Feature

Buying Mr. Right

THE PARTY BOY: Greg McKenzie at a birthday party in SoHo for a client.

(Photo: Scott Jones )

On a recent Friday night, Greg McKenzie, a svelte, ebony-skinned sports coach who has clocked personal-training time at nine gyms around the city, is rummaging around the Central Park West kitchen of a slim and sexy Calvin Klein underwear designer who regularly attends his abs class at her neighborhood New York Sports Club. McKenzie—wearing black pants and shirt, a pair of pricey A. Testoni shoes, and a silver heart ring wrapped around his pinky—emerges from the kitchen with corn bread, then clams in white-wine sauce, followed by poached salmon from Citarella. McKenzie, a 36-year-old single dad who lives with his mother in a less-than-glamorous neighborhood near Riverdale, carefully places the dishes on the dining-room table for a crew of six polished-looking guests who are chatting about mountain climbing and stationary bicycles.

When McKenzie finally sits, he’s at the head of the table, half-guest, half-staff. While he seems eager to please, bouncing up each time a guest expresses a need for some more wine or a glass of water, it is hard to say whether this is the behavior of a guy trying to woo potential clients or just a particularly considerate fellow.

Someone suggests that McKenzie maybe ought to offer his training time in exchange for, say, goods or services.

“I think we should have an exchange in kind,” says the designer in a clipped British accent, tossing back her coal-black hair.

“Training for underwear,” someone else adds.

Everyone—the professional mountain biker in the tight-fitting sweater, the South Carolina blonde in the black spaghetti-strap dress, McKenzie—chuckles. And it does seem funny. Except that it might not be so amusing if this were how you made your living.

“Ohhh,” the hostess drawls at one point during the evening. “I think it’s totally normal that I had my personal trainer make me dinner.”

Talk to enough service professionals, and it’s not always clear who’s getting what out of these relationships. One thing is clear, though: The closeness can get complicated. In the case of McKenzie and his dinner companions, what seemed like a potentially equal friendship became glaringly uneven a few weeks later when the underwear designer announced she was hosting another party--but asked McKenzie to show up after the meal. There wasn’t enough room at the table for him. Harry Hanson, who owns a chain of upscale personal-training gyms downtown, says another surefire way a trainer relationship sours is when a client opens up too much. He once stood awkwardly by as a female client halted her rigorous rowing machine workout and began to bawl. She told him she had been a victim of incest. “I didn’t really know what to do,” recalls Hanson. “So I think I said, ‘Keep rowing.’ ” He later offered her emotional support.

Some clients don’t want to exercise at all, but instead just want to do lunch with their new friend. Or in the case of one twentysomething Upper West Side trainer, an alluring client, unhappily married to a stockbroker, wanted to pay for her training sessions with sex.

“I really wanted to do it,” recalls the trainer. “But I said no. And I went home and I was glad I said no.”

Williamson recalls the first client he got to know well: a “big shot in fashion,” he says, who immediately awed him with her access to the “cream of the crop in the city. I was so impressed by it. And we just clicked.” Williamson cat-sat for her, ran errands for her, and spent countless hours with her over dinner and drinks, sometimes joined by her fabulous friends.

Then Fashion Big Shot “got difficult,” he says. She started treating him like the help: “She’d call me at ten and ask me if I could come over at eleven. I stopped returning her phone calls.”

Williamson winces.

For several years, Morand trained a well-connected personal assistant whose superrich boss was footing the bill. She loved him, and the boss and his wife called frequently to tell him that. When the boss died unexpectedly in an accident, the bills stopped getting paid, and his client stopped coming to her appointments. Morand kept her slot open for a while, knowing that she was devastated by the death. But eventually he had to let her go.

“She protested vigorously,” Morand remembers, sounding a bit like an ex-boyfriend still displeased with how things ended. She thought he would let her take the classes she missed for free. After all, weren’t they friends? Didn’t he care?

Well, he did care. But a working guy’s got to make a living.