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.
I’m going to do two things here, one of which will be intensely self-indulgent — so sorry, I don’t have an editor here and no one can stop me, proving again this is system is bad — and the other of which will hopefully be fun, and will certainly come first.
Command + Shift + F for:
In which I attempt to summarize two weeks of heiress news, rapid fire, including the Ecclezone. Like normal “rest of the alert” stuff but… more. And less. And sooner.
A psychic! A scam! Hundreds of words processing the death of a guy you don’t know or care about!1
From the most of the alert
In the Ecclezone: Petra’s in Disney with the fam; kids faces blurred which: yes! Her daughter’s name is Minnie, so on brand, and she was christened recently with aunt Tamara in attendance as well.
Publix’s Julie Jenkins Fancelli gave a sizable marketing budget for the January 6 riots, in addition to funding the actual event.
This Google Translate vibes article describes Doreen Lofthaus, whose money came from marrying a guy whose grandpa invented a candy Margaret Thatcher reportedly enjoyed when she had a sore throat, bequeathing her fortune to her small seaside town.
Gotta go full Mail headline here: “Socialite and oil heiress Christophe de Menil, 88, is being 'held hostage in her Upper East Side townhouse' by her daughter - Uma Thurman's half-sister, claims best friend.” We’re not done: in 1988, said best friend “falsely claimed she was pregnant with Eric Clapton's child by stuffing a pillow up her dress.”
What if I start calling the real estate section Real Estate: Real Estates. Is that something? Anyways: Fancy pet hotel heiress and owner of a boutique named Peri.A, Peri Arenas is trying to sell a Brentwood home for $21 million. Australian mall scionette Monica Saunders-Weinberg pays double what a house went for just last year! A Tisch (Lacey) gives Steve Mnuchin $22.5mil for a duplex on Park Ave! One last chance to see the house where Doris Duke almost definitely killed someone!
Curious about Huawei sanctions and the newly-released Meng Wanzhou? I frankly wasn’t this week, IDK what this says!
In-N-Out, owned by founder granddaughter Lynsi Snyder, isn’t checking customer vax status. San Francisco shut ‘em down.
Micosoft Bill’s daughter Jennifer Gates got married in two dresses. Coldplay performed, the cake was six tiers, her husband is some kind Olympian that the Mail didn’t care to spell out.
Jennifer Gates in Vera Wang | @verawanggang’s Instagram
Princess Diana’s godson is a Greek prince, who got married in a Covid ceremony that was DADS ONLY. His wife is Nina Flohr, daughter of a Swiss plane billionaire. Now they’re getting married again, presumably so her mother, the former EIC of Vogue Russia, can come.
Victoria Fertitta, casino money, paid Sam Smith $250K for one song at her wedding. Yes, it was “Stay With Me.” Post Malone performed too, and the whole thing maybe cost $25 million. Okay!
Paris Hilton went to Capitol Hill this week, about the bad teen camps, her best thing! She also said “legislation is hot” which: if that makes them actually do a thing, great! Never forget when Kim K. did criminal justice reform; can’t be mad at her for that. Paris had an Alice in Wonderland-themed bridal shower, sure, and RHOBH ladies were in attendance (some are her aunts and one’s her mom, so), as well as a joint bachelor/bachelorette. I can never decide if that’s a cool move or like… something else. She might wear Valentino to her wedding, like Nicky did when she married her upsettingly hot-to-me husband, and her registry is worth $61,254.
Some familiar friends: Keroche beer’s Anerlisa Muigai is, in short, keeping it tight (sorry, sorry). An apparently-rare Athina Onassis sighting. Kim Lim deletes and reposts an Instagram. The last NXIVM defendant got two years (Seagrams’ Claire Bronfman got six).
And finally, a man the Post calls “a pudgy Las Vegas high roller” is accusing an heiress he scammed of being bad, too, or something. Robert Alexander, a video game promoter, is claiming that after Sherry Pryor Witter — wife of the grandson to the Dean Witter stock brokerage fortune, as well as it’s current head and a Wharton-educated investor in her own right — realized she was being fleeced by a company called Kizzang, she ditched her shares on some unwitting investors before she talked to the authorities. Whoops!
“The case of the Martha’s Vineyard heiress and the Florida psychic who took her for millions,” Boston Globe
I had been derelict in Alert maintenance, again, until this story was brought to my attention by my near-psychically intuitive colleague Jariel Arvin. He very correctly understood this Boston Globe story, by Alexander Huls, was something that I (and you) particularly needed to know about. We have a romantically unlucky but compulsively generous elderly heiress, a Massachusetts locale, an American Romani Floridian with a penchant for “high-end pastel clothing” (the Mail has pictures of her, god bless ‘em), a breakdown of the economy of psychics, and $3.5 million stolen dollars. It is sad and glamorous and infuriating and archetypal. It has an almost happy ending. You should read it in full.
I don’t know if I actually believe in psychics — I think I fundamentally don’t — but I find the idea of a person being able to know things about you just by looking to be endlessly appealing, so I have been to and therefore spent money on plenty. Which is just to say, I’m not any better than Vera Pratt on that count.
Vera’s great-grandpa founded Pratt, and lived in this house I’m specifically jealous of in Clinton Hill | Wikimedia commons
Vera, “the great-granddaughter of Charles Pratt, a partner at John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company,” was unwell, in some capacity, before she met Sally Ann Johnson, who she knew as Psychic Angela. Vera believed there was a demon in her body, literally of course, and she spent millions getting it out. The fraud that Sally Ann(gela) perpetrated is gutting, but the thing that breaks your heart is the way that she separated Vera from her friends and family. The two women would talk on the phone for hours and hours, and those calls changed Vera. During her time in Sally Ann’s care, she wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever heard: “I felt a hurt, that I do not have such loving friends now — that it seems these days I am not a woman people look forward to being with.”
Here’s a weird sharp turn, so feel free to Command + Shift + F for “ACLU.”
My first real boss died this week. He was the mind behind some of the saddest sentences I had previously ever heard, and I have been thinking about him and them; about lonely people and what it means to take advantage.
Once, on one of the rare times he came into work, he showed us a little pushbutton thingy and told us that if he pressed it, right there, standing in our office on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, it would open his garage in Connecticut. At the time, he was particularly maudlin because his daughter, who was to some degree estranged or at least deeply alienated by her father, was pregnant, and he was struggling with notions of family and his own mistakes. He held up his garage door opener and said to his assembled assistants, “The only the thing that works in my life, besides my daughter’s reproductive organs and my own ability to be sad, is this.”2 I’ve thought about this moment at least six times a year for the last decade.
He wasn’t a good guy. He was amusingly bumbling but compulsively predatory, Michael Scott by way of Harvey Weinstein. He was an heir, or at least a rich child grown up. He would call us up and just talk and talk, about his time at the Sorbonne and his mother who claimed to have invented carrot cake and the notable New York women he had fucked at Limelight when it mattered. I used to write down the stuff he’d say and post it on my Tumblr, under the tag #shitmybosssays. (It was 2009.) Later I pulled it all into a document that I offered to multiple colleagues considering multiple sexual harassment lawsuits against him (“Some women think it’s sexist to say but, a woman has to be 50/50: fifty percent in the kitchen, cooking and talking and being intellectual, not Julia Child but, you know, and fifty percent a whore in the bedroom. Well, not a whore, better than a whore — that’s the worst sex in the world”). When I learned he passed away, I busted it out and read it, over and over and over.
He dyed his hair with shoe polish (we found it in his desk) but he was prone to fits of self-analysis. “People all have their problems; migraines, a bad stomach, an ugly nose, epilepsy… I think I drive women away,” he told me. Another time he mentioned not having a personal life and then said, “Uh-oh, victim!” Months later he told me, “Some people just attract partners, maybe they seem easy to be around. Other people are high maintenance… I think maybe I’m high maintenance —” but then, switching gears, he said, “Or, rather, I like to switch gears a lot, and talk about different things — be it space, or the moon, or Elmer Fudd — and some people can’t handle that.”
I used to take stuff from him, in semi-consensual increments. We’d drink the port in his liquor cabinet and sell books from the shelves to the Strand. When he came in, he’d give us an extra dollar or five for things like knowing an Allman Brothers song or going downstairs and smoking a cigarette with him. I did, also, virtually no work in this job, other than strange and sporadic emotional management and accepting jabs about my body and invasive questions about my roommates’ sex lives. Some would hasten to call this time theft but I would call book publishing. After I was laid off, I took three framed prints he’d been storing under a chair in his heavily upholstered, never-occupied office. It made me feel something to be the one taking advantage, surrounded by the advantages he had and took. I still have the pictures hung up.
Vera sounds like a lovely woman: she donated to the ACLU3 and sang in her choir; she had a trusting nature and many people who loved her. But she never married, even though she wanted that kind of love, and felt herself, in her lowest time, become someone people didn’t look forward to being with. Vera became a burden against her will, transfixed with her own “eating and digestion” and beset by fantastical and stubborn ideas about her afflictions and how to solve them. She was in a particularly scary, incredibly common position: alone without a partner or children at the end of your world.
When the justice system got Sally Ann, it was for tax fraud. It’s too hard to prove fraud-fraud; Vera gave money willingly for services that were, sure, fake but that she believed in. All Sally Ann had to do was give her someone to talk to; all she had to do was listen long enough to burrow in and ruin her life.
Vera’s family money could pay for the attention she wanted, but she wasn’t able to control what that attention looked like or what it did to her. In combination with loneliness, the money that gave her power made her vulnerable. What do we even do with that? How and when do we care and sympathize with the limits or pitfalls of wealth when it comes to human sadness? How do we think about a lonely, rich person who wasn’t nearly so kind or so innocent? What do we feel?
Estimated Net Worth: By the end of her life, Vera was owed $3.5 million by Sally Ann, but she still trued to give her sister-in-law the shirt of her back.
He was a wealthy New Yorker whose life was riddled with unsettling details, so indulge me.
He also told me that the name she was considering for her son was the same as the one he’d given to his penis in the 1980s; “Come on, [Harold], let’s go to the ski slopes,” he said, remembering.
To be fair, my former boss was the type to donate to approved liberal causes as well.