So it comes as something of surprise to encounter the Vikram Chatwal of today — the one who, at age 39, says he has put his partying days behind him; the one who is now single after a separation from Ms. Sachdev; the one who has embraced sobriety after two stints in rehab; and the one who says he is now more focused on being a successful hotelier than being a fixture in Page Six.
On a rain-soaked Thursday in June, Mr. Chatwal was seated in a black chair in Suite 1108 of his new hotel, the Dream Downtown, sipping coffee poured by a white-gloved butler who used to work for the designer Tom Ford. Two publicists huddled off in the distance, one of them perched on the closed seat of a bathroom toilet, tapping on a BlackBerry. “Welcome to my world,” Mr. Chatwal said.
It was the day after the opening of that hotel, his fifth in Manhattan and the eighth, over all, all managed and owned by Hampshire Hotels and Resorts, which is run by his father, Sant Singh Chatwal. And the talk was of Vikram 2.0, the more serious counterpart to his hard-partying younger self. Never mind that, a few months earlier, he had been photographed out on the town with Lindsay Lohan, another tabloid favorite who has passed through rehab more than once. (They are “just friends,” he said, having met her at a party in Los Angeles this spring.) “I was always told to be strictly business and to make money,” Mr. Chatwal said. “I got lost in the world of what I would do every day. There are two different tracks, the partying track and the getting serious. And it’s hard to balance those two things. You have to do one thing or the other. And my life has been a tricky balance.”
He has been thinking a lot about his future lately, he said: the tug between his Western upbringing and his family’s Indian roots; his interest in the film business; the split with his wife; the expectations of his father, as well as his own sobriety.
Early this year, he checked himself into Promises in Malibu, Calif., for alcohol addiction, his second rehab stint in five years. The first one came just a year after his marriage, and was not so voluntary. Friends expressed concern about his drinking. “They came in and told me to get my life together because I had been partying too much,” said Mr. Chatwal. (He was in New York; his wife was in New Delhi where she and their 4-year-old daughter, Safira, live.) “My parents and my wife made sure I got on a plane and went to Hazelden,” Mr. Chatwal said, referring to the treatment center in Minnesota. “It helped me realize that in life you obviously can’t do things by yourself.”
His sobriety was short-lived, he acknowledged, and thus the recent stay at Promises and his subsequent attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “It was just great to go to a 12-step meeting with people who really got stimulation hanging on to each other, and talking to each other about their problems and getting things out,” he said, talking publicly for the first time about his latest attempts at sobriety. “It was a real relief for me.”
His family’s hotels, which include the Chatwal on 44th Street, home to the Lambs Club restaurant (as well as a newly opened Dream South Beach hotel in Miami Beach), lack the cachet of Andre Balazs’s Mercer or the indie cool of the Ace. Still, they exhibit a certain urban chic, one apparently coveted by the Wyndham Hotel Group, which owns the Ramada chain and which earlier this year signed an agreement with Hampshire Hotels to franchise as many as 150 boutique hotels under the younger Mr. Chatwal’s brand. The expansion is ambitious given the glut of new boutique hotels (“Frankenstein has been created,” said Ian Schrager, the pioneer in the market who is collaborating with Marriott International) and Mr. Chatwal’s early ambivalence about joining the family business.
MR. CHATWAL was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the elder of two sons. His parents, originally from India, immigrated to Canada, then moved to New York in 1982. Mr. Chatwal has spent most of his life as a New Yorker, though his parents infused daily life with traditional Indian rhythms. As a child, he was sent upstate to Sikh camp to learn how to recite prayers. On his left shoulder is a tattoo of Guru Gobind Singh, a Sikh warrior Mr. Chatwal admired. Below that is a tattooed pair of eyes and a “G,” a relic of his relationship with Ms. Bundchen.
After graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1994, Mr. Chatwal had trouble finding his way professionally. He flirted with a career as an actor and movie producer, appearing in small roles in nine films, including “Zoolander” and the Bollywood hit “Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd.” (Recently, in Cannes, he hosted a dinner on his yacht for the movie producer Harvey Weinstein.)
“He has grown up in many ways but he is a child in many ways,” said Queenie Singh, a friend from Mumbai.
Mr. Chatwal admitted to a certain diffusion of purpose. “It is a tremendous burden growing up,” he said. “It’s almost like that authoritative rule to be successful in life and, you know, make money and do all these things.”
By the late 1990s, however, he said his father, who made a fortune after founding the Bombay Palace restaurant chain, expected his son not only to apply himself in the family business, but also jettison the socialites and enter into an arranged marriage.
In 1999 the younger Mr. Chatwal opened the Time, capitalizing on his social connections. In 2006, he opened the edgier Night on 45th Street. Finding a bride took more time. “I don’t know if I would have dated an Indian girl if I did not have the pressure,” Mr. Chatwal said of Ms. Sachdev, a long-legged beauty he first encountered at a dinner party in India.
Mr. Chatwal’s father said that his son found purpose in marriage and building hotels. But the elder Mr. Chatwal, 65, suggested that the company also benefited from Vikram’s youthful sensibilities. “He brought new life” to the family business, Sant Chatwal said. “It was the way to go.”
A few weeks ago Vikram Chatwal, his estranged wife, a family friend and his father were gathered at the Dream Downtown, seated on a round of silver lobby cushions. The usually gregarious elder Mr. Chatwal demurred when asked what role he played in his son’s recovery. “He had an idea to fix himself,” he said of his son, changing the subject. Pressed on the matter, he replied, “The mother sometimes sees more than the father.” The young Mr. Chatwal stared blankly at a cushion as his father spoke.
“He’s very mysterious; he keeps his feelings to himself,” Priya Sachdev said of her husband, adding, “It erodes you and that is what I worry about.”
Of course Mr. Chatwal had his own take on where he is headed.
“There is that idea that home is where you make it,” he said. “That is, home with my family, with my daughter and with myself. When I go out and enjoy myself, that is home to me, too, because I have done that all my life. So I tend to be O.K. with it, until it gets to be a little bit too much sometimes.”
SOURCE http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/fashion/the-hotelier-vikram-chatwal-finds-himself-in-a-good-place.html
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