Absolutely Fab

Colin Cowie is ready for his close-up.

He’s home alone in his Hancock Park lair, ripe with white damask and orchids, attended by a baby grand. As if that weren’t lush enough, Cowie has just flown about, seeing to finishing touches. The scented candles. The soft strains of synthesized baroque music.

But Cowie isn’t waiting for the arrival of a significant someone or even party guests. He’s about to do the interview for this story. And he’s tending to the details that will make it, in Cowie-speak, fabulous.

Because in a town whose most high-profile business is deceptively social, and where the ability to throw a fabulous party can signal something more fun than fun--that is, power--Cowie is known for his sumptuous bashes, not the least of which was PolyGram’s recent post-Grammys do at Chasen’s.

“He’s extremely creative, but instead of putting it into painting or photography or writing, he puts it into an extremely ephemeral art form, which is entertaining,” says Martha Nelson, managing editor of that handbook of celebrity style, InStyle magazine, where Cowie is a contributing editor. “And you know how difficult that art can be, but he’s quite a master of it.”

Of course, recruiting Cowie to throw your posh party doesn’t come cheap. Last spring, Buzz magazine included his services in its list of “The Most Outrageously Expensive Stuff in L.A.” Cowie says his fee starts at $15,000, and a Cowie-fied wedding tends more toward $25,000.

Working with a staff of 10 (including a personal cook), he’ll hold the bride’s hand from her engagement on, designing the invitations, the dress, the wedding, the thank-you notes. Oh yes, and there’s still that other matter of paying for the venue, the dinner and other assorted details.

Could this Colin Cowie be the same carefully dressed man who’s perched on a damask couch insisting that people have the wrong idea about entertaining these days, that they avoid it because they think it’s too costly and time-consuming? That entertaining at home can be cheap? That they don’t need to be perfect like You Know Who, who happens to have her own magazine, books, TV show and gracious living galaxy?

“I don’t think there’s any better way to invest quality time with anyone than to break bread with them and bring them into your home,” says Cowie, who gives his age as 34. “So my whole idea is to get people to bring their homes to life again. And it doesn’t mean picking cherries in the garden and tying yourself to the kitchen stove for 15 hours to make the perfect cherry tart because you get no medals at the end of the day.

“How many times have you been to a dinner party where the host spent the whole day cooking and the whole night running backward and forward to the kitchen? So she doesn’t [entertain] until Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s because the approach is completely wrong.”

Cowie says he doesn’t mind being tagged the male Martha Stewart, which is fortunate, because he’s embarking on what he calls his “five-year plan,” which could turn him into the Martha Stewart for the millennium. He opened a New York office a month ago. And in his fondest dreams, he is the sultan of an empire embracing books, china, linens, software, frozen foods, magazines and TV.

“I always thought he was big hype, yet when I actually sat down with him, all the things he was always carrying on about came to be,” says Joan Quinn, society columnist for the West Hollywood Weekly. “He said he was doing something for somebody, and he was, whatever celebrity it was.”

Indeed, Cowie, who comes from old African mining money, has a big job ahead of him. Having done his bit to clean up Hollywood and its new-money assaults on sophisticated living, he is moving up to the big screen--America.

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This month, “Effortless Elegance,” Cowie’s first coffee-table cookbook, is due from HarperStyle, a new imprint of HarperCollins. HarperStyle will publish another book next year on weddings, his trademark fete.

“I have an agenda,” Cowie says simply, when asked whether he has designs on global style domination a la Martha. He’s also planning a cornucopia of products to fill one’s nuptial needs. There will be a Colin Cowie groom’s guide, a Colin Cowie wedding planner, a software package, china, crystal and linens.

“I’ve done some of the most extraordinary weddings of the decade,” Cowie says. “From the $20,000 wedding, the ethnic wedding on the beach to the $3.5-million affair.”

And what exactly is a $3.5 million wedding?

“It’s a fabulous wedding.”

Cowie hoots.

“It wasn’t at all garish or over the top,” he continues in the “Masterpiece Theater”-ish accent that has invited comparisons to Martin Short’s wedding planner in “Father of the Bride.” “It was very, very stylishly done. It’s a wedding whereby we chose not to skip a beat whatsoever, whether it was how many years the scotch had aged or the vintage of the champagne and the vineyard that the champagne came from, the size of the caviar egg and where the foie gras came from, the wines that complemented it, the cigars that were served afterward.”

Cowie says the wedding was for a celebrity, although he won’t say who. His discretion is the better part of a business that has attracted privacy-minded clients like Bruce and Demi, Tom and Nicole.

“I’m very confidential,” Cowie says, “and I always make them look good.”

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By the way, that bouquet of wedding products takes us only through Year Two of Cowie’s five-year plan. After that comes a collection of ethnic cookbooks, dishware and foods. Then he plans to ring in the millennium with a contemporary line of tabletop accessories.

But perhaps his most intriguing project is an upcoming book on etiquette for the ‘90s.

Watch out, Hollywood.

“This is a business that is notorious for screamers,” Cowie says, demonstrating. “They exude all this negative nervous energy. I never shout. I never scream.”

Always useful in a host. And now that you’re not screaming at him, try a little RSVP.

“The reason I want to do this is, I just found such a deplorable fall in social graces here. And I really think that the most important aspect of style is really not about what plate you eat on or what watch you’re wearing. What’s really important is how we behave toward one another.

“And I just found that there’s such a lack of style in terms of the way people treat one another. Whether it’s returning phone calls, whether it’s RSVPing on time, whether it’s saying you’re going to attend something and don’t attend something. The whole priority system has just gone completely out of whack. And a lot of it is because of Hollywood.”

Cowie chalks up Hollywood’s bad manners to its big money.

“Because you find people who were ordinary people who became rich overnight, and all of a sudden the rules didn’t apply. They reinvent their own rules, and they think that they’re really more important than they actually are. And it doesn’t impress me one little bit.”

Cowie has been fighting the new-money, bad-taste war for some time. His quarry is those who hit the Hollywood lottery--the lucky few whose income shoots up, say, $20 million overnight.

“That person is an automatic A-lister,” Cowie says. “You take someone who had no money and is suddenly living in a 12,000-square-foot home with a walk-in refrigerator. But if they’re smart they’ll get someone like me to come in and help them rather than do it all with the Rolls-Royce and the big Rolex. When you earn $20 million overnight, automatically you have an ego as well, so I teach them through their staff.”

Cowie will hire staff and train them, tending to such details as what the maid wears, how she serves the tea and folds the toilet paper.

“I have written bibles this thick,” Cowie says, closing his fingers around an invisible Manhattan phone book, “on how to run your home for a lot of my clients. So when they have a change in staff they have a full training manual.”

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Cowie learned the finer points of mansion life as a child in Zambia, where his family had interests in a copper mine, and later South Africa. Zambia in the ‘60s was prime domestic goddess territory since it was not exactly a hot spot for restaurants or movies.

“There was never a Friday night when there wasn’t a soiree at somebody’s home,” Cowie says.

He began traveling the world at 16, cultivating his culinary je ne sais quoi. “Sometimes I ate from street restaurants, sometimes I ate in the fanciest of restaurants. Having a very strong passion for food, I’ve been able to create the sense of style where I could write a menu like poetry.”

At 20, Cowie says, he managed an exclusive spa in South Africa, luring big corporate clients with poems of lobster, filet mignon, cigars and cognac. Three years later, Cowie decided the good life meant finding his place in the sun. Ergo, L.A.

Right after he arrived, Cowie went to a lunch in Malibu, where he met Judy Henning, a publicist and wife of Playboy executive Dick Rosenzweig. Henning hired Cowie to throw a lunch for L.A. County Museum of Art ladies two weeks later. Then voila.

“I think people are intrigued with him,” Henning says. “Usually caterers have a hard time getting started, but he didn’t seem to have that problem.”

Within two months, Cowie was doing parties for Bruce Willis, for whom he later designed a restaurant and club in Hailey, Idaho. Celeb weddings weren’t far behind, and Cowie has dealt coolly with last-minute emergencies like whipping up bridal bouquets from centerpieces when the real ones were no-shows.

“He was my savior,” says Kimberly Hefner, whose 1989 wedding to Hef was bedecked with 10,000 white roses. “He pulled an incredible wedding together in eight weeks.”

And when the clock strikes 12 and the stylish peer into the jaws of the millennium, Cowie freely admits that the world of sunny domesticity could be divided between the Stewart-ites and the Cowie-ans.

Says Cowie: “I think she has her following and I have my following. I think that I’m a little bit more hip, a little more cutting-edge and more user-friendly.”