One of my favourite stories about André Balazs - and there are a few - is from Chateau Marmont, his hotel in Los Angeles: when state law clamped down on guests smoking on the outside terrace of his French-style café-restaurant, Balazs was so enraged he strode directly into the garden and lit up a cigarette in defiance. 'And the funny thing is,' says a member of staff, 'he's not even a smoker.'
What he is, is a libertine. A sybarite. A risk-taker. A character from Evelyn Waugh, almost. His hotels evoke the heady feel of Thirties decadence and 'anything goes'. And since he brought his sexy, seductive, scented universe to London in the form of Chiltern Firehouse, Balazs (along with Alessandra, one of his two daughters by Katie Ford, former CEO of Ford Models) has been quite the cat's meow on the capital's social scene. You've seen him - square jaw and George Hamilton tan in a well-cut suit. He's 60 but looks 40, usually drenched in pap flash on account of dating celebrities like Uma Thurman, Cameron Diaz, Chelsea Handler, Kylie Minogue and Courtney Love. He's currently expecting a child with the socialite Cosima Vesey, 29, daughter of the 7th Viscount de Vesci, although they're 'not attached', says a friend.
His daughter Alessandra, 26, is an actress (credits include, bizarrely, Shameless) and a 'hospitality expert', and she promotes the Freedom for All foundation, which fights slavery. She's slightly more discreet than her flamboyant father, but a friend describes her as 'a scenester'. Of the two daughters, she's the more engaged with his world. She stays at all his hotels and also happens to be the fiancée of Arthur Landon, 35, son of the late Sir Timothy Landon, the 'White Sultan' (a former SAS officer who secured a fortune of some £500m from the Sultan of Oman for helping to overthrow his father). Arthur is close to Prince Harry (he was on the infamous Vegas trip when Harry stripped for billiards).
The two Balazses are everywhere, from estates to townhouses. In three years, they've gone from exotic newcomers to full immersion in English society. How? Well, first there's the charm. Friends attest to Andre's magnetism, his looks, his outrageous flirting, his creative genius and phenomenal attention to detail (he describes his hotels as 'film sets' and the staff as 'actors'). And he's no slouch on the intellectual front, with degrees from Cornell and Columbia. 'He has a real admiration for the arts and artists, and a solid education in the classics,' says a friend. One year, he sent his hotel VIPs a present he'd curated - the best works on travel, from Herodotus to Paul Theroux. 'He admires artists,' his friend continues. 'He loves the idea that creativity is happening under his auspices.' To this end, Denzel Washington holed up with Balazs to prepare for Othello. Film ideas are hatched in his restaurants and he throws an annual party with Eric Fellner. Musicians have written and rehearsed in his rooms.
'He's not into money for money's sake,' adds a former employee. 'He's not interested in bankers.' He is, however, a nuclear networker in the world of celebrity. He knows better than anyone the power of celebrity endorsement. 'His view is that a hotel is only as good as its guests,' says a friend. 'This applies to his life too.' Balazs's genius in business is twofold: first, he knows that stars love excess - he'll go to any length to provide that - and privacy. Second, to stay ahead of the scene, you have to invent a new one. And so he does.
Balazs opened Chiltern Firehouse in an explosion of publicity in 2014. The critics gasped; they'd seen nothing like it before. The hottest stars came running: Madonna, the Beckhams, Kate Moss, Cara Delevingne, Rita Ora, One Direction, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kirsten Dunst and even John Cleese. To ensure their privacy, he'd created a bar called the Ladder Shed, initially invitation-only, which stays open until the early hours. Here, stars could avoid being ogled by 'civilians', and afterwards frolic on in a suite upstairs (he keeps hotel rooms clear for this reason). 'André always wants to make sure celebrities are not bothered by ordinary people,' explains one staff member. A friend of Mario Testino was 'nearly knocked to the floor' by an overzealous waiter who feared the photographer was being harassed. There's a 'filtering policy' at the door, and the maître d' can 'read the crowd'. Who wouldn't be allowed in? 'Fat boys. Women with big hair... Front-of-house staff will know who the tastemakers are, who is trendy.'
Another employee says: 'We're encouraged as staff to get as much info on people as we can. We make notes - this person is so-and-so, this person starred in blah. It can get bitchy - we know who is rude; who books for four but brings 10. We know who called a waiter an arsehole, or which civilian approached, say, Cameron Diaz. Civilian infractions are dated so that if we need to kick someone out, we can list what they've done in the past.'
Of course, celebrities are far less likely to be curtailed. Famously, Lindsay Lohan - an ex-date of Balazs - was asked to leave Chateau Marmont for running up a £37,000 bill ('and even then André was reluctant', staff say), but is now a regular at the Firehouse. Then there's the major-league Hollywood actor who was not ejected when he defecated in the bushes next to a restaurant table; nor was the starlet who slept with Balazs's head of security. 'André encourages guests to feel free, uninhibited,' says a friend. 'His philosophy is if it doesn't disturb anyone else, who cares?' He adds, sucking the air between his teeth: 'Sometimes this can be taken quite far.'
In America, his staff don't use the term VIP, but PP - personne privée - to describe celebrities, and there are four tiers of importance. 'PPX1, PPX2 and so on,' explains a staff member, who says the pressure to keep their hotels as 'the hot place in town' is enormous. 'If we don't maintain it, we're in trouble. André wants to know who the repeat guests are, and if someone hasn't come in recently, where they have gone. There's huge paranoia about losing the glow. But on the other hand, when we are super-exclusive, it's terrible for business, because we can't always be full if we don't let in some civilians.'
Balazs was once a civilian himself. His name originates from Hungary; his parents were immigrants to Massachusetts, where André was born. Both were high-achieving middle-class professionals - his late father was a doctor who taught at Harvard, his mother a psychoanalyst whose patients included the first known case of a man amputating his penis. Balazs is close to his mother, now 96, who lives with him in Manhattan following a stroke, but he had a more 'complicated' relationship with his father.
Alessandra, meanwhile, lives in Chelsea and New York, and her good friends include Noor bin Laden and Camilla Al Fayed. She supported Hillary Clinton and describes Trump's presidency as 'preposterous'. In London, she hangs with Susanna Warren, Lizzy Pelly, Emily Wickersham and Misha Nonoo. Her life with Landon, who makes films and also happens to have £200m in the bank thanks to his inheritance, is enviable. In the last year, they've chalked up visits to Cuba, Jamaica, Nepal and Croatia, as well as the regular back and forth to New York. One minute they are wakeboarding in Shelter Island, the next hiking in Scotland. They're fans of Burning Man and the French Riviera, and will travel as easily by helicopter as on the Tube. Valentine's Day was spent at Hotel Santa Caterina in Amalfi, where they may or may not have got engaged. Above all, they are fans of the English countryside: when his father died, Landon took over Faccombe in Hampshire, listed by The Field as one of the top 50 sporting estates in the country (for pheasant and partridge shooting, and roe- and fallow-stalking). They spend time with Armie Hammer at Guy Ritchie's home, Ashcombe House - an hour away on the Wiltshire and Dorset borders - and come shooting season, go from estate to estate, from the Pembrokes at Wilton House in Wiltshire to the Percys at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland.
Isabel, Alessandra's 23-year-old sister, is 'completely the opposite', according to friends. 'She's more her mother's daughter. Very studious, very straight.' A close colleague of Balazs said that in 15 years he never met her and suspects she very much shuns the social scene. And if Instagram is a measure
of these matters, that appears to be true. Isabel has 128 followers (and posts photos of lava fields and design-engineering notes), while Alessandra has 14,000 followers and a feed full of beaches and sunsets, pictures of her dog and shots of her partying with Princess Eugenie and Amber Le Bon.
Balazs's upbringing had a more erudite flavour (his father is described as 'brilliant' and his sister Marianne is an academic: 'She's serious and not showy, very under the radar and not "glamorous'' at all,' says a friend). He studied journalism at Columbia and worked as a reporter before considering a job in politics. But then he joined his father to found the bioengineering company Biomatrix. It was the profits from this company that brought the family real money for the first time. 'The fact he is Hungarian is the only exotic thing about him,' says a friend. 'His family are middle-class academics.'
The first inkling of his future came with Balazs's investment, in 1984, in a Manhattan nightclub called MK. Those who knew him back then say he was a touch louche - but not exceptionally so. He had known Katie Ford, who had also been at Columbia, for a while, and their engagement was significant enough to be written up in the Style section of the New York Times in 1985. Some say Katie was his ticket out of bourgeois professionalism into something 'cooler'. Although they divorced in 2004, he still describes her as his 'best friend'.
Without any previous experience of hotels, Balazs bought the rundown wreck of Chateau Marmont in 1990 for a rumoured $10m, with money he'd made from Biomatrix. The hotel was already long associated with hedonism: it was where Clark Gable had his affair with Jean Harlow, where Dennis Hopper held orgies and Errol Flynn slept with young girls. There were drugs: John Belushi overdosed on speedballs. And Led Zeppelin rode their motorbikes through the lobby.
By the time Balazs acquired it, however, Chateau Marmont was on its knees. He renovated room by room, careful to preserve the charm of its heyday. The vibe is Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes meets the American Colony in Jerusalem. Room 29 has a baby grand piano, guests are allowed to smoke in the rooms and bad behaviour is encouraged.
Hollywood came flooding back. Today the hotel makes £20-25m a year. 'He needs that hotel,' says one friend. 'Not because of the income, but because of cachet. It allows him to do good hotels elsewhere.' In 1997, Balazs opened Sunset Beach on Shelter Island, where he also has a house that was described by Taki in the Spectator as seeming 'untouched since the Revolutionary War'. (Taki holidayed with Balazs and Cosima there last June. People say the relationship between the couple was 'low-key'.)
What really made him famous on the hotel scene, however, was the Mercer in New York, which opened in 1998. It quickly became a haven for celebrity tantrums - not least Russell Crowe throwing a telephone at a desk clerk. Soon after, Balazs began building the Standard hotel chain, which expanded through the 2000s, opening across Los Angeles and New York at a clip.
The Standard hotels too became shorthand for explicit mischief: the Standard High Line, in Manhattan's Meatpacking District, featured as the setting of a sex scene in the 2011 film Shame (and thereafter guests had to be politely requested not to have copycat sex against the glass windows in full view of the rest of New York). It was also at the Standard that Solange Knowles lashed out at her brother-in-law Jay Z in front of her sister Beyoncé - and a security camera. When the footage was leaked, Balazs went berserk. Within three hours, the culprit was found and fired. 'André on the warpath is not something you want to see,' says a long-serving member of staff. 'He gets very, very angry. I've seen grown men cry.' In 2013, Balazs sold an 80 per cent stake in the Standard brand, and in March this year he stepped down as chairman.
Among staff his rages are legendary. As are his close shaves. One staff member remembers Balazs entertaining a young English girl - not his official on-off girlfriend, who was a household name - on a balmy night in awards season: 'Then, at the end of service, his famous girlfriend turns up at the hotel shouting the place down, barely able to speak properly, but demanding we get hold of André immediately.' When contacted, Balazs instructed staff to say he hadn't been found.
Not that this was in any way embarrassing to him. One of his mantras is that more affairs happen in hotels than anywhere else. Another is: 'All good hotels tend to lead people to do things they wouldn't necessarily do at home.'
If only Evelyn Waugh were still alive.
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