Editor’s note: This story first appeared in New York’s issue of December 15, 1997. We’re republishing it on the occasion of Jocelyne Wildenstein’s death on December 31, 2024.
Jocelyne was at Ol Jogi, the family ranch in Kenya, when she got the message. “You are free to come to New York, but it is impossible for me to let you come in at #11,” Alec wrote her in a fax, in French, which is what they spoke with each other. No. 11 was the family’s townhouse, at 11 East 64th Street, and Jocelyne thought that for such a weakling of a man, he was pulling a very assertive move in banishing her. “I have many dinners and will be entertaining at home this week” was the only excuse he gave. And so on September 2, she flew home. “I wanted to — how you say — call his bluff,” she says. And besides, she’d presided over the house’s redecoration, selecting fabrics that would match the ten Bonnard paintings in the Bonnard room.
Entering through the front door at street level, Jocelyne took the elevator to the third floor and found herself face-to-face with Alec, holding a towel around his waist with one hand and his pistol, a semi-automatic with the handle inscribed AW1, in the other. She had walked in on him in their bedroom, and he was with his girlfriend — one of them, anyway — a 19-year-old Russian. Alec, a pie-faced man of 57, was pointing the pistol at Jocelyne. “You will be on the streets when this is over,” he yelled. His eyes bugged from his skull the way they always did when he got worked up. Without his glasses on, it made him look like a tawny owl. “We stayed together too long. I should have left just after the kids were born. I should have had a life of my own.”
Alec grabbed his girlfriend and they headed downstairs, to the pool. Jocelyne ran into the bedroom and called the police. Alec spent the night in a holding cell at the 19th Precinct, on account of the gun. “When I went to see him in jail, he was remarkably cool, almost Zen-like,” says his lawyer, Raoul Felder.
“It was an experience,” says Alec Wildenstein. “I adapt to a lot of experiences.”
Jocelyne took it harder — not over merely the infidelity her husband showed her but the lack of respect. “Refinement is how man separate himself from the beasts,” she says, “and Alec now has forgotten that. He has forgotten his manners.”
Alec’s father, Daniel Wildenstein, was beside himself with embarrassment. A wizened man with jet-black hair, Monsieur Daniel, as he is known, was at home in Paris, weeks from his 80th birthday, when he heard the news. Daniel has enjoyed his own long career as a womanizer, but for the boy to get caught with his pants down — in his own home, by his own wife!
And to get arrested and have it make the papers! — well, that is another matter entirely, a big mistake, Daniel said.
Monsieur Daniel’s first reaction was to blame the incident on Jocelyne’s having called the cops. “That’s it,” he told Alec. “There will be no more money for her. This lady is going to wind up with nothing.”
Declaring an economic war on Jocelyne is something Monsieur Daniel — and not his son — is most in position to do. Daniel is the sole owner of Wildenstein & Company and the family fortune, and he was the one covering Jocelyne’s personal and legal expenses. He was also supporting Jocelyne’s widowed mother, sick with Alzheimer’s, at Ol Jogi. Monsieur Alec, despite a quality of life befitting a South American dictator, is merely an employee of Daniel’s. He has testified to not owning the townhouse on 64th Street; not owning the mansion in Paris in which he also resides; not owning Le Chateau Marienthal, the family’s castle in Igny, the largest home within the metropolitan environs of Paris; not owning the 66,000-acre Ol Jogi, thought to be worth some $40 million, where stand, according to Jocelyne’s affidavit, 200 major buildings, including an elementary and secondary school for the children of the ranch’s residential staff of 366. All are the property of Daniel or one of the Wildenstein corporations.
Although Alec Wildenstein has the use of a stable of cars, a personal house staff of ten, and a traveling staff of six; flies his own Gulfstream IV airplane; and runs Allez France, one of the largest and most profitable collections of racehorses and trotting horses in Europe (159 Thoroughbreds) — he claims in sworn testimony that he is supported by a salary of only $100,000 a year and that his net worth, besides the salary, consists only of an apartment in Switzerland he and Jocelyne co-own.
All of which means that if Jocelyne wanted money from this dying marriage, she would have had to sue her father-in-law for divorce. Everybody knows you can’t sue your father-in-law for divorce.
After the news of the case had been in the newspapers for a few weeks, Monsieur Daniel reconsidered and contacted Jocelyne. He asked if he could see her face-to-face, without lawyers, to discuss a settlement. He said he hadn’t decided yet whether Alec would be there.
But Daniel seemed (and still seems) to have no intention of settling, and the meeting went nowhere. By now the case had taken on a surreal quality. Almost each time there were courtroom proceedings for the divorce, the tabloids ran small updates, mostly, it seemed, as an excuse to print pictures of Jocelyne. As a result of several cosmetic surgeries, Jocelyne is an otherworldly looking person. Her forehead is high and spherical, and the planes of her cheekbones recall Grace Jones’s during her Demolition Man period. Her hair is amber, often in ringlets. Her flaring eyebrows, mostly painted on, are oddly peaked. In photographs, her eyes appear hollow, like those of the characters in “Little Orphan Annie.” And of course she has a terrific figure for a woman of 52. The New York Post has referred to Jocelyne as “the bride of Wildenstein”; Alec requested that the judge ruling on the divorce, Marilyn Diamond, bar reporters from the courtroom, “because Jocelyne’s looks are scaring people.”
Jocelyne’s looks are not so unusual, however, when considered in the context of the rest of the Wildensteins’ life. When school is out and Daniel’s in town, there are 11 family members living in the townhouse on East 64th, making the place “the most expensive tenement in Manhattan,” as Harry Brooks, former president of the Wildenstein Gallery, is fond of calling it. Alec and Jocelyne until their separation occupied the third floor of the townhouse. Alec’s younger brother, Guy, lives with his wife, Kristina, formerly a Swedish catalogue model. The fifth floor is shared by Guy’s four children, Alec and Jocelyne’s two children, and a nanny. All of them share the kitchen and the dining room. On the ground floor are lockers for the staff, with plaques marked KITCHEN, BUTLERS, and MAIDS. A coffee table in the Bonnard room is a glass-topped case of antique swords, buckles, “white hunter” guns, and a velvet-handled rifle that used to belong to Marie Antoinette. They have a pet lynx and a black leopard.
We sat in the Bonnard Room, and she served Champagne. I didn’t ask why, but Jocelyne said she was serving Champagne “because that is what one does.” She looked at me the whole time with a gaze that was unsmiling and unblinking but still somehow not cold, almost unaware.
Because of Alec’s arrest, Jocelyne was granted the use of the townhouse; Alec has been forced to live at the Four Seasons. But cut off from the family’s credit cards and staff, Jocelyne was helpless. She filed papers declaring she didn’t know how to use the institutional-size equipment in the kitchen, and that she wasn’t permitted to make long-distance phone calls. Her lawyer, Bernard Clair, asked the Wildensteins to reinstate her personal staff of seven and give her a budget of $200,000 a month until the divorce is settled, pleading that she was “a prisoner in her own home.” Which is true, in a sense: Jocelyne, who has no money to her name, has been given enough money to hire a chauffeur, one maid, and one all-purpose assistant but has still been forbidden from using the kitchen between the hours of 6 a.m. and 9:30 p.m, except for a couple of hours at lunch; she’s supposed to take her meals in the wet bar. “I am just on a tiny island,” she said. “I can’t move. The dogs get the same as me.” She had on a black cashmere jersey dress, a broad gold choker, and a gold belt shaped like a snake with eyes made of emeralds.
I didn’t want to bring up the divorce right away, so I asked for a tour of the house. The Bonnard room had a saffron-colored orchid on every table — a shade that matched the Scalamandre brocade on the tufted settees and the wing chairs. The pattern in the curtains matched the gilded moldings. They have an antique parquet floor modeled after Versailles’s in the room, as well as in the Blue Room, which Jocelyne is forbidden from using. The Italian greyhounds came out, Simba and Patou, the two of them that Jocelyne was allowed to bring back from Paris. There are five in the family, a mother and four children, skinny, wiry-haired, bundle-skinned dogs. Jocelyne let them sit in her lap.
She still had photos of Alec out. On the sink in the guest bathroom there was a small photo of Alec, in Kenya, ten years ago. He is wearing red swim trunks, and with a rope he holds a five-foot-long fish by its tail. “Is a grouper.” Jocelyne said. “He caught it.”
“I like everything exotic,” Jocelyne said as we made our way to the private rooms. A stuffed leopard and a water buffalo’s head hung in Jocelyne’s boudoir. Jocelyne’s bathroom had a glass wall above the tub, enclosing a floor-to-ceiling tank for May Moon, Jocelyne’s monkey. “He is stuck in Paris, too,” Jocelyne said.
Alec had the bed taken from the bedroom, so Jocelyne sleeps on a mattress and a box spring on the floor. She pointed out an Oudry painting of a dog. “He look like Simba, no?” she asked. Likenesses of their five dogs had in fact been carved into the friezes in the fireplace. There were chairs and an ottoman and a breakfront all done in zebra skin by Karl Springer. Then we got to a Monet painting. “It look like the mother dog,’’
she said.
There’s probably no one who would want his or her divorce chronicled by the press. Still, the attention has got to be especially unwelcome to the Wildensteins, who’ve always carried out their business and social affairs under extreme secrecy. Although the gallery has been based in New York since before World War II, in a building two doors from the townhouse (with outposts in London, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo), the Wildensteins still consider themselves French.
While it is known that the Wildensteins, who deal in the work of Old Masters — chronologically, this means everything from 14th-century primitives up to and including Picasso — own far and away the richest and most important commercial gallery in the world; the full extent of what’s in the storage room underneath the gallery (some 10,000 paintings) has never been ascertained. “Every now and then, the Wildensteins sell a painting whose whereabouts were last accounted for 40 or 50 years ago, and the entire art world says, ‘So that’s where it was,’ ” the art dealer Eugene Thaw says. Wildenstein is typically the first stop for any museum looking to purchase an Old Master painting; in fact, the Wildenstein holdings constitute a collection more valuable and important than all but those of the largest museums. They’ve been instrumental in building many collections: for Walter Annenberg, Norton Simon, and Florence Gould. A 1978 listing claimed that Wildenstein always holds a minimum of 20 Renoirs, 25 Courbets, 15 Pissarros, 10 van Goghs, 10 Cézannes, 10 Gauguins, and 10 Corots. On a good day, the inventory also has listed 2 Botticellis, 3 Velázquezes, 5 Tintorettos, 7 Watteaus, 8 Rembrandts, 8 Rubenses, 9 El Grecos, 79 Fragonards, and 400 Italian primitives. “Over the years, the Wildensteins acquired such volume that they can afford to hoard what they’ve got for 50 years and wait out the right offer,” says Hector Feliciano, the author of The Lost Museum, a recently published book about Nazi art theft during World War II.
The family fortune was estimated at $5 billion in 1991 (the Wildensteins’ holdings include, besides art and racehorses, real estate and Seibu, a chain of Japanese department stores). Alec and Jocelyne’s living expenses, according to household ledgers, averaged $1 million a month. Their circle does not revolve around any hub as ordinary as a shared hometown. “It’s a much larger playground than that,” Jocelyne said. While they count as friends people like the Basses (clients), and the David-Weills (fellow Franco-Jewish art collectors), the Wildensteins do not serve on many charity committees, and their names seldom appear in the society pages. They’re a level above high society; the queen of England is also a client, and Prince Charles is the godfather to one of Guy’s sons.
“It must break Daniel’s heart.” says Sir John Aspinall, the British casino and zoo owner who is a close friend of Alec’s, “that this sort of indiscretion is what the family would be known for.
Daniel, however, is not blameless in the matter of his son’s indiscretion. If Alec isn’t, at age 57, fully an adult, it’s because he’s been infantilized all these years by his father, who has tightly controlled his business life and finances even while supporting his extravagant, hedonistic lifestyle. So Alec’s passions seem those of a schoolboy, but on an unimaginably grand scale. He’s a collector of the vivid, the exotic, the rare: Ol Jogi, with its lakes and lava formations, became a present-day Happy Valley Club. Jocelyne, a woman whose proudest boasts are of having a pilot’s license and swimming with crocodiles, achieved through plastic surgery an image even more farouche (Alec says she wanted to look “like a cat”). And now there is Alec’s Russian girlfriend, Yelena Jarikova, a brilliant and self-polished girl whose modeling career Alec set out to underwrite.
Even as children growing up in New York, Alec and Guy, who is by six years the younger brother, inhabited another world, riding to the Lycée Français by limousine and rarely playing with fellow students. Alec was known as a bully: Guy was painfully shy. Then, as now, the boys were ruled by their father, who they liked to boast was a great ladies’ man. Their mother, Martine Kapferrer, was less of a presence in their lives. Throughout the ’50s, Daniel Wildenstein was much more likely to be seen at El Morocco with his girlfriend, Zafia Tarzia, an impoverished Afghani princess.
Daniel liked to play his boys off each other, Jocelyne said. “He kept score all the time between the two sons. If he did something for Alec, the next time he’d do something for Guy, so they know he is in charge. He didn’t go to Alec’s wedding, so he’d go to Guy’s.” If Alec seems a little soft, it’s because Daniel raised him with a protective hand. Although Daniel was a good boxer, he forbade Alec from participating in sports, even skiing. “Guy was younger, and so by the time he was old enough to do sport, Daniel had eased up and allowed it,” Jocelyne said. Neither boy was permitted to go to college. Alec wanted to badly, but Daniel told him there was nothing he could learn that he would use in the business. His father did seem to allow the boys to educate themselves in other ways: Alec says that he spent quite a bit of time with girls in the employ of Madame Claude, the legendary Parisian madam. “It made my youth,” he says.
“Alec always had to ask his father for anything,” Jocelyne said. “When he wanted to buy a new car for Paris two years ago, Daniel said ‘no.’ And Alec wouldn’t go against his father.”
“He really like to be the only one who knows everything,” she continued. “He never teach Alec and Guy to learn any accounting. They only know how to look at the last number on the page.”
Jocelyne was 31 when she first visited Ol Jogi in 1977. She was the guest of her best friend, a woman named Claude Bauche, and the white hunter Alain Muller. Just that year, the Wildensteins had bought Alec a 49 percent share of the ranch, a purchase he hoped would give him distance from his family, a continent of his own. The other half of the property belonged to Bresche’s father-in-law, Henri Roussel, a friend of Alec’s.
“My initial conversation with Alec was no conversation at all,” Jocelyne said. “It was a 5 a.m. lion hunt, and we were in the blind, all camouflaged and waiting in the bushes, not allowed to talk.” That night, he asked her to ride motorcycles up one of the mountains on the estate, to a promontory they called the Top of the World. “That was our premier baiser — first kiss.’’
She was born Jocelyne Perisset and grew up in Lausanne. Her father sold sporting goods in a department store. At 17, Jocelyne began dating Cyril Piguet, a Swiss movie producer, and two years later they moved to Paris together. “My life change then,” she said. “Lausanne is very plain, but I began meeting exciting, glamorous people. Before I met Alec, I’d already flown in a private jet. Adnan Khashoggi’s jet is bigger than Alec’s. It have a bedroom and a bathroom and a bidet.” She has always considered herself active but never thought of pursuing a career. “I have different talent,” she said. “I never worry for my career. I am very good at decoration. I am maybe extremely good at decoration. I always find at the right time what I can do.”
She had also fallen in love with Africa before the trip to Ol Jogi. “Africa is a paradise,” she said. “You meet people who look at life differently. They love the adventure. You never expect you find a person like that in the city.” Alec didn’t share Jocelyne’s interest in rock climbing or waterskiing down the Zambezi rapids (“He would have drowned. He swam with the kids at the pool”). Still, he was a good sport. “What we both had in common was our love for Africa, wild things.”
Alec’s view of what first drew them together is somewhat different, but it also has to do with animals. “We had both lost dogs recently,” he says, “German short-haired pointers. Beyond that, it was just something physical.”
When she returned from Ol Jogi, she immediately found herself missing Alec, now home in New York. At the time, Jocelyne was living in Paris with a boyfriend, the filmmaker Sergio Gobbi. “Alec couldn’t call me, and he couldn’t write me,” Jocelyne said. On her first Tuesday back, she headed to Karita, her hair salon; it was her routine to spend every Tuesday — all day — at Karita. When she arrived, the entire store was full of white orchids Alec had sent, “thousands of them, so big you couldn’t even get through the door.”
It was a brief courtship. “As soon as I met him, I knew,” Jocelyne said. “Sometimes you speak with the eyes.” At dinner one night at Pied de Cochon in Paris, Alec said, “I want you to be my wife.”
“He didn’t ask me; he told me,” Jocelyne recalled. “I was not about to argue with that.”
The news of his oldest son’s engagement did not please Daniel Wildenstein, and he wanted no part in the marriage.
“Mainly Daniel was upset because he didn’t want his son to get married with anyone, period,” said Jocelyne. “He just wanted his sons for him.” They held a wedding in Las Vegas on April 30, 1978, in a suite at the Hilton — just Alec and Jocelyne and his friend Adolph Schuman, the San Francisco entrepreneur, as their witness. They were married by a rabbi, and Jocelyne signed the ketubah. “Alec really want me to convert,” she said. “I would have if he had ever practiced any Judaism himself, but he never did.”
They quickly had two children, Diane and Alec Jr., who are now 18 and 17, respectively. Evenings were spent at home with the family, each week of dinners by the pool being given over to a different theme — such as tigers or gazelles — with new china and silverware and centerpieces to match. The pool is inlaid with tiles depicting dolphins and other aquatic animals. The room has a vaulted ceiling painted and lit to resemble the solar system, and wall-size fish tanks stocked with sand sharks, spotted eels, and neon tetras. “You think you’re in Bora Bora, in the middle of the water,” Jocelyne said. “You are not in New York when you are there.”
Beginning in 1985, when the Wildensteins bought out Roussel for full ownership of Ol Jogi. Jocelyne began to pour her energy into the ranch, orchestrating the renovation of the main residence. She also took charge of the family’s refurbishment of the castle at Igny (originally a bar mitzvah present from Monsieur Georges to Monsieur Daniel), which had been in disrepair and uninhabited for 13 years. At Ol Jogi, she hired the architect Jon Cavanaugh, after interviewing dozens, because he had written his thesis on Gaudí. “I didn’t want one straight line in Africa,” she says. She was in charge of the maintenance of the 400 kilometers of roads on the property as well as the installation of several swimming pools, 55 man-made lakes, and a wildlife preserve that employs an overseer, a general manager and his four assistants, a game warden, an animal trainer, a safari leader, and a veterinarian with his own private clinic on the grounds.
Ol Jogi is the only ranch in the world with a modulated game reserve. “We let some of the animals out periodically, when that animal’s population shifts the balance,” Jocelyne explained. “So if there are too many giraffes, we let a hundred of them run free.” The ranch is stocked with giraffes, bison, leopards, lions, and white rhinos (which are not indigenous to Kenya; the Wildensteins brought them up from South Africa). Its concealed electric fences — “straight out of Jurassic Park” — are there “so that the animals do not have the impression that they are caged,” Jocelyne said.
Talking to Jocelyne, it was easy to see how dear Ol Jogi is to her. She got considerably more animated describing the infrastructure of the animal reserve than when I asked about her $10 million worth of jewelry or a $350,000 Chanel dress she bought for a New Year’s Eve party. The only time she came alive talking about anything wearable was when I happened to compliment a necklace she had on; it was made of elephant hair, and she’d designed it herself.
Just before they were married, when they were still in their 30s, Alec and Jocelyne had already started to worry about looking old. “Alec hates old people,” Jocelyne told me. So it was that the newlyweds paid a visit to Dr. Richard Coburn, a celebrity plastic surgeon. They both had their eyes lifted. Between Coburn and Dr. Norman Orentreich, the family’s choice for liposuction, Jocelyne and Alec have submitted themselves to several rounds of plastic surgery. Away went Jocelyne’s delicate, milkmaid-like features, though Coburn won’t take full credit. “She did something with her hair,” Coburn says, “and it changed her whole look.”
Many of the Wildensteins have visited Coburn and Orentreich, Jocelyne told me; she said that simply to satisfy her curiosity, she recently made a list of all the cosmetic operations that have been performed on each member of the Wildenstein family. “I am not in the big number as far as operations,” she said. She was hardly defensive; she considered it part of her regular health regimen. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, and other than the tightening up, my appearance never change,” she said. “My clothes, I am still the same size when I am 16 years old. You like to stay young — to stay healthy. I do a lot of waterskiing with my son.” She said this was different from having liposuction to stay thin. “And I never touched my nose.”
Alec admits to a few liposuctions; but he says Jocelyne’s plastic surgery was out of control. “She was obsessed with her looks,” he says, “constantly remodeling, like you remodel an apartment.
“When she was not doing that, she was trying to build crazy things — beautiful things, maybe, but crazy.” For example, on the bank of a pool at Ol Jogi, two tigers are living in a bulletproof glass cave.
Around five years ago, Jocelyne said, Alec began to imagine that his own death was imminent: “He got very depressed. Even after the first liposuction, when he looked good, he was obsessed. He’s become a vegetarian. All this happened when he got the idea somehow that there was no way he was going to outlive his father. He very badly wants to outlive his father.”
It isn’t difficult to see the four art-dealing generations of Wildensteins as a textbook example of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks model of a family ethic in decline. The benevolent Nathan Wildenstein, who founded the gallery in Paris in 1875, was not considered particularly sophisticated, but he built a successful dealership by popularizing 18th-century art during a moment in French culture when the bourgeoisie had developed a taste for the high-middlebrow world described in the novels of the Goncourt brothers. Nathan’s son Georges, who published the influential La Gazette des Beaux Arts, was the family genius, known for his eye. Georges’s son, Daniel, lacked his father’s ability to judge a work. But Daniel was a ruthlessly competitive businessman who made a dynasty of the gallery.
Alec and Guy Wildenstein, by all accounts, have not measured up to their legacy. Veterans of the art market find it difficult to take Alec or Guy seriously as dealers. “I only knew them as the sons who lived this very Proustian lifestyle,” an art historian who worked as a conservator at the Wildenstein Gallery in the ’70s told me. “They were great playboys. They used to have parties above my office. I’d come in to work in the morning, and they’d still be going on.”
Nowadays, the newspaper that sits on a table in the gallery foyer every day is likely to be The Racing Daily. Fellow dealers describe Alec as “spacey” and “bored.” “The generations are petering out, as far as talent goes,” says the dealer Eugene Thaw. “The sons don’t have the same flair for the art business that Daniel does. They are spending their money, but they’re not bringing anything in.”
Among art dealers, however, Monsieur Daniel is not exactly seen as a role model. “Daniel Wildenstein is one of those men who get more of a kick out of pulling off a business coup in a louche way than in doing it in the normal way,” a salesman at a European auction house says. “He likes a mob flavor to things.”
Under his watch, the gallery was sued for wiretapping the telephones of the Knoedler Gallery in 1955, and for withholding taxes in the ’70s. Currently, the gallery is being sued for fraud by a novice collector in California named Gilbert Michaels, who says the Wildensteins surreptitiously paid Larry Ross, an “art agent,” to offer to obtain paintings from Wildenstein at below-market prices. Michaels was persuaded by Alec to buy four paintings, two by Renoir, for $2.54 million. Soon after, Michaels had the paintings appraised at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and was told he had overpaid by well over a million dollars.
Recently, new light has been shed on just how the Wildensteins amassed parts of their vast collection. A long-classified OSS document, written in 1945 by the art historian Douglas Cooper and unearthed by a writer for Spy magazine named Jonathan Napack, provides an account of how Monsieur Georges collaborated with Nazi officials in their looting of art owned by Jewish families and even profited from the arrangement. Having reviewed original Nazi correspondence, files, and receipts and having spent hours interviewing “some of the persons most closely concerned,” particularly
Karl Haberstock, who was Adolf Hitler’s personal curator, Cooper concluded that Monsieur Georges and Haberstock, along with the Wildenstein employee Roger Dequoy, held four days of clandestine meetings at the Hotel du Roy in Aix-en-Provence in November 1940. Wildenstein, according to the document, proposed to sell Haberstock (who was shopping for Hitler) and Hermann Göring artworks from the gallery, and instructed Dequoy to “make it his business to discover important collections or single works of art in France which the Germans would be interested in acquiring.” Alain Vernay, the grandson of Adolphe Schloss, another great family of Jewish collectors in France, is quoted in The Lost Museum saying that Georges visited his family and offered the Schlosses “honorary Aryan citizenship” in exchange for their entire collection. Haberstock, in return, agreed to sell to Georges Impressionist paintings the Nazis had acquired — most likely through confiscation. In addition, the Nazis refrained from seizing the Wildenstein collection, and instead gave Dequoy the authority to carry on the business of the gallery while Georges fled to New York. The U.S. Treasury Department intercepted letters from Georges in New York to Dequoy’s father-in-law in the south of France in which the dealer gave Dequoy instructions.
These issues surfaced again late in February of this year, when the Wildenstein Gallery began trying aggressively to sell a group of eight illuminated medieval manuscripts to Sam Fogg, a book dealer in London. Fogg knew of the manuscripts, and wanted to purchase one, a Flemish book long considered missing, The Hours of Jean de Carpentin. He settled with the Wildensteins on a price. (A conservative estimate for all eight of the prayer books is upwards of $5 million.
The prayer books had once been the property of the Kann family, Parisian Jews who prior to World War II had amassed one of the great private collections in France. Alfonse Kann’s collection had been seized by Nazis in 1941. The French government returned most of his paintings to him after the war, but as he had fled to America and kept no inventory, more than 100 works never made it back to him.
In late 1996. Francis Warin, Kann’s great-nephew, had for a few months been trying to track down his family’s art and obtained from the French Foreign Ministry records that last placed the manuscripts with the Wildensteins. He wrote several letters demanding the return of the books. It was soon after this that the gallery tried to sell off the works — in other words, the Wildensteins put the manuscripts on the market only when Warin went in pursuit of them.
The Wildenstein Gallery first claimed that they’d been bought from Alphonse Kann “before the Second World War”; later, the story was that the gallery bought three of them from a distant cousin of Kann’s in 1909. But Nazi documentation, corroborated by markings on the manuscripts, shows that all eight works were taken from the home of Alphonse Kann in 1941.
In September, when the news of Warin and the Kann manuscripts reached the New York Times, Daniel Wildenstein said of Warin’s claim, “It’s an absolutely crazy thing, 100 years after an object was bought, to come with a claim without any paper whatsoever. They claim it 50 years later? They had no claim for 50 years? I tell you something — if tomorrow someone steals a picture from me, I make a declaration to the police that it’s stolen. After 30 years, the man who stole it owns it.”
There are those who believe the dealership is entering a difficult period. The rise of the auction house and the fact that half of what Wildenstein sells it sells to museums (which, unlike galleries, seldom replenish the system by reselling their purchases) mean Wildenstein is “not as active, nor the dynasty it once was,” in the words of a fellow Old Masters dealer. There also seems to be a declining interest in the 18th- and 19th-century art that Wildenstein sells.
In 1993, to combat these forces, the Wildenstein Gallery paid a reported $40 million to the Pace Gallery, the most influential modern-art dealership, forming PaceWildenstein, a joint venture of which Wildenstein owns 49 percent. While the deal gives Wildenstein a hand in a market that seems to have staying power, PaceWildenstein’s efforts to expand have yielded mediocre results: A planned branch in London never opened, and the Los Angeles gallery, established in 1995, is said to be struggling.
Yelena Jarikova appeared in New York in February of this year, a Russian girl of 20, hard-eyed, blonde, pretty much flawless, five feet ten. At the time, she spoke almost no English and, she is fond of telling people, had never until recently eaten fresh fruit or vegetables in her life. She grew up in the province of Sakhalin, a remote island off the eastern coast of Russia. Her mother is a schoolteacher. When she was around 14 or 15, she made her way to Moscow. Within the last year, she made her way to New York, where she became an acquaintance of Gaddo Cardini, an Italian businessman now living in Manhattan. Cardini is a very social — if mysterious — man-about-town who makes a living selling Gulfstream planes to private citizens, including Alec Wildenstein. He counts among his friends Plácido Domingo and Gianni Agnelli, and at lunchtime most days he can be found at either Harry’s Bar, Cipriani, or Sofia’s, usually in the presence of rich or beautiful young ladies (the cousin of the former Shah of Iran; the daughter of Dewi Sukarno; a number of Russian models). He’s known to set up his single friends with young women.
Someone gave me the name of a man, a banker who’s known Alec from the time the two were young bachelors in New York. He said he too had been set up with Yelena, courtesy of Gaddo Cardini, just a few months before Alec met her. He told me, “One night I happened to walk into Champagne, that place with the piano bar adjacent to La Côte Basque, and there’s Gaddo, and of course he knew everybody in the room.
“Anyway, Gaddo says, ‘There’s a Russian girl here I think you’ll really get on well with,’ and it was Yelena. So we talked, and I called her up and we went on one date — a handful of dates, I guess. She was very sweet and charming, but at the time she didn’t speak much English. She ended up going out with another friend of mine, a top lawyer in town who’s younger than I am. He also met her through Cardini. People get passed around in New York.”
Friends of both Yelena and Cardini say Cardini introduced Yelena to Alec, though both Alec and Cardini say Cardini was merely present at the party. One friend of Alec’s says he “flipped over this girl immediately.” He took her on vacation a number of times. He bought her a Mercedes convertible. In June, according to INS records, Alec paid $15,000 in processing fees for an H-1 visa for Yelena. Still, a story has been circulating among Yelena’s friends that she won’t sleep with Alec until he proposes.
One friend of Alec’s likened Yelena to “an untamed animal,” which, given what I’d found out about Jocelyne and Alec’s life together, made sense. Alec’s friend John Aspinall says that in recent years, Alec’s awe of wild animals dampened his interest in hunting and is making a conservationist of him. “The more he learned about their adaptability to terrain, he realized he could derive more pleasure from them by owning and observing them than if they were merely dead trophies.”
Alec had been dating Yelena a short while when she told him she was interested in modeling. “Alec always wanted a model, and if she wasn’t one, so he make her one,” Jocelyne told me. He called Eileen Ford, the founder of Ford Models, who 20 years ago had set him up on dates with several models in her stable. Then Alec got hold of Wayne Maser, one of the best-known photographers in the fashion business, and commissioned him to take a series of glamour shots of Yelena. For one day’s work, Wildenstein paid Maser upwards of $80,000. In August, on the strength of this “portfolio,” Ford signed Yelena to a contract. In her first season, she has been photographed by Irving Penn and Raymond Meier, appeared in an editorial spread for Harper’s Bazaar, modeled in the Chanel show in Paris during Fashion Week, and was even cast in a small scene in Woody Allen’s newest movie project. Among the other Russian models in town, Yelena is affectionately known as the royal peasant girl. “She has a chance to do extremely well,” says Christian Paris, the Ford agent who was the first to handle her bookings (he has since moved to Karin Models). “She has that very fine skin and bone structure that only real Caucasians — from the Caucasus — can have. She’s a very determined girl. She’s taking acting lessons at Lee Strasberg; she rides horses; she shoots; she’s into skydiving. This is the real one — I mean, no shit.”
Alec and Yelena are said to be happy together. A woman who works in the fashion industry and who happened to find herself sitting with the two of them at a dinner last month says, “I had not expected to like either of them, but she was absolutely delightful. She knew more about his business than he does. She seemed too ambitious to be a model. I bet she goes to Hollywood. They got on well, but if she wants anything more than money out of a relationship, she could do a lot better than Alec.”
Jocelyne Wildenstein believed everything Alec said, and when he told her he wasn’t excited by the prospect of having dinner with their friends at Le Bernardin, she suggested just the two of them go.
“I don’t really feel like doing that either.” Alec said.
“Is something wrong?” Jocelyne asked. She was calling him at the gallery. She was upstairs, at home.
“Maybe we should talk,” Alec said. He told her to meet him in the Bonnard room in 15 minutes.
It was April 18, and Jocelyne had only been back in the country ten days. Already, the year was shaping up as a bad one. In the fall, both children had left for school. She’d been at Ol Jogi with her parents, watching her father die of pneumonia. She waited two weeks for Alec to come to the funeral, but finally he said he was too busy. So she buried him herself, on March 27, her parents’ anniversary.
Now, in the Bonnard room, Alec told Jocelyne that while she was out of the country, he’d decided to see other women.
“Is it one woman or more than that?” Jocelyne wanted to know. “Because if it is several women, I can overlook it. We can still work on it. But if you are already in love with a person, then I suppose everything is lost.
“No,” Alec said. “There’s no one person. Nothing serious.” He was lying to her. At this point there was only Yelena.
“So you’re not in love?”
“I want to find out if I’m in love.”
Alec told her he was leaving town for a few days. Jocelyne begged him not to. Their daughter, Diane, was on her way home for the first time since September. She wanted them to meet her boyfriend, a junior at McGill, premed.
So Alec stayed. And over the weekend, he brought Diane and her boyfriend out to lunch with him. And Yelena. “If she can introduce me to her boyfriend, I can introduce her to my girlfriend,” he said.
‘I had no chance to save it, Jocelyne told me. “It happen like a storm. It was a nice marriage until the end. Maybe I lost a bit of my attention when my father was sick at the end, but I didn’t feel it coming.”
Yelena has caused Alec to abandon the long-standing family creed of keeping a low profile. In October, she appeared with him in the winner’s circle at Longchamps when his horse Peintre Célèbre won the Arc de Triomphe race. On another trip to Paris, the two of them visited the atelier of Karl Lagerfeld to commission him to design some dresses specifically for Yelena. And in September, Alec rented the upstairs at Le Cirque 2000 and threw a party for Yelena’s 21st birthday. There were tables set up with caviar, with foie gras, with 20 different cakes. His son, Alec Jr., came in from Paris for the party. He lives above Daniel’s office and so was quickly co-opted by Alec’s side. Guy’s son tells friends that Alec has been fixing him and Alec Jr. up with Yelena’s friends. Diane did not attend, and according to Jocelyne this so insulted Alec that he gave Diane a hard time when making his customary payments of her credit-card bill, actually asking to see her receipts. Most of the grownups Alec invited did not show up — the room was filled with models and young Russians. After a round of toasts to Yelena, the band played “My Girl” — though it’s not clear that she’s the only one. The girl in Alec’s bedroom when Jocelyne walked in was not Yelena but another Russian. “I’m a bachelor,” says Alec, “and I’ve been seeing a lot of people. I like Yelena very much, but she isn’t particularly my girlfriend.”
Everyone knows what Jocelyne Wildenstein wants at this stage of the game. She wants to not see vanish the life to which she long ago became accustomed. She wants to always be allowed to go to Ol Jogi and perhaps the chateau at Igny. She would like to be on good terms with both her children.
She is asking for somewhere in the tens of millions as a divorce settlement. But why on earth have Alec and Daniel held out for so long? Allowing the case to go to trial would expose the corporation’s financial holdings — something the family has all these years fought hard to avoid but which is already beginning to happen. Alec recently received a letter from the New York State Department of Finance requesting more information about his earnings in regard to the taxes he has paid over the years.
“I think Alec want a divorce because he want to have someone to blame for the luxurious lifestyle, for being wasteful,” Jocelyne said. “He wants to be able to say to his father, ‘You were right all along: You were right about her, and you were right that I have not measured up,’ and to start fresh he will be pleasing his father.” To him, it is a form of absolution.
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