There was no image of Lady Gaga at 3 a.m., hanging near the wall with various members of Arcade Fire and Eddie Vedder. No images of Kevin Costner, single and ready to mingle by the bar. No images of Cher and Lauryn Hill over at the banquettes of the softly lit dining room. The owners of San Vicente West Village had made sure that no paparazzi could be found inside last Friday, despite the fact that some of the biggest names in music and Hollywood had come for a party after the Saturday Night Live 50th-anniversary concert at Radio City Music Hall.
Had any of those images been beamed across the internet, it might have built a sense that the first event at SVB, which officially opens in March, was a rager for the ages.
Perhaps that is the point: You had to be there.
Among New Yorkers who flock to power and crave exclusivity, the upcoming opening of Los Angeles’s best private club is being greeted with a sense of urgency that is second only to the future of democracy.
“Everyone in fashion has been talking about this club, whether to join, how to get on the list,” said Kendall Werts, a founder of the Jeffries, an agency at the intersection of branding and celebrity.
San Vicente West Village is the brainchild of Jeff Klein, a businessman with a long track record in hospitality, who opened San Vicente Bungalows Los Angeles in 2018.
In the 1990s, Mr. Klein bet that hotels would be to that decade what nightclubs had been to the 1980s.
In 2004, Mr. Klein spent $18 million to buy the dilapidated Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles. It went on to become the town’s premier canteen for moguls and movie stars (think: Jennifer Aniston, Jeff Bezos, George Clooney) and, for several years, it was the site of Vanity Fair’s famous Oscars party.
Mr. Klein also teamed up with the magazine’s former editor, Graydon Carter, on the Monkey Bar, a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan.
But the real follow-up to the Sunset Tower was the San Vicente Bungalows, a members-only club that changed how celebrities could socialize.
A cynic might say the idea was to create a safe space for the town’s best-known and best-connected people, one where they could gawk at and hit on one another without having those moments memorialized in a bad iPhone picture taken by a tourist. (The club requires all guests to cover their phone cameras with stickers for the duration of their stay.) The challenges associated with navigating Los Angeles’s sprawl also worked in the club’s favor. With fewer ways to run into people, they settled into picking one.
Dues ran around $4,000, not including initiation fees that ranged from $3,000 to $15,000, depending on age. Among those who joined were Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Tom Ford.
“When I’m in L.A., if I’m not eating at home, I’m at San Vicente. Before that, I was at Tower Bar,” Mr. Ford said by phone last week. “It’s like I’m at home. They know my favorite table and what I like. My Coca-Cola arrives before I ask for it. You feel Jeff’s presence in every way.”
After the coronavirus pandemic, an idea began to gnaw at Mr. Klein: Might he be able to bottle the magic in Los Angeles and bring it back to the city he’d left behind?
In short order, he decided to test his luck at the Jane Hotel, a red brick West Village landmark along the West Side Highway.
The blowback and intrigue from New Yorkers began as soon as the first invitations to join were extended. A select group of current members were instructed to invite their friends or people who they thought should be members. In emails, those new insiders were given the rare opportunity to join without the formal review process that most members were subjected to. The membership is being vetted by Gabe Doppelt, a British magazine editor who cut her teeth as the assistant to Anna Wintour and Tina Brown. After going on to be the editor of Mademoiselle, she oversaw Hollywood coverage at W magazine and The Daily Beast.
People who did not get invites were angry about not being invited. People who did get invites were angry about the fees, especially the older ones and some of the most creative ones who were not high-net-worth individuals. Prospective invitees were asked to upload their drivers licenses so that their age-adjusted fees could be determined. No one liked that.
It so happens that San Vicente’s annual fees are in the same ballpark as those of other New York City private social clubs, such as Casa Cipriani and Chez Margaux. They’re considerably cheaper than the Core Club’s.
A fair amount of debate began about whether the city had enough juice left to create a lasting clubhouse full of people who were both creative enough and financially solvent enough to pay for membership. Power in New York City is often cultural as much as it is capital.
“Does real fabulousness even take place in public anymore? Isn’t it behind closed doors in other people’s homes?” said Jon Reinish, a well-connected political consultant who received an invitation to the club last month and had not yet joined. “I just don’t know that it exists in Manhattan anymore the way it did during the days of Michael’s the Grill Room and Mortimer’s, and it’s very hard to reverse-engineer it any kind of lasting way.”
But for every person sniping, another was joining. Also helping ensure success: Mr. Klein’s unique popularity, according to Kevin Huvane, who, as the co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency, helps guide the careers of many San Vicente regulars, among them Ms. Aniston, Demi Moore and Jennifer Lopez. “People underestimate good will,” he said, before going on to liken Mr. Klein to Joe Allen, the impresario whose restaurants in the theater district established him as a king of Broadway.
The night after the star-studded S.N.L. party, Mr. Werts of the Jeffries was among roughly a thousand people who attended a hard-hat party celebrating the club’s upcoming opening.
Others in the crowd included the power literary agent David Kuhn, the television mogul Darren Starr, the actress Zooey Deschanel and the political pundit Molly Jong-Fast.
A magazine editor who earlier in the week had complained to me about having wasted several thousand dollars to join (largely because of FOMO) was now grousing about the long line for the coat check.
Even Mr. Klein appeared a little embarrassed by the size of the crowd. A few feet away, he talked to Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of Woody Allen.
“It’s a good thing Woody didn’t come,” Mr. Klein said. “It’s too crowded.”
Officially, Mr. Klein was not participating with this piece. Last December, he gave an interview to The New York Times in connection with the opening of a San Vicente outpost in Santa Monica, Calif. After its publication, Jay-Z asked him why on earth he’d cooperated with it. After all, a central promise of the club is privacy for its members. (Some have been suspended for uploading pictures to Instagram.)
And Mr. Klein had to concede that Jay-Z had a point.
Still, he also knew that in a town of journalists, nothing about the weekend was going to be totally off the record. And with opening costs in the $130 million range, he was not going to be able to make that back without some press. (“Oof, that’s a lot of money,” said Mr. Huvane, when told the number.)
So Mr. Klein did not exactly shoo me away as he greeted Risa Heller, a crisis manager whose clients have included Jeff Zucker and Anthony Weiner.
Waiters marched around the space serving crispy shrimp satays and cappuccino-flavored macaroons.
Ms. Jong-Fast and Ms. Deschanel went upstairs to see the movie theater, then checked out a few of the guest suites, where the hardwood floors had an amber hue and the bed linens were airy and white.
“This would be a great place to cheat on your spouse,” said Ms. Jong-Fast, stopping for a minute to admire a pumpkin-colored sofa with a Hudson Valley vibe. “Although maybe that’s more Casa Cipriani.”
