Profile
Serious Fun
Dan Weil
03/01/2008

George Cloutier is, as usual, wintering in Palm Beach and planning the parties he will host with his fiancée, Tiffany Spadafora, when they decamp to Nantucket for the summer. As anyone who has read Robert Frank’s book Richistan will know, Cloutier does much of his work—party planning and business consulting—from his Jacuzzi. He sends emails to friends to alert them when he and Spadafora are about to be featured on a TV show, and neither took great offense when a CNBC program last summer profiled Spadafora, who is 38 years old to Cloutier’s 61, as a jewelry addict who spends her days shopping. They kind of like publicity.

"I have wealthy friends who are so obsessed with not spending that they don’t enjoy themselves at each stop," Cloutier says. "We like to enjoy." Now, though, as he prepares to host a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee party in March, he hopes to curry political clout from his visibility, which, let’s face it, comes neither from being the CEO of American Management Services—a consulting firm he founded in 1986 that specializes in helping businesses in need of a turnaround—nor from previous business ventures.

GEORGE CLOUTIER and Tiffany Spadafora use their sense of fun for philanthropic endeavors such as throwing memorable fundraising parties. (Photograph by Claudia Kronenberg.)

Next year at this time, Cloutier might be spotted in Washington as often as in Palm Beach. The man who insistently says, "I’m not just a party guy," is now planning a lobbying attack that he will begin as soon as he knows who is going to be around to lobby. This party guy—that’s the festive kind of party—is, after all, a committed philanthropist, and he has a big idea for a federal program he calls the Small Business Success Corps, modeled after the Peace Corps, in which business students and graduates would assist small businesses in needy areas. He came up with the idea nearly five years ago, inspired by studies showing that 90 percent of small businesses fail because of management problems rather than funding issues. "I felt there was no delivery of management services to small businesses to help them grow," he says.

Then, when Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005 and Cloutier was pondering how he could help New Orleans, he found a way to put his plan into action, at least on a local scale. He donated $20,000 to Tulane University that ended up as the initial funding for IDEAcorps, a program developed by John Elstrott, a professor at Tulane’s Freeman School of Business. Cloutier helped with the program’s fundraising campaign, which ultimately took in more than $2 million. As a result, IDEAcorps has sent out more than 50 students to assist small businesses in New Orleans, helping with everything from cash management to marketing. The students have come to the program from universities throughout the United States, including Harvard, Columbia and Stanford.

"The idea needs a national kick in the fanny, which would be out of Washington," Cloutier maintains. But he does not think a major push is possible under the present administration, which, he says, "isn’t a big supporter of small business on an organized basis"—an opinion based in part on cuts of more than 40 percent in the Small Business Administration’s budget since 2001. Cloutier might find dissenters on that point, but his political donations have gone largely to Democrats; he has given more than $500,000 to Democratic campaigns since 1999. Not that this particular cause has any partisan overtones. Cloutier has begun talking with powerful senators and representatives to enlist their support, and he hopes to involve the U.S. Conference of Mayors, but he sees no reason to waste his efforts on lame ducks.

The Way to a Politician’s Heart
Inevitably, Cloutier will enlist support for this cause and others by hosting parties, but anyone who asks him or Spadafora how they feel about being the sort of people who have achieved a certain amount of fame (at least in Palm Beach) for being somewhat boisterous gets an earful about the serious side of having fun. In Richistan, Frank quotes Cloutier saying that the couple goes out at least five nights a week and that Spadafora virtually shudders over the thought of wearing the same dress to two balls.

"I told Robert there are a lot of people with a great deal more money than us," says Cloutier, who estimates his net worth at between $50 million and $80 million, and his annual outlay for his fiancée’s wardrobe at $250,000 to $300,000. "He said, ‘Yes, but you have more fun. That’s why you’re in the book.’ "

To be sure, they do party for causes. Cloutier thinks that all the money people spend on preparing a charity event and on clothes and jewelry for the shindig would be better spent on the charity itself. "But when they say, ‘Just send a check,’ no one does." He also thinks the charity balls in Palm Beach tend to be dull affairs; the real party comes when the couple goes out at 10:30 p.m. after the balls end, and he indulges in Dewar’s and she in champagne until the wee hours.

Inevitably, Cloutier will enlist support for this cause and others by hosting parties.

"But I didn’t get here by being a fun and frivolous guy," Cloutier says. He grew up middle class in Portland, Maine; his father was a program developer for the Department of Labor and his mother was a teacher. His intelligence and ambition got him admitted to Harvard, where he launched his first business—a very early computer dating service—with another student. In recent years, Cloutier has set up the Lucile Cloutier Scholarship, named after his mother, to help girls who graduate from public schools in Maine to go to Harvard.

Twice divorced and childless, Cloutier had an active social life before he met Spadafora, a former nurse. "But she’s augmented it, because she’s much better-looking than I am," he says.

The two are notable in Palm Beach as a breed of Richistani who do not merely wear their rather humble origins proudly, but believe that is the whole point: They are living proof that anyone can make it big, and more or less anyone who likes to have a good time is welcome to attend their parties and witness five-star fun in action. For the past two Decembers the couple has brought in wounded veterans of the war in Iraq, along with the usual party crowd, for a fundraiser to help young men and women who lost limbs in the war compete in the annual Marathon of the Palm Beaches. The host and hostess always work the crowd, trying to meet everyone, if only for a minute or two.

"There are a lot of guys like him who come in with a splash and throw parties," says Richard Rampell, a Palm Beach accountant. "I’ve been to a few, and it’s a pretty vacuous life. But he seems to have more direction." Rampell was impressed that when he went to a Democratic fundraiser at Cloutier’s house, several top senators showed up, including Ted Kennedy.

Then there was the Cloutier-Spadafora party last summer in Nantucket where, according to a report in Roll Call, present and former senators Maria Cantwell, Sherrod Brown, Debbie Stabenow and John Breaux unwound from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s annual meeting by grinding on the dance floor to the Village People’s "YMCA."

A guy who throws parties like that can make friends in high places, but he also lives with a nagging worry about being taken seriously. "But we will be who we are," Cloutier says. "We know how much we contribute to charity. We’re not promoting class warfare. We just want to have fun and do things our way. We will continue doing things our way. If someone doesn’t like that parade, that’s OK."

Dan Weil is a freelance writer based in West Palm Beach, Fla.