What a smoke!
Peacocks, trapeze stunts and swans: All bets are off when it comes to weddings of the rich and famous
LAST month, child actress-turnedfashion designer Mary-Kate Olsen wed banker Olivier Sarkozy in an intimate Manhattan affair that featured cocktails in a garden, dinner for 50 and, as The Post reported, “bowls and bowls filled with cigarettes.”
The unorthodox, unhealthy choice of party favors has some in the wedding industry fuming.
“It’s actually disgraceful that was done,” says celeb wedding planner David Tutera, who has handled the nuptials of Holly Madison, Angie Everhart, Shannen Doherty and Kim Coles.
But Tutera also admits that when the rich and famous wed, anything goes.
“I’ve had requests for people to take it a step further, with an abundance of alcohol and drugs, like rolled joints to be served by waiters. This comes up in the early stages of the party planning,” he says. “The art of simplicity is long gone.”
He once had a bride who wanted to rip off Pink’s stunt from the 2010 Grammys and arrive via trapeze — while in her wedding dress — to her lavish Cipriani reception. The woman spent tens of thousands of dollars on trapeze lessons and rigging, only for it all to go to waste. She got cold feet and walked into the reception in standard fashion.
Despite trying to accommodate such requests, Tutera says that when a client — however famous — wants something impossible, he’ll let her know. One celeb client recently requested dyed-blue horses to complement her wedding color scheme. He said nay.
“I feel like I have a moral obligation to go, ‘No, this isn’t going to happen,’ ” he says. He had to tell that to another couple who wanted to land at their ceremony in a hot-air balloon.
“It was just not possible,” he says. “I don’t control the winds. If I did, I’d be so rich.”
It was snow that planner Michael Russo had to tell his client he couldn’t control. When Kevin and Dan-Danielle Jonas weded in 2009, Daniellele wanted flakes to fall inside the tent.
“I kind of educated her as to why the snow wouldn’t work,” Russo says with a laugh, noting that melt-melting the substance would makeake for a far-tooslipperyry dance floor. Thehe starry couple hadd to settle for a customustom 12-2-foot ice barar withwith laceace etched intonto the block.ock.
FFor some wed-d ding planners, cigarettes in a bowl is downright tame.
“That’s nothing compared to a request for wild animals to roam at your reception,” says Sarah Glick, a NewYork-based wedding planner with Brilliant Event Planning.
Glick was tasked with rounding up peacocks for a June wedding in Queens who would mix and mingle with guests at the cocktail reception. The plan was ultimately squashed when peacock handlers were concerned about “the very vio- lent nature” of the animals.
The couple settled for a dancing bear instead — someone stuffed in a costume.
Andrea Correale of Elegant Affairs staged a 2014 wedding at a multimillion-dollar Southampton estate for “a celeb on wedding num- ber two or three — you would know who it is.” The bride demanded not just any old swans, but obedient, trained ones.
“They wanted ‘behaved swans’ — which [don’t] exist — to stay calm and not quack or fight before the ceremony,” says the Long Island-based event planner. The couple also had a vision that the female swans would stay to the left of the aisle, the males to the right.
Correale was forced to contract “swan wranglers” from a farm in the Midwest to make the flight of fancy a reality.
“They were hillbillies who arrived in the back of a pickup truck,” Correale recalls. “I sent someone to the village of Southampton and put them in polos — anything that was presentable.”
Despite having to deal with such headaches, Correale says it’s all part of the job. “For people who have means, they want something completely original,” she says. “To them it’s the most important day.”