Love Connections : Is Beverly Hills Big Enough for Two Very Exclusive and Expensive Matchmakers?

Helena Amram, a former gunboat crewman in the Israeli army who calls herself a “matchmaker extraordinaire,” can’t believe the question.

“Did you hear what he said?” she asks a lunch companion, her dark eyes widening. “He said I have competitors. Nobody competes with Helena. There’s only one. I am the best. I have no competition because (other matchmakers) are not making weddings. They’re making introductions and one-night stands. They don’t have my method. I don’t know why these stupid people don’t try to copy me. I devote my life to giving people happiness. Nobody can compete with me.”

This is news to Christine O’Keefe, Amram’s principal local competition.

‘The First Matchmaker’

“I was the first matchmaker in this area,” said O’Keefe. “I’m not interested in daters at all, or just casual people. I specialize in marriage and in high-profile, successful people. I want to be remembered and known as a lady who pioneered an old idea, brought it to the United States, made it legitimate, made it credible, made it safe and distinguished. That (Helena’s) opened in my back yard is not appreciated, but if she runs a clean business and does what she says she’s going to do, I don’t care what she does.”

Some back yard, that. It’s the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Drive in the deepest, deep-pile core of Beverly Hills, where there are now not one, but two high-ticket marriage brokers flanking the intersection.

Amram, whose office, at 9465 Wilshire Blvd., opened earlier this month, arranges marriages for the beautiful, the rich, the discreet, the psychologically well-adjusted, the felony-free and sometimes, she says, the famous. Across the street, at 9454 Wilshire Blvd., O’Keefe does the same.

Both insist they do not run dating services. Rather, they say, they are strictly in the marriage business. They are not out to find their clients a good time or provide them with dates for the office Christmas party. They are out to get them hitched.

Bookends, however, the two are not.

O’Keefe, 37, who has run her service, Christine O’Keefe Ltd., in Beverly Hills for three years, previously ran a dating service franchise in Chicago. She is tall, blonde, fair, Irish, Catholic, Midwestern, speaks easily, dresses in stylish business attire, is single, lives in Brentwood and would rather fix a client up with Charles Manson than say, “Have I got a girl for you.”

“I just hate that,” she says, wincing.

Informal Beginning

Amram, 40, born in Haifa, Israel, informally started arranging marriages for friends who had been widowed in the Six-Day War of 1967. Urged to become a professional marriage broker, she since has opened several offices in Israel, two in England, one in New York and another in New Jersey, in addition to the new Beverly Hills office. She is slim, raven-haired, dark, Jewish, exotic, relentlessly voluble, a flamboyant dresser, lives in New Jersey with her husband and has written a book titled “Have I Got a Match For You.”

“When my book comes out,” she says, “America is going to stop breathing. “

Three years ago, eligible Beverly Hills folk and other tony marriage prospects from the surrounding area had to slug it out on their own on the local playing field of love and marriage. Matchmaking was something that was done in “Crossing Delancey,” not on Wilshire Boulevard. Now, with the arrival of Amram, the field has suddenly turned competitive, with the two marriage brokers almost able to peer into each other’s office windows.

Is Beverly Hills big enough to contain all that arranged love?

“We are night and day when it comes to personality, appearance, religion, background, upbringing, where we’re from, what we do and how we operate,” said O’Keefe. But, she added, “I’m sure there’s room in this town for both of us.”

Amram said she agrees. Sort of.

“I have no jealousy,” she said. “I have all the people I can handle.” But, she said of O’Keefe: “I know everything about her. She is less than one year in the business. She has matched nobody up. I don’t want to talk about it. The others, they’re not even competition. I am the best.”

O’Keefe said that in the three years she has been in business, she has arranged about 35 marriages; she now has about 155 clients on her rolls.

Amram claims to have arranged, through her various offices worldwide, between 6,000 and 8,000 marriages and says she has about 25,000 clients.

In either case, it can be difficult to measure up to each woman’s idea of marriage material. Their requirements would make many computer dating service clients slink away.

Client Qualifications

To qualify as an Amram client, one must pass a battery of tests administered by a psychologist, supply a handwriting sample to a graphologist, submit to medical testing for communicable diseases and be thoroughly checked by an investigation service for felonies, current marriages or other illegitimacies that would throw a wrench in the marriage game. About 60% of her applicants get the hook, Amram said.

“Most people are not marriage material,” she said. “Many women are married to their careers. They can be so dominating and so strong that they overpower the ordinary man. With men, some are late bloomers or mama’s boys or they’re married to their jobs and very selfish, with no space to share with anybody.”

O’Keefe is slightly less strict. She conducts interviews herself from a standard form in which “a lot of psychological questions come into play.” And a background check, similar to Amram’s, is done. No physical tests are required, however.

“They have to be in good health,” said O’Keefe of her clients. “If someone’s height- and weight-proportionate, if they look good, they don’t smoke, they’re a light drinker, they don’t do drugs, if you know they eat healthy, they go to the gym twice a week and they have a good physician, then I don’t feel that any more physical testing is necessary. I expect people to take responsibility.”

About 40% of O’Keefe’s applicants are rejected.

“I have rejected a lot of people for a poor attitude or a cocky attitude,” she said. “If I’m talking to a man and I wouldn’t want to have lunch with him, much less a date, I’m not going to take him on. They’ll either conform to my guidelines or they’ll be history.”

Both matchmakers occasionally employ image consultants to work with clients they take on but whose appearances they feel needs sprucing up--a few pounds of weight loss here, a new wardrobe style there, more or less makeup or a better haircut.

A Matter of Money

Then, there is the matter of money. Both marriage brokers say that applicants’ salaries are not of paramount concern, but both women’s client rolls are filled with people whose incomes range from the well-off to the breathtaking.

In some cases, this is a necessity.

O’Keefe’s fees begin at $5,000 and go up depending on how much research and leg work she has to do to ferret out the perfect match. Amram charges a base fee of $5,500 if a client is to be handled by one of her nearly 200 staff members (13 in Beverly Hills), and $20,000 for what she called the “VIP, VIP, celebrity, celebrity” plan, in which clients are handled by her personally and unlimited introductions are provided until the client is married. She oversees about 500 such clients, she said.

O’Keefe’s fees seldom reach such heights, although she said she was approached by a woman “who gave me a list of four men and said if I could arrange it, she’d marry any one of them. She was a former actress here in town and she’d worked on this almost five years.”

After traveling to Europe for one contact, and around the country for the three others, O’Keefe said she was able to arrange a match with one of the men, a Texas oil millionaire. Her fee was $25,000.

“If I have to travel, do a cross-country search or if a client is looking for someone with a title or something so specific or difficult that it would take me much more time than usual, I’ll charge more (than the base fee),” said O’Keefe.

Arranging Introductions

Both women arrange introductions not only between clients but with men and women they meet in social situations whom they feel would be good matches for their paying clients. These contacts are screened using the same process as paying clients, but are not charged a fee.

Both women also maintain clients’ strict confidentiality, in part the result of what both say is a good number of famous names on their lists.

The common denominator among the two women’s clients--apart from good money, good looks, good grooming, good manners and good marital status--is a lack of time or inclination to do their own matchmaking.

“I’d been single for about five years after losing my wife, and if someone had suggested I go to a matchmaker, I would have laughed at them,” said Greg, one of Amram’s $20,000 clients who owns a large insurance company and another company that specializes in manufacturing racing car chassis and engines. “Now, I think it’s a good idea. It’s extremely difficult to find a real quality person and my free time is very precious to me. I don’t want to be running around looking for someone. It takes a lot of research and time, and how do I know what the girl’s after? Does she want me or my money? With this, you have better odds of meeting someone wonderful.”

Steven, a Beverly Hills lawyer, said he “put out some heavy bread--more than $5,000” for O’Keefe’s services, but said that “every woman I’ve met through her has been potential mate material. And how much money do you spend wining and dining and romancing women you’re not interested in? I’m not shy, but I like a woman who’s pre-screened, and how can you know the market like Christine does? I’d never thought of doing this, never. But the fact is that you reach a point when you’re tired of . . . going to bars.”

Determining Factors

So what factors enter into the matchmakers’ decision-making processes? How can they figure who is best for whom?

“I can look in a person’s eyes and read them like a book,” Amram said. “I can look and know everything about them and what they need. All these people that come to me think they know what they want. But I give them what they need, and they forget what they want.”

Similarly, said O’Keefe, her clients can forget sex, at least as a prime motivator.

“I don’t put people together for passionate sex and wonderful physical chemistry,” she said. “I put couples together who are going to have life-style needs that are desirable, who are power couples in their own right.”

And, she said, she does it alone.

“I don’t want a staff of counselors taking the personal touch away from it,” she said. “My business is me. It’s successful because of my personality. I’ve tried hiring assistants and it’s been a disaster because they’re not me. I don’t live 2,000 miles away and just bop in for a couple of days. I’d like to help people open offices of their own in other cities, and be a consultant to them. But I want to retain my business here. This is my baby.”

Amram, however, is bent on diversifying. Her book, she said, is scheduled to be published in December by Random House. It will, she said, contain a questionnaire that can be sent to her by the purchaser and she, in turn, will arrange an introduction by mail with another purchaser of the book who has also sent in the form.

“My book is going to be the best seller of the world,” she said.

She said she is negotiating for production of a regular television short, in which she would match eligible celebrities; she is planning to make a movie for TV in which she would play the role of a matchmaker.

Also in the works, she said, are a travel club for singles (“travel with the rich and famous”), an investigations service that can be used by people who are not clients of her matchmaking service, a line of cosmetics called “Helena of Beverly Hills,” a 900 telephone number offering recorded advice gleaned from her book and nightclubs in New York and Los Angeles (open to singles only, after screening).

“It was Helena from Troy, then Helena Rubenstein, and now it’s my turn, Helena Amram,” she said. “My name will be in the history books.”

It will at least be on the lips of the upscale marriage minded in a town in which two women are offering the tantalizing possibility that money, indeed, may be able to buy happiness, or at least well-screened wedded bliss. But how the marriage market at Wilshire and Beverly will shake out brings a shrug from O’Keefe.

“I don’t know how Helena will do” in Beverly Hills, she said. “We’ve never met. We will, though.”

She nodded toward the other side of Wilshire Boulevard. “One day I’ll just make a point of going over there.”