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.
Heirecommendation: this week I watched A New Leaf, Elaine May’s first film, on PlutoTV (you can find it OnDemand under ‘70s movies), because of the Blank Check episode about it and also because the plot is: Walter Matthau loses all his money and needs to marry (and for good measure murder) an heiress, played by Elaine herself. It’s streaming for free for now, and it’s real good.
This week, the leitmotif is NAMES, and the heiresses remind me of all the worst things I like — drinking! slutting! conniving! shirking! overspending! — and I love them for it.
CTRL + F:
The glassiest lady in all of Old Jersey
An “unfit” heiress and her horrifying (kindoffabulous) also-heiress mother
The CEO of Annapurna Pictures goes back to work.
From the rest of the alert: David Cameron’s wife, coal is bad, shockingly not all political heiresses are good, Ecclezone (TM), Chiefs heiress can afford college now, top 10th billionaire, Cindy Adams remembers, Beaches, don’t DM Anerlisa Muigai, “Oh You Red Sox”
“Butlins’s heiress banned from all pubs on Jersey for drunk attacks with wine glass,” Metro
“Glamorous estate agent avoids jail after bloody nightclub attack,” The Negotiator
Sometimes, for me, when a person is really bad they go back around to amazing again. Sacha Butlin, 23, is a princess whomst I love and will not heard a word against. She’s in the news for one reason, and I can’t even decide how to emphasize this sentence because every part is so impressive. She smashed her friend in the face with a glass, and now is BANNED from e-ver-y pub in Old Jersey.
The gentleman she “glassed” (as the Metro says and now I do too) was named Thomas Henry Le Vavasseur Dit Durell, which is similarly great news. Metro says she then slapped his girlfriend, flipped her the bird, and then punched a gal who tried to intervene (who, the Mail points, is an Only Fans model) — but The Negotiator says Thomas was HER boyfriend. Who knows!
Metro says she drank half a bottle of vodka to kick this all off. She reportedly told bar staff she didn’t do anything. An airtight excuse! Who could argue with this angel??
Sacha on a horse on a picture I found on Facebook by searching Twitter, like a normal person. |Aztec Diamond Equestrian
Her family founded a chain of seaside resorts in England, perfect, called Butlins (duh), where they hosted beauty contests for nanas. It was started by her great grandfather, Billy Butlin, who supposedly carried a razor around because he made so many enemies — and got people to come to those resorts by promising sex (The Mirror says, “The pioneer was also among the first to realise, even in the 1930s, that sex sells” which seems like, okay, perhaps an exaggeration, timing wise). He’d have weekly meetings where his male employees would bring women’s underwear to prove they’ve gotten laid (the phrase “giant bonking shop” came up in the Mirror piece).
Also he was knighted! By the same Queen from now! Cool knight!
Estimated net worth: Butlins was sold to a US company for £40million ($55,732,800.00) in the ‘70s, so some measure of that, less the £3,100 ($4,318.75) Sacha has to pay her victims — she also got 240 hours of community service, so factor that too.
“Inside the Shocking 1930s Trial of Socialite Ann Cooper Hewitt,” Town & Country
When Ann Cooper Hewitt was three, she was caught with her hands down her pants. You know, like a person does. This got her labeled “feeble-minded.” The past was bad in such dumb ways! Audrey Clare Farley details all of this in her new book, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt, which got pickup in the Mail and an excerpt in T&C this week (and now coverage here, the real get, congrats!).
The book’s cover | @momfluenster
The “scandalous sterilization” happened in 1934 at the behest of her own mom, who had doctors take out Ann’s tubes under the guise of appendicitis.1 It was a scheme to activate a clause in Ann’s dad’s will that took away her inheritance if she failed to have kids, and Ann’s mom, who’d received 2/3s of the estate, really wanted that last third. What a monster mother, right?2
Well, what if I told you that her mom — also an heiress, thanks to her dad’s death — was, at the time, going by the name Maryon Brugiere-Denning-Hewitt-d’Erlanger-McCarter. I know!!! She was married five times! She was gambler and an alcoholic, reportedly! Later she died penniless! Joan Collins is shaking! This toxic nightmare queen!!
Ann was the daughter (and Maryon, the widow) of Peter Cooper Hewitt, who invented a special type of lamp I got bored reading about — but he was the grandson of Peter Cooper, America’s first millionaire. Pete Senior built the US steam train and loved paper money and invented both Jell-O and that big chain that boats use. He maybe ruled, and not in a “glass-face-smash/sterilize-your-daughter-for-money” way. He was anti-slavery and worked to help Native Americans and started a free school (Cooper Union), and ran for president when he was 85, which is really the modern thing, if you think about it. At the time, everyone knew a man that old wouldn’t win. Lol!
Maryon, who got pregnant with Ann while PCH was married to someone else, succeeding in controlling her daughter by branding her a slut. One of the counts against Ann was that she was attract to men in uniform; another involved a pube-covered letter to a chauffeur (also the masturbation, from before). The details of Ann’s hospital stay are bizarre — a psychologist asked her what America’s longest river is to prove she was a moron — and deeply unsettling — hearing nurses say the “idiot patient” “didn't suspect a thing.” The part post-surgery, though, where she had to clean up her own room is a little less sympathy inducing (“I was forced to live with little more than the bare necessities or comforts of a poorhouse waif”).
Like her mom, Ann married five times. She died in 1956, at only 40.
Estimated net worth: Ann’s long dead, but PCH’s estate was worth $4 million in 1921 dollars, as per the book — which means $59 million today. Ann settled with her mother out of court in 1934 for $150,000 (~$2.9 million).
“Inside Annapurna CEO Megan Ellison’s Long-Awaited Return to Work (EXCLUSIVE),” Variety
Annapurna Pictures is the company behind Sorry to Bother You, Spring Breakers, and Booksmart, and their CEO is Megan Ellison, the kind of powerful film person whose name I know for reasons I can’t explain. But she didn’t go to work for a bit; like a year.
Variety details the past troubles at Annapurna that preceded Megan “ghosting” her company in late 2019:
…a failed attempt to expand Annapurna into a theatrical distribution engine; the departure of high-profile movie titles; a corporate financial meltdown that saw the intervention of her father, Oracle3 billionaire Larry Ellison; layoffs due to COVID-19; and the departures of some members of Ellison’s trusted executive team.
That “financial meltdown” included a debt of $200 million dollars. Apparently her thing is that she doesn’t care about budgets, she cares about art. Of all the flaws, that is how I want my rich people. Sure, she spent $40 million on a movie called The Sisters Brothers starring Joaquin Phoenix and John C Reilly as brothers named Sisters that I’ve never even heard of, but that’s the process!
She was also reportedly “the only notable show business figure to openly criticize Scott Rudin” after that Hollywood Reporter story that confirmed everything that anyone who has ever even passingly heard of Scott Rudin thought they knew about Scott Rudin (that he’s crazy abusive and vindictive; read the NYMag assistants story and marvel at Carl). The only one!!!
This is complicated by the time Megan herself allegedly threw a patio chair at someone. Other detailed incidents include swearing at a guy and general mindfuckery. She is said to be good at diversity though, so she is fucking with the minds of a varied group of people. And that’s progress in Hollywood, baby!
She bought Jerrod Carmichael’s movie, and he’s cool, and she has another coming out called Nightbitch, which is hilarious, so maybe things are coming up Megan. Maybe she’ll stop freaking with employees heads, too, why not! Maybe a better future awaits us all!
Estimated net worth: $200 million for Meg, according to celebritynetworth.com. However, Dad Larry is the 7th richest person in America as of this writing, at $99.9 billion, according to Forbes.
From the rest of the Alert
Didn’t realize former British Prime Minister David Cameron is married to an heiress (Samantha Cameron, the daughter of Sir Reginald Sheffield, 8th Baronet, unnamed in this Mirror rant) but that sure checks out. They have three houses and he’s trying to get rid of the NHS!
Unlike David Cameron, Tracy Norman seems cool, tbh. She’s formerly the mayor of an Australian town and the daughter of the man who cofounded Harvey Norman (which appears to be a down under P.C. Richards & Sons). She’s running now to replace an MP who this article says was forced to step down when “lewd” texts he sent surfaced, but a quick Google says he was also accused of rape by a sex worker in 2019. She’s throwing her hat in the ring because everyone else is running on a platform of coal coal coal, I’ll save your coal jobs, don’t worry about the future of coal, and she’s out here to say: get real. South Korea and Japan, huge buyers of Australian coal, are working to go carbon neutral; coal is bad and coal is also doomed. She’ll fund her own campaign, saying “I will be throwing everything I’ve got at it. I’ve lived a very privileged life, which is why I think it’s important to give back.”
Don’t get too excited about political heiresses though; in Peru, Keiko Fujimori, the far-right daughter of former leader and death squad aficionado Alberto Fujimori, who is herself under investigation for money laundering, is running for president against Pedro Castillo, a leftist former school teacher.
In the Ecclezone (TM): Oh my god, he admit it! Also, Tamara moves.
Gracie Hunt, Chiefs heiress, DID win Miss Kansas USA, and then found herself defending the swimsuit bit because of how it’s a big public titty appraisal, but Gracie says they “‘reinforce’ the importance of ‘health and fitness.’” Even the Mail doesn’t seem convinced.
#ConfidentlyBeautiful #BreakingBarriersThroughSports #LivingGracefully #TakeTheCrown | @graciehunt’s Instagram
The richest woman in the world, Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, heiress to the L’Oreal fortune, made it into the top 10 billionaires. We did it layyyyydiessssss!!!!!!!!
This week, Patrizia Gucci — NOT who Gaga plays in the Gucci movie, — called Al Pacino ‘short,’ ‘fat,’ and ‘ugly’ and the movie ‘shameful.’ She should probably someone who should get her own section of the newsletter like, idk, Patrizia Speakzia. Plus New York Post mainstay Cindy Adams remembered what the family said to her at the time of the murder: “Do I think it was an accident? No. Mistake? No. The Mafia? No. Someone who knew him? Yes.”
Carlota Busch Webster’s house was in Beaches! Now it’s for sale.
Keroche beer heiress Anerlisa Muigai is tired of DM marriage proposals — she’s not looking for anybody after splitting from singer Ben Pol! — and tells young women not to have kids with someone unless you’re sure.
If you have (or haven’t watched) This Is A Robbery on Netflix yet, here’s everything you want to know about Isabella Stewart Gardner, who married Boston’s most eligible bachelor and then found out she couldn’t have kids and collected art instead. Then she drank beer and drove fast and walked a lion4 on a leash around city. Finally: “Isabella also once wore a headband emblazoned with the words "Oh You Red Sox" to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.”
Ann coincidentally got cramps at lunch with her mom; the doctors were ready and waiting. Timing!
Arguably notttt great of her dad to include that provision in the first place, although it’s hard to imagine forced sterilization as the outcome, unless you understand who you married.
Oracle makes database management systems, among other things, in case you, like me, had previously been like, “yes, Oracle, totally, computers, yeah.”
A toothless lion so, some Tinder tiger vibes but it was 1897.