Heir Mail #31
“It’s a-what?”
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.
Who needs an intro, not us!!!
Command + Shift + F for:
Paris Hilton’s fiance’s boozy past (he was a liquor entrepreneur, duh)
A company in India that handles your dinner, your flight, and your ambulance ride to the hospital.
Sad shit that started at a pancake house.
From the rest of the alert: a pitch for BravoKids+, topiaries, and wedding makes #3, Shondaland’s Anna really getting press, Santa baby, call him Lupin, twins, quashed beef, “go to bed early, and often,” and rich people don’t give a shit about their peridot I guess!
“Paris Hilton to marry Carter Reum at late grandfather Barron's sprawling Bel-Air estate as wedding venue is changed ONE WEEK before lavish three-day nuptials,” The Daily Mail
“Paris Hilton Reportedly Changed Her Wedding Venue One Week Before the Ceremony,” Vanity Fair
Paris Hilton’s wedding is next week — Thursday, actually, the 11th, 11/11, which I’m sure we all know is Leonardo DiCaprio’s birthday.
According to the Mail, she changed the ceremony location from the Good Shepherd Church — a Catholic Church in Beverly Hills where her great-uncle Conrad Jr. married Liz Taylor, and which Mark Wahlberg attends — to her grandfather’s “sprawling Bel Air estate.” The house was the location of Paris’s (in)famous 2000 David LaChappelle shoot1, and now Google CEO Eric Schmidt lives there2, but I guess he’s like, cool with it. The whole affair is being going to be a filmed for Peacock series called “Paris in Love,” which is of course separate from her Netflix series “Cooking with Paris.”
It seems like maybe it’s finally time to learn a little about Carter Reum, Paris’s fiancee, an endeavor I have thus far refused to take on over the course of this writing this newsletter. Join me.
I never particularly thought Carter looked kind of like, sweaty before but | Wikimedia Commons
We’ll start, as we must, with Carter’s Wikipedia page. According to our spiritual guides at Wikipedia, Carter is a Career subsection FIRST kind of guy. Namely, he’s the cofounder of an alcohol brand called VeeV Spirits, along with a brother named Courtney. How did Carter and Courtney come to found an alcohol brand?
When I Google VeeV, I find a 2016 release on PR Newswire that doesn’t even want me to worry about any of that, because they sold that shit, and founded an investment firm called M133. As per PRN, M13 is “a diversified holding and branding development company at the nexus of consumer brands, media and technology” and has invested in so many successful, sometimes unsettling companies (“Pinterest, Lyft, SpaceX, Warby Parker, Bonobos, Thrive Market, Tender Greens, Pressed Juicery, KeVita, Blue Bottle Coffee, BirchBox, Ring and more.”) Wow, they must have made a lot of money on Veev!
But its existence was news to me. I texted friend-of-Heir-Mail Dave Infante, the editor of the best possible alcohol newsletter Fingers, to see if he had ever heard of VeeV. He also had not.
Despite VeeV’s lack of brand recognition by both a professional booze writer and a lady who really enjoys drinking, it’s much heralded, PRN-from-2016 tells me. The company won the Technomic Fast 50 Award (Technomic appears to be a management consulting company for foodservice, specializing in data), and one of the "250 Fastest Growing Companies in the U.S." by Inc. Magazine (sure why not!). Also: “Carter and Courtney were named as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of both 2014 and 2015 by Goldman Sachs at its annual Builders + Innovators Summit.” Also: Carter and Courtney used to work at Goldman Sachs.
To back up briefly, the brothers’ goal with VeeV, according to that PR Newswire release, had been to “change the spirits industry by creating a one-of-a-kind vodka alternative,” i.e. a “neutral spirit” for when you want to get drunk on something that tastes like nothing, but you’re mad at vodka for some reason. To that end, they created the liquor the company was named for, an organic no-dka made with acai (and wheat) — which still exists, having been sold to Luxco, the company that makes Everclear. They also sold VitaFrute, a line of premade VeeV cocktails, that Luxco today says are crafted with “American-Made Vodka.”
Carter, Courtney, and Paris at their bachelor(ette) party | @carterreum_official
Off this success, the brothers became VCs, appeared on a CW Shark Tank-esque show called Hatched that may or may not have been for kidtrepreneurs/entrepretots, and wrote articles for HuffPo (about, I swear to god, how to have a green wedding4 and signature wedding cocktails) and a book entitled Shortcut Your Startup: Ten Ways to Speed Up Entrepreneurial Success.
Oh, and maybe this is relevant, Carter and Courtney’s dad, Robert, who passed in 2017, had been the CEO of a Amsted Industries, which makes railroad and construction components and was valued at $4 billion dollars in 2019. Robert went to Yale, University of Michigan Law, and Harvard Business School, worked at MGM, and had sat on the board of Waste Management before his death. His own father had been a lawyer, and both he and Robert’s mother “held notable positions in Illinois governmental and political affairs,” as per Robert’s Chicago Sun-Times obit. I haven’t ever seen Carter or Courtney5 referred to as an heir. Paris is friend of the family.
Estimated Net Worth: Paris is still estimated at $300 million. Life&Style says Carter’s worth about $35-40 million.
“Inside Indian millionaire heiress Pinky Reddy’s ultra-luxury mansion in Hyderabad, where she throws extravagant parties with her GVK scion husband, GV Sanjay Reddy,” South China Morning Post
The unofficial subtheme of this week is “boys can be heiresses too” (or maybe “among the ultra rich, marriage is still a matter of power consolidation,” either way).
South China Morning Post has a piece about Pinky Reddy’s “ultra -luxury mansion” and “extravagant parties” in the tech-and-celeb capital Hyderabad. Pinky is an heiress, sure (she’s the daughter of Dr. T Subbarami Reddy, “a well-known Indian politician, businessman and filmmaker”) but she’s married to GV Sanjay Reddy, scion to the GVK fortune, which is like, serious.
Pinky Reddy, an heiress, and her husband Sanjay, an heir, goof trooping it up | @pinkyreddyofficial
Sanjay’s dad, GV Krishna Reddy, is the founder of a company that describes itself on its website as “a leading Indian conglomerate with diversified interests across various sectors of economic significance.” Sure! We’re treated to this vagueness as images of ambulances (“We care”) and placesettings (“We redefinite hospitality”) and airports (“We create new gateways”) flash above. They do energy, resources, airports and transportation, hotels, etc. etc. Truly fingers in every pie, too much!
Pinky is an entrepreneur and art collector, two of the best-sounding jobs that mean “rich already.” Her parties honestly sound like, good, fine — they have a nice yard and all-nighters on Choti Diwali — but details are actually scarce. More importantly, her wardrobe is two floors high, which frankly seems overwhelming.
Estimated Net Worth: BiographyMask.com puts her at $9.6 million, but her father-in-law was worth a billion in 2010, as per Forbes.
“Hillsborough heiress Tiffany Li is answering questions about murder of her children's father,” ABC7News
“Hillsborough Heiress, Now in Civil Trial Over 2016 Murder, Unsurprisingly Blames Other Two Suspects,” SFist
Tiffany Li made history in 2017 when she posted bail using a record-setting $66 million in property (and another $4 million in cash). At the time, the DA said, basically, “yup, the rich are buying their way out of prison.”
Tiffany, whose family money comes from real estate and construction in China, was accused of murdering Keith Green, the father of her two young children, outside of San Francisco. Also accused: her boyfriend, Kaveh Bayat, and Olivier Adella, an MMA fighter with a bunch of other names, who they allegedly enlisted to dump the body. All three got off on criminal charges.
But now it’s civil charges time, as Keith’s mother is suing, and Tiffany is saying in a leaked deposition that, having heard what she heard at trial, she does think her boyfriend did it. So good job on that one, prosecution!
The initial case alleged that Tiffany texted Kaveh “green light” and was the last person seen with Keith, at a local pancake house. She says she didn’t need to kill her ex because they worked out a custody agreement; lawyers at the time said the custody agreement didn’t mean anything because she knew he’d soon be dead.
Estimated Net Worth: Her family is allegedly worth $100 million, which would make that $70million she put up still a pretty good chunk.
From the rest of the alert
Anderson Cooper recalls pretending to be a long-suffering assistant named Monica to help his mother Gloria Vanderbilt sell her paintings on Instagram. Make Andy and Glo’s wacky adventures an animated series for BravoKids+ already!!
From Dallas’s D Magazine, here’s a lede: “Highland Park harbors a lot of oil money, none of it older or more likely to be spent on yard art than Jane Benedum’s trust fund.” Jane’s neighbors have a problem with the life-size wooden bears, topiaries, and lion statues in front of her house, but she’s not going down without a fight: “She says she is prepared to take her case to the Supreme Court, pointing out that she doesn’t have any children or siblings to otherwise occupy her time. ‘What else do I have to do?’ she says, laughing.”
We regret the error: what we last week called a second ceremony was actually wedding number #3 for Princess Di’s godson and “airline heiress” Nina Flohr. Still to each other!
Photos of Julia Garner as Anna Delvey were freaking everywhere.
Nicky Hilton appeared on the cover of Haute Living. There are no pictures of her hot husband, but there’s a little mention that he dressed up like Santa last year. I’ll take it!
England looking hard for the guy who robbed Tamara Ecclestone. They’re calling him “Lupin,” after the show! They’re using the word “manhunt!” He might be in Serbia!
Ghislaine was never offered a plea deal which… honestly seems maybe short-sighted to me? We really think she’s the most powerful person we can bring to justice here? Did I not understand the 40,000 hours of cop shows I’ve watched in my life? Also: she apparently has twin sisters, and no one can tell which one is which showing up to court.
DJ Cuppy, the Nigerian oil heiress slash, well, DJ had been fighting with a fellow musician, Zlatan, but she showed up on his London stage last week and quashed their beef.
DJ Cuppy and Zlatan make up | @cuppymusic
A Very British Scandal — a limited series coming to Amazon Prime from the A Very English Scandal people, you get it — stars Claire Foy as Margaret Campbell, a textile heiress and Duchess-by-marriage, the very 1960s object of slut-shaming and early revenge porn.6 This Vogue write up makes it seem like the show might take itself a little seriously, but she seems fun — she spent up all her money, is credited with the quote “Go to bed early, and often,” and once left a taping of the show After Dark because she was so tired. Wikipedia says people hated her memoir “for its name dropping and air of entitlement” but there’s no citation and damn, I want to read it now.
10 years of Crystal Bridges, and Town & Country gave us an interview with Alice Walton (of the Walmart Waltons, not to presume), but I just… couldn’t dive deep.7 Crystal Bridges is compelling, but Walmart is depressing, and the “how should we pay for art” of it all — pass, rn. A selection to end on:
Her jewelry is a tour of the world’s second-richest woman’s lack of pretension. A strand of gray-green river mussel pearls is a gift from a former neighbor in Fort Worth, Texas; an “all scratched up” peridot hovers over her middle finger, bought “many moons ago somewhere in New York,” and matches the green stones in her costume earrings. Asked who made her crisp, pine-colored blazer, she shrugs and invites the Art Bridges publicist to check the label.
“It’s Armani,” he says. “It’s a-what?” Walton crows in her Arkansas alto. She buys what she likes; she does not know brands, nor does she care.
Believable!!!
Which I’m not going to say “is notable for including a landline” but it does.
Here’s an Architectural Digest piece about the house, which was built in 1935 by Black architect Paul R. Williams for CBS founder Jay Paley (who, by the way, is not the guy from the Paley Center as I assumed; that’s Jay’s nephew William S.).
“M13 refers to the brightest cluster of stars in the galaxy with the sum of the parts being greater than the whole,” as per PR Newswire.
“The best kept secret at a wedding isn't that the groom slept with one of the bridemaids, it's that a wonderful celebration about love and new beginnings produces an enormous amount of waste,” writes Carter.
Here’s a clip from Carter’s IG of Courtney on Fox Business saying “never bet against Facebook, just for fun.”
Her Duke found and widely distributed polaroids of his wife nude and even mid-bone, leading to their divorce. During the split proceedings, he claimed she banged 88 other men. (Later, the Scotsman wrote that many of those men were gay so that is… more information?) She never revealed who the man in the nudes was; respect.
There is, at least, a casual mention of her driving a “street legal golf cart.” Wonder why.