I have a two-word answer: Denise Rich. —Senator John McCain, asked about the need for campaign-finance reform.
Denise Rich is finally getting the tidal wave of publicity she always craved, but there’s a downside to it. Since she 
played a key role in persuading her friend Bill Clinton to pardon her fugitive billionaire ex-husband, Marc Rich, the songwriter and political party giver is blinded by flashbulbs at every event she attends, but she is also bombarded with questions: Rich, who adores the attention, eagerly wades right up to the lenses, flashing cleavage and major jewelry, and firmly stays on message as if no brash questions had been asked: “I’m just here to talk about my music.… Did you see my daughter’s fabulous fashion show?” Meanwhile, behind the scenes, her entire existence is “being turned upside down,” according to Brad Boles, her “imagist,” who acts as her dresser, makeup man, and confidant. “She has lawyers examining every inch of her life under a microscope,” he says. In February she declined to appear before Congress, invoking the protection of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. In mid-April her lawyer labored to work out a deal to have her cooperate with the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is investigating President Clinton’s 11th-hour pardons. In exchange for limited immunity, Rich is now expected to appear before the grand jury. She will also be called before the House Government Reform Committee.
“It’s almost a Shakespearean tragedy,” one of Rich’s legal advisers tells me. “She marries young and then finds herself living abroad with a fugitive. She decides to rebuild her life and returns to the United States. She becomes a successful songwriter. Then her daughter dies. Now this.”
Jews don’t usually pray to angels, but Rich, who has endured more than her share of grief, fervently believes in calling on them for everything: “I got a whole angel chorus up there humming. I really believe angels are happiest when you’re happy.” After she petitions her angels, she claims, her song lyrics streak right through her. She also consults gurus and psychics, takes 30 vitamins a day, and believes in past-life regressions. “One great life I had, I was an Indian woman who ran around giving people herbs and lived in Native America.” As her soulful lyrics for such rhythm-and-blues singers as Aretha Franklin, Natalie Cole, Patti LaBelle, and Mary J. Blige might indicate, Rich also believes “there is definitely a black person inside [of me] waiting to get out. I’m sure I was once black.” Natalie Cole, who is a close friend, told me one night in the living room of Rich’s New York penthouse that before Denise’s photo got published so often, “people thought she was black.”
There is no denying that Rich is a real songwriter with a big career. “She’s not afraid to be vulnerable,” says Cole, who co-wrote last year’s “Livin’ for Love,” a No. 1 dance hit, with Rich. “She speaks on behalf of women. Her lyrics are about what she imagines women have gone through, what she has gone through.” Rich’s duet for Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige, “Don’t Waste Your Time,” was nominated for a Grammy, and she has written hits for Céline Dion and Marc Anthony, as well as the title song for the film The First Wives Club. After a recent radio-station appearance in Jersey City, Rich was on the phone in the backseat of a town car, chatting with Ricky Martin’s manager in fluent Spanish. “This too shall pass,” she said. “I want to write a song called ‘Perdoname.’ ” Although Rich may kid about her current situation, in the months ahead she’ll need her angels more than ever.
According to Rich, her only sister, Monique, who died of cancer at 45 in 1983, is the angel who gave her “the gift” of her first hit, “Frankie,” a No. 1 song in Britain recorded by Sister Sledge. Rich’s mother also died of cancer, a few years after Monique, and in 1996, Rich’s middle daughter, Gabrielle, died at 27 of leukemia. Responding to Gabrielle’s last wish, Rich formed a foundation to find a cure for cancer. Much of her severely scrutinized Democratic gift giving, in fact, began as a lure to get President Clinton to come to her biennial Angel Ball in New York. “She has to give a few hundred thousand in order to make sure Clinton shows up at the ball,” says Kalman Sporn, the self-described “gay Republican businessman son of an Orthodox rabbi,” who has helped Rich organize the events. “It’s a small price to pay to ensure he shows, and it means celebrities give more and all the corporations buy tables.”
“Gabrielle is always with me,” Rich says, and she often wears an old suede jacket of Gabrielle’s for good luck. “I’d give anything—I’d die—to have my daughter back. But with her death I learned another strength inside me I didn’t know I had.” Rich is convinced it was Gabrielle whispering in her ear from on high that prompted her to forgive her ex-husband after a bitterly fought divorce, and to intercede on his behalf for a pardon from Bill Clinton, an action which has sullied her and stained Clinton’s legacy forever. The fact that Marc Rich cheated on her after they fled to Switzerland 17 years ago, that he participated in the biggest tax fraud in U.S. history, that he traded with Iran during the hostage crisis and defiantly renounced his U.S. citizenship rather than face a trial here—all that has been washed away with a mother’s tears. As for her notorious list of gifts to the Clintons—$7,000 worth of furniture for their Chappaqua, New York, house; $450,000 for the Clinton Library; more than $100,000 for Hillary’s Senate campaign; more than $1 million for the Democratic National Committee, not to mention many millions more raised at Democratic fund-raisers in her apartment—Rich dismisses all that airily as a piffling amount. About the furniture for Chappaqua (two coffee tables and two chairs), she says, “Everybody gave furniture. There was a list going around from the decorator.”
In her eyes there was no quid pro quo whatsoever. “The truth is, there are a lot more people who gave a lot more money. Of course it gave me access [to the Clintons],” she admits, “but it went beyond that. There was truly a friendship with both of them.” Since the pardon, however, she has not heard from her good friends.
Instead, Rich has joined the bruised and swollen ranks of so many others who displayed generous impulses toward the Clintons. She is paying fat legal fees and spending untold hours on the various investigations into the Rich pardon, by Congress, the F.B.I., and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mary Jo White. Today Denise Rich, who spent millions and worked so hard to erase the stigma of always being described as “former wife of the fugitive financier,” and who briefly tasted the triumph of being able to stick it to her ex-husband that it had been her influence that got him pardoned, finds that he goes right on poisoning her. Overnight she has become this year’s poster girl for campaign-finance reform and a synonym for wretched excess.
Rich has a staff of six maids, two butlers, a cook, and a secretary, as well as two drivers, two masseuses, a hairdresser, a trainer, a yoga instructor, and a personal photographer on call. Her imagist often travels with her, as does Jimmy Hester, the vice president of Denise Rich Songs, her music company. In Manhattan, four people work for the company, and two more are employed by her foundation. She also maintains staffs at her houses in Southampton and Aspen. Rich’s mammoth two-story creamy-beige marbled apartment, said to be in the $40 million range, overlooks Fifth Avenue and Central Park, and is decorated with works by Picasso, Chagall, Miró, Léger, Braque, Warhol, Calder, and Lichtenstein, as well as a Julian Schnabel broken-crockery portrait of her with black hair and larger features. A recording studio, an office, a spa, and guest rooms are on the lower floor; there is also a rooftop garden. Two of New York’s best-known publicists, Bobby Zarem and Howard Rubenstein, work for her. Even for someone with a nine-figure fortune, that is a big support team.
According to Kalman Sporn, however, “For all the influence she curries as a result of her financial resources, she’s not a power broker. She listens to the men in her life.” Bobby Zarem goes further: “Denise is warm and bubbly. Both men and women can push her around and use her for their own purposes.” Jimmy Hester says, “I wish she weren’t so kind.” Her 88-year-old father, Emil Eisenberg, a retired shoe manufacturer and art collector from Worcester, Massachusetts, where Rich says she grew up with “unconditional love,” tries to keep tabs on her, but any effort to curb her spending is futile. She donates lavishly to countless charities and is a notorious soft touch.
