting on social media. Guests must hand over their phones on arrival to have the camera lenses covered by a branded sticker. Mobile phone calls, like smoking, are banished to designated areas. Members are responsible for their guests complying and face being thrown out if they don't.
Four people have lost their memberships so far. One broke the club's "no networking" rule when they went up to Tom Ford and asked the designer about his deal with Estee Lauder. "I kicked him out. We just can't have that. It was terrible, just so embarrassing."
Another was a member who brought the guest who leaked news of the dinner between Spielberg and Sarandos, the chief content officer of Netflix, to Page Six. At the time the veteran director had recently been publicly critical of Netflix so the rapprochement on neutral turf was a delicate matter. It was exactly the sort of meeting that Klein wanted his members to feel that they could use the club for. The culprit was identified in three or four weeks, a publicist who was "trading favours with the magazines". The member who brought her should have known better, apparently. "It was very clear [that] in a place like this she wouldn't be able to help herself."
Do you have any publicists and journalists who are members?
"We do have some journalists." Any without Pulitzer prizes? Klein thinks for a moment. "I don't know."
At this point he suggests, somewhat implausibly, that I would make it through the vetting process because my job here for The Times makes me inherently "more interesting than some real estate developer who's worth $2 billion who takes a picture of himself with his Gulfstream and thinks he's it, you know? I love a good billionaire once in a while, don't get me wrong but that's not what it's about. It's not about money. There are great film-makers, artists, art gallerists, producers, actors, writers here. Some who don't really have a lot of money."
For younger members, the annual fee breaks down to $236 a month – "Probably less than WeWork. A lot of them come here and bring their laptop and write, you know."
The paparazzi aren't a "terrible" problem, because the club never tips them off. For the biggest stars there are secret entrances and exits too.
Famous members "feel freer here", Klein says. "Their voices are louder. They have a couple more drinks than normal. They don't really care if they get a little sloppy. Some of them will bring a girlfriend here if they're married. Two very famous people will go on a date here [both those things have happened at least once]. They feel protected. Famous people strive for fame and notoriety and once they get it, it's like, 'What the f*** did I do? Now I can't undo this.' I feel like this is a place that they can come and it's like the old days for them, where it doesn't matter."
What about the Obamas, though? If they have dinner here, are people going to ignore them? "Yes," he says, grinning broadly. It's public knowledge that Michelle came a few months ago, because the motorcade "closed the street down. People were literally
hanging out of their windows taking photos."
Did Barack sneak in as well? Klein won't exactly say. But he does let slip that, "They've been here. They've brought their security," and adds that, "Nobody would bother them … It's probably about as close to normal as they can get."
Do you have a fantasy membership candidate who has not yet applied? "LeBron James [the basketball player and media entrepreneur]. All his friends are members. He's busy. He's only been once. I think it just has to get more in his head. I think he'll join. I mean, I hope he does."
What about President Trump?
"I don't think he would apply. I think he understands that LA is not a fan."
Klein had an upper middle-class childhood on New York's Upper East Side. Surrounded by wealth, he "understood posh people at an early age", although he says that his own family was not extravagantly rich or "super-fancy".
"We flew coach [economy]. My dad owned and ran an [extremely successful] exterminating company, so I was an exterminator over the summer. I'd go around catching rats and stuff."
His mother was "very elegant, sophisticated. She came from this real estate New York family and taught me that taste has nothing to do with money and some of the richest people are some of the tackiest people on Earth."
His parents took him on exotic holidays. "[When I was very young] we took a cruise ship down the Nile. We were going to Europe all the time." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Klein fell in love with hotels.
He graduated with a degree in French literature from Tulane University in New Orleans, after spending a year in Paris and started as a bellman at a small luxury hotel in New York four days later. Its owner, Bernard Goldberg, became a mentor and, aside from a brief diversion into ecommerce (founding a teddy bear delivery company when he was 25), Klein has been in the trade ever since.
He opened his first property in Manhattan in 2000. The City Club was a venerable former gentlemen's club that he renovated. It quickly made Conde Nast Traveller's list of the coolest new hotels in the world.
In 2004 Klein swooped into Los Angeles and snapped up the Argyle hotel, an art deco landmark on Sunset Boulevard with an underwhelming reputation at the time but a killer view and a glamorous history as an apartment block where Greta Garbo, Errol Flynn, Truman Capote, Marilyn Monroe, Howard Hughes, Mae West, the gangster Bugsy Siegel, John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor had all once lived. Capote once said that the "local gentry" in California had told him that the building was "where every scandal that ever happened happened".
In Klein's first week in LA, a few months before he closed the deal on the Argyle, he met John Goldwyn, a film and television producer who is the grandson of the Goldwyn in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. They married in 2011.
During his first months in the city Klein was also introduced (by Tom Ford and the screenwriter Mitch Glazer) to an unemployed Macedonian maitre d' called Dimitri Dimitrov, whose theatrical subservience, old-world formality and exhaustive study of Los Angeles' intersecting professional hierarchies made him a perfect front of house for the new hotel.
Klein revived the original name of the Argyle – the Sunset Tower – and with Dimitrov presiding, the Tower Bar quickly became a hotspot for A-list movie stars, studio moguls and aspiring LA power brokers.
For five years the hotel hosted the Vanity Fair Oscar party. It remains the sort of place where Al Pacino drops in after a day's filming. Aniston had her 50th birthday party there earlier this year. David Blaine was in just the other day, with Johnny Depp, performing tricks with cards and a coin on the terrace.
Then in 2013 Klein took over the San Vicente Inn, a disreputable, gay-friendly motel a few blocks away from the hotel. It wasn't an obvious next act and the long makeover had to be handled sensitively. "I think it would have been very hard for a non-gay man to buy this, because I think the gay community would have been very angry. But we don't need these places to come and hide to hook up anymore. Now we can get married and meet on Grindr. The gay community is pretty much assimilated. But who needs to hide? Drug addicts. People were doing really crazy stuff here, shooting up heroin and stuff. Guys were naked. It was just gross."
Dimitrov, 70, vividly recalls the afternoon that his boss took him to visit the new place. "I was working. He throws me in his Tesla and brings me here," Dimitrov says, waving his arms around excitedly in the bar. "We are coming in – sunny, warm, hot – and I'm seeing half-naked men around." He could hardly bring himself to look up. "I said, 'Why here? What happened?' He said, 'Dimitri, I just bought the place. It's mine.' Oops."
Klein told him to prepare for a new job as the host of the San Vicente Bungalows. Characteristically Dimitrov did not ask about money. ("I would never dare.") Instead, in early 2017 he began training Doppelt, the former glossy magazine editor with no restaurant experience, to take over from him at the Tower Bar. Last October, Dimitrov finally stepped aside, having passed on everything he could, beginning with a rigorous emphasis on silver-polishing, napkin-folding and precise table-setting to set the tone.
"So important is the service," Dimitrov explains. (In the 52 years since he left communist Yugoslavia for London with no English, he has never quite mastered the grammar or lost his Balkan accent.) "It is a lost art." A hunched, wiry man with swept-back hair and thick-rimmed spectacles, Dimitrov is wearing a black Armani suit with a skinny tie given to him by friends at Gucci and a pair of crossed gold keys on the lapel, a present from the director Wes Anderson, who was partly thinking of Dimitrov when he created a fictional secret guild of hotel concierges called the Society of the Crossed Keys for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Dimitrov's own childhood was much humbler than Klein's. His father was a slipper-maker in the old bazaar in Skopje. His mother was at home. Both parents worked formidably hard and their son has done the same.
He still works six days a week and rarely goes to bed before 5am. He has had only three holidays in 15 years. On the other hand, he is friends with half of Hollywood. Klein, who considers Dimitrov to be family, invites him over for Thanksgiving and once flew back from New York to take him to the doctor, gave him an ownership position in the new venture.
It has been an "incredible" journey from Skopje to this point, Dimitrov says. After that first year working in London restaurants and a season in Bermuda, he received his training at the Ritz in Montreal, where he would regularly serve the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau ("Justin Trudeau was 2 years old, not crying, was well behaved in a corner, yes").
In 1980 he moved to California to get away from the snow, and found work at Diaghilev, a grand but eccentric hotel dining room offering Franco-Russian cuisine with a starry clientele. Next door was a bar where young actors like Matthew McConaughey, Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix would come and misbehave.
"Joaquin Phoenix, he is my friend. I know him since a child. I have his number here on my phone. He was here two weeks ago, with Rooney Mara, and he said, 'Dimitri, tell her how I was when I was young.'
"I know George Clooney before he was George Clooney. Noah Wyle was my busboy at Diaghilev. George would wait for him. He was a struggling actor. I said, 'What are you doing right now?' He said, 'Dimitri, I'm doing this medical show pilot. I hope, fingers crossed, it will be picked up.' It was ER. That was the beginning for them both."
Now George and Amal Clooney are San Vicente Bungalows fans. So, Dimitrov says, are Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Jay-Z, Sean Penn, Lorne Michaels (the creator and producer of Saturday Night Live), Bryan Lourd (co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency), Robert Greenblatt (boss of HBO) and Jeff Skoll (the billionaire former president of eBay), among others. Some of them have been or will be in the club today, he adds nonchalantly.
Dimitrov himself is rarely starstruck, but growing up he dreamt of the West and idolised the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Warren Beatty. These days, "Paul McCartney is my friend. I'm invited to many screenings by Mick Jagger. I'm very close to Warren."
He has never told any of them what they meant to him as a teenager.
Nor did his parents ever know how successful he'd become. His elder sister, living in Macedonia, still has no idea that he has famous friends, he says.
"I don't want her to think, 'Oh, my God – he went Hollywood now.' "
"New York City now is so expensive, it's just an island of rich people," says Klein. "When you have all one kind of person, it's not interesting. All the artists have been pushed out of New York. And the struggling musicians. There's none of that any more. But they do live in LA.
"I always joke, I could be so rich if I just sold out. I've had so many opportunities to do big, soulless hotels. I'm happy, quite honestly, that I didn't."
Instead, Klein is now wondering where else his new small-scale templates would work.
He's opened Hotel 850, an upmarket but just about affordable bed and breakfast across the street from San Vicente Bungalows. It's a 1918 structure that Klein had lifted 10ft off the ground to ensure that the roof terrace had panoramic views from the Hollywood Hills almost to the Pacific. The rooms were styled by the British decorator Rita Konig, who also did the San Vincente Bungalows.
Quite deliberately, 850 and particularly San Vicente Bungalows are concepts that, unlike the Sunset Tower, could be rolled out elsewhere.
"I think part of the fun of the Sunset Tower is that mythology feel, just the history of the place," he says. "Part of the fun of this place is the fresh start we're getting creating a mythology on our own."
It's the private club model that Klein is pushing first, inspired by the enormous global success of Soho House. He is convinced that he can compete by offering greater exclusivity, presenting the idea of privacy as today's ultimate luxury.
He is already looking at locations in LA, New York and London. Of course, that also makes him anxious. "Honestly," he says at one point. "I'm so neurotic. I have so many fears. Everything possible you could imagine."
With New York, "my fear is that it will just be a bunch of investment bankers" who join. With London, he worries "because it's the capital of private clubs. It would have to be spectacular for me to do something in London." On past form he will take his time, fret, and then get things right.
Until then, there are worse places to plan an empire from than his adopted home.
"New Yorkers are really trained to hate Los Angeles," Klein says. "But I think it's the greatest city in the world."
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