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.
Not to draw a bunch of attention to it, but there hasn’t been a lot of editorial judgement that goes into writing this newsletter lately.
I feel like I’ve been dragging my corpus around here the last few months, pinging dully off of news items would have sent me to Mars back in January. Partially, this is an outgrowth of Being Vaccinated and Having Fun Plans, but more than that I’ve been cranky about our subjects: tired of judging or forgiving rich women, done with reading about men who murder, exhausted of assessing my own complicity with regard to loving! shiny! things! while feeling increasingly resentful of dresses and houses I can’t afford. Too clammy for camp, too sweaty for empathy, sick of being sick of the Ecclestones.
When I realized my humid irritability allowed me to whiff on Abigail Disney, I knew I needed to take a little do-over.
Last issue, I mentioned Abigail’s big Atlantic piece, “I Was Taught From a Young Age to Protect My Dynastic Wealth,” but only in passing, in the last bit. I didn’t have a lot to add, because she nailed it.
But really, I’m sort of paranoid about praising Abigail excessively. What if she’s suddenly revealed to be bad in some other way? My research is notoriously lazy and unfunded! Or what if y’all think I’m being an ass kisser, just because she doesn’t suck? The standards lower for the $$, etc. That would be embarrassing!
I pulled this picture off Wikimedia because I’m cheap, so it’s only $130 | Milad Mosapoor/Wikimedia Commons
This week, though, as I was going through the alert seeing outlet after outlet aggregate the story and her subsequent CNN appearance — Boing Boing, The Hill, local news sites, and Someecards, which boiled it down to what looks like a “how to (protect your dynastic wealth)” — it reminded me that she has reach, along with a deeply true message. That deserves amplification, and a lot of attention here in this email, specifically.
How hard it is to escape the pull of extreme wealth is Abigail’s own subject; money after a certain accumulation is a profoundly perverting force. As she explains, it drains the rich of their capacity to understand or even recognize people who aren’t like them, to accept and behave like they’re subject to the same laws.
And the legal system, in response, is just as befuddled. We don’t know how to punish the really big crimes. The laws exist, but the enforcement doesn’t. It’s a matter of a broken country, sure, but it’s also a failure of imagination. We have a hard time clocking it when the rich are doing wrong.
The rich go to great but almost reflexive, unconscious lengths — she compares it to a fish being unaware of water — to maintain their control, and we let them.
Abigail, worth $120 million because her uncle invented the cartoon mouse that runs Florida, represents my personal best hopes for this newsletter’s subjects — that a person can be not only unencumbered by her (advantageous) circumstances, as so few seem to be, but have the awareness to comment on and criticize them. That money might be terrible but that people are occasionally good. I like when that happens!
She’s not just any rich lady with progressive politics, she’s a particularly heiress-y heiress. She always shows up in the news with her semi-honorific attached; with her iconic family implicated in whatever she’s revealing now. As far as I can tell1, if there’s one woman in the current discourse who truly stands in her place as a generationally wealthy person while speaking out against that particular system, it’s Abigail. In terms of being a high profile member of the inheritor class, you just don’t see that all the time.
Anyways, after I experienced a small attitude adjustment, I discovered that another popular story in the Alert that I’d been lightly avoiding — because murder — was actually incredibly moving, too. Another rich lady who used her money and platform for something genuinely cool, and did so in a way more tangible and in fact, dangerous than your average philanthropist.
That’s the only other thing in this issue, basically. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with dresses and houses and Tamara and Petra.
Command + F:
The villain of this story is a property developer. Shock! But the heroine rules.
From the rest of the Alert: a smattering of headlines with elaboration
Oh, and a personal favor: starting Tuesday, The Goods is running a month long series about life under consumerism. We’re really proud of it so like, keep an eye out?
Happy fireworks weekend!
“Juanita Nielsen case: $1m reward offered,” Daily Liberal
“$1m reward for information on heiress who vanished 40 years ago,” Yahoo!
“NSW Police post $1 million reward for Sydney heiress disappearance,” 9News
“VIDEO: Govt offers reward to help find remains of missing heiress Juanita Nielsen,” ABC.net.au
I don’t say lightly that there’s some shit worth reading about in the story of a retail heiress who went missing four decades ago.
Juanita Nielsen disappeared in 1975. It’s developments with her unsolved case that bring it her into the news. She also ruled. I would like to talk about that first.
Not to be shallow but number one, she looked like this:
That hair!!!! That bearing. A great LOOK. | Wikipedia
So like, 1970s with a 1880s twist — who is she, etc!
Juanita’s dad was the heir to the Mark Foy retail fortune2, and as a young girl she worked as a glove model for the chain (deeply glamorous but one of the more hilarious sectors of modeling; delightful). When she was around 25, she married a Dutch merchant seaman in Japan, but they broke up after three years (fantastic, you know we support a failed marriage to a romantic figure).
But here’s where it gets truly Good, and eventually very sad, in a rare, heroic way. In the early ‘70s, Juanita started an alternative newspaper called NOW, through which she waged a war against developers in her Sydney neighborhood of Potts Point. (She would also model for the paper, because again: style.) In NOW, she promoted “green ban” labor strikes from the Builders Labourers Federation, where the union refused to build environmentally and historically damaging properties (the BLF, at least in the 1970s, took up causes like aboriginal rights and support for the elderly too). She was a thorn in the side of some real money-grubbing pricks.
Her Wikipedia links to a report about a former police informant/protected witness named James McCartney Anderson. James (Jim, as per Wikipedia) may have played a role in Juanita’s disappearance — at least, the PDF persuasively argues, it seems likely enough that the police probably should have stopped actively protecting him. But if you skip to page 155/210, they’ve appended the report about the inquest into her going missing, conducted in 1983. I read it, because it was very compelling — Juanita’s actions prior to that day only make me like her so much more — and also it was too hot to go outside earlier this week.
Juanita’s support for her fellow residents against sometimes-violent forced evictions was a big problem for a man named Frank Theeman, who had made his money in lingerie and then moved, like you do, into property development. He hoped to develop Victoria Street, where Juanita lived, and the larger Woolloomooloo area, and to that end had a couple of bodyguards, including a karate expert and a corrupt former police, who would set out groups of karate students to throw people out of their homes. Our heiress highlighted these resident struggles in NOW.
Juanita worked against Frank’s takeover even after the BLF quit, and in the last months she was seen around, befriended someone at the water board, who was poised to delay the work further. At the inquest, Frank admitted that delays were costing him $16,800 a week in 1975 Australian dollars, which would be about $134,039 AUD today (or a little under $101K USD).
Frank isn’t particularly connected to James Anderson, but he did, supposedly, owe money to James’s boss, Abe Saffron, a probable mobster and loanshark. Among other businesses, Abe owned a club called Carousel (previously: “Les Girls”). 3
Starting in June 1975, a group of Abe’s employees started trying to get ahold of Juanita through the paper. First, a squirrelly little PR guy — James’s wife’s assistant? who had reportedly been ripping off the club on marketing — invited her to a press event for Carousel, even though NOW “did not give free publicity,” as per the report. (<3 Heart eyes emoji <3.) She skipped the press night, obviously, and reportedly James was pissed as hell.4 Later, the same flack tried to get her to meet him at a motel to advertise “landscaping;” she passed.
But on the morning of July 4th, 1975, Juanita had agreed to a meeting at Carousel. Supposedly, the club upstairs area wanted to advertise their “businessman’s lunches” in NOW, although the truth of this plot was a cause of concern for the inquest — in part because Abe’s man changed his story about it (saying he hadn’t, then had, paid her for advertising) but also because absolutely duh they weren’t advertising or even having lunches in the club.
After that meeting, she was never seen again. Her purse was found a few days later, near a highway in Penrith, an hour from Sydney.
There’s a lot more in the report — an incredible amount of evidence the police didn’t follow up on, accounts from different low-level mob associates about attempts to nab Juanita, a whole subplot about some local reporters who the cops blamed their fucking up on, a bit where a man who likely physically killed her runs off to San Francisco and then calls her “an out-and-out Communist” and “no loss to society at all” when he’s tracked down (uh, not that he thinks she’s dead), and surprisingly sensitive descriptions of the women who worked at and dated the men who ran Carousel and its drag shows — but the inquest ultimately ruled that while Juanita was dead, they didn’t know where she was, or how she died. They did note that police corruption had prevented her disappearance from being solved.
Now, in 2021, the Australian government is offering a reward $1 million AUD (~$750K USD) for information about her disappearance. They acknowledge that finding her killer is unlikely, but the family hopes to find her remains.
The video from ABC said that she lived at 202 Victoria Street in Potts Point so I did what felt like some real old fashion lady-with-a-murder podcast journalism and looked up the neighborhood.
Here’s her place today on Google Street View:
Google Maps
It’s a sweet, unassuming home, from appearances. There’s a little plaque out front, honoring her.
Here’s what happens if you scroll over and up next door:
Google Maps
It is safe to say that developers got into this neighborhood (further confirmed by Australian Zillow, a website called Domain).
I don’t point this out to imply that Juanita’s work didn’t matter. The world, and Potts Point, would have been worse off without her. At the very least, and I think she deserves a lot more than that, I certainly prefer Juanita to any other single person we met in that story. I do think, though, its worth sitting with how much incredible fortune and true effort went into what ends up being a horribly sad story. It’s scary and depressing, but it makes her all the more impressive.
Sure, maybe if she hadn’t been killed, she might have packed up her newspaper and moved away, like her colleague Arthur did (read the footnotes, dang) — but just as and actually more likely, she might have been killed while actively telling her captors to eat shit. That’s really the most any of us can do in this world.
Estimated net worth: N/A for the deceased, although the store closed in the 1980s.
From the rest of the Alert, a smattering of headlines without elaboration
“Fendi heiress married handsome beau in lavish Ibiza ceremony last weekend,” Tatler
“Paris Hilton Confirms She Will Film Her Wedding for New Reality TV Show,” Ace Showbiz
“DJ Cuppy Shares Plush Photos Of Her Dogs' Bedroom For The First Time,” GH Gossip
“I married the Branston Pickle heiress — then it all went wrong,” The Times
And I do only read English-language news sources, so who even knows what I don’t know.
The store had Australia’s first escalator! And closed for good in 1980.
Abe and James were used to doing what they needed to do to get what they needed done.
As per the report, in 1973, Arthur Charles King, the head of the Victoria St Residents Action Group and an associate of Juanita’s, disappeared, briefly. He turned back up a few days later and immediately moved away. Initially, he told police that he had a migraine, so he took a bunch of rides to boathouse in Port Stephens and just like… had his headache in there (Port Stephens is, as per Google, two hours from Sydney by car, if I’m understanding this right). Later, in 1983, Arthur said he was actually in the trunk of a car driven by, it turned out, two guys who wanted James to tell them what to do with the dude in their boot.
The idea of trying to get access to someone to murder them by allowing them to give you free publicity, my good GOD. And thinking that kind of PR move would work with a muckrakey little alt newspaper, these absolute fool criminals. My policy of effectively never answering PR emails remains extremely sound.