A Four-Star Scandal

The Gasparilla Pirate Fest is Tampa’s version of Mardi Gras. It’s perhaps the most eccentric — and politically incorrect — civic festival in the country. Every year, on the last Saturday in January, the men of Tampa, including those from the oldest, richest families, dress up as pirates and invade the harbor in “krewes,” while the poorer civilians let themselves be invaded, at least symbolically. The festival was founded in 1904 by the oldest krewe, Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla, which took its name from the legend of the courtly buccaneer Jose Gaspar, who, the story goes, eluded the United States Navy by wrapping himself in an anchor chain and plunging to the bottom of Tampa Bay. Ye Mystic Krewe’s membership is currently closed, at 760, and there’s a waiting list. “The old guard, the established hereditary class, they have not integrated their membership,” Amy Scherzer, the social chronicler at theTampa Bay Times, told me. Still, there are dozens of newer krewes that have embraced diversity, and Gasparilla, despite its aristocratic origins and social pretensions, isn’t exactly a redoubt of Tampa society — or a model of decorum. Women bare their breasts, drunkenness is rampant, and the police look the other way. “I kept an off-duty sheriff on my lawn,” said Norma Gene Lykes, whose family, which had holdings in steamships, cattle, citrus, and land, practically founded Tampa, in the mid-1800s.

In the midst of this intoxicating melee is the military. The current director of Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla is a retired military man, as were three former directors, including the late James Tarbet, a 25-year Royal Navy veteran and former aide-de-camp to Prince Charles. Tampa’s chief link to the military is MacDill Air Force Base, which sits on a spit of land that juts south into Tampa Bay and is home to Central Command (Centcom), Special Operations (Socom), and the Coalition Forces. The base was put there in 1939 because the site is surrounded by water and was considered a safe place for test flights. Tampa and the military have always looked out for each other. “The military is a crucial part of the fabric of this community,” former mayor Sandy Freedman told me. Tampa has one of the leading veterans hospitals in the country. Generals Tommy Franks and the late Norman Schwarzkopf liked the town so much they retired there. Military dollars help keep the economy running, and military protocol and pageantry add heft, sparkle, and intrigue to Tampa society. It’s also well known that many military men are enthusiastic patrons of Mons Venus, a local strip joint whose founder is renowned as the inventor of the nude lap dance.

PHOTOGRAPH BY WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

PHOTOGRAPH BY WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

Every year the Gasparilla fest includes a Parade of Pirates, led by Ye Mystic Krewe, that winds through Tampa on a 3.8-mile route and, at one point, passes by the Bayshore Boulevard residence of Jill and Scott Kelley. More recently another kind of parade has made its way to the Kelleys’ mansion: Reporters and photographers have been streaming there since last November, in the wake of the scandal that resulted in the resignation of General David Petraeus as head of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was revealed that the general had been having an extramarital affair that came to light only because Paula Broadwell — the biographer with whom he’d had the affair — had written disturbing e-mails under the handle “Kelley Patrol” to Jill Kelley, warning her to back off from her relationship with Petraeus, the four-star general whom Broadwell liked to call “Peaches.” Similarly ominous messages were sent to Petraeus’s former second-in-command at MacDill, General John R. Allen, reportedly warning him to beware of the Tampa “seductress.” In the days that followed, Petraeus, Allen, Broadwell, Kelley, and a local FBI agent named Frederick W. Humphries II, who had been asked by Kelley to investigate the matter, were exposed to intense media scrutiny, as the baroque details of the affair trickled out, with devastating consequences for some national heroes.

As the tabloids camped out in front of the Kelley house, the 37-year-old woman at the center of it all quickly became notorious. She said nothing, but she seemed to revel in the effect created by the bright pink and yellow figure-hugging dresses she wore to parade in front of the paparazzi. At one point Jill Kelley called Tampa’s mayor, Bob Buckhorn, and requested “diplomatic protection” because she held the title of “honorary consul” for South Korea. (Since the title was honorary, the request was denied.) Onlookers couldn’t help wondering: Who is the woman at the heart of this tawdry tale, and how did she insinuate herself into the most exclusive levels of Tampa society, not to mention national power?

Jill Kelley’s twin sister, Natalie Khawam, was a Washington, DC, lawyer who often visited the Kelleys and became a fixture at their Bayshore Boulevard parties before she eventually relocated to Tampa. A photograph of the two sisters in matching designer suits was featured prominently in Kelley’s house, and guests quickly named the duo “the Chanel twins.” “They targeted the rich and powerful here very clinically,” said one society heiress, who explained that she “dropped them, like we all did, because they behaved so badly. If they thought someone was no one they just ignored them.” There were stories about Jill and her surgeon husband hosting lavish parties and receptions, even though their finances were a mess. Many a Tampa matriarch was left shaking her head, and the Chanel twins gained a new nickname: the Kartampians. The members of Tampa society would be damned if they were going to let the twins reduce them, and their town, to the level of tabloid and reality show sleaze. The Kartampians were something of a Gasparilla in reverse: arrivistes intent on swashbuckling their way through Tampa society, taking no prisoners. “I called probably 50 people,” Amy Scherzer, of the Tampa Bay Times, said. “They all had a Jill Kelley story, and none of them was flattering.” Sandy Freedman, the former mayor, told me, “This town has become too porous. That a bimbo like Jill Kelley should be given any kind of recognition or access to the military — it’s outrageous. Tampa needs to be more careful about vetting people. It cannot go on like before.”

Jill and Natalie could not have picked more fertile ground for “arriving” socially than Tampa, which Scherzer described as “a well-kept secret for almost one hundred years.” It offers easy access to the Northeast — the flight to New York takes only three hours — and the town’s relaxed Southern charm, slow pace, and balmy temperatures make it a target for those wishing for a wonderful lifestyle without the social and financial pressures — or restrictions — of Palm Beach. And parts of it are just as beautiful, if not more so. Bayshore Boulevard fronts the water and has the longest unbroken sidewalk in the world (four and a half miles). The houses on it are genteel Southern mansions that can be had for only about a million dollars. The area is welcoming in other ways, too. “There are fewer older families here than elsewhere in the South,” Norma Gene Lykes said. “Anyone with money can make it here, but you have to behave nicely. I hate to say that, but it’s the only rule.”

Tampa’s other founding families include the Fermans, Franklands, Lowrys, McKays, Culbraeths, and Howells. All are members of the Palma Ceia Golf & Country Club and the Tampa Yacht & Country Club, not far from Bayshore Boulevard. But those lines are dwindling, along with the old Latino families that made Tampa a North American capital of cigarmaking: the Corrals, Cuestas, Garcias, and Vegas. The town has many more professionals than blue bloods these days. “More doctors and lawyers than we need,” as Lykes puts it. Another breed that Tampa is known for: sports owners. In 1976, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner moved down from Cleveland; his two daughters, Jennifer and Jessica, grew up here and married locals. His two sons, Hal and Hank, also live here. Other Tampa sports owners have included the Glazers (Manchester United and Tampa Bay Buccaneers). Star players come too: Derek Jeter built a 30,875-square-foot house in the Davis Islands enclave that the locals have taken to calling “St. Jetersburg.”

All of this makes the town an eclectic, unpretentious mix, something its people are proud of. They like characters and intrigues — as long as they are “in bounds.” Another former mayor, Dick Greco (who served four terms), is married to Dr. Linda McClintock, a physician who has been married so many times people have lost count. They are popular, beloved figures. “Dick Greco is always the last to leave a party, and while he was mayor he was often to be found at 2 a.m. socializing in Ybor City with whoever happened to be there,” said Scherzer, referring to the town’s arty nightlife district. The road construction magnate Douglas “Diesel” Cone, a member in good standing at Palma Ceia, kept a mistress and a second family in an exclusive North Tampa neighborhood for 25 years. This fact was revealed only days after his wife Jean Ann died in 2003 and he quickly married the mistress, Hillary Carlson. For years Cone had apparently lived another life as “Donald Carlson,” devoted husband to Hillary and State Department employee. Tampans love this kind of story, and they are not prudes.

Jill Kelley arrived in Tampa in 2001. She had recently married Scott Kelley, a surgeon who had been offered the position of his dreams: a fellowship at Tampa’s H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, widely considered one of the top 10 cancer facilities in the country. They soon bought a three-bedroom spec house in the well-heeled neighborhood of Hyde Park, right behind Bayshore Boulevard.

Jill was born Gilberte Khawam in Lebanon of Syrian parents, on New Year’s Day 1975, and grew up around Philadelphia (where she was known as Gigi), along with her identical twin, Natalie; an older sister, Caroline; and a younger brother, David. Her parents moved to the United States in 1976 with nothing. In 1988 they opened a Middle Eastern restaurant called Sahara, in Voorhees, New Jersey. Jill and Natalie both attended Lower Moreland High School, in the suburb of Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, where classmates recall that they were introverted and kept mainly to themselves. One of them remembers Jill announcing that everyone would think of them differently after they’d had nose jobs, which they eventually had — together — in New York, according to Tony Khawam, a distant cousin once married to their sister Caroline. A family friend recalls the Khawam household as being “traditional Lebanese” and very welcoming. But according to Tony Khawam, the mother, Marcelle, had a habit of overspending, and Sahara closed after only a year in operation because the family could no longer afford to keep it staffed. The family lost its home, and the father, John Khawam, returned to his previous occupation, selling insurance.

After graduating from Lower Moreland in 1993, Jill took a job as a researcher for a physician at the University of Pennsylvania, where she soon began dating Scott, a burly, affable surgical intern out of Columbia Medical School who had been an undergrad at Dartmouth. Scott had worked his way up from Boston’s middle class, and for Jill he represented, to use a phrase she would later often repeat, an “upgrade.” Tony Khawam remembers her laughing with Natalie about her success. “He’s going to be a surgeon!” she would brag, perhaps seeing a way out of the family’s financial straits. Jill and Scott married in a Catholic ceremony in Philadelphia in 1998. (The Khawams are Syrian Catholic.)

Meanwhile, according to Tony Khawam, the inseparable twins (who declined to be interviewed for this story) had come up with “a plan” that was focused on one thing: money. “They made up their minds they were going to use men to get money, and they discussed this quite openly in front of the family,” he said. He added that Natalie got engaged several times, and in each case would use the beau’s credit card for trips and clothes for Jill, Scott, and the twins’ parents, before dumping him. One of Natalie’s boyfriends was Lew Blum, 20 years her senior, who owns a well-known tow truck business in Philadelphia. “They’re mean. They’re just mean,” Blum said. “I couldn’t realize that they were nothing but cons.”

Blum claims that he lent Natalie the down payment for a Jersey Shore condo — $50,000 that vanished. “I probably invested in those people maybe about a hundred grand, like going on trips and paying for rooms. That was how they used me. I thought these people liked me. They didn’t like me. They took my money; they promised to pay me back. They didn’t pay me back.”

Of course, Tampa knew nothing of this. By 2004, all anyone knew was that the Kelleys and their two young daughters, with a third on the way, were living the high life in the $1.4 million Bayshore Boulevard brick mansion with columns and dormer windows they’d bought that year. “They started having large birthday parties for their children, with huge bouncy houses,” Norma Gene Lykes recalled. “They had these funny things at Christmas that blow up. That’s not something you usually see on Bayshore. Bayshore’s a little more subdued than that.”

The ostentatious young family appeared to want for nothing. The household staff the Kelleys hired at their new home included a live-in nanny and a housekeeper who wore a French maid’s uniform at Jill’s parties. The Kelley children were often dressed in matching outfits.

Many locals found the Kelleys’ behavior over the top. But the couple had started appearing in the pages of the Tampa Bay Times in 2002, and by 2006 they had established themselves as a social duo who loved to throw parties. They could always be counted on to have free-flowing champagne and a glittering guest list. “It started with the Grecos, who are just very welcoming,” Scherzer told me, referring to the former mayor and his wife. But soon there were the Steinbrenner siblings, whom Jill befriended when their children attended the same preschool, and, increasingly, the military. “Jill liked dramatic, floor-length halter-neck hostess gowns, even for a casual supper,” one former guest recalled. “She would sometimes wait until everyone was assembled and then make her grand entrance.” Jill knew how to charm and have fun. “People thought they were a riot,” Scherzer said. “People assumed they were from Lebanese money.”

Then, in November 2008, General David Petraeus, the popular commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, was transferred from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to MacDill, upon being promoted to the leadership of Centcom, where he oversaw the troops in Afghanistan. The Kelleys arranged a dinner party for the general and his wife Holly, the daughter of the late general William A. Knowlton, when they arrived in town, to welcome them to the community and introduce them to Tampa society. The guest list for the event indicates how far the fun-loving Kelleys had ascended in only a few years. It included Tampa mayor Pam Iorio and Florida governor Charlie Crist.

The Petraeuses and the Kelleys became fast friends, frequently dining at each other’s homes. Some of the Petraeuses’ more formal friends didn’t know what to make of the fast-rising Kelleys. When the general and his wife hosted a dinner, cooked by a private chef at MacDill, the whole thing was immaculate — except, some guests say, for Jill Kelley and Natalie Khawam. “First of all, they were dressed inappropriately,” one guest told me. “Miniskirts, boobs out — and everyone else looked elegant.” The girls’ full figures, along with their favored conversational subjects, only furthered the Kardashian-like impression they made on Tampa society. “Jill would yammer on about shopping and travel, while Natalie would discuss whistleblowers and class action suits and, especially, her divorce — she talked like she was going to collect billions of dollars,” the guest said. “Scott barely said a word except ‘Hi, how are you?’ ”

In 2009 the Kelleys hosted the Petraeuses for a Christmas dinner. The general sat between the twins at one end of the table, while the matronly Holly, a former debutante who graduated summa cum laude from Dickinson College (and whose father was the superintendent of West Point), was seated at the other end. Another guest recalled that during dinner one of the twins screamed, ” ‘Look at my new Manolo Blahnik shoes!’ and kicked up her legs for everyone to see. David Petraeus absolutely loved it.” Natalie joked to one of her friends, “I am Petraeus’s version of People magazine!”

It was all fun, for the most part. But some in Tampa society began to note a darker, conniving side. One matriarch I spoke to said, “Basically, my ex-husband and I weren’t getting along so well, and we’d be having dinner with Jill and Scott in a restaurant, and suddenly Natalie, who hadn’t been invited, would appear wearing a skimpy outfit. The next thing you know Jill would be in my then-husband’s lap.” Several society wives called one another and expressed their fears that Jill was setting Natalie on their husbands. Tony Khawam said that from his perspective the wives were entirely right to suspect this. The twins, after all, were quite clear about their plans behind closed doors. “They had their eyes on Hal Steinbrenner and his brother Hank,” Khawam told me. “They’d take trips on the Steinbrenners’ plane and brag about how they would split Hal up from his then-wife, Christina — and then the plane would be theirs.” Khawam went so far as to call someone who worked in security for the Steinbrenner family to warn them about what was going on. Hal Steinbrenner and his wife did ultimately split up, but not, according to a source close to them, because of Jill and Natalie.

As such exploits began to make the rounds of Tampa conversation, Jill and Scott Kelley’s marriage also became a subject of speculation. “Jill controlled Scott,” said one observer. Many people heard Scott complain about how, no matter how hard he worked, he could not make enough money for his wife’s spending habits. “Have you tried cutting up her credit cards?” one person is said to have asked. “She just orders more,” he replied.

In early 2008, Natalie had married a DC-based businessman, Grayson Wolfe; in the fall of that year she gave birth to Grayson Paul Wolfe II. Almost immediately afterward, she filed for divorce and moved from DC to Tampa, into a small house at the back of the Kelleys’ Bayshore Boulevard mansion, with her son. She claimed that Wolfe had been physically abusive. The claims were eventually ruled in a court opinion to be false, but over the next 17 months Wolfe was not allowed to visit his child. In the interim Natalie and the rest of her family began calling the infant by a new name — a fact his father realized only when he caught a glimpse of a photograph of his son’s one-year birthday cake, decorated with the words “Happy Birthday John.”

Scott Kelley’s expenses increased when Natalie moved in. He was now supporting not only his wife, three children, and a household staff, but also his sister-in-law and her young son. Troy Jimenez, who occasionally did Jill’s and Natalie’s hair, noticed that the sisters often didn’t pay for their Saturday afternoon appointments. “They just forgot to have their credit cards with them,” he told me.

Around this time Scott left Moffitt for a new job at the Watson Clinic in Lakeland, a 90-minute drive from Tampa. Fortunately, it came with a hefty pay upgrade, or so he told people. Dr. Kelley needed the raise. In addition to the pressure of having to support his wife’s sister and nephew, more financial trouble was brewing. Jill had bought an investment property in downtown Tampa for $1.8 million, but its value plummeted because of the economic meltdown. Natalie, a 2005 Georgetown Law School graduate, found work at the Tampa firm of Cohen, Foster, and Romine, run by the colorful Tampa lawyer Barry Cohen, but left within six months after making a sexual harassment accusation against a co-worker.

If the twins were in turmoil, they hid it well. Jill and Natalie became close to the Petraeuses’ 30-year-old daughter, Anne, eventually attending her wedding, in 2012. They also became close to an expanding network of senior military personnel, including General John R. Allen and his wife Kathy, and a good-looking Navy SEAL, Vice Admiral Robert S. Harward, who arrived that year to become the deputy commander of Centcom. All of them, at various points, would show up at the Kelleys’ for parties, often in staff cars. Accepting local hospitality was a military custom. Everyone had everyone else’s e-mail addresses. The barriers were down.

When the Kelleys invited the Petraeuses to their Gasparilla bash in January 2010, of course the Petraeuses accepted. They’d never been before. The military couple arrived with a 28-motorcycle police escort, and they hobnobbed with state attorney general candidate Pam Bondi and David Laxer, the owner of Bern’s Steak House, a Tampa landmark. The four-star general described the proceedings as “awesome.” His financially challenged hosts apparently found creative ways to hold down champagne and canapé costs at their functions. “I have heard from several people that Jill used patriotism as her carrot and asked vendors to donate food and wine when she entertained the military,” Scherzer told me. The Kelleys also typically hired multiple security guards for Gasparilla, and there was a report of one guard using a Taser to shoo away the rabble that day.

The Kelleys’ money problems continued to worsen in the months that followed. Their home was foreclosed on in 2010 (they ultimately managed to hold on to the house), and they have been involved in numerous credit card disputes since then. These included a Chase Bank allegation over a revolving credit account debt of $25,088.56, which has since been dismissed, and a Regions Bank suit for $253,437.31 for unpaid credit card bills. (The couple has since agreed to a repayment schedule.) The couple have nine court actions on record involving debts, mortgages, and multimillion-dollar foreclosures. In 2007 the Kelleys set up a now-defunct cancer charity called the Doctor Kelley Cancer Foundation. Records give no indication of any funds from this foundation going to cancer patients, although the Kelleys claimed $135,423 in expenses and tax write-offs. “I think having Petraeus’s personal e-mail made Jill feel pretty special, like maybe she didn’t have to pay her mortgage and could fudge the numbers on a nonprofit,” Scherzer told me.

Natalie, meanwhile, made a bankruptcy filing showing that she owed $3.6 million to an array of creditors, including $800,000 to Scott and Jill Kelley. She and Scott had embarked on a strategem in 2009, drawing up a potentially big money lawsuit against the medical company Genzyme, manufacturer of an adhesive that covers and protects incisions after surgery. Scott believed that Genzyme had misrepresented its approved use by suggesting it could also be crunched up and inserted as a slurry into wounds. He and Natalie found two Genzyme sales reps who would be whistleblowers. But then Natalie’s departure from Cohen, Foster, and Romine complicated the initiative.

In March 2011 the Petraeuses hosted a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, awarding medals from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to four civilians for distinguished service to the military. All the recipients were members of the Petraeuses’ Tampa social circle; two of them were Jill and Scott Kelley. Jill’s “selfless contributions” and “willingness to host engagements” were cited as reasons for her receiving the military’s second-highest civilian honor.

Inevitably, Natalie was invited to the dinner following the ceremony, at Washington’s Prime Rib restaurant. Unlike the other guests, the twins made a point of changing outfits for dinner. Photographs show Jill in a floor-length pink evening gown, while Natalie is in black, leaning into Petraeus. They are both smiling.

But by November of that year Natalie had less to smile about. Despite letters of support from generals Petraeus and Allen, her ex-husband Grayson Wolfe was granted full custody of their son. Judge Neal E. Kravitz wrote a searing opinion, finding Natalie to be “a psychologically unstable person” with “an unsteady moral and ethical compass.” The judge reported that a court-appointed psychiatrist had found that her allegations against her ex-husband — which included his putting a gun to her head — were “part of an ever-expanding set of sensational accusations…so numerous, so extraordinary and so distorted that they defy any commonsense view of reality.” (Natalie is appealing the verdict.)

In 2012, Jill received her “honorary ambassador” title for her service at MacDill from Centcom and an “honorary consulship” from the South Korean government. (Neither title comes with any official rights or responsibilities.) The Tampa locals were startled to see “Honorary Consul 1JK” vanity plates on her Mercedes S500. She also bragged of visits to the White House and other high-level connections. She sent breezy e-mails to Tampa’s mayor, Bob Buckhorn, saying, “I’m up in DC having dinner tonight with Gen Petraeus & Gen John Allen,” and, “I was at the WH with my friends in the Administration this weekend — the stress was surreal!”

But there were signs that the military leaders were growing tired of the Kartampians. In the spring of 2012 General Allen’s wife Kathy called Mark Rosenthal, a sporty member of Tampa society known for the “train room” in his converted garage, to complain about the e-mails Jill and Natalie were sending her husband. Rosenthal, in turn, called Jill and left a voicemail suggesting to his friend that it was inappropriate to pester members of the United States military’s high command and their wives. Jill apparently did not respond. Vice Admiral Harward’s office, meanwhile, started to make calls to civilian friends to see if they could somehow get the twins to leave the admiral alone. Last fall, before the Petraeus scandal broke, MacDill’s chief officer of protocol canceled a dinner that Jill Kelley had organized in DC that Centcom’s new commander, General James Mattis, was to host.

No one knows precisely how Paula Broadwell, Petraeus’s biographer, first heard about Jill Kelley and her sister. But since she was having an affair with Petraeus, one can speculate about the source. Some of the general’s friends wonder if he began to express irritation and Broadwell went too far in trying to protect him, or if it was, as others have suggested, a “catfight.” (No one I spoke to would venture to say whether the friendships the twins enjoyed with Petraeus, Allen, and Harward had crossed the line to become romantic affairs.)

Either way, Broadwell’s “Kelley Patrol” e-mails started a train wreck. The FBI agent to whom Kelley went to air her concerns about cyberstalking, Frederick Humphries, was a friend of all concerned. He was also a national hero, having helped foil the planned Al Qaeda attack on Los Angeles International Airport in 1999. Humphries immediately reported the threats to his superiors, who in turn asked to see all his e-mail correspondence with the Kelleys. Two years previously he had e-mailed the couple and other friends a spoof photograph of himself topless and flanked by two target dummies. He became a laughingstock when the story got twisted by the media into his “posing shirtless” for Jill Kelley, and the innuendo went viral. He e-mailed a friend saying he was miserable and could not believe what had happened to him.

Petraeus, of course, resigned from his post as Director of Central Intelligence on November 9. General Allen then became the target of an investigation into the appropriateness of his extensive e-mail correspondence with Jill Kelley. President Obama has put Allen’s nomination to become supreme commander of NATO on hold as that investigation continues.

And Tampa’s famous twins? Jill initially hired Monica Lewinsky’s publicist, Judy Smith, the inspiration for ABC’s Scandal, and John Edwards’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, who has filed a series of complaints in every direction: against the FBI for leaking information about his client; against Natalie’s former employer, Barry Cohen, seeking damages for revealing privileged information; and against a New York businessman, Adam Victor, for defamation. (Victor alleged that Jill had asked for $80 million in commissions to put together a business deal with the South Korean government and that she had used Petraeus’s name to get in the door.) Natalie hired the celebrity attorney Gloria Allred and gave an attention-grabbing press conference that left the press corps scratching its head. She is still pursuing her sexual harassment case against her old employers.

The question remains: How did General Petraeus ever get mixed up in all this? Amy Scherzer shared a theory with me: “I know people wondered why David Petraeus was so taken with them, and I couldn’t help thinking that maybe he wanted an escape from the world” — and, as Centcom commander, the world and its security were essentially his purview. “These girls were the perfect escape. They are fun, effusive, hospitable.”

Norma Gene Lykes had some insight into the fast rise and even faster fall — if that’s what it is — of the Kartampians. “They tried social climbing in a place where there’s a very short ladder,” she told me. “And the fact that they couldn’t do that, I think, says a lot about them.” She believes Tampa’s reputation may have suffered irreparable damage. “Frankly, it is an embarrassment. Tampa is now known for the seedy underbelly of MacDill.” Mayor Buckhorn declared the whole affair “a circus” in the Tampa Bay Times. “Hopefully, this thing will go away soon,” he said, “and we can all get back to business.”

Indeed, the Kelleys’ inflatable Christmas decorations went up as usual on Bayshore Boulevard, and they spent New Year’s Eve partying in New York. There was no sign of any bruising, even though Jill was stripped of her honorary consul title and is no longer allowed through the checkpoints leading into MacDill. As Gasparilla 2013 approached, Tampa society wondered if the Kelleys would go ahead with their annual front lawn blowout. In any case, the city is longing for the day when it can open a newspaper and no longer read the words Jill and Natalie.

I Tried to Warn You About Sleazy Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2003

“Jeffrey wanted me to tell you that you looked so pretty,” the female voice said into my disbelieving ear.

It was the fall of 2002. I was pregnant, uncomfortably so, for the first time and with twins, due the following March. I was besieged by a relentless morning sickness. I was sick in street gutters, onto my desk, at dinners with friends. I suffered severe bloating and water retention.

But here was this faux-compliment coming, bizarrely and a bit grotesquely, from a woman I hadn’t met—a female assistant who worked for one Jeffrey Epstein, a mysterious Gatsby-esque financier whom I’d been assigned to write about by my then-boss Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair. (Epstein had caught the attention of the press when he had flown Bill Clinton on his jet to Africa. No one knew who he was or understood how he’d made his money.)

 

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

Upon hearing of my assignment, Epstein had invited me to an off-the-record tea at his Upper East Side house (during which I distinctly remember he rudely ate all the finger food himself) and then had his assistant call to tell me he’d thought I was pretty.

At first—it was the early stages of reporting—I was amused at having been so crassly underestimated. For a man who clearly considered himself a sophisticated ladies’ man (the only book he’d left out for me to see was a paperback by the Marquis de Sade), I thought his journalist-seduction technique was a bit like his table manners—in dire need of improvement.

If only it had all ended there. This was what it had been meant to be. A gossipy piece about a shadowy, slightly sinister but essentially harmless man who preferred track-pants to suits but somehow lived very large, had wealthy, important friends, hung out with models, and shied away from the press.

But it didn’t.

I haven’t ever wanted to go back and dwell on that dark time. But then the latest Epstein scandal broke, when Prince Andrew was accused in a Florida court filing of having sex with a 17-year-old girl while she was a “sex slave” of Epstein’s.

In the last 48 hours I’ve had a journalist from the U.K. Sun newspaper put herself inside my foyer. I’ve been inundated with requests for TV interviews. And Epstein’s old mentor, the convicted fraudster Steven Hoffenberg, recently released from jail after a 20-year sentence, has been pestering me and my agent to write a movie.

Separately, Hoffenberg’s daughter has gotten in touch—and it’s gotten me thinking. There are some injustices that maybe only time can right. And perhaps now is the time. Things happened then that simply shouldn’t have, and if I don’t talk about them, then probably no one will.

It became obvious as I was reporting his story that you could essentially divide Jeffrey Epstein’s biography into two themes. One was the hidden source of his wealth—he claimed he’d fueled a lifestyle of vast homes, a private jet, and endless travel by managing the money of billionaires and taking a commission, a story that no one I spoke to believed—while the second mystery was his unorthodox lifestyle.

“The advice I was given was he is so wealthy, he can fight you, he can make your daughters look ridiculous, plus he can hurt them.”

Then in his 50s, he’d never been married but had had a string of intelligent, good-looking girlfriends, including Ghislaine Maxwell, the raven-haired daughter of the late, disgraced British newspaperman Robert Maxwell whom he promoted from girlfriend to “friend” when it was over. She remained frequently by his side.

But the New York gossip was focused on the many parties he gave at his house, where he regularly hosted a mix of plutocrats, academics from Ivy League schools, and nubile, very young women. Oh, and also Britain’s Prince Andrew, whom he introduced to everyone as just “Andy.”

 

I got to work on all of it—and Epstein kept close tabs on me. He didn’t want to be seen to cooperate, but he’d do his best to control me. He phoned regularly. I wasn’t altogether surprised to be quickly summoned to the offices of the rich and powerful, sometimes before I’d even asked to meet with them.

James “Jimmy” Cayne, then the cigar-chomping CEO of Bear Stearns, not only phoned me up, he found the time in his busy day to give me a tour of the office. He was on his best behavior, talking up Epstein’s alleged supposed great brain, his value to the bank—never mind the fact that Epstein had had to leave it quickly in 1981; this Cayne put down to Epstein’s ambition “outgrowing” the place.

I also met with respected real estate developer Marshall Rose; the former Bear Stearns chairman Alan “Ace” Greenberg called me; so too did Leslie Wexner, the founder and CEO of The Limited, who trusted Epstein so much he had given Epstein carte blanche to insert himself into both Wexner’s family and business affairs, according to people who saw Epstein’s contract; they all chattered on about Epstein’s brilliantly creative mind, his intellectual prowess—a mental agility that, to put it bluntly, was simply not evident in the many phone conversations he had with me.

These were conversations that took a fairly grim twist pretty quickly. “What is the nature of the piece?” he kept asking. “Does it have this aspect in it?” “This aspect” would refer variously to his philanthropy, his interest in biological mathematics, his well-known friends, some tycoons, some academic wonks—and yes, the women. “I don’t expect there’d be a piece on me without that,” he’d said, preening.

The women he directed me to were all respectable. There was a doctor, there was a socialite, there was Ghislaine Maxwell; they were all grown-ups, with the appearance of financial independence.

While Epstein’s friends speculated that retailer Les Wexner was the real source of Epstein’s wealth, Wexner (who called him “my friend Jeffrey”) never commented on this, though he did send me an email praising Epstein’s “ability to see patterns in politics and financial markets.”

My investigation began to take on unexpected twists. After a bit of digging I found myself not in some plush office setting but going through the metal detectors inside the Federal Medical Center at Devens prison in Massachusetts, where I met with one Steve Hoffenberg, a fraudster who’d been convicted of bilking investors of more than $450 million in one of the largest pre-Madoff Ponzi schemes in history. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Hoffenberg told me that he’d met Epstein shortly after Epstein had been kicked out of Bear Stearns in 1981 for “getting into trouble” and that Hoffenberg had seen charm and talent in him —“he has a way of getting under your skin”—and had hired him as a “consultant” to work with.

Hoffenberg, officially, ran Towers Financial, a collection agency that was supposed to buy debts that people owed to hospitals, banks, and phone companies, but instead the funds paid off earlier investors and subsidized his own lavish lifestyle. Hoffenberg told me had he had been Epstein’s mentor and that Epstein had made a terrible mistake in doing something so high-profile as flying Bill Clinton, since that would only draw a spotlight to his business dealings. “I always told him to stay below the radar,” he said.

Aware that I was listening to a convicted felon who had lied under oath—he was, after all, sitting before me in an orange jumpsuit—I left the jail determined to get more concrete proof about the source of Epstein’s finances. Slowly, I got there.

It took many meetings of the type you see in the movies. There I was, with my growing belly, in the backs of people’s chauffeured-driven cars, in out-of-the way hotel bars—and finally, in my sixth month, when my doctor had begun to look dismayed and told me to take it easy, a train ride to a law firm in Philadelphia, where I and a research assistant were shown a room full of boxes with legal files, and the man who brought us there whispered, “Good luck!”

Luck did shine upon me that day. I opened the first box, and there was Epstein’s deposition in a civil case explaining in his own testimony that he had indeed been guilty of a “reg d violation” while at Bear Stearns and that he’d been asked to leave the investment firm; it was the nail in the coffin I needed.

I had discovered many other concrete, irrefutable examples of strange business practices by Epstein, and while I still couldn’t tell you exactly what he did do to subsidize his lifestyle, my piece would certainly show that he was definitely not what he claimed to be.

I had to put all my findings to Epstein and, bizarrely, he seemed almost unconcerned about the financial irregularities I’d exposed. He admitted to working with and for Hoffenberg but quibbled with some of the specifics of Hoffenberg’s allegations, reminding me that Hoffenberg was a convicted felon. Third parties in turn quibbled with his accounts, and he was irritated, but not overly so.

I was a little mystified at how benignly he responded to my questions about his business activities. Now, when I look at my meticulous notes, I notice that his tempo quickened—and he was much more focused—when he himself asked: “What do you have on the girls?” He would ask the question over and over again.

What I had “on the girls” were some remarkably brave first-person accounts. Three on-the-record stories from a family: a mother and her daughters who came from Phoenix. The oldest daughter, an artist whose character was vouchsafed to me by several sources, including the artist Eric Fischl, had told me, weeping as she sat in my living room, of how Epstein had attempted to seduce both her and, separately, her younger sister, then only 16.

He’d gotten to them because of his money. He’d promised the older sister patronage of her art work; he’d promised the younger funding for a trip abroad that would give her the work experience she needed on her résumé for a place at an Ivy League university, which she desperately wanted—and would win.

The girls’ mother told me by phone that she had thought her daughters would be safe under Epstein’s roof, not least because he phoned her to reassure her, and she also knew he had Ghislaine Maxwell with him at all times.

When the girls’ mother learned that Epstein had, regardless, allegedly molested her 16-year-old daughter, she’d wanted to fight back. “At the time I wanted to go after him. I mean, physically, mentally, you know, in every way, shape, and form. And the advice I was given was, you know, he is so wealthy, he can fight you, he can make you look ridiculous, he can make your daughters look ridiculous, plus he can hurt them. And that was the thing that frightened me was that he would know where they lived and could possibly just send somebody when they walk the dog at night or something around the corner, and we’d never hear from them again,” she told me.

When I put their allegations to Epstein, he denied them and went into overdrive. He called Graydon. He also repeatedly phoned me. He said, “Just the mention of a 16-year-old girl… carries the wrong impression. I don’t see what it adds to the piece. And that makes me unhappy.”

Next, Epstein attacked both me and my sources. Letters purporting to be from the women were sent to Graydon, which the women claimed (and gave evidence to show me) were fabricated fakes. I had my own notes to disprove Epstein’s claims against me.

And then there was Epstein himself, who, I’d be told after I’d given birth, got past security at Condé Nast and went into the Vanity Fair offices. By now everyone at the magazine was completely spooked.

But my sources, my young women and their mother, heroically held firm. They were going to tell their story, consequences be damned. And as for me? My doctor insisted that once I filed this piece I lie down on my bed and not get out. One of my babies had started to grow alarmingly slowly.

I worked through December 2002 like a dog. I worked with three fact-checkers, the magazine’s lawyer; I sifted through everything Epstein threw at me and defused it. We were getting ready to go to press. And then the bullet came. “Graydon’s taking out the women from the piece,” Doug Stumpf, my editor, told me.

I began to cry. It was so wrong. The family had been so brave. I thought about the mother, her fear of the dark, of the harm she feared might come to her daughters. And then I thought of all the rich, powerful men in suits ready to talk about Epstein’s “great mind.”

“Why?” I asked Graydon. “He’s sensitive about the young women” was his answer. “And we still get to run most of the piece.”

Many years later I know that Graydon made the call that seemed right to him then—and though the episode still deeply rankles me I don’t blame him. He sits in different shoes from me; editors are faced with these sorts of decisions all the time, and disaster can strike if they don’t err on the side of caution.

It came down to my sources’ word against Epstein’s… and at the time Graydon believed Epstein. In my notebook I have him saying, “I believe him… I’m Canadian.”

Today, my editor at The Daily Beast emailed Graydon to ask why he had excised the women’s stories from my article. A Vanity Fair spokeswoman responded: “Epstein denied the charges at the time and since the claims were unsubstantiated and no criminal investigation had been initiated, we decided not to include them in what was a financial story.”

But this wasn’t a financial story, it was a classic Vanity Fair profile of a society figure. I don’t know—because I never asked him—if Graydon still believed Epstein when in 2007 Epstein was sentenced to jail time for soliciting underage prostitutes. But it has often struck me that if my piece had named the women, the FBI might have come after Epstein sooner and perhaps some of his victims, now, in the latest spate of allegations, allegedly either paid off or too fearful of retribution to speak up, would have been saved.

He has a way of spooking you, does Epstein. Or he did. My babies were born prematurely, dangerously so; he’d asked which hospital I was giving birth at—and I was so afraid that somehow, with all his connections to the academic and medical community, that he was coming for my little ones that I put security on them in the NICU.

When they’d been released home some months later, I went out to my first party. There was Jeffrey Epstein, sucking a lollipop. “Vicky,” he said, “you look so pretty.”

Vicky Ward was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair for 11 years. She is the best-selling author of The Devil’s Casino and most recently, The Liar’s Ball (Wiley).

The Very Rich Should Divorce Very Quietly

Since the so-called “Wolf of Wall Street” divorce scandal broke, I’ve been studying photographs of Christina Kelly, the angry blonde housewife whose specific allegations might yet very well bring down not just her errant husband but a whole investment bank.

I keep scanning Mrs Kelly’s thought-out wardrobe, searching for a sign of her motive. She’s got the classic boots-and-blazer look down pat; she looks put-together in a friendly, controlled way that is mystifyingly at-odds with the angriest—and most seemingly self-destructive—lawsuit to have hit the courts in years.

For those who haven’t been keeping track: Mrs Kelly, 38, and her husband, the in-advisedly-named Sage, 42, head of health-care banking at Jefferies & Co, are divorcing. She alleges that he and twenty-or-so named colleagues collectively abused “alcohol, cocaine, mushrooms, Special-K, heroin.”

She also alleges that Sage, who is the father of their two daughters, aged ten and six, urinated on himself at the office annual party and elsewhere; that he defecated on himself while intoxicated and that he encouraged her to have sex with a named client while he had sex with the client’s named girlfriend. Oh, and one of their girls almost ingested cocaine left out on a pool table in their basement.

Sage and the identified colleagues have denied all of it. He has taken a leave of absence from Jefferies, which has reportedly already lost five clients. On Monday it was also reported that, in a desperate-sounding attempt at damage control, Jefferies CEO Richard Handler had taken a random drug test with the health-care bankers (all were clean)— which only added to the surreal nature of the fiasco.

Whatever the truth of the specifics here, it’s no surprise that rich guys on Wall Street do bad things. I know this. I write books about this. I’ve heard many, many ugly stories about strippers, orgies, private islands, private clubs, hush money, missing wedding rings on strip-club floors. The anecdotes all reveal something uncomfortably schizophrenic about our world…but even so: what has gotten into this woman? Mrs. Kelly, for some reason, doesn’t seem to have understood the truism that most people in her bubble-wrapped environs intuit more clearly than the Constitution: rich people get divorced quietly. It’s a simple equation. Scandal equals reputational, emotional and financial ruin—for all concerned.

Some examples of the cost of public brawls: In 1999 Patricia Duff, the dazzlingly beautiful political hostess tried to battle publicly with her husband Ronald Perelman. All that happened was the custody of their small daughter Caleigh was decided in his favor, while she was (predictably and stereotypically) painted as over-emotional.

Even when handsome Peter Cook callously cheated on stunning Christie Brinkley in 2008, their public battle was not damage-free for the former model. It led to column inches devoted to his claim that her coldness had alienated him, a speculation that she could probably have done without.

More recently Richard Gere and Carey Lowell ducked for cover—and a privacy seal—when it looked like their differences were being put under a harsh microscope not likely to flatter either.

But more important for Christina Kelly, whose husband earns $7 million per annum, is the loss of his earning power that her scandalous allegations may very likely cause. Injuring the family breadwinner is the same as injuring yourself.

“It’s not unusual for either partner to have access to sensational or powerful information, but it is highly unusual for them to use it in such a way as to shoot yourself in the foot and let out the economic foundations of the divorce,” says divorce attorney Deb Lans of the Manhattan firm Cohen Clair Lans. “You have to be very angry to be at the point where you no longer have any self-interest.”

I can’t help thinking (yes, completely self-servingly): if only Christina Kelly had read my new book, The Liar’s Ball, perhaps she would have read about a story that shows the prudence of taking a different path.

In the early 1990s Louann Hilbert was the middle-aged wife of one of America’s highest-paid CEOS, Steve Hilbert, the founder of insurance behemoth Conseco.

Hilbert was a flashy man who helicoptered five miles daily over corn fields to and from the office. One day Louann’s phone rang. It was the local BMW dealer. “How are you enjoying your new convertible?” he asked her.

“What new convertible?” she replied. It emerged that her husband, had secretly bought the car for his new girlfriend, Tomisue Tomlinson, a 23-year-old woman whom he met a few weeks previously when she jumped nearly naked out of a cake at a bachelor party.

Divorce ensued, along with a deluge of humiliating media coverage. Louann kept dead quiet, taking a settlement in Conseco stock which she quickly sold; the new Mr and Mrs Hilbert lived, by contrast, a public, glamorous life on a 33-acre estate with a 23,000 square foot house named Le Renaissance. The Indiana Pacers came to practice there….

And then, six years later, Conseco went bankrupt. Hilbert and other Conseco directors were sued for $700 million it emerged they’d borrowed from the company. The Hilberts would lose the estate and much else. But by then Louann Hilbert had not only remarried, she had actually pocketed around $100 million from her Conseco shares…

There are many people interviewed in the book who enjoyed telling me Louann’s story (except, obviously, Steve Hilbert). And there isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t smile, hearing it.

The former Mrs Hilbert’s story is a parable about a woman of class who needed no help from a wardrobe of carefully-co-ordinated riding-style clothes and Birkin bags, to exercise elegance and self-control. Ultimately she won out. Like I said: the rule is simple: rich people should divorce quietly…

‘Housewife Tycoon’ Took On ‘Mad Men’ NYC Real Estate Market and Won

Real estate, so an industry proverb goes, is a circle of men holding a revolver to one another’s heads. One moment’s hesitation—and bang—they’re all dead. But while alive they act and react with the adrenaline-rush of men who’ve got it all-on-the-line and who are hopelessly, haplessly connected to one another.

For three years I’ve been immersed in this masculine mesh of mistrust, reporting my latest book: The Liar’s Ball: The Saga of how One Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons. From my interviewees I’ve heard multiple versions of the same story: of how an entrepreneur’s financial success made multi-millionaires of his golfing foursome: he required a banker, a lawyer, a broker on the way up… they could talk bidding strategies, term-sheets and loans while driving and putting. It saved everyone time.

“You need people who are loyal to you if you are an entrepreneur” explains Eric Schwartz one former member of Deutsche Bank’s real estate group. What he didn’t say, but I ended up deducing from my research is that loyalty in this group is an exclusively male concern.

Simon Benattar

Simon Benattar

“We make the Wolf of Wall Street look tame,” one of my sources for the book told me. He outlined a relationship-based world in which the fee-earning professionals do whatever it takes to stay on the right side of the principle. Requirements include trips with mistresses to Las Vegas. “You bring a girl, I’ll bring a girl and if you don’t have a girl I’ll find you one…” one of my characters, a (married) “tycoon” generously offered to his (married) broker. Closing parties take place in hotel suites where the ratio of prostitutes to men is five to one.

The decadent lifestyle is as much a part of the adrenaline-fuelled risk-taking as is the daily battling over buildings, suing competitors, raising leverage; work-is-life and vice versa to these “rough riders” and it’s all one big intoxicating gamble. The impetus to win is valued far more highly than anything else, including, ironically, money—which explains why, in the development world, there are just as many spectacular falls as rises.

It’s not really a surprise then, that of all industries, real estate, despite being by far the largest market in the United States, remains the least attractive arena for women. Yes, there is a sprinkling of very successful women on the circumference—namely in the broking, banking and legal professions—but the central role of the developer remains dominated by men. The exceptions tend to be either daughters (for example, Ivanka Trump) or wives (Zhang Xin) but even their remarkable headway is blighted by a steady stream of chauvinist chatter about what they wear to meetings as well as speculation that they are only in the room because of either their father or husband respectively.

So, it was a treat as I was researching all this testosterone to stumble over a woman who played in this arena, and who played faster, harder, and wilder than the men. And the most interesting fact? She was better than them all!

Five feet two inches tall, Cecilia Benattar came from a working-class background in Manchester, England. She arrived in New York in her early thirties and didn’t even know where Times Square was. This didn’t stop her from pulling off the business shock of the decade in 1964. Functioning as the North American representative of the dashing British developer Max Rayne (later Lord Rayne] who was happy to delegate from London, she negotiated to partner with General Motors, then the biggest company in the world. To secure their interest she bluffed. She introduced a bunch of strangers to the GM board as “my staff”; she went around a conference room and said “Meet my CFO,” etc., of people she’d met the night before in order to give the false impression she was running a behemoth on a par with theirs. If she’d been discovered as a fraud, as the one-woman shop she truly was, what did she care? She had nothing to lose. “This was my chance at the brass ring. … I had no fear,” she said.

She struck a deal to pull down the Savoy Plaza Hotel, a treasured McKim Mead and White Hotel in New York’s midtown in the face of protests in the streets. She quelled those by changing the topic. She held a private auction of the hotel’s contents; it was the chicest second-hand sale New York society had ever seen: “It took a woman to think of this piecemeal disposal,” wrote Gloria Steinem in Ladies’ Home Journal. Yet being a woman was not something Benattar dwelt on. “I strive to make people forget me as a woman and see me just as someone who knows her job,” she said in an interview.

In the hotel’s place, she erected a gleaming new 50-story trophy building to house General Motors in what was then considered a deserted New York location. Her job was to make it attractive.

She pretended to hold an architectural competition but in reality handpickedEdward Durrell-Stone, because she felt she could control him. With the help of a lawyer named Jesse Wolf, a partner at a then tiny legal partnership named Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, she personally wrote every single lease in the building and chose every single non-GM tenant. They were all leading global brands: Estee Lauder, Revlon, the advertising firm Wells Rich and Greene and the broking firm Carter, Berlind, Weill & Levitt. Because of this, the building became the symbol of global excellence.

She broke with the mafia that controlled New York real estate and, instead, staffed the building with ex-convicts, many from minority backgrounds, because she believed in second chances.

“This was my chance at the brass ring. … I had no fear.”

She would put in long days and nights, chain-smoking and drafting and reading every word on every document personally. But she always left the office in time for dinner with her four children—and then she’d reappear back, smokes in hand. Her mother, she said in interviews, helped run her household. Her husband, an architect, worked for her until in the early 1970s she fired him and married another guy, a lawyer, who also worked for her.

She was very busy leasing in 1969 when her youngest daughter was born, so she didn’t name the baby for six months. Inevitably, there were jokes about this. She didn’t care. She was supremely self-assured. She liked crosswords: she once entered a national competition and thought she might win, so she shut down the offices for two weeks so her employees could help her win it.

She was fiercely loyal to those she respected. She worshipped Rayne and they corresponded daily by telex; she repaid Jesse Wolff by insisting Weil Gotshal lease space in the GM building; she promised him they’d remain the only law firm in situ and that this would be the making of them. She was right. The little firm became GM’s lawyers and evolved into one of the most dominant legal firms in the world.

Her downfall came about, because for a second she forgot that to swim in the shark pool, you have to always act like a shark.

She refused to participate in political bribery, which is the unspoken prerequisite backbone of this world. New York Mayor John Lindsay asked her for $100,000 for a potential presidential campaign. She refused on principle.

And it was this that felled her. Lindsay reneged on a deal to rezone a second residential building she was converting to commercial use; this cost Rayne millions and, against her wishes, he decided it was time to get out of New York. It was time to sell the GM building, something his son says he regretted until his death in 2003. Had he held on to it, the building would have been worth more than the rest of his vast portfolio combined.

Benattar moved to Canada and formed her own real estate company, NIOT—an acronym that stood for Now It’s Our Turn (an acronym that made Rayne laugh). Before her death in 2003 the Canadian developer Paul Reichmann flew her to London’s Canary Wharf to get her input; he was one of the few who knew just how valuable her ideas and her brawn were.

“She wasn’t a woman; she was a man,” is one of the things that was said about her. Her popular nickname was “the housewife tycoon”—not a label one imagines today’s female business leaders, with their talk of leaning in and getting their partners to do the laundry, want said of them.

But Benattar’s story serves as a timely reminder that if we women really want to break into the tawdry circle of men holding revolvers and taking each other to Las Vegas strip clubs, it can be done. The better question might be this: Do we want to go there?

Vicky Ward’s The Liar’s Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons is published by John F. Wiley & Sons

New York law firm’s bond with most expensive office tower in US

Everyone knows that office space, ideally, reflects a company’s brand (see Facebook and Apple’s multibillion-dollar headquarters). But in the era of the “cloud”, there have been loud mutterings in the client-services industry, especially among law firms, that high rents in prestigious buildings are no longer justified. Certainly this question was raised recently inside the law offices of Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP as the partnership considered whether or not to renew its lease, due in 2019, in the General Motors (GM) building in New York, the most expensive office tower in America. The lawyers had been there since 1968.

On September 30 it was announced that Weil had decided to stay put – at an eyebrow-raising cost. Their new lease is said to be about $150 a sq ft, which is known in New York as a “hedge-fund level” rent. No other law firms pay anything close to this. “[The building] is part of who we are and our good fortune,” Barry Wolf, the firm’s executive partner, told Crain’s New York Business.

So why the counter-cultural move? What Wolf didn’t say – after all, he’s a lawyer – is that the bond between Weil Gotshal and the GM building is so entrenched, that for some partners, including the firm’s high-profile former managing partner, Ira Millstein, 87, the idea of breaking it had been “frightening”.

9c0f9f50-54de-11e4-b2ea-00144feab7deLast summer, while negotiations were under way, I met with the snowy-haired Millstein in his sunlit office on the 32nd floor. He was anxious to explain his sensitivity. “This building is a game-changer for us,” he explained.

Back in 1962, Millstein was a partner in a predominantly Jewish firm that struggled to get a foot in the door with establishment clients. Enter Max Rayne, later Lord Rayne, a dapper English property developer who wore tailored suits, smoked long slim cigars and had a passion for art through which he’d met a fellow art aficionado and Weil partner named Jesse D Wolff. Wolff, Millstein recalls “was a very nice man and a very good lawyer”. Rayne asked Wolff for help in purchasing a block of land at 767 Fifth Avenue. It sounded straightforward but what Rayne was asking for was almost the equivalent of asking to go to the moon – and a good deal more controversial. Rayne needed to knock down a McKim Mead and White hotel – right as New Yorkers were starting to protest the feckless never-ending dismantling of their landscape – and he also wanted to negotiate with GM, the biggest company in the world, to build a global headquarters in an area of Manhattan where no one else worked.

It sounded to Millstein like an impossible sell. But, somehow GM bought in. The new building would be designed by architect du jour Edward Durrell-Stone. It would be all white marble and 705ft high. When it went up the critics applauded and the protesters were silent. GM took the bottom 25 floors, including a showroom. The upper half was leased to blue-chip brands: among them, Estée Lauder, Helena Rubinstein, the advertising agency Wells, Rich, Greene and the brokerage firm Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt.

Out of gratitude, Rayne pressed Wolff to take space too. But Wolff demurred. The rent at $7 a sq ft was double what Weil currently paid. But then Millstein and Wolff went up to stand on the roof. Millstein looked out: “It was just wow!” Warily, they rented half a floor. “We did this with great trepidation,” says Millstein.

But GM found they enjoyed working with Wolff so much that he became their go-to adviser. He was invited to GM board meetings in a dark-panelled room where the attendees at one end of the table could barely hear the chief executive speaking at the other.

Weil took the lead on GM’s litigation, credit and antitrust advisory work. And in 1991 the lawyers helped structure the deal that took GM back to Detroit. Millstein thought the move was a big mistake. “It took them out of the melee where people exchange ideas,” he said. But he wasn’t being paid for that kind of advice.

In 2009 the lawyers found themselves working on GM’s bankruptcy – which, ironically, only enriched the booming law partnership.

So, as Millstein and his colleagues weighed the pros and cons of whether to stay in the building so responsible for their metamorphosis, the importance of following their gut, of not being afraid of bucking the trend was not lost on them. On the other hand they got where they are by being pragmatists. “Mike Bloomberg now sits on the middle of the floor over at Bloomberg,” one of them mentioned aloud.

Ultimately they compromised. They are giving up 20 per cent of their space, and reconfiguring what’s left into an open-plan, more efficient office. But they agreed that they are not ready to shed the GM building, which remains, in their view, not simply a glossy marketing vehicle but the visceral, tangible embodiment of who they are. It is hard not to admire their story and their spirit – and indeed their building. Only time will tell whether the bold statement was worth it.

‘The Liar’s Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons’ by Vicky Ward is published by John F Wiley & Sons on Wednesday, £19.99

Illustration by Heather Gately

The Diary: Vicky Ward

“This table is reserved for Mr X – but you can have it . . . ” The maître d’ at the Grill Room in New York’s Four Seasons showed me to the only free table in the restaurant, which is notoriously jammed at lunchtime. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. “I’ll figure out what to do with Mr. X when he gets here . . . ”

b965c96a-b08f-11e3-8efc-00144feab7deMr X (not, obviously, his real name) is one of the main characters in a book I’ve almost finished writing. Broadly, it’s an investigation exposing the shady stories of various real estate moguls who’d prefer people to think they’d made their money on the straight and narrow. It’s taken me more than three years to report and research; only a few days earlier Mr X, whom I’ve spent days interviewing, had called me to ask if he could possibly be relegated in the book from a “protagonist” to “passer-by”. He was coming under “pressure”. “I didn’t tell my wife I spoke to you,” he said. “I lied.”

Lying is a job requirement for many of the characters in the book – and their wives know it, too – so I told him to relax. I got on with writing.

. . .

I’d gone out to lunch partly because I wanted a break from the grubby world festering in my head; more practically, I’d wanted a change from the monotony of my routine. I have been like a robot. I sit down at the same hour each morning and type. Through one window I see the trunk of a leafless tree, out of the other there are the pale bricks of the building next door. I hear passing traffic but don’t feel part of it.

So “lunch” is a critical part of mental health maintenance. I sit there thinking: “Amazing . . . you can still talk!” Better yet, I can even talk about things and people who are not in my book. I feel normal, clean . . .

Except today. Mr X arrived. I waved. He ignored me. The charade continues.

. . .

On my way out of the restaurant I passed a peaceful corridor known as “Picasso Alley”, now the source of a noisy controversy. At stake is a 20ft theatre curtain depicting a bullfighting scene. Painted by Pablo Picasso for the Ballets Russes production of Le Tricorne in 1919, it has hung on a wall in the Seagram building since the Four Seasons first opened there in 1959.

While the building and its interior are protected by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, the curtain isn’t protected as, technically, it isn’t architecture: it’s art. Aby Rosen, a developer who is the building’s owner, was reportedly overheard saying he thinks it’s a schmatte – Yiddish for “rag”. He wants it moved. The New York Landmarks Conservancy, which owns the curtain, argues it should not be moved, since it’s integral to the interior and moving it could damage it. For the moment, it is staying put: the Conservancy has won a temporary restraining order.

Perhaps my book research has jaundiced me but I find “the chatter about theschmatte” on one level rather humorous. New York developers sometimes go to absurd lengths to cover their tracks when dealing with historic buildings or precious artefacts. Deals are negotiated in secret and leaked only when it’s too late to stop them; public relations firms are hired to smooth over image issues. No one wants to get caught repeating, even in a small way, the tragic 1963 destruction of Penn Station.

Except Aby Rosen who, uniquely it seems, says what he really thinks aloud. “If we break it, we buy it,” his lawyer told the judge in reference to moving the Picasso – which, of course, only further enraged the “schmatte” preservationists who are aware that, for Rosen, such an expense is pocket change.

. . .

On to the New York Public Library where there’s another battle between culture and commerce, of a far more gargantuan nature. This one does have echoes of the Penn Station debacle and will potentially be billed to taxpayers, so there’s not much to smile about.

In 2008, the British architect Lord Norman Foster was selected to design a $300m renovation of the library’s glorious Beaux Arts main branch on 42nd St.

Late in 2012, after four long years, Lord Foster unveiled his design, which was described by New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman as having the “elegance of a suburban mall”. Worse, Foster proposed demolishing the steel book “stacks” that were an intrinsic part of the original design. A rival (American) architect confided in me that some trustees had begun to feel, too late, that they had been seduced by Lord Foster’s “British accent”.

Enter Anthony Marx: a sprightly man, named library president in 2011, Marx is an academic who does not want to go down in history as the man who ruined the library. He’s consulting with Lord Foster in the hope that a redesign will provide resolution.

Marx and I spent the afternoon looking at the library’s treasures. Among them was a handwritten draft of Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration of Independence, which, intriguingly, had an extra paragraph, underlined, in which Jefferson condemned the slave trade. Jefferson felt he had to excise it to placate delegates from Georgia and South Carolina before signing the final version. We stood contemplating the extraordinary ramifications of what would have happened if that paragraph had stayed in.

. . .

Home, finally, where my other half is hosting a fundraiser for two new colleges at Yale. This project is delightfully controversy-free since Robert (Bob) AM Stern, Yale’s dean of architecture, is in charge and the buildings are – like their architect – unapologetically old-fashioned.

As he showed his slides depicting airy rooms dedicated to learning, I wanted to be 18 again and go back to college. The images were reassuring for someone who has spent the past three years writing a book, something that people keep telling me is pointlessly out-of-vogue. Stern sipped his Martini and moved on to the last slide. “Here’s the library,” he said. He pointed at the shelves. “And those are books. Real books. I promise you they will be there, if I have to buy them myself!”

Vicky Ward’s next book is scheduled for publication by John F Wiley & Sons later this year

Jill Kelley: The Real Story Lies in Tampa

A couple of weeks back I laid into Howie Kurtz for printing an interview with Jill Kelley that was shamefully light on extracting answers, in particular the only answer we want from Jill Kelley: namely, how did a woman like her — a voluptuous Tampan housewife who throws parties — come to be such a close friend of the nation’s former top military leader, David Petraeus? And are we safe as a result of this “friendship”?

Kurtz instead talked about the stresses faced by a “private” person thrown into the media spotlight — and argued that this perspective merited a story. Well, that would be fair enough if Jill Kelley truly wanted to be a “private person.” But Jill Kelley is the equivalent of a George Clooney ex-girlfriend whining that her photograph has appeared in US Weekly. Kelley and her sister Natalie Khawam are military groupies. They have posed for numerous society photographs in Tampa. In fact they are much more than just military groupies: they are fame and money groupies. Just ask the Steinbrenner family, or even their sister Caroline’s ex-husband Tony Khawam! Or an ex-boyfriend of Natalie’s Lew Blum. I know all this because unlike Howie Kurtz, unfortunately, I have spent so many months researching the Kelleys — including a week in Tampa, Florida — I may as well have earned myself a masters degree in the subject by now. (Read the <a href=”http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/jill-kelley-and-natalie-khawam-history”>full story</a> at Town and Country magazine).

Obviously, had I known what I was in for, I wouldn’t have chosen to dwell in such a deep abyss of tackiness, but total immersion in Kelley-land did actually hold some insights more valuable and intriguing than a simple study of the Machiavellian psychology of a pair of social climbers.

David Petraeus, his friend Gen. John Allen and Vice Admiral Robert Harward — all senior military personnel and all close friends of the Kelleys — only ever encountered and fell into close friendships with people like Jill Kelley and her sister Natalie for one reason: Tampa.

Had our military’s top brass been stationed almost anywhere else, a friendship like this could not have happened or been sustained. But Tampa, as I discovered, is not like anywhere else. Tampa, I realized when I got there, wasn’t just the background to the Petraeus/Kelly/Broadwell/Allen brouhaha. It WAS the brouhaha. Socially, it is more porous than quicksand. In Tampa people get out of prison and run (almost successfully) for political office. Politicians are thrilled to dine with anyone — well, almost anyone — and they do. So do the military who are thrilled to be feted by people who don’t ask them “So how are we doing in Afghanistan?” and who treat them as reverentially as Manhattanites treat billionaires — when in fact they are quite far away from being even millionaires.

In Tampa they get to kick back with the locals and Petraeus, especially, played fooseball with civilians into the wee hours. Many officers loved to watch the trains run in a “train” room owned by Marc Rosenthal, a popular member of town. Nobody stands on ceremony. Small wonder that the military men thought Jill Kelley and her sister was just “riots.” As Natalie says in my piece, “I am Petraeus’ version of People magazine.” It’s what he was looking for.

The townsfolk are desperately proud of MacDill airforce base and its inhabitants who provide Tampa with half its economy. But they are just as proud of Mons Venus, the strip joint where most of the military go, and where the nude lap dance was invented. It is a town full of contradictions and serendipity. One night there I found myself at dinner inside a beautiful house a few doors down from the Kelleys. The son of my hosts works with, of all people, Paula Broadwell’s husband, Scott, in Charlotte… the Kelleys have absolutely no idea of the remarkable connection…

Another night I found myself helping volunteers feed veterans and I encountered a man who knew the Kelleys… he was George W. Bush’s cousin. You could see the family resemblance in his features. His name was GW Bill Hamblin. He served in Vietnam and now he works hard for AT&T because his pension is so small. Every week he organizes a group, the Bayshore Patriots, that stands on Bayshore Boulevard about a mile down from the Kelley’s house and waves red flags at the sea. “We’ve been doing it since 9/11” he told me. “It’s a warning to terrorists. We are telling them to stay away. We are still standing.”

His impression of Jill Kelley whom he has seen at various military benefits? “That’s just a lady who wants to be noticed,” he said and went back to waving his flags into the wind.

It was hard not to be moved by his tenacity and that of his jean-clad group.

That’s why I got so cross that Howie Kurtz wrote what he wrote. Because he didn’t know the real story about Jill Kelley. The real story lies in Tampa — where Jill Kelley was certainly not known to shy away from the press or the famous. David Petraeus was Tampa’s George Clooney — and she and her sister were blatant wannabe Stacey Keiblers. V

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Media Ethics Journalist Howie Kurtz Should Be Ashamed of Himself: New Low in American Journalism

Last Sunday I got an email from one Kevin Kalwary, a Tampa-based private investigator who knows Jill Kelley, the woman at the heart of the Petraeus scandal. Kalwary and a legal team had advised Kelley on a building she’d invested in, in downtown Tampa around 2007 and had helped her sort out the legal messes involved. [There was a tenant to be evicted and Kelley’s investment became worthless]. He’s a nice guy — and had long thought Kelley should speak up for herself.

His email read: “Vicky,

I think I have convinced Jill Kelly to speak with you if you are still interested? Let me know.”

I called Kalwary. I had got to know him and a great many people who know the Kelleys when I spent a week just before Thanksgiving in Tampa researching a 5,000 word piece on Jill Kelley, her sister, Natalie Khawam and her husband Scott, all embroiled in the saga of David Petraues’ resignation as director of the CIA

(For that piece, you will have to wait a couple of weeks for the next issue of Town and Country. By the time you’ve read it I hope there will be a new national catchphrase: “Only in Tampa… only in Tampa”…).

But back to last Sunday afternoon. I called Kevin immediately. I told him I’d fly to Tampa at once but how did I know Jill would not pull out — and what had happened to her Praetorian guard of a publicist, Judy Smith? She who had inspired ABC’s Scandal — and gotten a front page article in the New York Times Style section out of the whole debacle?

Well, Smith had been fired, Kalwary told me. Jill was fed up. She wanted to speak. (I did wonder if she thought it was her turn to be on the front page of the New York Times Style section and then I reprimanded myself for being uncharitable…). “Ok,” I said, I would get on a plane immediately. He went back to Kelley and then phoned me back.

“This woman is just impossible,” he said with a sigh. “She wants the promise of a cover and an assurance that the interview will be favorable.”

I laughed.

“Kevin,” I said “We both know that anyone who promises that is either low-rent or lying.”

He agreed — and we left it at that.

Until today, I saw, to my astonishment, that Jill Kelley appeared to have got her conditions — not in People magazine (she had told Kalwary that’s where she was headed), or the National Enquirer or Us Weekly — but The Daily Beast.

The Daily Beast??

And what’s more the “journalist” who penned the simpering interview that was mind-boggling in one aspect only — its lack of finding any real answers from the interviewee — is Howie Kurtz. Howie Kurtz?

Howie Kurtz has set himself up for years as the watchdog of “media bias” in his various platforms: The Washington Post until 2010; CNN’s Reliable Sources (which he hosts) and the Daily Beast — where he is paid a reported $600,000… hopefully not for puff pieces like the one he put out today…

Among the books he has authored is Media Circus: The Trouble with America’s Newspapers.

On Wikipedia this 1993 book apparently “identifies a host of problems afflicting U.S. newspapers and also offers some suggestions. Among the troubles identified by Kurtz are: timid leadership, a spreading “tabloid” approach to news with a growing focus on celebrities and personal scandal, poor coverage of racial issues and the Persian Gulf war, increasing bureaucracy and a “pasteurization” of the news.”

Well, what does Howie think of this interview — headlined “Jill Kelley Says Paul Broadwell Tried to ‘Blackmail’ Her”? Well, he thinks it’s fantastic. He emailed me this morning. “There were absolutely no conditions for my interview with Jill Kelley. And I don’t agree that the piece was favorable — it was an opportunity for a woman who has been thrust into the vortex of a scandal to tell her side for the first time.”

Kevin Kalwary does not believe this. “I don’t believe there were no conditions,” he wrote me.

Kelley’s publicist has gone mute and is not returning my calls.

OK: I’m not a judge. Howie, like Kalwary, seems like a nice guy. Let’s say there were no “conditions” for this piece, what do we think of it as an interview? Has Kurtz made the most of this amazing “opportunity”?

Let’s take it from the top.

The headline? “BLACKMAIL?”

Bizarrely, nowhere — nowhere — in the piece does Kelley explain how Broadwell tried to blackmail her; she won’t show Kurtz Broadwell’s alleged emails to her and in fact “someone close to Kelley” says the emails were “threatening, without being explicit.” Is this blackmail? I dunno. Apparently the U.S. Justice Department doesn’t think so. It looked into Broadwell’s emails and decided not to press charges. So, I repeat, where’s the blackmail? Am I missing something? Or was the inclusion of that word in the headline just the thought bubble of Tina Brown, Howie’s editirix, of whom I am enormously fond, trying to come up with something punchy to awaken people after a sleepy Inauguration Day? Experience tells me, yes, probably.

Then to the body of Kurtz’s poem of praise — I mean — interview with Jill Kelley: What she won’t say is a lot. In fact it’s a great deal more than what she will say. She won’t say how many emails she and General John Allen, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan — a matter still under investigation — traded. She won’t talk in detail about her friendship with Gen. Petraeus and how she, a civilian, came to be so close to the former head of the CIA.

But here’s what she will say: She says she was shocked — shocked — to have her daughter’s birthday party ruined by paparazzi — and yet the story had already broken before the party — and she went ahead with it anyway. Half of Tampa knew the paparazzi was coming — and she didn’t? Now that is odd — but I note Howie doesn’t dwell on it.

She is upset there are errors on her Wikipedia page (and why, exactly, does she have a Wikipedia page at all?). She does not find it unusual that Generals Petraeus and Allen wrote on behalf of her sister Natalie in her child custody case with her ex-husband even though the judge, Judge Neal E. Kravitz ruled that Natalie was “a psychologically unstable person” with “an unsteady moral and ethical compass.” The judge reported that a court-appointed psychiatrist had found that Natalie’s allegations against her ex-husband — which included his putting a gun to her head — were “part of an ever-expanding set of sensational accusations … so numerous, so extraordinary and so distorted that they defy any common-sense view of reality.” (Natalie is appealing the verdict). Yet Howie accepts Jill’s explanation that Natalie was just her sister — and she, Jill, is nothing more than much-wronged housewife. Howie prattles on about “ordinary people pushed into the media vortex”… but he does not address the apparent contradiction that if she’s so “ordinary” why is she worried about her Wikipedia page?

It’s baffling stuff…

Kevin Kalwary emailed me “My God what an awful story. I can’t believe any true journalist would go with that story.”

The comments at the bottom of Kurtz’s article seem, mostly, to echo that thinking.

For the real story on the Kelleys, you’ll need to wait two weeks. Meanwhile, I am sorry Howie, but today is not a good one for American journalism. This really is a “Media Circus.” Time for a new book? V

Hilary Rosen Should Donate to Multiple Sclerosis Foundations

I thought I was done blogging for the day.

But, like Ann Romney, my sister suffers from Multiple Sclerosis. So, even though Hilary Rosen has correctly apologized for attacking Ann Romney for staying at home, being rich, and not representing economically-challenged women in America, I am still furious about the saga in a way, I suspect, that only people who know firsthand about MS, as Multiple Sclerosis is known, can be furious.

Today Ms. Rosen referred to Ann Romney’s “illness”.

Ha. Illness sounds like a head cold.

MS is far from being a head cold.

Every time I’ve watched Ann Romney up there on that podium late at night with her husband, all that energy flowing during the Primaries, I am amazed.

Because I know how tough it is for people who suffer from MS to manage their energy. I know that the later in the day it gets, the harder it is for them — and no matter how rich you are, there is no magic bullet to make you feel better or the weakness go away.

Drugs can help but at the end of the day you have to manage your days and your time so you do not get overtired. Ann Romney has said she copes very well with a mixture of Eastern and Western medicines — and she looks great. But who knows what the real story is? Recently I was sitting in my office with Scott Johnson, the CEO and founder of the Myelin Repair Foundation — a non-profit organization looking at alternative treatments for the disease. Johnson has had MS for 36 years and told me “MS is a secret disease. Far more people have it than is documented.” In other words they prefer to struggle privately than broadcast it.

My sister has to grocery shop in the mornings and rest in the afternoons. She doesn’t like people knowing quite how tired she gets.

I know of others who are much, much worse off. They cannot drive, they cannot walk, and slowly the brain goes too.

That Ann Romney even appears on the campaign trail with her husband, let alone supported him to run for president — not once, but twice — speaks volumes about her courage and utter selflessness. I have also noticed how little she talks about herself, her own battles both with MS and with breast cancer. When she’s up there, it’s all about Mitt.

I don’t care what your politics are, but to attack someone who suffers from a debilitating chronic illness — and has also battled breast cancer — because they are rich and unrepresentative of women who work? What is that?

Many people with MS cannot really work. Especially not in highly-charged America with its grueling hours.

Yes, Ms. Rosen is right: women and women’s economics are hugely important and should be debated heavily in the build up to November. All of us mothers worry about earning enough, paying for our children, and we all want policies to incentivize us to do this. But to knock someone with a chronic illness who has not really talked about her illness, not exploited it for political gain, is shockingly wrong and grotesquely ill-informed about the disease in question.

I am very glad and grateful Ms Rosen has apologized. Let’s drop this line of attack. And start over.

But a donation to the National Multiple Sclerosis society — or to Mr Johnson’s foundation, might not go amiss. V

The Ultimate Appeal of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’

So, finally, thanks to a vacation, I got around to reading — well parsing — the bestselling phenomenon du jour: Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James, the romance novel that deals in S&M sex between the ludicrously named would-be dominator Christian Grey and his “oh-I-don’t-want-to-be-submissive-or-do-I?” partner Anastasia Steele.

Why did I put myself through this? To be clear: it was not for sex — or literary — education. No, my straight hairdresser tells me he’s reading it to improve relations with his female clients who have all read it — surreptitiously, on their Nooks. So, I feel it’s my job, as an author, corporate publicist, TV commentator to understand modern culture, probably every bit as much as my hairdresser, who assured me: “There’s not much in it you wouldn’t find in a Harlequin romance.”

Well, yes and no.

I haven’t read a Harlequin romance since I was about sixteen but I don’t think you’d find whipping, spanking, and hitting in a “red room of pain” in a regular romance read.

But Fifty Shades of Grey is not really about S&M sex at all. Its appeal is that it’s a brilliant psychological thriller — albeit a truly horribly written one.

The book keeps you turning the pages because you want to know how far he will push her, mentally, physically; quite regularly he tries to control her food intake, which appalled me until I realized that I’ve watched husbands on New York’s Upper East Side admonish their emaciated wives, in public, not to have dessert, so perhaps this isn’t as weird as I originally thought — but far more importantly, why does he do this?

You sense he both does and doesn’t want to do this to her — and this is one of the book’s two great strengths. He is hugely conflicted by his mysteriously self-imposed role as the dominator. He does and doesn’t want to hurt her.

That’s why the title suggests he is complicated: it is called Fifty Shades of Grey… not Blue and Orange: A Story of Why Two People Were Completely Wrong for One Another… So how will his inner conflict play out, as slowly he falls in love with her?

And as for her? This is the book’s second strength: and the bigger one. Her story is really about her psychological development as a woman on a complicated, intense journey from virginity to learning what it is she really wants from men, from relationships — but far more interestingly, what does she want for herself? This, I think, is the book’s ultimate appeal. The real reason why it’s on top of the New York Times Bestseller list, leaving more established authors — and publishers — scratching their heads.

The book’s great seduction is that is poses a question most women — and for that matter, men — grapple with, secretly, usually every day. They don’t express it because it’s not very politically correct. Would you choose a life of security over love? The answer is supposed to be “of course not.”

Anastasia initially falls not just for Christian Grey’s sex appeal, but for his billions, his helicopter, his glider, his cars, his clothes, his brains, his wit, his vulnerability, and, yes, his controlling tendencies, the fact he’s a challenge; she realizes he’s in love with her — or the closest he’s ever come to being in love — and even so part of him is untouchable. So once she’s fully hooked by him, the question remains what should she do about their emotional (as opposed to sexual) inequality?

In this book she leaves…

But how many women would have the courage to leave like Anastasia when they could have all that money, power, sex — but not love on equal terms?

Think again of those New York women being told not to have dessert by their husbands in case they gain weight; think of the husbands who brag: “My wife is seven months pregnant — and look — she’s only gained ten lbs.” (Yes, I’ve heard this more often than I care to remember.) I think of the tortured look in so many women’s eyes — most of them mothers and wives — as they struggle to be seen for who they really are. Anastasia realizes she is caught in an unequal emotional relationship. Unlike most people who have those sorts of trappings on offer, she chooses for herself: she runs.

So, Fifty Shades of Grey, with all its ghastly prose, raises serious and important questions for women — and, actually, for men. And, nope, I didn’t think I’d be saying that about a so-called “mommy porn” book. V