Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
I guess the bar for government spies is as good a place to start as any. According to the blonde in the silver pointy-toed shoes who’s yelling into my ear, there is a man in St. Louis researching the viability of an ultraposh, possibly no-jeans-allowed, NYC-style club downtown. He doesn’t want regulars to have to stand in line with the wannabe players who show up only when they hear that so-and-so from that movie with you-know-who is going to be there, so he’s thinking of providing the VIPs with no-hassle access via thumbprint identification pads. The kind of thumbprint identification pads you’d see at a high-security facility in Mission: Impossible.
Apparently the guy told her all about this at Dante’s a week ago, and he asked her whether she wanted to sit down and kick around some ideas. She’s worked in marketing for a couple of restaurants in town, so it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that she might be able to brainstorm concepts, but bars with biometrics are a little out of her league. “Oh no, no, no,” she told him. “You need serious help. You need to talk to Amit.”
You wouldn’t think it to look at the guy, but Amit Dhawan is quite possibly the hippest and best-connected man in all of St. Louis. Technically, he works in event promotion and strategic marketing, but that doesn’t really tell the story: The contact list in his cell reads like a phone book of Who’s Hot in Sports and Entertainment Right Now. (Remember when someone hacked Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile Sidekick a couple of years ago and all of her famous friends’ numbers showed up on the Internet? It’s a little like that.) He frequently attends the Grammys and MTV’s VMAs, planning afterparties for Justin Timberlake and Kelis. Synergy Productions, the marketing collective that he founded almost five years ago, has planned the opening events for what seems like every upscale restaurant and bar downtown in the last three years, and it routinely works with companies like Anheuser-Busch and LG. (It has also partnered with St. Louis Magazine on a handful of events.) He played a major role in organizing Nelly’s Black and White Ball last summer, and he spent hours on the phone in October planning the rapper’s surprise birthday party with pop star Ashanti.
The blonde in the silver pointy-toed shoes reiterates her endorsement of Dhawan, either because she wants to make sure I understand how good he is or because it’s so damn loud that I might have missed it the first time. We’re standing close together in an elevated section of Nectar during the club’s first-anniversary party in October, and Dhawan is leaning against a wall right next to us. He doesn’t show any sign of hearing our conversation, possibly because the music is drowning us out, probably because everyone who walks by us stops to say hi to him, most likely because an unusually large shot has just been shoved into his hand and he’s been instructed to drink it now. (He finally runs out of excuses and gives in to the demand.) Nearby, a blonde in a crop-top sweater designed, I can only assume, to expose her Janet Jackson–like abs, dances, eyes closed, with no one in particular or—given the number of people in the small corner we’re packed into—everyone at once.
I mention all of this—the Studio 54 as imagined by the NSA, the parties for ultrahot celebrities, the shots from strangers, the abs—because it was only two days earlier that Bill Mattson (who co-founded the Mattson Jack Group, the pharmaceutical-consulting company where Dhawan works during the day) was telling me all about Dhawan’s “extraordinary depth and breadth of knowledge of science” and the fact that he works on “projects of strategic importance for pharmaceutical and biotechnological clients.”
See, that’s the other Dhawan, the guy who discovered as a kid that he loved “analytical things”; the guy who graduated second in his class at Parkway North in 1993; the guy who petitioned the powers that be at the University of Missouri–Kansas City for permission to enroll in the MBA program at the same time he was finishing an accelerated six-year combined BA-MD degree program.
“He was a geek in college,” one of Dhawan’s friends tells me at Nectar. He gives a little “heh” and shakes his head, as if to say that planning birthday parties for hip-hop phenoms and programming pro athletes’ numbers into his cell phone isn’t exactly what he’d envisioned for Dhawan. “Looking at where he was then and looking at where he is now ... ”
And here he is, surrounded by late-night scenesters, his face awash in blue light from his cell phone, his glasses reflecting the screen as he text-messages a recommendation for a club to a St. Louisan in New York. (The Cardinals just beat the Mets in Game 2 of the NLCS, and the acquaintance wants to celebrate. Dhawan suggests Tenjune, which I’ve never heard of but later discover is a new subterranean lounge in the Meatpacking District favored by Diddy and Kanye West. A couple hours later, he gets another message: “tenjune was fuckin hot.”)
A couple weeks before all of this, I asked Dhawan how a guy who went to med school ends up planning parties for celebrities and helping launch new bars. “I think a lot of the things that I found most appealing on the medical end—the puzzle, putting together the pieces to create a whole—I found in marketing as well,” he said. In another conversation, I asked him how one reconciles working full time in two worlds that seem so diametrically opposed. That time, he was a little less forthcoming. “As long as the clients are happy with what you’re providing them, you’re doing a good job,” he said. “It doesn’t need to be explained. A magician doesn’t need to explain his tricks.”
This is how a geek becomes a nightlife god: He reads magazines. He reads Entertainment Weekly. He reads InStyle. He reads Rolling Stone and Billboard. Actually, he doesn’t so much read them as analyze them, picking them apart in search of a cipher to unlock the code for what’s cool now and what will be cool in six months. The truth is out there, on the newsstands—but Dhawan’s one of the few who can divine it.
It’s that analytical approach to the world of superficial hero worship and manufacturing “affordable luxury” that makes it a little easier to believe that a guy as un-Hollywood as Dhawan doesn’t retch every time he steps into a party and has to shake the hands of 100 people who probably wouldn’t give him a second look if he weren’t the reason they got on the guest list in the first place.
He was born in New Delhi and moved to St. Louis for good when he was 9. His parents both have Ph.D.s—Mom, Meena, is a psychologist, and Dad, Balram, is a chemist—so the path to postgraduate pursuits was laid out in front of him early on. In med school, health care management, more so than patient care, caught his attention. The fact that he took a liking to his marketing classes as he was getting the MBA, though, was an unexpected deviation from the plan—and served as the first step toward the founding of Synergy.
But first he added a master’s in health administration from Washington University to his résumé and landed a consulting job at Mattson Jack. The work didn’t fulfill his need to create and market, so he decided to plan a party. One night he poked his head into the manager’s office at Velvet, the now-shuttered dance club on Washington Avenue, and told them that he had a prepackaged carnival of dancers and stilt walkers and acrobats set to music from a DJ he planned to fly in from New York—he just needed a venue. Doug Hall, the club’s manager at the time, decided to give him a shot. “Most promoters, when they come to us, it’s ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea for a great party,’” he says. “Amit came with a presentation and a package and sponsorship. By the time he showed up at the venue, he was wowing us.” Cirque, as they called it, went off without a hitch in March 2001.
Synergy wasn’t an immediate success—Nelly’s people wouldn’t return his phone calls—but Dhawan kept planning events and finding new clients. “He wasn’t somebody who you were, like, ‘Oh no, here comes that greaseball again with the sticky hair and the girlfriend with the fake boobs,’” Hall says. “He was always a real nice guy who could have blended in at any software firm.” And then, inexplicably—Dhawan doesn’t detail exactly how it happened—things started to snowball. Nelly was returning his calls, and a Grammy afterparty hosted by the rapper and Justin Timberlake in 2003 got some serious ink and established Synergy as a major player.
Though they do work across the country and manage events with multiple focuses (a Kelis afterparty in New York at the VMAs last fall doubled as a pre-opening buzz-builder for Maryland Plaza’s Mandarin Lounge), Synergy is a small collective of about five independent contractors. Dhawan gets a little cagey when asked to name them, fearing that someone else might steal them.
“You always have to be one step ahead,” he offers as an explanation. “Take the ice buckets at Nectar—they were the talk of the town. We created the mold; we worked with the local ice company. Now every club that opens wants to do ice-bucket events—so we have to create something different.”
It should come as no surprise that Dhawan is frickin’ smart. I didn’t ask to see his college transcripts or a copy of his SAT results—although given how forthcoming he was, I have no doubt that he would have produced them—but after a couple conversations I didn’t really need any more proof. Mattson stops short of calling Dhawan a genius, but just barely: “He’s one of those super-gifted people who are able to juggle six balls at the same time and not drop any of them.” (Mattson does use the word “genius” later, but as a commodity that Dhawan possesses, not as a state of being—which sort of counts, but not enough to work as Exhibit A.)
Although obviously not a quantifiable measure of his intelligence, Dhawan’s refusal to take notes during meetings—and his explanation for why he refuses to take notes during meetings—may be the most intriguing evidence. (“I went through three degrees and I filled probably less than 10 notebooks,” he jokes, and I want to punch him in the face.) As I talk to club owners he’s worked with, the image of a handful of people sitting around a table discussing the details of an event as Dhawan types text messages on his cell phone is a common one. “I actually feel rude when I’m in a presentation or a business meeting and there are 10 or 12 people in there taking notes and I’m not,” he confides—but with no suggestion of an interest in changing his ways. As with most things, he just sees it differently. Really differently.
“You have to look at key points and then synthesize all of the information,” he insists. “I think that’s the key to any sort of learning: You create linkages and relationships. On an anatomical level, the way learning happens in the brain is the creation of different synaptic connections between neurons. So it’s kind of the same thing: It’s creating links in the brain. You have to be remembering not only what someone says but also what they mean by it.”
When I point out that his method of processing spoken information sounds a tad more difficult than just writing down the conversation, he shrugs. “Yeah, but my way is so much quicker,” he says, “and if you just look at it on the surface and say that he said this and she said this, then you’re missing intent, and that’s just as important.” In other words—if you believe him, and I do—his memory acts like a tape recorder instead of a court reporter’s transcriber.
The idea that a person can not only memorize complete conversations but also catalog the tone in which they were spoken sounds, of course, ludicrous—even more so because he says all of this (as he says most things) almost too quickly to be comprehended on first listen. He spews thoughts and ideas in long, hyperactive succession, with words tripping over each other and becoming paragraphs before you even realize they were sentences. At times I start to assume that he’s rattling off an endless line of bullshit just for the sake of filling time and twisting me in circles—but on second listen it all makes sense.
“He really means well, but for the average person he can be really overwhelming because he’s so full of ideas,” says Andrew Mullins, a friend of Dhawan’s who used to partner with him on events in Synergy’s early days. “A lot of people find it difficult to process things as quickly as he does.”
“Everybody’s got a different way of synthesizing and analyzing information,” Dhawan says. “Some people are more broad-stroke, and others want detail. People often want to know, on the day of the event, how it’s going to work, point by point, and when I have to sit down and write it down ... I don’t like doing that. That pisses me off.”
Dhawan does not have a day planner, and he doesn’t keep a schedule. It’s a risky approach for a guy in his business, and it’s earned him a reputation among club owners for working off the cuff a little too often, to the point that there’s often a sense of “Is this going to be the time when it all bites him in the ass?” surrounding his events. “He’s a whirling dervish of sorts,” Hall says. “He knows everything that’s going on and his events always come off, but behind the scenes there is a certain amount of chaos.”
In 2002, before Synergy was doing VMA afterparties and before Dhawan had Nelly on speed dial, the small collective was promoting DJ shows at clubs on Washington. That February, Ben Watt of Everything but the Girl made a stop at Velvet. Dhawan was producing the show, and no sooner had Watt stepped into the dressing room than he started making demands: He wanted a bag of pot, and he wanted Dhawan to score it for him. Panicked and unsure of how to go about fulfilling the request—being the squeaky clean guy that he is—Dhawan turned to Hall for help. “Dude, this ain’t my show,” Hall told him. “This is on you. You’re the promoter.”
Dhawan was able to keep his hands clean of the transaction, thanks to another DJ who happened to have a connection, but he wasn’t done being an errand boy: Watt still needed rolling papers. Off to the gas station Dhawan ran, with Hall’s instructions in his head: “Ask for EZ Widers—and make sure you get the large ones because these guys are from England and they’re going to want to roll them big.”
Dhawan returned triumphant, so eager to prove himself that he ran through the club to the VIP booth waving his purchase above his head. And then he tripped and fell. Flat on his face. He lay face down on the floor, embarrassed yet somehow still proud, held up the package and exhaled: “I got the rolling papers.”
Dhawan would rather I not say where he lives. The last time his address made it into print, he got a lot of mail from randoms, asking for jobs or begging him to get something autographed by a certain musician or actress. Not exactly the “stalker breaks in and steals your underwear” variety of danger, but it’s an annoyance nonetheless, especially for a guy who is, by all accounts, unfazed by celebrity.
“Most of the people that you have good conversations with tend to be highly successful people on the creative side or the business side as opposed to the actual celebrity,” he says. “That said, there are a few celebrities that when I meet them, I’m like, ‘Wow.’ But that’s a very fleeting moment.”
Who makes him say “wow”? Professional athletes: “What they do, I’m very fascinated by it because (a) I’ve always been interested in sports and (b) it’s something that I know I can never do. I know I can never hit a 100-mph fastball, and these guys do it regularly. It’s the same way with surgeons. I can appreciate what an OB does, what a pediatrician does—but surgery was something that I never thought I could be good at. I think you tend to appreciate something, you find it impressive, if it’s something you don’t think you can do yourself.”
There is a cynical way to interpret this. It would be perfectly understandable for one to say that he’s full of it, that he clearly sought out this life because he’s obsessed with celebrity: The studious smart kid who was slightly awkward in school pushes his way into the world of big-name stars in an effort to attain the ultimate level of coolness, to flip the script and be the one who gets to grant or deny access to the best parties. This would, without a doubt, make for a much more complex character study, a slightly pathetic, yet sadly predictable commentary on the burden of being cool that has been foisted on his generation. Instead, it just turns out that he’s enamored of the guy behind the guy.
“It all goes back to the why,” he says. “Like with movies, I was never interested in a celebrity but in the people who worked on the movie and how it was made: ‘This is the producer’s role, this is the director’s role,’ all the way down to what a grip does.”
When I first tell Dhawan that I’d like to write an article about him, he asks me what the angle will be. It’s a natural curiosity for anyone who’s deciding whether to let a magazine writer into his world, a necessary act of self-preservation. But Dhawan makes his living shaping public perception and building brands, which gives his interest in the direction—and outcome—of the article a completely different level of significance.
Toward the end of our first conversation, back in September, he paused to ask me whether I was taking notes, almost as if he’d suddenly remembered that some people have to write things down from time to time. And then he began to deconstruct the interview, piece by piece: “It’s a good interview style. It’s just, like, keep it on casual conversation and figure things out. If you listen back to this tape, here’s what you’d note: The first part of it, I’m kind of hesitant because I don’t know where it’s going, but as it goes on I’m just, like, ‘Eh, go with the flow.’”
I asked him whether he was comfortable. “Yeah. I don’t know exactly which way ... Interviews can go one of three or four different ways: They can go into who you are as a person, they can go into the Synergy end, they can go into the biology/pharma end, or they can go into what it was like to do a particular event.” After I commented that it sounded as if he had it all figured out, there was an uncomfortable pause. “I think I’ve got one narrowed out,” he said. “I think you’re doing the personal, ‘Who are you?’ type interview.”
He contacted me a week later: “Please let me know via e-mail today what your thoughts are related to the piece.” I replied that at that point, my focus was on who he was and what his goals were for the future of St. Louis. “Great—I like the St. Louis angle since that is what I was leaning towards,” he responded. “Let’s focus on that a little more.”
His effort to steer the story didn’t come as a surprise. He is the same guy who, when asked a question as inane as “What do you drink when you go out?” said, “Do I give the corporate answer, or do I give my answer?” before telling me that he drinks Pearl Persephone and tonic or Bud Select. Pearl Vodka and Anheuser-Busch are companies that sponsor a large number of his events.
Halfway through my conversation with Doug Hall, as we’re discussing the behind-the-scenes chaos that often colors Dhawan’s events, he stops suddenly. “I almost want to ask him if I should tell you this story,” he says, laughing a little. “Can I call you right back? This could be some really good stuff if he ends up giving me the OK on this.” A couple minutes pass, and, true to his word, Hall calls back. “I just got off the phone with him and he gave me carte blanche, so we’re good to go,” he says, before launching into the story about the rolling papers.
At the Nectar party in October, Dhawan asks me whether I’ve been doing some research on him that week. Then he lists five people I’ve called for background information—all of whom have, in turn, called him to ask whether they should talk to me. He seems amused by the process, and, as we stand there, music pounding, crop-top sweater girl grinding on nobody and everybody at once, he smiles and laughs a little, even if he does sound a tad uncomfortable.
“I still don’t know what this article is going to be about,” he says. “But I guess you’ll figure it out.”
