GQ Interview about Casamigos with Rande Gerber

Rande Gerber's billion dollar hangover
One man’s fantasy – a supermodel wife, the A-list best friend, over-achieving children, bottomless bank account and a preternatural instinct for the good life – is another’s reality. So how did the cofounder of Casamigos bottle success? GQ meets him in Malibu to talk straight up about Studio 54, Cindy Crawford and how distilling tequila with George Clooney made him one of the richest men on the planet


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JOHN RUSSO


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BY JONATHAN HEAF

Wednesday 18 April 2018

Hollywood is burning. It’s early October and journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s investigation for the New York Times, -followed by Ronan Farrow’s further revelations for the New Yorker, into Harvey Weinstein’s -decades-long sexual deviancy has torched dark corners of the industry and left, quite rightly, many of Hollywood’s rich and powerful reeling. There are whispers of spies, ex-Mossad agents and a murky organisation called Black Cube. The Hills shudder at the horror of it all.

About an hour north of the cryotherapy sessions and juice bars of central Hollywood, a different blaze is raging – a real one this time – with LAFD’s Ladders battling the largest wildfire ever seen in the city’s history. Thick, acrid smoke drifts out towards the city’s limits; its inhabitants go about their lives under a lid of perpetual twilight. To this visitor with a little long-haul wooziness, it feels like the end of something and not yet the start of something else. If this were a film the hero’s fate would, as of right now, be uncertain.

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JOHN RUSSO



As I drive west from Hollywood to the coast, turning right onto the Pacific Coast Highway at Santa Monica Pier and then propelling my rental due north, it’s unquestionably something of a relief to be heading into bright, light Malibu, a wealthy spit of Cali coastline that cosies up against the tumbling Pacific Ocean like an expensive Hermès cashmere quilt. Here in this exclusive neighbourhood the sun is still high, the houses are all draped in billowing Egyptian ivory linen, and the chill is as deep and as rolling as the perfect foaming surf. If anywhere in Los Angeles still believes in California’s “sure thing” – its postcard naivety and its disconnect from the real world – it is Malibu. It’s the sort of place where its wealthy residents are still allowed to believe in fairy tales – the last post of unabashed privilege.

Casamigos’ headquarters – the tequila brand started by businessman Rande Gerber, actor George Clooney and property mogul Mike Meldman in 2013, which sold in June 2017 to British drinks company Diageo for a bar--slamming $700 million (£534m), with an -additional $300 million (£228m) slice of lime on the table for expansion over the next ten years – is located on the upper deck of a small retail park set back from Malibu Lagoon State Beach.



It’s a Monday, just gone midday, and the shops and restaurants are jangling with the odd uncommitted customer. Gerber’s office sits directly above a large James Perse boutique – a man who has done more to promote the idea of “Californian cool” than perhaps any other designer – and next door to a restaurant that serves zero per cent “beef” burgers. The Casamigos office is two rooms: the main office space and a “den”, complete with photographs of employees at office parties holding “Fuck Patrón!” banners and a bespoke ping-pong table. (A testament to Gerber’s -aesthetics, this is perhaps the first time any journalist has been able to describe a ping-pong table as either beautiful, or bespoke, let alone both.)

The placement of objects throughout is meticulous. Someone, for example, has spent a great deal of time printing out snaps of Gerber, Clooney and their famous friends – everyone from Bonoto Barack Obama enjoying a glass or two of Casamigos – and pinning them up along one wall like big game trophies. There are nine women here in total today, all between their early twenties and thirties, all noticeably good-looking, and all busying themselves on laptops, sat on dark couches or at polished wooden tables in front of desktop computers. It’s quiet. Almost too quiet. There’s a sense the boss is due on the shop floor at any moment, which of course he is. 

Rande Gerber, 55, strolls through the glass doors looking every inch the ex-model, billionaire liquor brand owner. He’s tall, lean and perfectly tanned. If I’m honest, he looks precisely like the man who should be married to Cindy Crawford. (He is.) His shirt is a rich military green, tucked in and unbuttoned just so, not too sleazy, neither too prudish. His jeans are a dark indigo wash, narrow but not wincingly skinny.

Refreshingly, nothing about his style is ostentatious, nor worn with a sense of needy nonconformity, something many LA men over 30 fail to remember when getting dressed. Gerber’s smile is inclusive and boyish rather than anything more Machiavellian. Despite the hush tones of his Casamigo- -coworkers, there’s no sense of an ego pushing into the boardroom, no sense of a chest--thumping, CEO-as-silverback strategy. Noticeably, there is only one other male worker here, the brand’s creative director. Gerber and I take our seats in the smaller room away from the quiet, beautiful melee.

Directly below Casamigos is Gerber’s bar, Café Habana, a bar and restaurant enjoyed by the likes of family friend and LA resident Harry Styles and Gerber’s 16--year-old -daughter, Kaia, not least for its huevos -rancheros, but also for its sense of pap-proof privacy – the bar’s sun deck is fenced off from the outside world by a lush wall of bamboo and banana plants.

Gerber has a story he likes to tell about the café. It’s a good story and one worth retelling, although it’s not just a story about its main protagonists – Gerber, Clooney and a large bottle of tequila, steadily getting sunk – but one that can explain precisely why the Casamigos brand has been so successful: an augmented reality blended into a lasting, -aspirational mythology. Or in other words, brilliant storytelling. “The café downstairs was the place George and I came the day, five years ago, we realised we had to take this whole tequila thing a little more seriously,” Gerber says.



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To rewind, Gerber and Clooney were already pretty serious about tequila. Over a decade ago the pair built two houses next to one another in Mexico. They named them “Casamigos” or “house of friends”. Although they enjoyed drinking the local liquor, they could never find a tequila blend smooth enough to drink straight up, or without a lime chaser to cloak what Gerber almost fondly calls “the burn”. So, seven years ago, in 2010, they did what any perfectionist, multimillionaire hedonists would do: they decided to make their own.


“We called a friend, Mike Meldman, who is in the real estate business,” Gerber explains. “He has some connections in Mexico and he put us in contact with a big distillery. We started the process. It took a long time to get right. But 700 samples down and a year later we found our drink. It was perfect. And most importantly, no burn.” So far, so indulgent. But not, as yet, a $1 billion business.

Five years ago, everything changed. It had to. “We got a call from our distillery. Turned out the amount of tequila we were consuming was a little excessive.” How much were they drinking? “Around 1,000 bottles a year,” Gerber chuckles. “Listen, we were giving a lot away to friends and family, but still the law didn’t allow for us to be producing so much booze without being licensed. It was either go legit or stop production. So, we decided to go into business together.”

Cut back to that scene in the café five years ago: “So George and I are in Café Habana talking about launching this business – the design of the bottle, who we’d get to -distribute it. We were excited about doing more with our tequila than just drinking it. Anyway, we got dead drunk. Now, George can usually hold himself, but that night there’s no way he was going to drive home. So, he came out to my house here in Malibu. I have a little guest house on the beach and George usually stays there. If I’ve had a couple of drinks I will stay in the guest room in the main house, rather than bother Cindy. But things didn’t go to plan that night. George is like, ‘You know what, I think I’ll just stay in the guest room...’”

So Gerber goes to see if his children are all tucked in and Clooney wanders off. “George crashed out and I fell asleep with the kids. Now, Cindy wakes up at some point and wonders, ‘Where the fuck is Rande?’ So, she gets up and goes into the guest room looking for me. She sees a body, face-down, fully clothed, -motorcycle boots on, phone in hand. So, she gets in and she whispers, ‘Babe, why don’t you take your clothes off and get under the covers?’ And with that, George wakes up and is like, ‘Huh?’” Gerber relishes the payoff that came to them shortly after: “Drink Casamigos and wake up with Cindy Crawford!” Or as Cindy saw it that night: “Drink Casamigos and wake up with George Clooney!”

It’s a story that, with a few embellishments, eventually became a video the trio – alongside Clooney’s then-girlfriend Elisabetta Canalis – shot for the launch of their newly formed premium tequila brand, Casamigos, a brand distributed by Southern Wine & Spirits to 50 states from day one, a national deal the size of which is unprecedented. It’s pure -storytelling, pure Casamigos and pure Rande Gerber: one man’s reality, another man’s fantasy. And if you can bottle that? Well, you get a lot closer to answering the billion-dollar question. 

Rande Gerber was born in Queens, New York, in 1962, growing up on the south shore of Long Island. The household was “your typical, middle-class family setup”. Gerber’s father, Jordan, worked as a salesman for a jeans company. “He’d make the commute, work nine to five, clock in and out, every day. The weekends were barbecues and basketball, just hanging out in the neighbourhood with my two brothers. Pretty unremarkable.” Gerber’s parents split when he was 13, so on the weekends he would travel into the city to see his father. Exposure at a young age to such a swarming and, back then, -dangerous urban sprawl, seemed to have a profound impact on the budding entrepreneur. As he got a little older, those bright NYC city nights started to draw in the tall, athletic kid from the suburbs. “Around 16 I began going out with friends to the city. That’s where the action was. We would go to this place on Times Square – real shifty – and get fake IDs made up. I got mugged there one night, actually.”

In 1977, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened Studio 54; the most glamorous nightclub the city had ever seen. Though neither would know it then, Schrager would go on to become one of the most significant players in Gerber’s working life. “Studio 54 was the place you could never get into,” remembers Gerber of the club, a scene renowned for its glamour, decadence and iron-fisted door policy. “Of course, the place you can’t get into is the place everyone is trying to get into. We parked up one night and there must have been 200 people outside. We were like, ‘We’re never going to get in!’ Still, we puffed out our chests and got in line. Somehow, this guy at the door under the ropes looks at me and asks, ‘How many?’ And just like that we’re through.” Fortune favours the brave. Well that, and as regards to cool nightclub queues, the tall, the blond and the very handsome.

That same year, aged 16, Gerber was picked out from another crowd, this time on a -bustling New York street. “I was in the city one day and a photographer asks, ‘Are you a model?’ He asked if he could take some -pictures. I gave him my info and I didn’t think anything of it. A week later I got a call from Ford, a modelling agency. ‘Do you want to be a model?’ I just replied, ‘What does that mean?’ They told me I could travel and earn some decent money. I mean, why not?” 

Gerber went to college in Arizona and then, to some extent, drifted. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to work in music production for a while. I worked for a film producer. Then I was given the -opportunity to open a bar in New York. So, I was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to give it a shot.’”

It was 1991 and Gerber was working in real estate, representing Ian Schrager, the man who co-owned the only nightclub he ever wanted to get into, aged 16. Studio 54 had been -infamously busted for tax fraud in 1978 and, since getting out of jail a couple of years later (he would receive a presidential pardon of all charges from Obama in 2017), Schrager had -reinvented himself as a doyen of hot NYC hoteliers. Gerber was charged by Schrager to find -suitable bars and restaurants to put in these new “boutique” hotels, first and foremost The Paramount Hotel on 235 West 46th Street.



“I was looking for someone to do a cool bar with,” remembers Schrager. “Rande had a nice way about him. You know, it’s hard to find people in nightlife that don’t look like -vampires during the day. I asked Rande for some ideas about who could open the bar in The Paramount and I didn’t react to any of them. So, I asked Rande to do it. I told him, ‘Rande, this isn’t rocket science!’” They named it The Whiskey and it opened in August 1991. Looking back at a nightlife column that ran in the New York Times that year in September, it seems Schrager was right to put his faith in Gerber, then 29. “For the moment, at least,” the -editorial reads, “the Whiskey is the hottest spot in the theater district, if not the city. It is unquestionably the place to be seen.” The hype continues: “‘It’s a happening spot in a cool hotel,’ said Larry Lieberman, 30, who works for MTV and was sitting with... Ross Zapin, who is 28 and works for a record company. ‘Between 1 and 3am this place is awesome,’ [said Zapin]. ‘You’re not getting the single-breasted crowd here, you’re getting the double-breasted guys.’”

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JOHN RUSSO

Enabled by Schrager, Gerber had created something we now take for granted as part of our 24-hour cityscapes – the destination hotel bar. “I wanted it to feel like a mellow rock’n’roll lounge rather than a club,” Gerber explains of that first place. “We had some café tables in there, a couple of couches, armchairs and about a dozen tall bar stools. There was a long mahogany bar and I lined the walls with Polaroids. It was a sophisticated crowd.” When did he realise the bar was a hit? “When we had 1,000 people outside trying to get into a space that holds 75.”

Gerber would go on to open a number of bars with Schrager, not least the Skybar at Mondrian Los Angeles, which for many years was by far the hottest bar on the planet. He also was one of the very first businessmen to spot the potential of South Beach, opening a branch of his Whiskey bar in Miami.

In 2000, however, their mentor/prodigy relationship soured -spectacularly as Gerber’s ambition and energy saw him sign a deal with another hotelier, Starwood, to open new hotel bars around the world, not least the Wet Bar in NYC. Gerber insists that he had Schrager’s blessing, although at the time Schrager didn’t quite see it that way: “I gave Rande his start,” he fumed to the New York Post. “I expected nothing in return other than the decency and integrity to honour his word.” The Post -gleefully described the pair’s feud as, “Bar Wars!”

“I would take what the Post writes with a large pinch of salt,” says Schrager today. “Did we have a falling out? Sure. Have we patched it up? Yes. We didn’t speak for years. To Rande’s credit he was staying at one of my new hotels a few years ago and he dropped me a note. It said, simply, ‘You still got it!’ That gives you an idea of the sort of person Rande is – he’s a class act, a gentleman.”


I ask Schrager what he thinks the secret of Casamigos’ success might be. George’s star quality? The perfect “no burn” blend? Something else more ethereal? “It all helps. But listen, let’s be realistic: tequila is tequila to most people at 2am, although to the more discerning drinker Rande’s is better. Essentially, he has the same liquor as everyone else. But what Rande has – much like that first bar, with the design, the lighting, the music – is the experience that goes with the tequila. The story. Casamigos is about selling a vibe. And Rande is a genius at conjuring that vibe.” Does Schrager drink tequila? “Sure! Casamigos! No hangover! I mean, why the hell didn’t I think of that?” 

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At 55, Rande Gerber’s fame and that of his -family is only just beginning and one can’t help but notice the Gerbers’ steep trajectory doesn’t feel too unlike that of another famous LA-clan, the Kardashians.

The week before I sit down with the Casamigos CEO in Malibu, in fact, his entire family is the talk of the fashion world. His wife starred as part of a spectacular finale for the Versace show alongside a triumph of other supermodels, while his son, Presley, 18, walked for Ralph Lauren, sharing a catwalk with the designer’s collection of vintage Ferraris. In October, the entire family were signed up to Omega watches – Crawford has been an ambassador since she was very young – in a deal thought to be worth millions.

Yet for all the noise, it is Gerber’s 16-year-old daughter, Kaia, who has every set of industry eyes on her at the moment and who is commended for both her incredible looks and also her professionalism. If Kendall Jenner got into modelling through sheer will and social media, Kaia might simply be described as “the Natural”.


Kaia is floating about the office today, in fact, and halfway through my interview with Gerber she pops in – all Balenciaga bucket hat, white singlet and camo pants. She mentions a dental appointment and asks if she can get her father something from the café downstairs. Twenty minutes later, her long limbs swaying gently like the palms that line Sunset Boulevard, she delivers her father’s -requested iced beverage. “The benefits of home schooling,” Rande laughs. After Kaia sashays off you can sense a father’s pride: “She just got her driving licence and she’s all, ‘Dad, I’m just popping out, can I get you anything from the market?’ So sweet.”

With all the talk of predatory behaviour, not least in the fashion world concerning young models, I ask if Gerber had reservations about his daughter entering this very adult world at such a tender age? “I definitely did at this young age, sure. I have always told my kids I will support their decisions, however, and she enjoys modelling, loves it. As much as I thought she’s too young and it was hard for me to see her during Paris Fashion Week having to wake at 4am and go to a fitting, these opportunities all came to her and, well, I couldn’t say no.”

Well, you could have said no, I say, respectful, one father to another. “Listen, Cindy has been there, she knows a lot of the people looking out for her. If we heard of anything inappropriate we wouldn’t hesitate to reel her back in and draw the line. Kaia is, I think, very responsible. She’s on time. She turns it on. And she’s lucky – she doesn’t have to do it. She’s not doing it for the money. Of course, I wish she could just stay as my little girl, at home, getting me smoothies and not have any pressure, but that’s not realistic. She’s just growing up so fast. I’m her dad, what else am I going to say?”

[size=16]Before we finish up Gerber walks me back through the office, ending up perched on his desk, a beautiful hand-carved slab of timber, waxed, polished and planed. Unsurprisingly, Gerber’s power desk, found directly in front of the glass entrance, has been postioned to project maximum vibeyness – a lifestyle with no burn.

Casamigos-branded candles, shot glasses, even surfboards are displayed alongside rare first-edition books, one of Gerber’s own beautiful guitars and black and white images of Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger by rock photographer Jim Marshall. It all gives a sense of curated rebellion, not unlike, it must be said, a really cool hotel bar.

“Yeah, funny that,” Gerber smiles, shaking my hand and walking me to the door. I have to ask him, I say, having closed the liquor deal of the century, why does he still bother coming into the office? “I was here at my desk the very next day. What else am I going to do? Play golf? George would kill me.”

Ah, a modern bromance (and cool $1bn) made at the bottom of bottle. Clooney and Gerber’s very own tequila sunrise: it’ll make a great story one day.

Admin wrote:Wonder who he was texting, eh?

Murray.http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/clooney_tequila_team_uSFfFp4a3Gn6tea9K2uc5O

A source said: “George and Rande came up with the idea of creating their own house tequila years ago when they both built houses in Mexico. They have been working with a master distiller ever since to create the ultimate blend. The tequila was supposed to just be for them and their friends, but after the success of Rande’s Caliche Rum, they decided to go for it.”

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The commercial, shot at the Gerber’s Malibu beach home, is titled: “It could happen. Drink responsibly.”

“It’s loosely based on a true story,” Gerber said by phone.

Clooney and Gerber were riding motorcycles in Malibu in June and stopped to take a drinking break.

“We drank a bottle of Casamigos and caught a ride home,” Gerber said.

When they arrived at the Gerber’s home, Clooney “stumbled into the guestroom” and crawled in bed, instead of going to the guest house, Gerber said.

Crawford, thinking her tipsy husband was in the guest room, joined him. Or so she thought. To her horror, or eternal delight, she quickly discovered it was Clooney.

The next morning, Clooney found it so hilarious he decided to turn it into a commercial for Casamigos, Gerber said. The brand name comes from their twin beach homes in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where they spent several years researching tequilas.