Jocelyne Wildenstein, an extraordinary destiny

At 30, not being able to stand these dark circles, she started by having the underside of her eyes “sucked from the inside”

Born Périsset in August 1940 in Lausanne, she was the only daughter of a sporting goods salesman and a former model, employee of a law firm specializing in divorces. As a teenager, she was as beautiful as Botticelli, endless legs, strawberry blonde mane, high cheekbones, almond-shaped green eyes. She lives in Paris, pilots planes, practices aerobatics and water skiing. The men succumb: first a Swiss film producer, then the Italian director Sergio Gobbi. But Jocelyne, who only dreams of Africa, will meet her destiny there.

Kenya, 1977, businessman Adnan Khashoggi introduces him to Alec Wildenstein, heir to the largest dynasty of art dealers and owner of a 26,000 hectare farm neighboring his own. In this setting worthy of “Out of Africa”, he invites Jocelyne to hunt the lion at dawn. An accomplished shooter, she hit the beast twice, whose heart they devoured, she liked to say. The same day, they exchanged their first kiss in front of the snow-capped peaks of Mount Kenya. A year later, wedding in Vegas. Two children were born from this union, Diane, in August 1979, and Alec junior, in July 1980. Between Paris, New York and Nairobi, Mrs. Wildenstein traveled in a Gulfstream IV, with her monkey and her eight dogs on Chanel leashes. Alec never takes a dim view of her spending $35,000 on a dress.

Without dieting or exercising, she prides herself on not having gained a single gram since she was 18, and only maintains herself with a horsehair glove. However, at 30, not being able to stand the dark circles that darken her eyes and seeing her lips wither, she began by having the underside of her eyes “sucked from the inside” and injected with silicone to make her mouth fuller. At 40, his eyelids were retouched; at 45, facial contours. It’s climbing. To resemble the tame panthers on her African farm, she had the inside of her eye tattooed with ink.

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Her husband files for divorce. He can no longer see in painting the one nicknamed “Wildenstein’s bride”, not to say Frankenstein…

In the late 1990s, her misshapen face found itself on the front pages of tabloids around the world during a divorce that was as bitter as it was lucrative. By dint of touch-ups with collagen and strokes of the scalpel, she exhausts a husband who can no longer see in painting the one that all of New York nicknames “the bride of Wildenstein”, not to say Frankenstein… The reality, it The reason is that she is 52 years old and Alec prefers a 19 year old Russian woman, with whom she surprises him at their home. At the end of an epic legal battle, the legitimate wife wins: compensatory compensation of 2.5 billion dollars is granted to her, as well as a pension of 100 million per year. On the other hand, she loses her children, whom she will hardly see anymore.

After consoling herself for a time in the arms of her lawyer, Jocelyne met Lloyd Klein in 2003. To complete their relationship, seventeen years later, he handed her a 32-carat diamond, kneeling on the ground, in Gianni Versace’s house in Miami. We saw them less afterwards, until the Paris episode. In one of her rare interviews, with the “Sunday Times”, in the summer of 2023, Jocelyne Wildenstein affirmed that the family of her ex-husband, who died in 2008, had not paid her any money since 2015. To cover her debts, the three apartments she owned in Trump Tower had been seized and, undoubtedly to rebuild her finances, she had agreed to break the silence on her life in a documentary. The cat woman died in her sleep in Paris, where she returned to look for a little… light.