Heir Mail #15
Heir Mail #15
This is mostly about things rich women owned or will own, hopefully a brain bath.
Hello! You’re reading HeirMail, the only newsletter to come from me (hi) setting a Google Alert for the word “heiress” and then just writing about whatever pops up.
This week we are doing ONLY! GLAMOUR! (Basically.)
CTRL + F:
When the tenant’s unnamed but the building has one: Culross House
Big ole art auction outta Texas
Westfield shopping center heiress owns houses
Our nearly-recurring feature Ghislaine Trackswell returns
From the rest of the Alert: Paris got a new fiancé and a new bestie, Nicky’s here too, the rich writer who hates Alexey Navalny, Gracie Hunt gunning for a scholarship, Anna Delvey long read rec, Kendall Jenner reps the 818 and the 818 reps back, toilet roll heiress thin now, Anerlisa Muigai is not your spokeswoman
“Inside London home rented out by Chinese billionaire heiress, 24, for £4,200-a-night,” The Mirror
“Inside home Chinese billionaire heiress, 24, is renting for whopping £4,200 a night,” The Daily Star
“House is let for £4,246 per night - and it’s gone to a 24 year old,” Letting Agent Today
“Mansion Global Daily: A Price Record in Sight in Sarasota, Hong Kong Ranks as Most Unaffordable Housing Market, and More,” Mansion Global
“Heiress pays £3m advance rent for Mayfair home she saw on Channel 5 show Sally Lindsay’s Posh Sleepover,” The Evening Standard
This well-covered rental apartment on London’s Hyde Park costs:
£4,246 a day ($5,912.55) or
£130,000 a month ($181,025) or
£1.55 million a year ($2,158,373)
A bedroom in a house | Culross House via K10 Group
The unnamed occupant — rumored to be a 24-year-old daughter of an anonymous Chinese billionaire, whose money is “thought to have been made from property, fashion and IT in China and Hong Kong” — for some reason put out £3.1million ($4,316,747), or two years rent, to get the place. If they decide to rent-to-own, as the current owner hopes, it’ll cost them a total of £32 million ($44,559,968) to buy the house.
That security deposit is the most anyone’s ever put out to rent a place in London. Absolutely wild alien rich people shit, until you learn how she found the place: watching TV.
Picking a house right off the HGTV! All I’ve ever wanted!
This one popped up on a British show on Channel 5 called Sally Lindsay’s Posh Sleepover, which only started airing on February 6th. This secret lady acts FAST.
Since we can’t dive into the heiress, let’s get into the place — which does have a name: Culross House.
The kitchen which is like, okay? | Culross House via K10 Group
It has a lot to offer: the location, a name, square footage (8,051 sq ft), a swimming pool, a private gym, a movie theater, five bedrooms — including a “Hermes bedroom suite” — some slick looking bathrooms, a spa, a glass elevator.
But I intensely hope my favorite TikTok show, Samir’s Celebrity Home Shopping, takes this property on because I think it’s like, beh, aesthetically. (“Beh” is not as bad as “bleh” but not as good as “eh.”)
The kitchen’s a little underwhelming, what they list as a theater looks like a living room to me, the color scheme is not my fave, all the glass and marble is so sterile and cold. It’s modeled after fancy hotel rooms and it feels like it is. Beh.
The cinemah which sure, Jan. | Culross House via K10 Group
But the Sun, the Star, and Letting Agent Today are all excited.
The landlord is property developer Kam Babaee. Kam is reportedly a friend of Boris Johnson’s, and he once tried to claim poverty in court to get out of paying the £10K a month he owed his ex-wife. He said he was wearing sweaters (“jumpers” !!) with holes in them, and lost his Harrod’s black-tier status! Phew, this tidy income should help with all that.
Estimated net worth: No idea!
“Texas ranch heiress' art collection, worth about $150 million, up for auction,” Hindustan Times
“Oil heiress’s $150-million art collection could ease a market crunch,” Financial Post
“Sotheby's to Auction Art from Texas Heiress's Estate,” Wall Street Journal
Anne Windfohr Marion was the founder of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and her husband was a retired Sotheby’s chairman and auctioneer. She passed away last year at the age of 81, and the famous auction house has her next level collection up for sale now.
According to Financial Post, this auction is huge for the art world because they’re lacking in big, big-deal art to sell. Everything’s online only these days, and do you really want to buy your big, big-deal art remotely; no buzzy gallery, no fash-ons, no gavel echoing through the hall? Neither does anyone else. But when you’re dead and husband’s a company guy, you can be counted on to jumpstart the market, I guess.
Anne was a Burnett on her mother’s side, the great-granddaughter of original Texas cattleman Samuel Burk Burnett, and an oil tycoon herself, founding Burnett Oil in 1980 (oil was first discovered on the family’s ranches back in 1921). This 2014 official write-up from the company says that the then-75-year-old was often called “Little Annie.”
Anne Windfohr Marion, wearing a hat, like she was always doing | AQHA
She was “Little Annie” at least in part because her mom was an Anne: Anne Valliant Burnett Tandy.
Anne Sr., for our purposes, was married four times, a cowgirl, the owner of houses by I.M. Pei and Frank Lloyd Wright AND in possession of a diamond so large she couldn’t lift her hand while wearing it. She was willed the ranch directly by her grandfather when she was 21. Samuel had reportedly tried to both commit and disinherit his wife in Anne Sr’s favor, as per Wikipedia, but her step-nana broke out of the asylum on the day he died and successfully got hers, ranches notwithstanding.
Anne Sr. was a big art collector, too; Anne Jr. met actually her husband when he helped sell her mom’s estate.
Anne Jr. owned the famous Andy Warhol of Elvis as a gunslinger (twice), and some more figurative works that Sotheby’s expert tells the paper look like the Texas landscape she grew up in, Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park No. 40” and Clyfford Still’s “PH-125 (1948-No. 1).” The last one is expected to get up to $35 million; the other two are each estimated at $20-30 million. She also owned Roy Lichtenstein’s “Girl with Beach Ball II,” in which a malformed blob woman has pouty lips and no top.
“Elvis 2 Times,” by Andy Warhol, displayed at the Whitney | @eight_inagroove’s Instagram
Anne Jr. was a big art donator when she was alive, and more will be given to museums from her collection, including works by Rothko and de Kooning. She also donated a million dollars to Trump in 2019 and plenty to Kevin McCarthy and John Cornyn, so you know, maybe don’t get attached to her like some people briefly did.
Estimated net worth: Anne was last on the Forbes list in 2009 at $1.1 billion.
“Westfield heiress Betty Klimenko's Vaucluse property-buying spree,” Daily Telegraph
I do hate (and rely on) the Daily Mail, but every once in a while they’ll give you a bullet point like “An outdoor toilet housed in an English phone box will also be built on the lawn” and you’re like, okay you’ve done it again.
That little tidbit is just one of the facts about the six Australian homes purchased by Betty Klimenko. The Mail takes care to note several times that Betty is the adopted daughter of John Saunders, the guy who founded Westfield shopping malls, which makes it sound like she’s a real interloper, basically a thief. The legitimacy of inherited wealth is something we can debate, but Betty is John’s daughter, that’s how adoption works.
Betty Klimenko gives me P!nk fan vibes on her Insta | @erebusgirl’s Instagram
That’s not to say the circumstance of her birth aren’t compelling — this Wayback Machined Telegraph article is… something — but Betty owns the Erebus Motorsport SuperCars racing team and ran off with a man half her age after her first marriage bombed out, marrying him in Vegas, so there’s plenty of other stuff to talk about. When she eloped, her father was furious (her new husband wasn’t Jewish), so he cut her off for years — she talked about waiting around for expired meat when she was at her lowest. She and John reconciled before he passed in 1997.
Now she owns an acre of land in a suburb outside Sydney for her kids and grandkids, with views of the ocean and the harbor.
Estimated net worth: $2.37 billion Australian, according to the 2019 Financial Review Rich List (about $1.8 billion USD).
Ghislaine Trackswell!
Ghislaine Maxwell is back on the trying-to-get-bail-scalator, again! She offered to give up her French and British citizenships, a “precious and priceless asset,” as per her counsel. Did you know Ghislaine was a naturalized American citizen?
Her defense also said that she’s been depicted as a “cartoon-character villain” in the media which like, bitch, you wish. You know what Natasha Fatale would never do? Arrange and imprison teens for Boris Badenov’s assault massages.
I do love the turn of phrase, though, I will funnel this energy into picturing evil bird Ghiscrane Trapswell as an integral part of the unaired 7th season of BoJack Horseman, following the death of Hank Hippopopalous’s close associate Jeffrey Shepstein. God, that plot line would be unsettling and well-done.
Estimated net worth: $20 million, according to CelebrityNetWorth.com
From the rest of the Alert
Paris Hilton got engaged (and met some lemurs) while we were offline, but Showbiz Cheat Sheet notes this isn’t her most expensive engagement ring ever. She also hung out with her new bestie Saweetie. The lip gloss application scene is objectively funny.
Saweetie X Paris 4eva| @saweetie’s Instagram
Nicky Hilton wore a hat.
If you’ve heard a bit about Alexey Navalny and his revoked “prisoner of conscience” status but thought “eh, this story, not enough rich women,” then I cannot recommend you read reporter Natalia Antonova’s newsletter on the “Stalinist heiress trying to get an imprisoned Russian dissident cancelled.” Katya Kazbek is the pen name of the daughter of Yury Dubovitsky, who owns what Natalia calls “the Russian version of CircuitCity.” Also there’s media goss! I don’t want to spoil it, but if you like this, you’ll like that. (Thanks to Liz Lopatto for this one)
Chiefs heiress Gracie Hunt is running for Miss Kansas USA, the pageant that leads up to Miss Universe. The state level website says the winner receives a “prize package including cash, wardrobe, and travel;” the winner of the national pageant gets a $50K scholarship and a six-figure salary. Also this week, the heiress went to Mexico.
The caption here reads “Family motto: Praise Him when you win; Praise Him when you lose. 💔” | @graciehunt’s Instagram
This BBC deep dive on how Shonda got the Anna Delvey story is worth reading.
She usually doesn’t get the heiress tag, but when you piss people off in the right way… You see, “for almost 4 years” Kendall Jenner has “been on a journey to create the best tasting tequila.” Enter: 818 Tequila exists. Yes, people are mad about the area code. Yes, it is the area code for Calabasas, too. Yes, some people might buy this shit instead getting from Mexican producers, and also yes, a ton of celebs make this same kind of liquor.
This story about toilet roll heiress Davinia Taylor paddleboarding while in shape is like, ‘kay, but I love writing “toilet roll heiress.” That’s minimizing to her and rude of me, but come on, if we can’t have a home sauna and money to wipe our asses with, we deserve to have some fun in life.
Speaking of bodies, I guess, when we first met Keroche beer’s Anerlisa Muigai, she was talking about her weight loss, a journey she’s said she’s embarking on in order to look more like her late sister. Now, weight loss companies are falsely claiming her as a client and she’s reasonably pissed.