Hello! You’re reading Heir Mail, the only newsletter to come from me (hi) setting a Google Alert for the word “heiress” and then just writing about whatever pops up.
Hi, hi, hi, it’s been a minute, hello. Turns out it is fun to leave the house and not spend every other Saturday sitting inside thinking about rich people? Will continue to monitor this situation, but we’re back this week.
(I almost used this space to discuss my qualms with the three week old film Cruella, but then thought the better of it, so you’re welcome.) 1
Command + F:
A diamond in some ruffs.
A Bunny no longer in her garden.
Ecclezoned for business innovation.
From the rest of the alert: a baby, a missing Gaugin, “flaunted” cleavage, “The Incident,” Yashar, “comforts, once gained, become necessities,” shoutout to Laconia, NH.
“Less is more, my idea of sexy by DJ Cuppy,” The Nation Online Mag
In movies, rich and/or famous people always seem to have art in their home that is OF them. It is hilarious and I love it, and I have long wondered how real it could be.2 Like, does Bill Gates have a bunch of pseudo-Warhols with his little face turned skyward? Does Elon Musk have a family portrait of him and Grimes and their precious little string of letters and numbers hanging in a hangar somewhere? Does Bezos have a generously reimagined statue of himself post glow-up?
DJ Cuppy (née Florence Ifeoluwa Otedola), a DJ and the daughter of Nigerian oil importer Femi Otedola, popped up in the alert because African culture site The Nation picked up an Instagram post of hers this week. (That the headline sounds like Cuppy wrote an essay for the magazine is very funny, good scam.) She wrote, “My own idea of sexy is that LESS is MORE,” by which she means less skin, not less fabric — adding, “The less you reveal the more people can wonder right? 👀.” Like, Billie Eilish vibes, etc. What matters is that it drove me to her Instagram, where I found these pictures she has in her home where she wears Shakepearan-y ruffs and a pink wig and looks both uncomfortable and delighted.
These RUFFS!! | @cuppymusic’s Instagram
The outfit change, the sort of Mona Lisa smile, the coordination with the wallpaper, A++++.
Her father has been implicated in a bribery scheme (as the briber, trying to get an MP to drop his company from an investigation into a fuel subsidy scam had cost the country billions) and blackmail (as the blackmailee, scammed by “Canadian’s answer to the Kardashians,” who may have tried to kidnap him), and he is the controlling shareholder of Forte Oil, which owns more than 500 gas stations in Nigeria. So, her money comes from DJing, which is the worst thing you can do to music, and from oil, which is the worst thing you can do to dinosaur bones3 — but commissioning these portraits is fantastic way to spend it. I stopped doing “heiress points” months ago but still: one million heiress points for this art!
Estimated Net Worth: $750,000 on her own, according to Answers Africa, but her dad had $1.85 billion in 2017, according to OxFam.
“Rachel ‘Bunny’ Mellon’s Grandson Lists Cape Cod Family Home for $19.8 Million,” Wall Street Journal
“Bunny” Mellon used to fly orange and lime trees between Cape Cod and Antigua every year. She was a big gardener, and I’m sure she would say she loved nature!4 Now, 7 years after her death, her grandson is selling the Massachusetts home where she used annually to repot the heavily carbon-footprinted citrus, putting it up for $19.8 million. Bunny bought the house — which has a name, of course: Scallop Path, very seafood Hansel and Gretel — in 1973 for $400,000, making the current asking price a chill, nearly 5000% increase.
What does that get you? Well, the outside is beautiful, but here’s a picture of the rec room, featuring both a pool table and an exercise bike. It’s a reminder that for real WASPs, pedestrian disarray is some kind of class marker.
WASPs genuinely love when stuff looks like ass. | WSJ viz ZENAS CROCKER
This haphazard cramming tells other WASPs they are for real; a Shitbboleth.
The WSJ calls the house “unfussy in its design,” and grandson/seller/wealth manager Thomas Lloyd says, “It’s a house where you can go with your kids and walk in with a bunch of sand on your feet and not feel guilty about it.” In his own childhood, however, the family dressed up to see each other (“It was always a little formal,” he said).
Of course, the Mellons are banking royalty, and Bunny was married to Paul, who liked horses and whose dad Andrew was U.S. Treasury secretary for 11 years, including during the crash of 1929. But Bunny was from money, too, honey — her dad was the president of Gillette razors and her grandpa invented Listerine. Before her marriage to Paul, she was married to Stacy Barcroft Lloyd Jr., who’d been roommates with Paul during World War II. The couples stayed friends, and after Paul’s first wife died from an asthma attack, Bunny divorced Stacy and married the Mellon. Bunny died in 2014 at the age of 103.
Estimated net worth: Bunny’s passed, but in 2012 Business Insider estimated her net worth at $400 million.
The Ecclezone (TM)
“Petra Ecclestone looks chic in leopard print as she steps out with fiancé Sam Palmer for dinner in Santa Monica,” Daily Mail
“Millionaire Petra Ecclestone flogging her old clothes for cash in new business venture,” The Mirror
Petra Ecclestone (Formula One money, but you know that by now) has invented Depop (or Poshmark, ThredUp, The RealReal, eBay, garage sales, etc.) — she and her fiance are selling their old clothes. “We’re starting out with our family’s clothes but we’re going to be taking other people’s designer clothes soon,” her ex-car salesman boyf Sam Palmer says. Finally! A place to buy luxury clothing secondhand, so that the profits go directly to the daughter of a billionaire!
No word if the leopard print pants she recently wore to dinner in Santa Monica will be part of the offerings, but the Mail loved her look, noting that “a rich palette of make-up enhanced her pretty features.” “Are you done getting ready?” “Almost, I just need to apply a rich palette of make-up to enhance my pretty features.”
Here’s a cool recent Instagram from Petra:
Body positivity has not come to the rich, I suppose! | @petraecclestoneofficial’s Instagram
Nice gal!5
Estimated Net Worth: Petra stays at $400 million, as per Celebrity Net Worth, but expect that to skyrocket once she starts hawking her old tops.
From the rest of the alert
A Rothschild (Kate) had a baby, and everyone is very excited to congratulate her while also mentioning the death of her teen daughter two years ago. The new baby is a boy.
In perfect name news, Princess Camilla de Bourbon, an Italian heiress to a mining company and a telecommunications firm, owes £1.83m (~$2.53m) to her family trust, reportedly for hiding her actress mother’s assets, including a pricey Gaugin. Forbes has a fun article about Camilla’s inheritance mess, if you’d like to know more. Her dad bribed Lockheed Martin, her mom posed on a piano! The argument, it seems, is that Camilla’s mom straight up likes her better than her sister, Christina, who is not a princess. To get that title, by the way, Camilla is married to Prince Carlo, Duke of Castro, of the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. Sure! Apparently this is, and I’m heavily quoting Wikipedia now, “an Italian cadet branch of the Spanish Bourbons that ruled Southern Italy and Sicily for more than a century in the 18th and 19th centuries.” If I were very rich, I would offer to buy the name Princess Camilla de Bourbon from her and settle all of her debts.
Francesca Packer continues to keep her social media locked down, forcing the Daily Mail to post the same pictures of her trainer boyfriend’s butt over and over. (@AdamCooperFit still loves to post.) This week, she appeared for the photographing when went to a fancy party called the Gold Dinner. The event raises funds for the Sydney Children's Hospitals Foundation, and a bunch of important Australians celebs were there, i.e. the Hemsworths and Rose Byrne and Matt Damon’s wife who isn’t Australian at all for some reason. As the Mail notes, our girl Francesca went tiddies out — or, as they say “put on an eye-popping display in a very low-cut sequin gown” which “flaunted her ample cleavage.”
A Newport, Rhode Island exhibit about deeply-probable murderer Doris Duke (tobacco money) was changed from “The Accident at the Rough Point Gate” to “The Incident at the Rough Point Gate,” thanks to Peter Lance’s book, which puts it even more plainly.
If you didn’t already read the Yashar Ali expose (but there’s kind of no way you subscribe to this gossip-ass newsletter and haven’t already), one of the rich women he mooched from was Ariadne Getty, of the stock image Gettys, and she sued him for $179,000 in unpaid loans. The Mail has the bullet points.
Abigail Disney wrote a good thing for The Atlantic, titled “I Was Taught From a Young Age to Protect My Dynastic Wealth.” It was, in part, a response to the absolutely amazing ProPublica expose about the tax dodges of the very rich, and Abigail writes, “these methods and practices… are so downright mundane and commonly applied that most rich people don’t see them as unethical.” It’s worth reading in full, but another good line is: “Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.”
For no apparent reason, the Laconia Daily Sun (a paper local to where my parents live now) reviews Marci X, a film that came out 2003 starring Lisa Kudrow as a JAP-y music industry heiress, calling it her worst.
(But if you’re curious I will happily email you.)
Like, did Regina Hall keep the paintings of herself from Little? Does Melissa McCarthy still have the portrait of herself as the boss from The Boss? These questions consume me.
And to the ozone, just as an aside.
Picture me smiling so tightly my face breaks at this destructive ass “green thumb” behavior.