A chill settled over Bel Air one evening in October 1998 when 100 guests, including President Bill Clinton, gathered to honor California senator Barbara Boxer. As the mercury dropped outside the home of the hosts--then-Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Bob Daly and his wife, songwriter Carole Bayer Sager ("That's What Friends Are For")--the bare-shouldered ladies were on the verge of a mass shiver. "Gee, I wish I had some wraps for the women," Sager whispered to Sharon Sacks, the woman who had orchestrated the event. Just then, quicker than you can say "pashmina," Sacks produced 50 of the soft, trendy alpaca-hair shawls. "I knew that night was going to be chilly, so I went out earlier and bought them," Sacks says. Each shawl cost a couple hundred dollars, but it paid off. "Carole was so happy," Sacks says. Plus, Sacks now has a stock of pashminas ready for the next cold snap.
This admirable bit of forethought may seem insignificant by itself--a good idea, nothing ingenious. But Sacks's prescient purchase was part of a pattern that has kept her in the upper tier of Los Angeles event coordinators for nearly two decades. And yes, planning parties is big business, particularly in a town where the social circuit is a big part of the economy. Sacks charges $25,000 or 20 percent of the total party cost, whichever is greater. If a party costs half a million dollars, she earns $100,000, bringing the client's total cost to $600,000. This excludes the cost of materials, but on those Sacks makes no profit. "If I bought that tablecloth at one price, then marked it up, you might not be able to afford it," she says. "So I buy it for you at the best price I can get and sell it to you for that. Then my parties look gorgeous, my clients are thrilled, and I make my fee. That is why I still have clients from 19 years ago."
As the pashmina affair demonstrated, Sacks's job doesn't end when the party begins. During events, she positions a staffer four feet from the host at all times, ready to provide whatever's needed before it's requested. Sacks and the rest of her crew, meanwhile, do the same for the guests while someone mans the kitchen. For weddings (she had been working on Ben Affleck and J.Lo's before whatever happened happened), Sacks brings a bridal survival kit that would embarrass Martha Stewart: umbrellas for unexpected downpours, hankies for expected tears, garter belts in case the bride forgets hers. She's even forecasted the needs of Madonna, who hired her to set up a Kabbalah study dinner.
Not that Sacks was always commanding large sums of money to help international celebrities throw bashes. Nineteen years ago, she was the executive assistant to one-time producer Jerry Perenchio (currently chairman and CEO of Univision), for whom she managed all parties and gift-buying--no small job in the gifty world of Hollywood. When Cosmopolitan included a wedding she threw as one of the top four of the year, Sacks nervously told her boss she wanted to open her own business. His response: "I'm your first client." Perenchio recommended her to friends and is still a loyal customer. Today, Sacks Productions has a staff of seven and a client roster that reads like a cross between the Fortune 500 and People's 50 Most Beautiful People. She has organized Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas's engagement celebration, the In Style-Warner Bros. Golden Globes after-party, Pierce Brosnan's fiftieth birthday bash, and the Olsen twins' sweet 16.
Perenchio didn't give his patronage and his Rolodex to be nice. Neither did Madonna or Brosnan. They did it because Sacks prizes a characteristic crucial to the success of any business, from a multinational to, well, a party planner: obsession with detail. From a minimalist office in the San Fernando Valley, she can mastermind a full slate of events at any given time--10 in a recent two-week stretch. At a morning meeting not long ago, Sacks's staff told her the status of each event, and in a matter of minutes she decided the following: how to time the food, music, and speeches at a birthday party for a former Island Records executive at the House of Blues; which magazine should be placed in the gift bags at a birthday party in Mexico; and what belonged on the five-course French-Asian menu for a major Bel Air soiree. For Sacks, little things are the big things. Proof sits in a room packed with color-coded binders cataloging past events, some five inches thick, bursting with bills, invoices, layouts, permits, cost drafts, insurance policies, and status reports, all on neatly Xeroxed, hole-punched pages. They come in handy--when she was planning a recent fund-raiser for President Bush, Sacks dug up a four-year-old seating chart from a luncheon at which a UCLA medical center wing was dedicated to Ronald Reagan.
In building her business, Sacks has found it necessary to employ some less conventional tactics in client relations. First, she rejects some people outright. "With some brides, I just don't feel it," she says. "We have to have a very tight relationship." Also, she's learned to ignore a client's wishes--not a technique used by many people in the service business, but sometimes her only option. "I had a client who refused to put poles in the tent," she says. "He thought it would take away from what we were creating." The day before the event, the tent collapsed onto the tables. "The moral is, I don't listen to my clients anymore," she says. "I do what I know is right." Her attitude toward the competition is equally unusual: "I love when my clients go to another planner," says Sacks, "because they're right back the next day."
