High life
Upstairs, downstairs
Taki
Alas, the marriage did not last. Once he became a serious billionaire, Perelman needed a tall blonde by his side, something Claudia was not. In came Patricia Duff, having left her Hollywood producer schmuck of a hubby following two box office disasters. La Duff is a Clinton fundraiser and looks like a Third Reich poster girl. And as everyone in Bageltown knows, the bigger and more Germanic the blonde, the shorter and balder the Noo Yawk billionaire. It was a marriage made in deja vu!
Mind you, Perelman isn't as bad as he sounds. Far from it, in fact. I had teased him for years, but when we finally met at a mutual friend's house —the designer Car- oline Herrera — he was extremely civil. Ditto the new wife. I saw them at the Miller's New York ball last autumn and asked Briinnhilde to dance, but for some strange reason could not get out of my seat. She laughed.
Last week the Perelmans were in the news when a Noo Yawk weekly reported how employees in the Perelman household are not permitted to directly address their employers unless they're spoken to first. (Quite right.) 'Rather, communications to and from the household work force are routed through the head of the household staff.' It was also alleged that staff mem- bers are encouraged to make themselves as invisible as possible. 'If you're walking past a room and the Perelmans are coming toward you, you just look the other way.'
Now the Perelmans are hardly the first to act in such a manner. In feudal Japan, peo- ple not of the top drawer would immedi- ately get off the sidewalk and bow low when a samurai strolled by. ,Again, quite right. Having been accustomed to consort with the great and to avoid as far as possi- ble those unfortunate and offensive per- sons that constitute the common man, I do understand — where the samurais are con- cerned. The Perelmans are not top-drawer, and should stick to their old customs of touchy-feely a la Draft Dodger.
The way Ron's ex-wife has. Claudia Cohen stuck to her own and ran off with Republican New York senator Al D'Amato, a man who claims the bags under his eyes are Gucci. Alas, that didn't last either.
The first person to pull this 'don't look and don't speak to us' stunt was Courtney Ross, the widow of Steve Ross, a man who started in a funeral parlour and ended up head of Time-Warner. The egregious widow once chartered a boat and was shocked to hear members of the crew openly addressing her and her gravedigger of a husband. She quickly put a stop to it by establishing a chain of command. First the lowly sailor wrote a note to the captain, who then passed it on in writing to the Ross butler, who brought up the matter at Mrs Ross's convenience. My only reaction when I read this was, why, oh why are the nouveaux riches allowed to own yachts?
Be that as it may, the Big Bagel and Hol- lywood does provide fun material for over- seas hacks. Imagine how dull it would be if, as in Greek drama, the murders were done offstage. The murders of manners, that is.
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