- Reaction score
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- Location
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Jocelyn Wildenstein, who has died aged 84, hit the headlines in 1997 during her divorce from her wealthy art collector husband because of her addiction to cosmetic surgery, the decidedly scary consequences of which led to her being given the nickname “the Bride of Wildenstein”.
Jocelyn Wildenstein’s story had truly tragic elements. Her devotion to extreme plastic surgery began when, some years married and with two children, she began to fear that her husband (who “hated old people”, she claimed), was losing interest in her.
Hoping to win back his affections, she embarked on a series of procedures to “improve” her looks. These included an unknown number of collagen injections to her lips, cheeks and chin, along with at least seven facelifts and drastic eye reconstruction surgery. By the end her skin was stretched so tightly over her face that she could barely blink and her lips so stuffed with collagen they looked like rubber. “I don’t think I’ve known her when she wasn’t healing from something,” a friend recalled.
Alec Wildenstein had an interest in exotic wild cats, which he hunted on his 66,000 acre ranch in Kenya, and Jocelyn conceived the bizarre notion that he might find her more attractive if she became “more feline”. To achieve the desired effect she even had her pigment darkened.
Unfortunately the treatment (costing a reported £2 million in total) had the opposite effect of that intended. The first time Alec Wildenstein saw his newly-sculpted wife, he was said to have screamed in horror. “She seems to think that you fix a face the same way you fix a house”, he complained later, in court.
But Jocelyn took his reaction as evidence that she had not gone far enough. When she returned to her plastic surgeon for further treatment, patients in his waiting room were said to have fled, fearful that they might end up the same way.
Things went from bad to worse. One day, in June 1997, she returned from a trip to Kenya and turned up unannounced with two bodyguards at her New York town house only to find her husband in bed with a 19-year-old Russian model. As Jocelyn marched into the room, a hysterical Alec Wildenstein seized his Smith & Wesson and threatened to shoot her.
The rest of their relationship was played out in the courts.
She was born Jocelyne Alice Perisse into a middle class family in Lausanne, Switzerland, on August 5 1940. Blonde and Nordic looking as a young woman, she set her heart on snaring a rich husband and, to this end, gained her entrée into the international jet set by learning to fly and shoot big game.
Her opportunity came in 1977 when the Saudi Mr Fixit invited her to visit his Kenyan ranch and arranged for her to go on a dawn lion hunt with his neighbour Alec Wildenstein, the heir to a 10 billion dollar art fortune. So impressed was Wildenstein with Jocelyn’s lion hunting skills that he asked her out for a motorcycle ride through his estate the next day. Within a year he had proposed. They married at a lavish ceremony in Las Vegas in 1978, after which Jocelyn embarked on her career as a society wife.
While Alec managed the affairs of the art business and his Kenyan estate, Jocelyn busied herself with the upkeep and maintenance of their many houses around the world, including a Paris apartment, a Caribbean beach estate, a chateau in France, and another house in Lausanne. Their marital base was a 5-storey New York townhouse which contained a hugely valuable art collection and indoor swimming pool, along with an army of servants, five pure-bred greyhounds and a rare monkey which Alec had bought his wife as pets.
Their favourite possession was the 66,000 Ol-Jogi ranch in Kenya which they turned into a sort of African Versailles, importing herds of giraffe, bison, leopard, lion and white rhino, some brought up from South Africa, and building 120 miles of road, 55 artificial lakes, a swimming pool with rocks and waterfalls, a golf course, a racetrack, and a tennis court with floodlights so bright it was said they could be seen from most of Kenya.
Jocelyn also kept a menagerie of big cats, including a pair of tigers kept in glass cages beside the swimming pool. Her passion for the animals inspired not only her later plastic surgery, but also the designs she commissioned for her fabulous collection of jewellery.
Determined that his wife should always outshine her socialite rivals, Alec Wildenstein spent lavishly on her wardrobe and bought huge quantities of jewellery. For 20 years they spent at least $1 million a month; in 1995 they got through $16 million. Jocelyn paid $350,000 for one Chanel gown and spent $10 million in one go at Cartier. Their budget included a $5,000-a-month bill at the florists.
But by Jocelyn’s account Alec was a difficult man to please. He was subject to fits of depression at the control his imperious father,, still exercised over him, and, after some years of marriage his eye began to wander. By the time she decided to turn herself into a cat, Jocelyn had already had a series of more discreet nips and tucks. Indeed she claimed that she and her husband had made their first trip together to the surgeons before their marriage for an eye-tuck and that he had, initially, encouraged her obsession.
The Smith & Wesson incident, however, left Jocelyn in no doubt that her husband no longer loved her. Wildenstein, who claimed he thought he was being burgled, was arrested for threatening behaviour, hauled before the courts, and bound over to keep the peace. Jocelyn promptly filed for divorce on grounds of his adultery.
