Hella Nation - Evan Wright [102]
AT ITS PEAK, IEG had approximately one hundred employees in its headquarters and at a crosstown facility known as the Arcade, which housed the sets for live performers as well as the customer-service and tech-support departments. Fairly or unfairly, a handful of employees were known as Warshavsky’s “paid friends.” Aaron Seravo was director of advertising. He worked in an isolated office on the eleventh floor, where he had been moved after a coworker complained of harassment. His sole companion there was his assistant, Cole Peterson, a buddy from a rock band who appeared to do little but play computer chess all day; Peterson became known as “the paid friend to the paid friend.”
Soon after I started at IEG, Warshavsky’s drive for power began to apply to his own body. He developed an obsessive weight-training regimen and supplemented his hours in the gym with a rigid diet of high-protein foods; muscle-mass enhancers, such as a legal form of GHB that he got at a natural-foods store; and a precursor to human growth hormone. For a several-week stretch, liter-sized bottles of pale green fluid began to appear on the floor behind Warshavsky’s desk. He said they contained “a really intense but mellow form of GHB.” He drank from the bottles throughout the day. When visitors entered his office he recommended they try some, saying it would make them feel “sleepy and horny.” The bottles abruptly disappeared one morning. I casually asked him what happened to his bottles of special GHB. “I forbid you to ever mention that again,” he said. “Do you understand?” (I was later told that Warshavsky had dosed an employee, who had a bad reaction.)
Warshavsky was assisted in his quest by a three-woman secretarial team. Their job was to procure protein and yogurt dishes specially prepared by chefs from various Seattle restaurants. The team delivered these meals every two hours, whether Warshavsky was in the office or meeting his attorneys across town or at home. They also found nurses to do in-office blood tests to monitor his hormone levels, pick up refills for his tooth-whitening system, arrange for massages, schedule the tanning sessions and book his last-minute trips to Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. When needed, they also flew in a hormone specialist from California, a physician who would arrive at the office dramatically attired in surgical togs, as if he’d just stepped out of the operating room. The physician’s job was to inject Warshavsky with human growth hormone (HGH), which he began taking in order to build more perfect chest muscles.
Perhaps the oddest denizen of the IEG offices was a character named Cort St. George, who was one of Warshavsky’s most valued paid friends, since he seemed to do pretty much whatever Warshavsky wanted him to. A former golf instructor and man-about-town in circles that he described as “Hollywood’s sleazy underground,” St. George had the blond good looks of a soap opera star. He dressed in a California preppy style—loafers, khakis, polo shirts worn with a white sweater tied over his shoulders—and would sometimes interrupt a business conversation to ask things like, “Dude, does my hair look all right?”
St. George, who left IEG in 1999 to start a celebrity-scandal website, now expresses a mixture of awe and regret regarding his former employer. “When I first met Seth, I immediately saw his charisma,” St. George says. “But I equate working with him as mental hell. I felt like I was Seth’s hostage.”
WARSHAVSKY SEEMED to thrive on chaos. He relished confrontations, rising to these occasions and showing off his greatest talent,