-Caveat Lector-
The New York Times
November 3, 1996
HEADLINE: 700 Days In Society And Politics;
Fund-Raiser Wed To Billionaire Finds Roles Clash
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Few people in the annals of New York society have made an entrance like that
of Patricia Duff, the influential Democrat who two and a half years ago left
behind a Hollywood studio executive, married the Revlon billionaire Ronald
O. Perelman, gave birth to their child the following day, then turned her
attention to raising enormous sums of money for President Clinton, her old
friend.
Ms. Duff soon became a pillar in the small, powerful circle of Manhattan
investment bankers who have helped raise tens of millions of dollars in New
York for the Democrats -- their part in making the 1996 campaign the most
extravagantly funded in history. Often, she sat next to Mr. Clinton -- at a
dinner at Mr. Perelman's hacienda in Palm Beach, Fla., then at two
fund-raising events this year in New York. In April, Ms. Duff became chair
of a get-out-the-women's-vote campaign for Emily's List, the political
action committee that supports Democratic women candidates, and by this
summer was under consideration to become a member of the United States
delegation to the United Nations.
But now, not quite 700 days after her wedding, and only two days before the
election that has been a focus of her life for a year, Ms. Duff has largely
vanished from public sight. Holed up at her own home in Southport, Conn.,
she is struggling to resolve the future of her marriage and her course in
New York.
Her crisis began in August, when she and her husband had a blow-up at the
Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (Mr. Perelman's spokesman, James
Conroy, calls it a "disagreement.")
Friends of Ms. Duff say Mr. Perelman became so angry that he stormed out of
the city early in his private jet, leaving his wife and daughter to get home
on their own.
Today, Ms. Duff's troubles remain the talk of Manhattan's political and
social elite, though friends describe the conflict as more prosaic than one
might suppose. "If you move the decimal point a little bit to the left --
maybe a lot to the left -- they're like 10,000 couples I've met from
Queens," said former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, who knows both.
Ms. Duff's difficulties have nonetheless unfolded on a stage where the
worlds of finance, politics and entertainment intersect, and where her
friends in New York, Los Angeles and Washington are asking these questions
about her future:
If her marriage does not survive, will any financial settlement be enough to
maintain her as a player in the stratosphere she now inhabits?
Will she be hampered if her net worth is only in the tens of millions of
dollars, an amount viewed by her husband's business associates as mere
"rounding-off money" -- the difference, say, between $1.96 billion and $2
billion?
Or will Ms. Duff, 42, a film-starlike beauty who reminds people of Grace
Kelly, make peace with Mr. Perelman, 53, the cigar-smoking chairman of
Revlon, with an estimated net worth of $4 billion? And will she press him
further toward Democratic causes? (Common Cause reports that Mr. Perelman
and his companies had contributed evenly to both parties until Mr. Clinton
was elected. Since 1993, they have given $750,250 to the Democrats and
$115,000 to the Republicans.)
"Either way, Patricia Duff is going to continue to be involved in Democratic
politics," said James Harmon, chairman of the investment banking firm of
Schroder Wertheim and a leading Democratic fund-raiser in New York. "She has
been involved in politics for most of her life."
Ms. Duff's East Side town house has been an important port of call over the
last 18 months for top Clinton Administration officials, many of whom she
knew before her marriage to Mr. Perelman, a registered Independent. Friends
describe her as intelligent and committed. Some say they would not be
surprised if Mr. Clinton rewards her with a prominent appointment in a
second term.
Both Ms. Duff and Mr. Perelman declined to be interviewed. But many friends
agreed to talk about their story, which tells much about the upper reaches
of an insular and conservative part of New York. In this world, a
billionaire's wife is often an ornament, a woman who gives his parties and
manages his houses -- not someone with political ambitions of her own.
"I don't think anybody understood what she was about," said a woman in Ms.
Duff's circle.
Even so, friends cannot describe Ms. Duff without returning to her beauty.
It is not just ordinary attractiveness, they say, but an ethereal quality
that over the years has helped advance her career, stirred jealousies among
women and perhaps confused Ms. Duff herself about the reasons for her
achievements. Without these qualities, and without the help of rich
husbands, her friends insist, Ms. Duff could have succeeded on her own --
though not as quickly.
The Fund-Raiser
Warm Friendship With a President
The city's Democratic establishment stuffed itself into a monstrous ballroom
of the Sheraton New York last February for a $1,000-a-plate glimpse of the
President. He sat at a front table surrounded, to no one's surprise, by his
most important New York contributors.
Mr. Perelman sat across from the President; on Mr. Clinton's left was Jane
Harmon, a theatrical producer and Mr. Harmon's wife. Ms. Duff was on his
right; Mr. Clinton spent more time talking to her than anyone else, and the
two laughed easily like old friends.
"She's been up there at the top of the Democratic political business since
1980," said the Democratic consultant Bob Squier.
Ms. Duff was born Patricia Orr and grew up largely in Europe, where her
father worked for Hughes Aircraft. She graduated from Georgetown University
in 1976, worked on Capitol Hill and joined the staff of Patrick Caddell, the
pollster. Later, Mr. Squier made her a vice president of his firm.
As a brief first marriage to a lawyer named Dan Duff was ending, she left
Washington to organize Hollywood for the 1984 Presidential campaign of Gary
Hart, and in Los Angeles met Mike Medavoy, who ran Orion Pictures and was
the national finance chairman of the Hart campaign. They married in 1986.
Later, she founded a Los Angeles forum for political candidates called Show
Coalition, which helped introduce an ambitious Arkansas governor to the
Hollywood establishment.
Mr. Clinton ended up staying at the Medavoys' Coldwater Canyon mansion one
night in 1991 -- Mr. Medavoy was by then chairman of Tristar Pictures. As
President, Mr. Clinton reciprocated by having the Medavoys spend a night in
the White House. A friend said Ms. Duff recounted how the President had
knocked on their door in the morning, announcing, "This is your wake-up
call."
Friends say Ms. Duff's marriage to Mr. Medavoy was in trouble by the summer
of 1993. In January 1994, Mr. Medavoy resigned as chairman of Tristar; that
spring, Ms. Duff was seeing Mr. Perelman, whom she knew through mutual
friends. They married on Dec. 12, 1994, after Mr. Perelman's expensive
divorce from his second wife, the television celebrity reporter Claudia
Cohen. Ms. Duff's and Mr. Perelman's daughter, Caleigh Sophia, was born on
Dec. 13.
Friends of Mr. Perelman went out of their way to welcome his new bride,
knowing that he was "mad" for her, as one of them put it. Barbara Walters
and the socialite Gayfryd Steinberg gave Ms. Duff baby showers, and everyone
talked about how ecstatic Ms. Duff had been when she learned she was
pregnant after long years of wanting a child.
What many people in these circles did not know was Ms. Duff's history with
the Democratic party, or the extent of her political work.
"She never made that clear," said a woman in Mr. Perelman's circle. "If you
got an invitation from her that was politically oriented, I think people
assumed it was because of Ronnie's money."
The Billionaire's Wife
A Devoted Mother Dives Into Politics
In the first months after her daughter's birth, Ms. Duff worked out of Mr.
Perelman's East Side town house, filled with works by Picasso, Matisse and
Modigliani, but eventually moved to an office in a town house Mr. Perelman
owns next door. She focused at first on a half-dozen charity projects, as
well as the presidency of the Revlon Foundation and the chairmanship of a
state task force on teen-age pregnancy.
Most days, she rose early, left for the gym at 7:30 A.M. and returned by 9
to do business on the phone and in meetings. In between, she would spend
time with her daughter. At 4 P.M., a butler brought fresh chocolate chip
cookies. "Cookie time!" Ms. Duff would say to Kathryn Roth, vice president
of the Revlon Foundation and Ms. Duff's political adviser.
Ms. Duff usually worked until 7:30 P.M., and about half the time went out to
dinner afterward with her husband. She took Caleigh everywhere she could.
"She worked hard, and she put an awful lot into the baby," said Ms. Roth,
who now works at the Pentagon. "Whatever she was doing, if the baby cried,
she'd put it down and focus on the baby."
(One friend from the Clinton campaign remembers going over to the Perelman
house at Christmas and seeing at least a dozen children's car seats in the
front hall. "What a great idea for gifts," the staffer said, only to be told
that the seats were all for the cars in the Perelman fleet.)
A highlight of those early months was the March 30, 1995, dinner in Palm
Beach for Mr. Clinton and 15 others, including the actor Don Johnson and the
singer Jimmy Buffett, who led guests after dinner in "Margaritaville."
Subsequent events at the Perelman town house included a visit by Tipper Gore
in the spring, a briefing by Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff,
in October, and a reception attended by Hillary Rodham Clinton in November,
after which Mrs. Clinton joined Ms. Duff and her baby in the nursery for 45
minutes.
On Valentine's Day this year, the day before the big Sheraton fund-raising
dinner, Ms. Duff gave a small dinner at home for Vice President Al Gore. By
this time, the Clinton-Gore campaign had raised all the money allowed by
law, so the fund-raising operation had switched to soliciting what is known
as "soft money" for the Democratic Party for which no ceilings on
contributions apply.
For the evening with Mr. Gore, Ms. Duff invited the art dealer Larry
Gagosian, who later wrote two checks totaling $25,000, and the lawyer Joseph
H. Flom, who contributed $100,000 to the Democrats this year and last,
according to Federal Election Commission records.
The big dinner at the Sheraton came the next day. For New Yorkers, it was
the first public display of Ms. Duff's status at the White House. Its
genesis also reflected her work up until then.
The dinner had been originally scheduled for November 1995, when Mr.
Clinton's political fortunes were floundering, but was postponed because of
the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, and then
because of a winter storm. Two weeks before the original date, ticket sales
were so slow that the dinner was "tanking," one staffer said.
So Ms. Duff and a handful of other Democratic fund-raisers responded, by
assembling 50 phones at Mr. Harmon's office at Schroder Wertheim and calling
just about everyone they knew. In one day, some 100 people came in to sell
the $1,000 tickets to friends, business associates, or strangers from the
lists of names provided by the Democratic party. Ms. Duff worked from her
own list.
"Patricia comes in, she's wheeling her baby, and to her credit she gets on
the phone and makes calls," Mr. Harmon said. "She's not a prima donna."
Ms. Duff's life became increasingly hectic last spring, with a speech in
Washington, a conference in Los Angeles, more fund-raising events at home --
and more checks written by her and her husband. Ms. Duff gave a reception at
the town house at the end of June for Representative Robert G. Torricelli,
the Democratic candidate for Senate in New Jersey.
In that race, however, Mr. Perelman appears to have hedged his bets. Federal
Election Commission records show that Mr. Torricelli got $1,000 from Mr.
Perelman on June 3; the Republican candidate, Representative Richard A.
Zimmer, received his $1,000 on June 4.
After still more fund-raising events, including a $5,000-a-plate dinner at
the Plaza Hotel, where Ms. Duff again sat next to Mr. Clinton, the Perelmans
rested. In August, they took a 10-day break on a yacht off Italy with
friends. The support staff floated along in its own boat.
The Separation
At the Convention, A Marital Fight
Ms. Duff came back to the United States to serve as an official New York
State delegate to the Democratic convention. She arrived in Chicago on a
Sunday with her daughter and plunged immediately into a round of speeches,
receptions and parties.
Four days later, Mr. Perelman arrived and en route to the convention hall,
asked his wife if she had attended a party at the restaurant of Michael
Jordan, the basketball star, the night before. Friends say he had disliked
her going to parties alone, so when she said yes, he became enraged. Ms.
Duff's friends say he leapt out of the chauffeured car, got into another car
in his motorcade, and was soon gone.
Later that night, Ms. Duff's friends say, Mr. Perelman instructed his aides
to begin dismissing his wife's staff, including her public relations aide,
Alma Viator, who had already announced her resignation.
"They were acting like some little tin-pot despots," said Ben Jones, Ms.
Viator's husband, a writer and a former congressman from Georgia. "It's just
a bad soap opera."
Mr. Perelman's spokesman, Mr. Conroy, said Ms. Viator was not dismissed, and
that four other assistants on Ms. Duff's staff were "reassigned" within Mr.
Perelman's holding company, MacAndrews & Forbes.
Ms. Duff and Mr. Perelman spent a weekend this fall in Paris, and on Oct. 17
appeared together at a Revlon charity ball in Los Angeles. But Ms. Duff was
at neither of the two Presidential debates, the place for big donors to be
seen, and she has withdrawn her name from consideration for the United
Nations position.
For the most part she remains in Southport, and from there talks to Mr.
Perelman by phone and through lawyers. Friends of the couple say they have
no idea whether they will reconcile.
"I think the best thing in the world she could do is to be without a man,"
said a friend, echoing the others.
Whatever happens, New York's Democrats cannot imagine that Ms. Duff will
withdraw from the scene. She has invested too much time through two decades
and three marriages, they say, to walk away now.
"She didn't just want to be a power," said Representative Charles E. Schumer
of Brooklyn. "She wanted to learn."
GRAPHIC: Photos: For years, Ms. Duff has also been a top fund-raiser for the
Democratic Party. In February, she sat at President Clinton's right at a
$1,000-a-plate dinner at the Sheraton New York. Mr. Perelman sat across from
them. (Thomas Dallal for The New York Times); Patricia Duff is the wife of
Ronald O. Perelman, the Revlon billionaire (at a charity event in 1995).
(Andrea Renault/Globe Photos); And the mother of their child, Caleigh
Sophia. (Herb Ritts/Visages
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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