He’s a magic man

SELF

PORTRAIT

Date and place of birth:

Jan. 18, 1974, Cambridge, Mass.

Occupation:

Event planner

Favorite piece of decor everyone else hates:

Carnations. I love to mass them together, in two or three shades of the same color. Carnations are beautiful, and they’re hardy.

My most marked characteristic is

I’d like to think my parents and grandparents taught me the difference between right and wrong, and to accept others for their differences.

Telephone numbers I know by heart include

The night duty police officer in any jurisdiction where a client is hosting an event. I refuse to get shut down by the noise ordinance, and I always want to know who to call when I need the cops to come - or stay away. Also, the restaurant Live Bait, which has the best fried chicken in New York.

An extravagance I allow myself

I support, encourage, allow, and, in fact, require all extravagances.

The pleasures of denying oneself are overrated.

The way I deflect political conversation at a social event is to

Change the subject to God or sex. Or just mention Madonna.

My daily media habits are

Arkansas Online, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph.

When I’m home, I always read the letters page in the Democrat. It’s nice to know that there are people from Arkansas who are even crazier than I am.

One word to sum me up:

GratefulNEW YORK - If Bronson Van Wyck had been at the helm of the White House state dinner notoriously crashed Nov.

24, 2009, by Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the social-climbing couple would not have enjoyed green curry prawns with the prime minister of India.

The meticulous command Van Wyck, one of the East Coast’s top event planners, takes to each project evokes military precision. He dressed his crew in T-shirts with the British wartime slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” long before the phrase became an Internet meme, and he meant no irony.

Here, in the city of eternal one-upping, a Van Wyck orchestrated celebration belies a pre-fete mania the intricacy of which would satisfy Claire Danes’ Agent Carrie Mathison on Homeland.

Re-assembling classic props from decades of lavish Bergdorf Goodman window displays, as Van Wyck did recently for the retailer’s 111th anniversary party, or evoking the sensuality of Ferragamo fragrance ads by coaxing dinner guests one-by-one or two-by-two into a rumpled bed with the model from the ad, nude beneath the sheets - these feats of total immersion represent months of workadayplotting, in three-ring binders, Excel worksheets and insurance riders.

And yet, for all the contingencies that Van Wyck anticipates and pre-empts, the legends of his improvisations just before the curtains part are so numerous that you half suspect some of his clients, moneyed enough to have had their capriceshonored more than once, must change their minds for the pure fun of seeing exactly how calmly Van Wyck can carry on.

A writer for Hamptons magazine called this Van Wyck’s “last-minute magic.”

The example that seems to make Van Wyck proudest was a whim of the rapper turned mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs who, after expressing extreme happiness with the decor for his 40th birthday party at the Plaza Hotel, indicated the only thing that would make him happier was if Van Wyck could make it snow. Indoors. On less than an hour’s notice.

Van Wyck tracked down the phone number of the man who held the key to the technical closet at the Metropolitan Opera, where a snow machine was stored. At the appointed hour, with a small wink from the client Van Wyck calls, simply, Puffy, it snowed.

These instances abound.

For the island wedding of a Vogue editor, Van Wyck searched for, found and shipped a missing piano in the midst of an advancing hurricane. The wedding merited an eight-page spread in Vogue, and Van Wyck’s career blossomed.

At a turn-of-the-21st-century party in Sun Valley, Idaho, the negative temperatures outside the tent Van Wyck had erected made the warm breath of the guests condense on the fabric and fall like rain. Flummoxed, Van Wyck called his eighth-gradeearth sciences teacher from the Arkansas town of Tuckerman, where he grew up, and was reminded he could fight condensation with convection. He trained fans on the tent walls and stopped guests from being spritzed by their exhalations.

SPLENDID ISOLATION

But to earn the trust of repeat clients like Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, and mega-brands that include Chanel, Dior and Mercedes-Benz, there must be something more to Van Wyck - more than precision instrumentation and an iPhone contacts file as accommodating as a janitor’s jangly hoop, holding a key for every caprice.

It helps that Van Wyck establishes an intimacy with clients that allows him to absorb their anxieties even as he sublimates his own. When family friend Mimi Bowen, a boutique owner in New Orleans, hired the Van Wycks - mother Mary Lynn and sister Mimi work with him - to plan her daughter’s wedding, she marveled as Bronson recreated her home in an 8,000-square-foot tent.

Besides hauling her furniture and rugs into the space, Van Wyck created vignettes - including cocktail lounges, a front porch and a dance floor - by frequenting the French Quarter’s antique stores and borrowing couches and chandeliers.

“It was very warm and inviting,” Bowen recalls.

The morning after the wedding, Bowen was also delighted to find she had hired an event planner who would come back to her house and help her finish the champagne and caviar “while I’mhanging out in my sweat pants.”

The source of the something more Van Wyck brings to the party can be found in Tuckerman. It’s where his parents moved to Arrowhead, the family farm of Bronson’s mother, after his father, also named Bronson, graduated from Harvard Business School. Life on the farm created what Bronson has called a “splendid isolation” for him and his sister.

“There was little else except for the seasons and animals and space, really,” Van Wyck said thoughtfully, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, in his event-planning offices near Manhattan’s garment district. A light snow began to fall on the building and its neighbors, mostly furriers and fur cold-storage brokers, as he remembered his childhood. “Imagination,” he said, “was kind of our onlyfriend.”

EXPRESSWAY TO SUCCESS

A Van Wyck in New York will inevitably see certain doors open for him. One need not know that the name dates to the 1600s - when a young city of Dutch settlers coalesced into five boroughs under the mayorship of Robert Van Wyck - to give it weight; the Van Wyck Expressway, connecting Kennedy Airport to Brooklyn and Queens, confers that daily.

Anecdotally, Van Wyck has developed a theory about the socio-economic lines that neatly divide the camps of those who pronounce his name correctly - rhyming with Van Tyke - and those who don’t. The greater one’s education, the greater one’s odds of getting it wrong.

But even without his name, Van Wyck inherited a winning formula. If imagination was Bronson and Mimi’s only friend, Mary Lynn created a nourishing diorama in which the three forged their bond.

Mary Lynn demanded a plot of land from which only women would be allowed to raise crops, part of her insistence that farming wasn’t only men’s work. Each Halloween, she transformed an abandoned home on the grounds into a haunted house to lead her children through. Mimi was allowed a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.There were parrots and a miniature horse. Mary Lynn kept a macaque monkey.

A history buff who geeks out over the advent of the 3-D printer, Van Wyck in his early 20s was working as a creative executive on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and vetting scripts for movie studios when he called his mother in Arkansas. He was miserable with his prospects.

Mary Lynn listened carefully, then asked Bronson what he would rather be doing.

“Throwing a party,” he answered.

Mary Lynn thought for a moment, then offered a simple suggestion that changed the course of social history, at least as it is recorded in Town & Country and the Sunday Styles section of TheNew York Times, where Van Wyck galas tend to be admiringly chronicled.

“Let’s figure out how to get paid for that,” she told him.

Mary Lynn was remindedof this story weeks later, at a celebration in Manhattan’s West Village for the debut of a new line of Bronson Van Wyck products - vinaigrettes and cocktail mixers Bronson has been making insmall batches for friends for years. The Arrowhead Farms collection also includes holiday decor with a tartan motif, and Mary Lynn had swathed herself in a swatch, in the spirit of the evening.

In that way, Mary Lynn resembles other strong, blond women with knacks for diplomacy and self-invention to whom her son has gravitated. After his graduation from Yale, Van Wyck worked as anaide to Pamela Harriman at the American Embassy in Paris, and in 1992, he traveled with Hillary Clinton as she made campaign appearances for her husband.

(Sales of Arrowhead Farms products benefit Citymeals, a delivery program for the homebound and elderly; details can be found at holidays. vanwyck.net.)

FROM THIN AIR

Mary Lynn Van Wyck’s advice - ‘‘Let’s figure out how to get paid for that’’ - has spawned a global business, and that makes her thoughtful if radical advice all the more authentic - a quality that, to hear her son tell it, is the hallmark of hospitality.

As creators of romantic, notional spaces, the Van Wycks have a talent for artifice but not for pretension.

For the recent Bergdorf Goodman event, Van Wyck created a giant overhead cloudscape made from cotton and dotted with miniature hot air balloons. Weeks later, when he finally got around to seeing Cloud Atlas, the movie, he realized he must have somehow internalized the idea that clouds were, as they say, having a moment.

That is not to say Van Wyck approaches his work as a pure aesthete, intent on seeing each party as a canvas for his inspirations.

“None of us are trying to live out our clients’ lives in our work. I’ve given parties. I’ve given some great parties. I’m going to give more. I’m not trying to throw my party on my client’s dime.”

As strategic as he can be, there is also something slightly cheeky in the way Van Wyck approaches party-throwing, appropriate perhaps with the Anglophilia that seems to surround him.

The key to a good cocktail party? “I always try to serve really salty hors d’oeuvres,” Van Wyck said with a twinkle in his eyes. “It makes people thirsty. Thirsty people drink.People who drink flirt. That makes a good party.”

Van Wyck’s great-grandmother, Ruby Thomas, would be proud. According to family lore, her collection of recipes from the kitchen of the Red Apple Inn in Heber Springs, was banned from the Baptist Bookstore for including instructions for rum cake. Van Wyck’s fried chicken recipe, calling for a brine that includes beer, is preserved in the Clinton Presidential Center cookbook.

“I sometimes wonder what it is we’re doing,” Van Wyck said, by way of reflecting on the meaning of his success. “We’re not saving the world. We’re not curing any terrible disease. But it’s about helping people celebrate and be happy and spread joy, and that is important.”

And if that can be in a sumptuous, well-lighted space, why not?

Then Van Wyck cited one of his favorite quotations, from Oscar Wilde, who wrote, “it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” And suddenly, Van Wyck had another idea - for a Dorian Gray-theme party.