Gilded Lily

by Isabel Vincent

  A month before Ted’s trial began in Monaco, Lily was among 115 guests at a fortieth-birthday party for Elton John’s partner, David Furnish. It was a black-tie affair, with champagne and white truffle risotto, in both London and Venice (Elton chartered a plane for the London-to-Venice trip). The guests were decidedly more rock-and-roll royalty than the kind Lily was now used to. It’s rather difficult to imagine the gilded Lily on the dance floor alongside guests like Donatella Versace, Elizabeth Hurley, Sting, and Isabella Blow. Lily’s friend Lynn Wyatt appears to have been right at home, though—“dirty-dancing” with video artist David LaChapelle, “in dangerous deshabillé as his shirt hung open, his suspenders dangled at his knees and his trousers slipped down his hips.”

  After the conclusion of Ted Maher’s trial in Monaco in December 2002, Lily’s public relations consultants appeared to work overtime to reestablish her important role in society. Triumphant after Ted’s conviction, Lily flew to New York to dedicate the synagogue on the Upper East Side that Eli Attia had begun in the 1980s. Following the nasty legal battle with Attia, the beaux-arts–style synagogue, with massive doors of carved brass, was completed by the French architect Thierry Despont. Attia’s early work on the house of worship on East Sixty-third Street, off Fifth Avenue, was conveniently forgotten. The Sephardic community for whom it was built was also conveniently forgotten at the dedication even as Lily organized a dinner for three hundred people at the University Club of New York on Fifth Avenue.

  Instead of inviting the important members of the New York Sephardic community that her husband had generously supported over a lifetime, the sacred occasion seemed to become just another New York society event. At a later party for the synagogue, it was Lily’s golden dress and her “17th century heavy gold necklace recovered from a Spanish ship” that took precedence over the dedication of the Edmond J. Safra synagogue. After the University Club fête, Lily’s friends threw other parties to commemorate the grand occasion. One party was held at Swifty’s and was hosted by the Iraqi-born financier Ezra Zilkha and his wife, Cecile. Later, Lily was the guest of honor at another lavish party hosted by Joan Rivers at her palatial apartment, which was exquisitely decorated with white lilies, snapdragons and roses for the occasion. “There were Buccellati’s silver sparrows at each place setting and silver vases filled with bunches of tiny white roses.” Lily arrived wearing “an iridescent claret-colored taffeta coat over claret brocade pants with little satin slippers to match,” by Oscar de la Renta.

  “Lily is a lovely, courageous woman, who in the last several years has gone through hell since the mysterious death of her husband in a fire in their Monte Carlo apartment and later at the trial during which she handled herself impeccably and emerged in triumph like the lady she is,” said her friend Aileen Mehle in her Women’s Wear Daily column a few weeks after the conclusion of Ted’s trial in Monaco.

  The “lovely, courageous” Lily also celebrated her legal triumph with the purchase of a new Paris apartment on the exclusive avenue Gabriel, a duplex with marvelous views of the Eiffel Tower from every room—the same apartment that Blaine Trump’s family lived in when Blaine was a student in Paris. Again, her friends at Women’s Wear Daily felt compelled to defend her honor: “These days and nights, she is a happy woman, out lunching and dining with her friends, wearing marvelous clothes, and emerging from the three-year nightmare and the ugly, false and unfounded speculation that followed her in print after the death of her husband, Edmond, in their Monte Carlo apartment, a victim of a fire set by one of his nurses, the now-imprisoned Ted Maher.”

  Indeed, after years of tension following the bizarre death of her husband, Lily was ready to reassume her place as a leading hostess in New York. Because she believed in doing nothing by half measures, Lily hired Preston Bailey, the most sought-after event planner in Manhattan, to create an evening that would impress even the high-society luminaries who had seen it all.

  Bailey is a striking figure on the New York social scene, with his muscular physique and his shaved head—smooth and polished like a billiard ball. He is a former model from Panama who embarked on his career as haute society’s foremost event planner when he designed the 1998 wedding of Joan Rivers’s daughter Melissa at the Plaza hotel. Bailey turned one of the ballrooms of the hotel into a Czarist winter garden from Doctor Zhivago, featuring 30,000 white flowers and 100 trees painted white.

  For Lily, he would transform one of her empty Fifth Avenue apartments overlooking Central Park (she owned two) into a French country garden. “We agreed that a lush garden setting would be the perfect antidote to the endless weeks of rain we’d been having, so I set about conjuring an atmosphere that would recall the French countryside,” wrote Bailey in an article for Elle Décor that devoted one of its glossy pages to the decoration of Lily’s party room. “Still, nothing short of a magical evening would wow the guests.”

  Two weeks before the party, Bailey set about transforming the foyer and forty-seven-foot-long living room in the apartment into a French garden. In the dining room, he attached a grid covered in lemon leaves to the ceiling and hung rose petals sewn together to look like garlands of wisteria in white and lavender. He lined sections of the walls with screens imprinted with photographs of vast landscapes. “I then wove thousands of blossoms into the screens to further blur the boundaries of the area—used weathered green trellis lit from behind to convey dappled sunlight.” The effect was similar to dining under a huge wisteria tree.

  For the centerpieces, Bailey used white peonies flown in from Holland, cymbidium orchids, lavender, sweet pea, blue hyacinths, and Australian dendrobium orchids. “At each window there were trellis arbors draped with celadon and pink Fatima orchid ‘curtains’ outlining the park views.”

  The sixty guests, who included former British prime minister Lady Margaret Thatcher, Brian and Mila Mulroney, Michael Bloomberg, Diane Sawyer, Nancy Kissinger, the Erteguns, Joan Rivers, Princess Firyal of Jordan, Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera, Robert Higdon, and Lynn and Oscar Wyatt (who flew in from their home in Texas), assembled for drinks at Lily’s other apartment on a higher floor. For dinner, they took the elevator to the other apartment. “When the elevator opened 60 jaws dropped at the sight of a fabulous ‘conservatory’ fragrant with the smell of all those flowers,” gushed Mehle.

  “It was a scene of great beauty and those 60 who have been everywhere and done everything could hardly believe their eyes.” As Bailey himself noted, “I waited in the foyer—it was a harbinger of the lavish things to come, with elephant’s ear branches, trellis, and light patterns bathing the walls and floors—for everyone to arrive. I was handsomely rewarded with audible gasps, most definitely a few dropped jaws and I’m not exaggerating, a few soft shrieks of delight.”

  After dinner, the guests “lounged on wrought iron garden furniture under 10-foot topiary trees built of birch branches and hanging with pears, lemons and limes.”

  A month later, Lily was off to England for Elton John’s annual White Tie and Tiara party, an upscale AIDS benefit “that draws every celebrity, moneybags and social figure for leagues around and then some”—at his country home in Surrey. In “a chiffon dress the color of moonlight,” Lily hired a motorcoach to bring her friends from London to the party. As usual, Blaine and Robert Trump, Joan Rivers, and Robert Higdon were among her guests.

  That fall, Lily wowed them again with the opening of the Edmond J. Safra Hall at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Elton John performed and Diane Sawyer and Michael J. Fox also presided at the dinner, where Lily greeted her guests in “a black Valentino.” In addition to the usual suspects—the Trumps, the Erteguns, the Zilkhas, and the Herreras—legendary New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau, the museum’s chairman, also attended.

  In the years after Edmond’s death, Lily was surely living her dream. She had transformed herself into an elegant hostess, creating memorable parties, wearing beautiful clothes, dining with royalty, and donating huge sums of money to good causes. Which
is why she must have received such a devastating shock when, in the summer of 2005, the royal biographer Lady Colin Campbell published a novel about a social-climbing billionairess who murders her second and fourth husbands.

  With her imperious manner and drawling upper-class Jamaican accent, Lady Colin is a towering and rather intimidating society blonde who is afraid of no one. Born with a genital disfigurement to a wealthy Jamaican family in 1949, Lady Colin was christened George William Ziadie and raised a boy. When she was twenty-one, she had corrective surgery. She married Lord Colin Campbell, a brother of the Duke of Argyll, in 1974 and divorced him a year later, but held on to the title.

  Empress Bianca, Lady Colin’s first novel, was not supposed to garner any of the worldwide publicity that it received when it was quietly released in Britain in June 2005, but that was before Lily’s society friends read the book and were convinced that it was a thinly disguised roman à clef about her life. Lady Colin is best known for her best-selling tell-all biographies of Diana, Princess of Wales. Known as Georgie to her friends, she argued that Empress Bianca was based on one of her cousins and had little or nothing to do with Lily. But the argument may have seemed unconvincing to Lily, especially as Lady Colin’s book was dedicated to the memory of Rosy’s daughter Christina Fanto, Lily’s niece during her marriage to Alfredo Monteverde.

  In Empress Bianca, the central character, Bianca Barnett, is “a veritable monster of vanity and pretension” and “the most ambitious and mercenary person.” She hails from South America, has three children by her first husband, and loses her beloved first son in a tragic car crash. Her second husband, Ferdy Piedraplata, is shot by a hitman who makes the death look like a suicide. The hit is organized by Bianca’s lover, a Middle Eastern banker named Philippe Mahfoud, who eventually becomes her fourth husband.

  “In life, circumstances sometimes force people to do things they normally wouldn’t do,” says Philippe to Bianca as he outlines the plan to kill Ferdy soon after Ferdy threatens to divorce her. Philippe enlists a member of the Gambino crime family to carry out the murder in the victim’s home in a luxe suburb of the Venezuelan capital Caracas.

  The murder further unites Bianca and Philippe, who eventually marry after Bianca divorces her third husband—an interior designer—whom she marries to make Philippe jealous. But years after the murder, relations sour between Philippe and Bianca. Philippe and one of his nurses die in a mysterious blaze in his apartment in Andorra, a tax haven nestled in the Pyrenees between Spain and France. “When police finally managed to cut through, they found Philippe and Agatha sitting on the floor…Both were dead. Asphyxiated.”

  In the novel, police and investigators are paid off by Bianca’s highly organized team of lawyers and financiers. Frustrated at the complete absence of justice for her crimes, Bianca’s enemies decide to fight her where they know it will hurt the most—in the court of high society. “Wherever she goes and whatever she does, she will know that a healthy proportion of the people around her will either despise her or laugh at her,” writes Lady Colin. “All her money, all the influence she has so avidly courted, the people she has just as avidly cultivated and all the manipulations to which she will resort in the future are powerless to bring this punishment to an end. As long as she exists, Bianca now clearly understands, so will it. And the thought of it starts tearing slowly away at her insides.”

  On July 3, 2005, the Sunday Telegraph published an account of Empress Bianca. A day later, Lily hired high-powered London lawyer Anthony Julius of the prestigious London firm Mischon de Reya. Julius, who had previously represented Princess Diana in her divorce from Prince Charles, demanded a retraction and apology from the editors of the Sunday Telegraph.

  The apology was swift, appearing soon after the article. “It was never our intention to suggest that the actions attributed to the fictional character had been carried out by Mrs. Safra in reality,” read the newspaper’s groveling apology. “We understand that our linking of Mrs. Safra’s name with that of the novel’s central character has greatly upset her. We very much regret this and apologize unreservedly to Mrs. Safra for any embarrassment caused.”

  Had Lily read the book?

  “I believe that Mrs. Safra read part of the book,” said Mark Bolland, Lily’s public relations consultant, in a sworn statement. “I understand that she was unable to read any further because she was so distressed by the contents. I believe her advisers also read part of the book.”

  Bolland, a former public relations adviser to the Prince of Wales, noted that it was his job to promote Lily’s charities, protect her privacy, and “keep her out of the papers.” Presumably, Bolland meant only the newspapers that refused to kowtow to Lily, and not the society press where she loved to appear.

  But not content to focus on the newspapers, Lily turned against the book’s London publisher. On July 12, 2005, Lady Colin Campbell’s publisher Bliss Books, a subsidiary of Arcadia Books, received a stern letter from Julius. The letter said that “Mrs. Safra regarded the book as defamatory” and wanted it removed from distribution and pulped. It spelled out seventeen direct parallels between the lives of the character Bianca Barnett and herself. Julius gave Arcadia Books five days to respond.

  Gary Pulsifer, the publisher of Arcadia Books, moved quickly to withdraw all unsold copies of the book and destroy them. “Our investors want us to settle now, which we’ll do,” said Pulsifer. “If Georgie takes it further—sounds like she will—it will be interesting to see who steps into what witness box.” Lily settled with Arcadia on July 25, 2005, after the publisher agreed to destroy all copies of the book.

  Lady Colin turned the tables on Lily, suing her on the grounds that she was depriving the author of her income and foreign sales of the book, which she defended as a work of fiction based on a distant relative of her own.

  “Lily tried to misuse the laws and then I used them against her,” said Lady Colin. “I’m an experienced litigant, so I sued her when Arcadia shut down.”

  In the early days of the controversy, when the book was released in London, Lily’s friends and foes snapped it up before the ban. A Brazilian woman close to the story ordered eighty copies of the book and had them anonymously distributed to Lily’s highly placed society friends, including Nancy Reagan. A handful of copies that survived the pulping were available on eBay for nearly $1,000 a copy.

  The lawsuit against Lily turned into a Mexican standoff, but Lady Colin did win back the right to rerelease her book in the U.S., provided that she make the seventeen changes demanded by Lily. These proved to be relatively minor.

  “She objected to the fact that Bianca’s fourth husband was Lebanese, so I have made him Iraqi,” said Lady Colin. “In fact, the character was partly based on my own father, who was Lebanese. On the advice of my lawyer, I changed everything that Mrs. Safra objected to.”

  In late summer 2008, Lady Colin, impeccably coiffed and elegantly dressed, hosted a group of friends and fans who sipped white wine and munched on hors d’oeuvres at her Manhattan book launch, which took place at a tony Upper East Side bookshop.

  One of Lady Colin’s biggest fans turned out to be Ted Maher himself, who read a copy of her book during his last year in prison. He also maintained a correspondence with the grande dame, who publicly stated that she felt he was made a scapegoat by the Monaco authorities, that he was wrongly convicted, and that the real story behind the events of December 3, 1999, has never been properly investigated.

  Her claims were unexpectedly bolstered by one of the investigating judges in the Maher case. Jean Christophe Hullin told the French newspaper Le Figaro in June 2007 that before Ted’s trial in Monaco he had attended a meeting with other high-ranking Monaco officials to discuss Ted. Hullin told a journalist that he had met with Monaco’s chief prosecutor and that they had allegedly agreed that Maher would get ten years in jail. His comments have led to an investigation in Monaco, but there is no word on when and if any report will ever be released.

  In a rare o
utburst, Lily lashed out at the allegations that the trial had been fixed. For her, the whole ordeal had come to an end when Ted was convicted and sent to jail. Why did everything need to be rehashed now, some five years later? No doubt this was just more nonsense from “journalists who have nothing better to do,” as she had noted in her testimony at Ted’s trial when she was confronted by the results of the autopsy report that seemed to suggest Edmond might have caused Vivian’s death.

  “To say the trial of the one who murdered her husband was fixed, it’s totally unbearable to her,” said Marc Bonnant, in an interview with the New York Post. “Monaco is not a barbarian country. You can’t fix trials in Europe.”

  According to Bonnant, Lily had suffered “years of sorrow and days of despair” since Edmond’s death. “Her life is not only made of roses. When you love somebody, the money doesn’t make up for their loss. Nothing will heal her wounds. Nothing will take away her pain.”

  The pain must have returned with a vengeance when Ted Maher was released from jail in the summer of 2007, returning to the United States in the fall. He had spent more than eight years in jail (he was incarcerated shortly after Edmond’s funeral) for a crime that he claims he did not commit, and he was angry. Once he stepped onto American soil, Ted told reporters that he had been nothing more than a scapegoat—he had been convicted in order to keep up Monaco’s appearance as a safe playground for the rich and famous. He still insisted that two intruders broke into the apartment the night that Edmond died, but there were new elements to his story. Now he spoke about being accosted in Nice a week before the penthouse fire. He now claimed that two gun-toting thugs abducted him off a street in Nice and showed him photographs of his wife in Stormville and his children leaving school.

  “He was threatened, and pictures were shown to him by these people of his children coming out of school, and his wife coming out of work,” said Michael Griffith, the American lawyer for Ted, who had originally been appointed to the case through Amnesty International. Griffith, a fast-talking Southhampton-based attorney, rose to fame in the 1970s when he represented Billy Hayes, an American student convicted of smuggling hashish out of Turkey in 1970 and the subject of the Hollywood film Midnight Express. Since then, he has specialized in helping Americans who find themselves in legal difficulties abroad through his firm, International Legal Defense Counsel.