Los Angeles, 6.47pm. It’s a mid-winter evening in a city sweltering under an all too familiar heat. Gadi Macher* is finally on his way home. His fatigue is off the charts. His anger is palpable. He guns his engine and tears down the driveway of this sprawling estate that punctures the skyline like a sex addict on steroids.
“Limp dick, more like it,” he says to himself.
The driveway is close to half a mile long. There are eight cameras along this route. Security is one thing, and understandable, but eight cameras? This is ego laid bare. If Gadi was ever impressed by his boss’ imperiousness, it faltered years ago. He knows a great deal about the man’s reckless disregard for common decency and his failure to understand that entitlement should have limits.
Part of his anger is self-directed. He should have left when the allure of celebrity faded to little more than a rank odour. He stayed because of the money – at least that’s what he tells his friends. In truth, he was becalmed by the cavalcade of stars that routinely gather here, generally when his boss is “on heat” (a term to describe a producer or director who is starting or in the middle of a new project).
Gadi is on a first-name basis with many A-list actors in this town. After more than 20 years that list runs into the hundreds. He also knows their foibles, not because he has experienced many of them first-hand, but because his present boss keeps a register. And he’s not the only one to do that. Knowledge is power and in the entertainment industry, knowledge and power are heady ingredients that the entitled sup on with impunity.
After waving off the security guard, Gadi turns left onto the highway and aims his Lexus towards the Valley. Gadi lives with his wife and two young children in a modest home compared to residences in the Hollywood Hills that sell for many millions of dollars. But for the 99 per cent who don’t have estates that deserve their own zip code, his home is more than comfortable.
Gadi takes this road every day, except for the days when he oversees other homes in his client’s portfolio. These are in Miami and New York. In the early days, the private jet was a drawcard. He loved the way it powered down the runway and took off at what felt like a near vertical climb. He loved its status and the smell of leather in seats that morphed into lounge chairs when the seatbelt sign was off. He loved the way the cabin crew deferred to his needs. They knew he was important, even if they didn’t quite understand what an estate manager is.
Over time, being away from his family was difficult. Even worse, being away meant he was on call 24/7. There was nowhere to hide. Such is the reality of a job where your life is not your own. From the outside looking in, the few people who are employed as estate managers have the best job there is. It’s financially rewarding, it has high status and from a fandom point of view, you have front row seats pretty much every day on celebrities who matter.
From the inside looking further in, it’s a job that requires enormous amounts of energy, tolerance, a very thick skin and a degree of moral ambivalence. And that is the hard part, which gets increasingly harder to stomach the more you see and the less empowered you feel.
Shortly before our interview, Gadi accepted an offer for a new job. Strictly speaking, the job is the same but the celebrity is known for her benign relationship with staff as much as her stellar career in film and television.
But Gadi Macher has a secret.
It’s a secret he shares with a small group who spend much of their waking lives as close to A-list celebrities as an intimate other. Sometimes even closer. If he tells you his secret he’ll have to kill you.
I don’t wish to die, at least not now. So what I know beyond what is revealed here will remain between us. Names will be withheld and I won’t paint word pictures that could describe people. That’s the promise I’ve given to Gadi.
So who is Gadi Macher? And how did he come to occupy such a vaulted position in the lives of Hollywood’s rich and famous?
Gadi was born in 1972 to artist parents. Most creative people live disordered and often chaotic lives. Children of artists can become the foil, the people expected to bring order and balance to the home. And so it was with Gadi.
“ My family was middle class but we thought we were upper middle class,” he says without a hint of irony. “I grew up in Georgia believing that cuisine was culture. I honestly believed that if I wanted to walk into a party and speak many different language”
He was eight.
Much of his weekends were spent in front of the television. He certainly consumed a diet of cartoons, but his real interest lay with cooking shows. He says he grew up on The Frugal Gourmet, Julia Child and Yan Can Cook. He also watched Discovery Channel with Best Chefs Around The World being one of his favourite programs.
He would have been considered a weird kid if his parents were doctors, teachers or accountants.
With the optimism of youth on his side, he experimented in the kitchen and failed but wasn’t deterred.“You can only fail so many times before you learn the right way to do something,” he says.
After high school he tried out at film school but didn’t see a future for himself. He finally bit the bullet and found his way to culinary school.
“I loved it immediately,” he says, the experience still comfortably front of mind.
“The first thing I made was a seared venison chop in vodka cream sauce. I’d never seen venison, let alone eaten it. At that time you couldn’t even buy it in butcher shops where I lived.
“The other amazing thing is that I got to cook with an open gas flame. Searing the meat and pouring vodka into the pan and then having this unexpected explosion almost burn your eyebrows off was heaven for me!”
Two years later he graduated top of his class.
Gadi moved to North Carolina in search of a job, any job. The world isn’t exactly short of wannabe chefs, and that’s particularly true of the US. He wrote copiously looking for work, especially outside of the US. A well-known hotel in Australia, where kangaroos are eaten despite being on the country’s coat of arms, expressed interest but admitted that securing a work visa was unlikely.
Zuniu Cafe, San Francisco
“Then I wrote to a place in San Francisco called Zuni Cafe which was one of the highest-rated restaurants on the Zagat Survey (previously owned by Google). I pretty much tossed a coin between New York and San Francisco. I was never a fan of the Big Apple, so I opted for San Francisco despite not hearing from Zuni.
“I stayed at cheap, scary hotels and on the last day before my money ran out I got a call from Zuni. And that’s where I met Judy Rodgers, a legendary chef who passed away in 2013. She was an encyclopedia of culinary knowledge and I couldn’t get enough of it. Honestly, it’s what made me as a chef.”
Over the next few years Gadi worked with an extraordinary group of people, eventually settling in Los Angeles where he worked with Nancy Silverton and Suzanne Tracht, two of the great contemporary names in the culinary world. What he will tell you is that while shows like MasterChef and Worst Cooks in America create “chefs” overnight, there is no substitute for hard work and inspiring teachers.
“You have to learn every station, be it pasta, desserts, garde manger or the mesquite grill. Until you master them you can’t expect to work through the kitchen hierarchy, let alone lead a brigade,” he says.“I love cooking shows, but I despair what they tell kids about how to get into the industry.”
It was around this time that Gadi decided to settle down and raise a family. He had learnt a bitter lesson as a child, and didn’t want to repeat it with his own family.
“Children need order as much as they deserve to be loved and cared for,” he says, reflecting on his own parents’ laissez faire approach to parenting.
Having settled in LA and made friends, talk often turned to celebrities and their need for private chefs. It’s a curious concept and one that can appear to suggest a triumph of wealth over wisdom. But Gadi saw it differently.
“Knowing how busy people live, it makes sense to have a private chef if you can afford it,” he says.
“You can certainly host dinner parties at a moment’s notice but making sure the family is catered for – be it school lunches or daily meals – is a big tick. Busy households can often drop their standards, even if they justify it by saying, ‘oh, well a pizza here or a burger there can’t hurt!’ For many it’s a slippery slope.” He also discovered that there were agents for chefs, as well as butlers, drivers and executive housekeepers. He threw his hat into the ring.
The first agent he approached studied his resume and three names jumped out at him: Zuni, Campanile and Jar. Within a matter of days he had his first gig. More followed until it made sense to embed himself with one family on a long-term contract.
“I was fortunate to have positive experiences from day one,” Gadi says, referencing an early short-term position with Australian director Baz Luhrmann, who was completing post-production on Moulin Rouge!
The first long-term gig was with a music executive who owned a record company. The family consisted of the man and his wife, his mother-in-law and a baby, with a second baby arriving close to the job ending. “I got to experience being in someone’s intimate life. You become part of the family, whether you like it or not. There is always dysfunction in busy households, people’s guards can be down, and you carry the burden of that intimacy.
“You pretty much know when it’s time to leave.”
The next job was with a legendary media executive who was one of the founders of cable. That lasted 12 years and became the template for what was the ideal posting. It also revealed the next stage in his working life.
“I would arrive in the morning, prep food for lunch, dinner and the weekends, and do other odd tasks during the course of the day. I became very close with his kids and that also meant I was tasked with jobs that a parent might be expected to do.
“It dawned on me that I was actually running the house and not just the kitchen. I was learning about things that were totally new to me, like pool systems, security systems, the heating and cooling systems, even gardening and landscaping.
“He was also buying properties in places where he would normally stay in a hotel,” Gadi says. The change was driven partly by a new investment strategy and the desire to give the children a more stable environment. “I was suddenly being asked to help with permits and other planning issues.”
The saying, “A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing” proved to be prescient.
“I was dealing with multi-million dollar properties that were jaw-droppingly amazing. But on closer inspection, I saw defects that should never have been allowed in houses of this value.
“When I pointed these out, I was immediately tasked with rectifying the problems. I had now left the safety of the kitchen for an ocean of responsibility that I wasn’t equipped for, didn’t ask for, and had no pressing desire to accept.”
What changed was a decision that he and his wife took to renovate her family home. It was led by his father-in-law who was a contractor and Gadi was dragooned into helping. This process introduced him to micro elements of building, such as plumbing, electrical services, concreting, painting and negotiating with sub-contractors.
One door closes while another creaks open
He clearly couldn’t travel the country and work on a big renovation at home. The decision to leave his employment coincided with the birth of his first child. Gadi became a house dad and a “self-employed builder” with a fickle, pro-bono client.
“After a year, I was so immersed in building our home and proud of what I achieved, I asked my agent to find me work as a house or estate manager,” he recalls.
“Without thinking it through, I had given up my dream of being the greatest living chef. I would still cook but I saw a different direction that I felt would sustain me and my family over the longer term.”
His agent wasn’t convinced. But Gadi was adamant.
It didn’t take long for the offers to come. He had stellar references and a proven ability to run a household. The offer he chose was to become a more conflicted experience than he ever imagined. On paper it was the dream posting. He had three interviews – at this point none with the actual client - with each interview unveiling an ever-more complex world of mega-houses and challenges for which he felt he was now equipped.
“The client is well known in the movie industry, not only as a highly successful director and producer but as an extremely difficult and temperamental person,” Gadi says. “I felt I could deal with any challenges, having seen celebrity close up and many at their worst.”
His final interview with the client was underwhelming. There was nothing to suggest the emotional chaos that was to come. As Gadi explains, there are people in the world who have economic leverage that can change the political fortunes of a country. It is not only their wealth that is off the charts but the use of that wealth to buy and consolidate privilege. The world sees them at their best because the viewing is highly orchestrated. They are generally not given to outbursts in public, and any indiscretions are usually stage-managed by highly paid enablers.
They live inside their Hearst Castles and those who are invited to enter, do so on the understanding that what is said or done inside, stays inside. Those were the rules and Gadi was prepared to live by them. What he wasn’t prepared to do was sell his soul. At times that almost became his reality.
Saying ‘no’ should have been easy. It should have been the default position for my moral compass. But at times I struggled to draw a line. Thankfully I never crossed it, despite getting close.
What Gadi learned is that in his world the mega-wealthy, the obscenely mega-wealthy, struggle with issues of trust. They don’t know if the person sitting opposite them is a genuine friend or just looking to advance themselves financially or career-wise. With age comes cynicism to the point that everyone is out to scam them, until proven otherwise. And that also means family.
“That realisation was the saddest of all for me,” Gadi says. “The very idea that your own kids are trying to shake you down is beyond my understanding. But this is what I experienced.
“With my last job, which lasted for six years, I came face-to-face with someone who was incapable of empathising with anyone. His wealth coupled with his ego and paranoia placed him in a category that I can’t even begin to describe.
“The people he assembled around him were truly the ‘yes men and women’, be they people who performed the most menial tasks to those who knew what was in his bank account. “Beyond them no one of any value or consequence existed.”
Gadi has a theory
According to Gadi, people like this don’t process right and wrong the way the rest of us do.
“Their brain has forgotten how to hear no, and how to react to no. It’s not even spoiled. It goes beyond spoiled. Something turns off, and they don’t hear no. They want a yes all the time. If they don’t get a yes, that’s a problem. “Even in my close business relationships, as close as they were, as trustworthy as they were, the answer always had to be, ‘Yes, I’ll take care of that’. Also, the rules that the rest of us abide by don’t apply. Private planes get them anywhere in the world, with or without a passport. Nobody is prepared to stop them.”
There were compensations, of course. Not just financial or the daily interaction with some of the most accomplished people in the creative arts. His resume was growing and his skill set was expanding. That was the upside.
The downside was his sense of isolation from reality.
“My family was my anchor but no one I know possesses a switch that you turn off the moment you leave your workplace. I had to stop the anger from intruding on the people I love and it wasn’t easy. I’m truly thankful for a wife who understands what drives my responses and who can anticipate how I might react when I’ve had a really shitty day at work.”
The final straw came when his boss went ballistic over a minor matter that had nothing to do with Gadi. But, as the estate manager, he had to accept the ear-shattering obscenities and the rat-a-tat-tat spittle that were coming from his mouth.
That’s when he marched to his car and took off at speed, conscious that the security cameras lining the driveway were capturing his every move. That only reinforced his resolve to get the hell out.
As he reached the security gates, freedom was inching every closer. But as Gadi will tell you, freedom is a nuance. There is a comfortable place within turmoil, being in the eye of a storm. You are protected to an extent, knowing that to confront the storm is to lay bare every anxiety you’ve built up over many years.
He was trapped in a world that was partly of his own making. He understood the consequences of saying “no”; it might only be delivered in a letter of resignation but that would be amplified in his employer’s mind.
One thing Gadi knew was that Hollywood is a very small place. It may loom large in popular culture, but the movers and shakers – actors, directors, producers – are a small clan who protect their interests at all costs. They may happily trash another member of their group behind his or her back but god help anyone outside the “family” who tries to do the same.
It takes a Harvey Weinstein-type transgression to break the bond.
Gadi was concerned that if he wanted to continue working in the industry, he had to follow the rules. A bad reference, or even a middling reference, can be fatal to one’s job prospects.
But it was now or never.
However ... the sun has a way of piercing the gathering clouds. And so it was when the previously mentioned celebrity reached out to Gadi. She didn’t need to ask if he was unhappy in his present position. It was a given, knowing (a) how difficult the man was to work with and (b) how well Gadi was spoken of by those who were likely to know.
In a matter of months, Gadi will celebrate his 40th birthday. It will be a wonderful knees-up with the people who matter most – his wife, children, extended family and friends.
And celebrities? Not a chance.
*Gadi Macher is a pseudonym
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