DENISE RICH - Is different from you and me

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By Lloyd Grove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 27, 2001; Page C03
The ex-wife of presidential pardon recipient Marc Rich is on a total-immunity publicity binge, sitting for an interview with Barbara Walters tonight and cooperating with a profile in the upcoming Vanity Fair. Denise Rich, the star songbird in the federal probe of Bill Clinton's pardon scandal, tells the ABC News diva: "I feel that what I did was right and I would do it again." The socialite-lyricist -- whose support for her ex's pardon was backed up by millions of dollars to Democrats and Clinton's presidential library -- calls herself "a simple girl from Massachusetts." Never mind her 28-room Central Park triplex with a staff of 20, including a personal healer.

Vanity Fair fleshes out the Rich lifestyle, enumerating her "six maids, two butlers, a cook, and a secretary, as well as two drivers, two masseuses, a trainer, a yoga instructor, and a personal photographer on call." With showplaces in Southhampton, N.Y., and Aspen, Colo., along with her Manhattan palace filled with originals by Picasso, Calder and other name-brand artists, Rich employs a man who "carefully calibrates her wardrobe for each scheduled event up to six weeks in advance," the magazine reports, "individually numbering the designer and custom-made outfits, often for as many as three changes a day."

Rich, who believes in reincarnation, claims that her late daughter Gabrielle, who died of leukemia at age 27, was "whispering in her ear from on high" to lobby for Marc Rich's pardon. As for her gifts of two coffee tables and two chairs to Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, "Everybody gave furniture," Rich tells Vanity Fair. "There was a list going around from the decorator." But our favorite revelation is this: "There is definitely a black person inside [of me] waiting to get out. I'm sure I was once black."

-- Anonymous, April 27, 2001


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