Jocelyne Wildenstein, the Swiss-born socialite and former wife of Alec Wildenstein, the scion of an art-world dynasty, whose lavish lifestyle, bitter divorce and exotic cosmetic surgeries brought her tabloid fame, died on Tuesday at her home in Paris. She was 79.
The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said Lloyd Klein, her longtime partner.
Mr. Wildenstein was a member of one of the wealthiest families in the French art world, with a vast and mysterious collection of old masters as well as galleries in New York and Tokyo. Ms. Wildenstein was the only child of a clothier and a lawyer. She counted Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer, among her jet-set friends. She was beautiful, athletic and up for adventure; the couple met while hunting game in Africa.
But in 1997, after 19 years of marriage and two children, Mr. Wildenstein wanted to see other people, and they were living apart, he in their limestone townhouse in Manhattan and she at their ranch in Kenya. When Ms. Wildenstein, escorted by two bodyguards, surprised her husband at the townhouse — where he was in bed with his 21-year-old girlfriend — he brandished a gun. The bodyguards called the police, and Mr. Wildenstein spent the night in jail.
Their acrimonious divorce then played out histrionically in the tabloids, which breathlessly noted the couple’s excesses: Their monthly expenditures of $1 million. The $350,000 Chanel dress she’d bought for a New Year’s Eve party. Her yearly phone bill of $60,000. The $80,000 he reportedly paid a fashion photographer to create a portfolio for a young Russian model with whom he was having an affair. Their East 64th Street townhouse, home to 10 Bonnard paintings, a black leopard, a lynx and a sand shark that lived in a wall-size tank. Their 66,000-acre African ranch and game preserve, where two tigers lived in a bulletproof glass cave overlooking a pool. The his-and-hers plastic surgeries (eye lifts, apparently). And, most notably, her own metamorphosis from a delicate-featured young woman into an otherworldly being with catlike eyes, at a cost estimated to be $2 million.
Tabloids called her “The Catwoman.” “The Bride of Wildenstein,” read a headline in The New York Post. A British paper compared her to a space alien. Mr. Wildenstein complained in court that “her continuing plastic surgery and hair transplants and tattooing” were subjecting him to public ridicule, and temporarily reduced her monthly allowance to $50,000 from $200,000; a judge ordered it restored, with the stipulation that none of it be spent on surgery.
By 1999, a divorce settlement had been reached. Ms. Wildenstein was widely reported to have been awarded $2.5 billion, the ranch in Africa and $100 million in alimony for 13 years.
Through it all, and beyond, Ms. Wildenstein became an avatar of body dysmorphia, a cautionary tale of cosmetic excess, her name shorthand for a self-improvement project gone terribly awry. But she disavowed that pathology — she averred that her surgeries were maintenance, not renovation, and that her eyes were her own — and seemed to embrace her notoriety. Clad in leather, stilettos and, often, cat prints, she became a nightclub fixture, a star of the underground. In 1998, when she won the Nightlife Award from Life, an after-hours club on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, guests at the ceremony explained her appeal to The New York Times.
“She’s an enigma,” said Patrick Fox, an art dealer. “She’s like a lost Caravaggio that we didn’t know existed before she was brought into the world.”
Those who were blind to her allure, another clubgoer said, “are the people who shop at the Gap.”
For her part, Ms. Wildenstein said she was pleased to be honored. “I am very proud of it, but I feel like everybody here,” she told The Times. “It’s what I like. Always. To feel like everybody else.”
Jocelyne Perisset was born on Sept. 7, 1945, in Lausanne, Switzerland. (Her first name is often spelled without that second “e.” As Ms. Wildenstein told The Times of London last year, “People in Europe want to put the ‘e,’ and in America they don’t put the ‘e’ — it came on and off, this ‘e’.”) Her father, Armand, was a custom clothier; her mother, Liliane, oversaw the home when Jocelyne was young, then became a lawyer.
When Jocelyne was 17, she began dating Cyril Piguet, a Swiss movie producer, and after a few years they moved to Paris together. She was 31 and dating Sergio Gobbi, a filmmaker, when she met Mr. Wildenstein, who was also involved with someone else, on a trip to Kenya. The two were holed up in an animal blind hunting lions at 5 a.m., after which they rode motorcycles to a hilltop and shared a first kiss. By all accounts they were smitten with each other, and they married in Las Vegas in 1978.
In addition to Mr. Klein, Ms. Wildenstein is survived by her children, Diane Wildenstein and Alec Wildenstein Jr., and three grandchildren. Mr. Wildenstein died in 2008.
She met Mr. Klein, a fashion designer, in 2003, when she accepted an invitation to one of his shows. Their relationship was stormy. In 2016, they were both arrested after assaulting each other in the Trump World Tower apartment they shared, but a year later they had made up, and Mr. Klein proposed to her with a 32-carat engagement ring in the Versace mansion in Miami. (At her death, they had yet to marry.)
Throughout her life, Ms. Wildenstein remained a tabloid staple — and seemed to revel in that status. She made headlines when she sold her cat-themed jewels in 2002; when she evaded eviction for unpaid rent at her United Nations Plaza apartment in 2013; and when New York State’s labor commissioner sued her for failing to pay a personal assistant in 2014.
In 2018, Ms. Wildenstein declared bankruptcy, telling reporters that a Velázquez painting she had been guaranteed was a forgery, a Cézanne had been undervalued, and her income was zero. Mr. Klein, in an interview, said that the bankruptcy was a “technicality” and that she had been in good shape financially.
In recent years, Ms. Wildenstein turned to television to tell her story. She is said to be the subject of a forthcoming HBO documentary, as well as a reality series.
“I think I had a lot of fun,” Ms. Wildenstein told Interview magazine in 2023. “I found freedom, and instead of having to behave according to a program, I could suddenly have the freedom to appreciate it.”
The post Jocelyne Wildenstein, Socialite and Tabloid ‘Catwoman,’ Dies at 79 appeared first on New York Times.
