Nothing gets in the way of Stanley Horwich and a wedding.
Certainly not the fact that four hours before the orchestra was supposed to launch into ”Here Comes the Bride,” the bride was stood up by her gown.
Horwich, a man paid to iron out just these sorts of wrinkles, leaped into action.
He called the department store. He worked his way from extension to extension till he discovered where the buyer was: At Wrigley Field. Taking in an afternoon ballgame.
”Over the loudspeaker I had him paged. I arranged a police escort for him to go down to the store, open the store, pull another gown and have two seamstresses at the hotel. Just as the bride was about to walk down the aisle, we finished sewing the hem.”
Horwich has enough of these rescues under his belt to make him a high-ranking officer in the army of intrepid wedding consultants.
Theirs is a terrain littered with the debris of Big Days Gone Awry:
– A four-tier cake that melted into a puddle of icing on the ballroom floor; another into which the groom collapsed.
– A wedding tent that flooded, its wet electrical wires shorting out the band.
– Guests left with forks dangling from their mouths as strong winds lifted a tent a foot off the ground and then politely returned it to its perch.
– A bridal gown stolen from a hotel room the night before the wedding;
others split down the back just as the brides were zipped in.
– Entrees dispatched to the wrong ballroom by the hotel kitchen; meals doused in smoky powder when a smoke alarm started spraying in a synagogue kitchen.
– A groom who turned and ran from the altar, or … it doesn`t get worse than that.
As if that`s not enough, wedding consultants find themselves beeped at all hours of the night and day by breathless brides wondering what color nail polish will match the carpeting in the room.
And when a bride insists on a certain $10,000 wedding cake, it`s the wedding consultant who must track down the New York baker, book her first-class airline ticket and a suite at the Drake, then negotiate permission from the hotel to have this out-of-towner take over the pastry kitchen for 3 1/2 days to create the confection.
”I`m Mr. Peace of Mind and Mr. Insurance Policy,” says Horwich, 66, who figures he has shepherded some 10,000 brides down the aisle. After four decades at it, he`s considered the granddaddy of Chicago wedding consultants. ”When you`re getting married, you need the peace of mind that whatever you`re doing, you`re doing it right mentally, physically and financially.”
The strongest evidence that Horwich is doing something right is the fact that he is now marrying off his second generation of brides and grooms. About 100 of his recent clients have been children of couples whose weddings Horwich masterminded a quarter century or more ago.
Typical of the reviews is that of Shigeki Makino, 25, a just-married man who relied on Horwich to orchestrate his Chicago wedding with the bride residing in Tokyo and the groom in Boston.
”Mr. Stanley was wonderful! Can you imagine planning a wedding half a world away,” asks Makino, an equity analyst now honeymooning in St. Martin.
”It was wonderful to be able to ask someone: `Who`s the best musician?
Who`s the top photographer?”`
Starting out
Forty years ago, Horwich`s late brother George, a World War II veteran with strong people skills, got into the business of orchestrating nuptial extravaganzas ”on a lark.” He called his company Weddings Inc.
The Horwich brothers started with two desks and a telephone in a bedroom in West Rogers Park. There was no Wedding Consultants listing in the Yellow Pages, so Horwich settled for an entry under Caterers. Postage stamps were 3 cents back then; the wedding cake of choice was spun sugar; and a supply of hors d`oeuvres cost $1.50 per person.
Today, there are a page and a half of listings under Wedding Consultants in the 1991 Chicago Consumer Yellow Pages; you don`t need to be reminded of the cost of stamps; the wedding cake of choice is white chocolate; and six hors d`oeuvres cost $18 to $25 per person.
Seven desk phones ring continuously in Horwich`s 4,000-square-foot, exposed-brick-and-hardwood office suite in River North. His partner of 20 years is Charles Share; the office staff numbers four; there are four full-time calligraphers and a full-time maintenance man and driver. A bank of six phones on one wall connects the office with the directors of catering at five downtown hotels and one florist.
Next to one of the phones on Horwich`s desk sits a bronze aspirin the size of a hockey puck. Across his desk, nestled among a slice of chocolate mousse cake, two date books and an empty bottle of Dom Perignon is a portable phone that fits into the pocket of Horwich`s custom-tailored suits. He takes it everywhere; it has enabled people to track him down even in rooms where phones should not ring.
”In this business you gotta live it, eat it, drink it and you gotta sleep it-24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is not a 40-hour-a-week position,” says Horwich, who sneaks away only a few weekends a year but has just returned from a birthday dinner with his daughter in Beverly Hills, Calif. ”But also you gotta love it. I still get goose pimples when I hear the musicians play `Lohengrin,` ” the traditional wedding march, ”and when I`m straightening the bride`s train before she walks down the aisle.”
One minute he sounds like Uncle Stanley, and you think the tears are going to well up in his eyes. The next he`s talking like Stanley the Stage Promoter, prodding a groom: ”Walk down the aisle. Let everyone look at you.” He sounds so sure of himself, you believe him when he insists to the nervous groom: ”Ahh, don`t listen to the weather reports. There won`t be thunderstorms.” (Even though forecasts called for weekend rain, Horwich called it right. Not a drop fell on the Saturday afternoon wedding.)
”There`s no school for a consultant to go to. Not like there is for law or an MBA,” says Horwich. ”It`s trial and error and common sense and knowing how to work with people. It`s knowing where to go and who to go to to reach the top of that field under extreme pressure.”
Like when you think you`ve got nine months to plan an elaborate wedding only to learn the groom has received orders to report for military duty and you are left with five days in which to fill a ballroom with one bride, one groom, 300 guests, 7,000 roses and 15 musicians.
`No second chance`
The one and only truth of wedding consulting: There is no ordinary wedding.
”Getting married is the highlight of a lady`s career,” says Horwich, who married his wife, Ruth, 30 years ago in his mother-in-law`s living room in front of 20 guests. They have two grown children: a son, married 10 years ago in his parents` living room with 30 guests, and a daughter, not married.
”From the time you could walk, your mother said, `At your wedding we`re going to do this.` Or, `At your wedding we`re going to have this.`
”It`s like buying a house or a car. You want all the little extras. It`s so nice to have somebody guide you through the details.”
Horwich says he charges a set fee, and he also takes a cut of the bill for the florist, photographer, decorator and on down the line. He will admit that he costs more than the industry standard of about $1,000 per wedding. Mind you, his weddings tend to be high end. Very high end. The bill for one black-tie affair for 800 guests a few years back was $800,000; champagne alone cost $81,000.
”It`s embarrassing, it`s really expensive the weddings we do,” he says, pausing to take a deep breath. ”The minimum, minimum is $175 to $250 per person and up.” And that doesn`t factor in the cost of the bridal gown, which in some of these weddings has the father of the bride muttering such things as: ”She just drove my car up the aisle.”
”You need a real professional when you`re getting married,” Horwich says, though he`s quick to add the industry motto: ”We only get `em going. You need another kind of professional to keep `em together.”
”It`s just like with a will,” says wedding consultant Phil Gershman, proprietor for the last 25 years of Gershman & Co., stationed on North Lake Shore Drive. ”Would you write your own will, or go to a lawyer? With a will at least you get a second chance; with a wedding there is no second chance.” This is how you play the wedding consulting game:
Six months before the sprint down the aisle, the wedding consultant meets with some combination of these players: bride, mother of bride, father of bride, bridegroom. Date and site are locked in. Size of guest list is estimated. Budget, a figure that seems only to expand as the date approaches, is approximated.
The number of meetings, phone calls and faxes varies, depending on the complexity of the wedding and the nerves of the wedding party.
Files quickly thicken. For an upcoming wedding for 800 in which every thread of every napkin, tablecloth and chair cover is being custom spun and woven into one-of-a-kind pieces, Gershman has a file that is threatening to challenge in size the World Book Encyclopedia.
Consultants routinely draw floor plans to map out seating. They design stage sets for weddings that might call for clouds floating over a ballroom, or castle doors through which guests are ushered into a medieval banquet.
Gershman hands his clients a spread sheet, detailing an average of 67 line items, including every expense for the wedding down to that essential extra dressing room for the bride`s 12th attendant. The day of the wedding, Gershman arrives with a time-flow sheet, choreographed to the minute, leaving not a lip`s move to chance: ”Bride and groom kiss.”
”It takes a good stomach and a lot of Librium to do this job,” jokes wedding consultant Randy Schuster, who works out of his Highland Park home and wouldn`t dream of going to bed without a pad and pen under his pillow.
Filling etiquette gaps
Not in the job description, wedding consultants insist, is refereeing family feuds.
Horwich figures it nevertheless comes with the territory. ”You`ve got to be a real diplomat not to offend anyone. Sometimes the brides are dead wrong. One told us, `I don`t want to invite the groom`s aunt and uncle, so I`m going to say you forgot to put their name on the list.` They`ll use me as the wedge.”
”We`re in the middle quite often, but we enjoy it,” says Horwich`s business partner, Share. ”That`s what we`re paid to do.
”The etiquette book is great, but sometimes it has to be modified.”
Like what to do when the groom and a groomsman break into fisticuffs on the dance floor. ”We stay out of it, and have hotel security come in,” says Share. ”And have the band play louder.”
Or what to do when the divorced parents of the bride refuse to be in the same ballroom, let alone walk their only daughter down the aisle. ”It takes us a few meetings. We tell them, `It`s one day. It`s five hours.` They usually come around.”
”We`ve seen it all,” says Share, 43, who, by the way, took the expert`s way out and got married under his mother-in-law`s apple tree with 35 guests 10 years ago. ”My job is to stay cool, so everybody else stays cool.
”If I`ve ever lost my cool, it hasn`t been at the wedding. And then I get up the next morning and run an extra few miles.”
