As her husband left for a meeting hours before she came to grips with jet lag, she awakens alone in her room. Flipping through a mind-numbing array of channels on her flat screen TV, she pauses to find a familiar face smiling back at her, Julia Roberts on In the Wild series. The cine-siren looks like she is having so much fun. Reaching for her Vertu phone, she presses the button that immediately connects her to Quintessentially, and to the friendly concierge service, she says, "I'd like to play with a baby chimpanzee this weekend."
Before she knows it, a meeting between madam and simian is arranged for only HK$10,000. A fabulist tale to feed urban legend in a city devoid of wildlife? Hardly. Hong Kong is a land of endless opportunity to those who have copious amounts of credit and credibility. In a city that has more millionaires per square mile than Hollywood, New York or London, perfectly manicured fingers are forever punching in digits to get things signed, sealed and delivered to their doorstep.
A knock on the door leads to the arrival of a home-delivered bottle of bubbly the size of a small child. She uncorks, lifts and pours bubbling gold into an Italian tiled Jacuzzi. Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield reportedly dipped their celebrated bodies every week in champagne ablutions, as did King Louis XIV of France. In Hong Kong, she finds herself in the finest bathwater, Veuve Clicquot's La Grande Dame, and before the sun rises again, HK$605,760 will have been poured away. Courtesy of a call to Richemonde's direct sales department, several Balthazars were delivered for the VIP client.
A bushel of Waratah petals, one of the rarest flowers in the world, litters a silver Tiffany & Co basin, for a mere $15,208. Found only Down Under, the rare flora was purchased via phone-auction at Sotheby's Australia by her personal assistant and they arrived only moments ago, plucked simply to delicately scent her bath. Gingerly, she slips out of her hand-painted (and hand-delivered) wooden Dior shoes, of which only 2,000 were made in 2002, and sold for just under HK$10,000. She sinks into the sparkling champagne.
Her pedicured poodle Pooky trots by. Despite his long face, she feels her pup has been in a better mood since the seance she had for Pooky and his bitch, who died a month ago, after the dog-caretaker left her too long under the curling helmet. It totalled $4,000 but was money well spent on the reader from the New Age Shop.
Her phone buzzes and she's informed the delivery was made on her hubby's flight. "Yes, mm hmm," she mumbles, trying to slip her Lucida diamond toe-ring off with her other foot. The life-sized teddy bear accompanying her husband made it through immigration and was belted comfortably into the Gulfstream G5. A simple speed-dial to Metrojet ($1,369,000) for the 15 hour return journey to LA) and her beloved was floating on air in utter comfort.
"Ma'am, they have arrived," says one of the staff after a glove-padded knock on the door. Trained at the Ivor Spencer international school for butler administrations, his salary rivals that of a manager in a major bank, but where else would she find someone trained to fly her chopper as well as deliver a steaming cup of mocha with the same degree of ease?
With aerated excitement she slides out of the tub to see what taitai.com has delivered. Though a technophobe, she was thrilled to log onto the Net and order the entire fashion spread of September's UK Elle. A few clicks and two-fingered typing made her the first owner of that collection in the continent.
Signing off the invoice with one of the rarest pens in the world, she didn't look twice at the instrument that had fascinated her for all of 15 minutes. French artist Michel Audiard's mammoth tooth pen ($182,000) is held only by presidents and other captains of industry, but this session of retail therapy is flung aside soon after she circles the total of $421,000 from her bill.
Sifting through the rack of her new favourite line, stroking one of the whispery textiles, her assistant gives her the phone again, "Your mother, ma'am."
That would be the chair, she presumes. For mother's day she had delivered an ergonomically perfected Osim iMedic 500 Massage chair ($31,571) wrapped in Mongolian, hand-knit pashmina (an additional $38,987) to her mother in Vancouver. Her black card came in handy on her impromptu decision to send a gift at such short notice.
She had considered giving Mother the portrait she had done by Simon Birch, but when she saw how beautiful she looked, she decided not to part with it.
What she didn't know, of course, were the hurdles the service would have to jump through to find the chair supplier, deal with customs, and work through a public holiday to deliver on time a limited-edition chair. The devils in the details were shoved under the carpet as she heard, "It is lovely, I just don't know what to do with it!"
Hmm. A multi-lingual technician will have to be arranged to help Mother employ her high-tech recliner. Re-dialling her Centurion contact, expedient arrangements are made.
While chatting, her favourite stylist, Philip B, swishes in and she warmly greets him before he and his entourage start setting up. Stylist to the stars in Los Angeles, a well-advanced jingle had him on a flight and in person, in the room with his bouquet of hair-spa treatments. "Gotta go!" she calls down the line to her mum. She sits down as stylist and assistant puff and coif her head into Hepburnian perfection.
There for all of 60 minutes, with a bill totalling $39,500 (not including first-class return tickets from the States at HK$60,000, and his stay at the Inter Continental Hong Kong Deluxe Suite, HK$14,000) he sits on a chaise nattering as her face gets painted by Cameron Diaz's make-up artist, Gucci Westman. On cue, Westman had entered the scene. Their rendezvous was arranged via agent Art and Commerce.
Astride on a stool wrapped in songket, the gold-threaded textile once worn exclusively by Malaysian royalty (a whopping $21,392 per sq/m), a blur of hands fasten sashes on her back, roll strands of a $238,000 Cartier double-rowed diamond, coral and gold necklace that her personal shopper from Lane Crawford wisely picked out. Priceless in her eye, but 426,000 on the register. Someone sprayed her fovourite scent (custom made in the French city of Grasse, at HK$1,400/250ml), as a final nail brush stroke coats an aberrant chip. In a flourish she's done.
Even the border-hopping mane man was impressed. "When's project Dumbo drop?" he asks, referring to her plans to have an elephant greet guests at the entrance of her upcoming bash.
"Not good. They can't ship one in from Africa but the Thai connection is working out well. Ideally, the African giants would be perfect - they have bigger ears than the Asian elephants - but Loxodonta africanas area protected species."
"Can it be done?"
"Of course! You-know-who got in a pair of albino peacocks for her wedding reception brunch to flitter in the garden. Just a matter of logistics that people have to deal with."
When told that the Moscow circus have sent animals and their trainers for private viewing for less than HK$3,000 per hour, her eyes sparkle brighter than her jewels.
One of the staff arrive with a fax that had concurrently been sent to her spouse. The grand total of her recent expenditure had reached Imelda Marcosian proportions. This didn't include her elephantine expedition which would be another HK$200,000 (the elephant itself cost a mere HK$35,000). How did it reach him so quickly, she near-frowned, as the tax-month always made him gratuitously cranky?
A shadow slides across the carpet and it dawns on her who sent the grand tabulation of $3,466,426 to her husband: "Ah, the butler did it."
*Names have been changed to protect the decadent.
Originally published in Hong Kong Tatler.
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