VIP In Civvies

In the armed services, VIP means “very important person.” It means the same thing to Manhattan’s VIP Service, Inc., run by a fast-talking ex-Navy officer, William Jeremiah Murphy, and his wife Charlotte Morgan, both 32. Principal stock-in-trade of VIP: red carpeting for the VIPs of U.S. business. By last week, exactly one year after VIP Service was started, Bill Murphy was on his way to becoming a VIP himself. His service was rolling out red carpet at the rate of $100,000 a year.

Murphy clients are a dozen-odd industrial VIPs (Westinghouse Electric, Pacific Mills, Columbia Broadcasting) and some 250 individual VIPs who pay a flat fee for the general service. When the clients’ star customers, big dealers and other sacred cows turn up in New York, Murphy gives them “the treatment.” Usual ingredients: choice hotel rooms, choice train and plane reservations, choice sport and theater tickets, choice Scotch. Says Murphy: “Most people who come to New York on a business trip don’t know what the score is. They want a lot of things, but, especially in times like these, they don’t know how to get them. We know, and we get them.” How? “Connections,” says Murphy.

Murphy’s connections are plentiful, but not as mysterious as he makes them sound. For the most part, they are based on reciprocity. Example: when he wants Scotch, it’s not too hard to get it from the caterers he employs for clients’ parties.

Bill Murphy got his connections (plus ulcers) in the radio business, then in the Navy. Mrs. Murphy got hers as a travel expert, then as a professional gift-shopper, hostess, and party-arranger.

VIP Service will tackle almost anything. Once, it arranged a wedding on two days’ notice. When nobody showed up to give the bride away, Bill Murphy did it. Last week the Murphys were 1) bringing a VIP’s wife and seven children from Iran, 2) hunting a consulate in Manhattan for the Philippines, 3) trying to buy 10,000,000 feet of iron pipe and 50,000 tons of sheet steel for a European VIP.