A NYC surprise birthday party for Eliot at Patsy’s Italian restaurant, a favorite of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. This is one of the oldest Italian restaurants in Manhattan and Adriano, our head waiter, treated us all like family. Thank you everyone for attending and providing me with a collection of photos. We ended the night with the night owls at the Thompson Hotel, our NYC home away from home, for after dinner drinks.
My good friend Gerald Posner, an American investigative journalist and author of thirteen award winning books, reminds us of the conspiracy theories that swirled around Diana’s death. He talks about it in his popular Substack column, “Just the Facts,”that is gaining more and more eyeballs every day. Gerald gave me permission to reprint it in my blog. Substack is a desktop and app platform designed for creators to produce and distribute newsletters, podcasts, and other forms of content directly to their audience. Check it out. Gerald just announced good news regarding his Substack newsletter. Congratulations Gerald!
Today marks 29 years since Princess Diana died at the age of 36 in Paris, when the car she was in crashed while being chased at high speed by paparazzi.
Two years later, the magazine editor Tina Brown asked me to investigate the persistent conspiracy theories swirling around Diana’s death. The story was for the premier issue of her new magazine, TALK.
Over a couple of months, including reporting from Paris, Washington, and London, I interviewed dozens of people, some for the first time, including the paparazzi who chased the car that night, French police, the pathology team that treated Diana at the hospital, and sources ranging from the U.S. National Security Agency to the British Home Office.
I spent hours with Mohamed al-Fayed, whose son Dodi was also killed in the crash and who was spending a fortune trying to prove it was murder.
At one point I was shown unpublished photos of Diana in the wrecked car, before emergency crews arrived — photos someone was trying to sell for $2 million.
The TALK article, “Al-Fayed’s Rage,” broke several things:
• Diana might have survived the crash if not for mistakes by the arriving medics and ambulance crew.
• First accounts from witnesses who slipped away from the scene because police failed to secure the perimeter.
• Hospital lab work so shoddy that the driver’s blood sample may have been contaminated.
• Evidence that French intelligence agents met with the driver just three hours before the fatal crash.
• Classified French police files shedding light on the mysterious Fiat Uno many believed was involved.
• The first report that someone from the UK Home Secretary’s office interrupted the autopsy to order any reference to a possible pregnancy struck from the record.
• The first disclosure that NSA surveillance of the Brazilian embassy in Washington had accidentally picked up conversations between Princess Diana and the wife of the Brazilian ambassador.
Was it murder? No. But the errors and cover-ups I uncovered by French and British authorities are exactly what fed the “who killed Di?” theories that persist to this day.
My full 1999 article for anyone who wants the whole story: https://www.justthefacts.media/p/was-princess-di-murdered-full-copy-13-08-18
Eliot and I had the pleasure of attending the wedding of our cousins Ashley and Michael Wohlgemuth this past Saturday night at the Riviera Waterfront Mansion in Massapequa, Long Island. The most dancing crowd we have ever witnessed. A sensational event. A true love-in.
PTown celebrates Eliot’s birthday. Thank you Gail and Dawn for hosting a wonderful afternoon of great food, drinks and terrific friends. We love PTown and we are so fortunate that Gail and Dawn take such good care of us. Thank you Ruth for driving a great distance to be with us. To all those who attended we are grateful for your attendance and hope you will visit us in Miami.
He spent decades quietly buying paintings.
Then one day he gave all of them away, more than a billion dollars worth, and kept nothing back.
No wing named after his art collection. No sale. Just a gift.
Leonard Lauder was heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, chairman of the company his mother built, and by any measure a man who could have kept anything he wanted for the rest of his life.
What he wanted, for over four decades, was Cubist art.
Starting in the 1970s, Lauder began buying works by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger. Not as an investment. As an obsession. He bought carefully, piece by piece, building one of the finest private collections of Cubist art anywhere in the world.
By 2013, that collection held 78 works.
Then he gave every single one of them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Forbes valued the gift at $1.1 billion. One of the largest donations in the Met’s history, and one of the largest art gifts ever made by a single private collector to any museum.
Sit with that number for a second. $1.1 billion in paintings, handed over with no strings attached.
He did not sell a single piece first. He did not keep the best ones for his own walls. The entire collection went to the public, all at once.
Think about what most collectors do instead. They sell at auction. They negotiate naming rights. They keep a few favorites until they die and let their estate sort out the rest.
Lauder skipped all of that.
Alongside the paintings, he funded a new research center for modern art at the Met with a $22 million endowment, the first center of its kind dedicated entirely to modern art inside an encyclopedic museum. Scholars study there today, using his collection as their foundation.
Here is the part that connects to anyone who has ever walked through a museum. Before Lauder’s gift, the Met had almost no significant Cubist holdings. A visitor wanting to see the birth of modern art in one room had to travel to Paris or to the Museum of Modern Art across town.
Now they just walk into the Met.
There was no scandal pushing him toward this. No lawsuit, no tax problem, no public pressure campaign. Lauder was in his 80s, in good health, running a company worth tens of billions. He simply decided the paintings belonged to everyone, not just to him.
“I have never thought about how much things cost,” he told reporters at the time, “only about what they mean.” He had spent a lifetime building something magnificent in private. Then he handed the whole thing to strangers.
Some collectors questioned why he didn’t wait, why he didn’t will the collection to his family or sell pieces to fund other causes. He answered that question by pointing at the museum’s doors, which opened to anyone with the price of admission, or on free days, to anyone at all.
The paintings still hang there now. Tourists walk past Picasso’s early Cubist experiments without knowing the price tag that once applied to what they are looking at for free.
A billion dollars of art, sitting in public rooms, because one man decided ownership meant less to him than access.
That is the whole story. He simply let go.
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Meet my new friend Mary Beth. She is the general manager of the B&B that we stay in during our time in PTown. Yes, we spent three months last summer house sitting in Gail Williams and Dawn McCall’s beautiful home. That was a huge treat. We have stayed at the White Porch before but this year we got to meet Mary Beth. Her welcoming personality, premium concierge service and great stories of PTown has made this trip extra special.
With permission from White Porch owners, Tom Shirk and Felipe Lara, Mary Beth was allowed to provide shelter to many artists during the 2026 snowstorm that shut this town down, no power, no heat, no electricity. Very few services. She turned what could have been a disastrous few weeks into paradise for many stranded artists.
Read all about it below in the Provincetown Independent.
Thank you Mary Beth. Special hugs to Tom and Felipe.
Mary Beth Bongiovanni is the general manager of the White Porch Inn in Provincetown.
This is the article Mary Beth wrote.
For four days in February, I lived with a group of artists inside the storm — the storm on Johnson Street. I sat with them inside the snow fort that the White Porch Inn had become. On the first night, we called it Pop-Up Igloo. After several nights, it felt more like a meetinghouse than a warming station.
Tadhg Slater, a New York School painter living in Provincetown, blew in the door. He has a fabulous way of elevating the space and shifting the energy. “Amazing things happen when artists and blizzards combine,” he laughed. “Not one town on the Cape has power, but this place is our pop-up sanctuary for warmth and great conversation.”
Slater wrote on social media: “We gathered. … Sitting together while the wind tried to rearrange the town. That’s Provincetown. Galleries shuttered. Streets empty. Joe Coffee closed, five-foot drifts in places, a Nespresso machine on a generator, and still we are here. Artists don’t disappear when the lights go out. We walk into the storm … We absorb it. Because later it becomes something. Another painting. Another song.”
What whirled through the space were excerpts from drafts, hybrids of new concepts, and curious collaborations. Slater finalized the PR for his Concrete Winter series. The generator kept laptops powered and heaters warm. Community filled the void left by the absence of convenience. People power, the interplay of distinct, even sacred, human resources, fueled conversations and created wonder amid fear, comfort in the cold, joy in the silence.
From the Fine Arts Work Center, sculptors, interdisciplinary conceptual artists, a culture worker, installation artists, a poet-organizer-educator, a violinist, a novelist, poets, painters, and their dogs came to the inn. Johnson Street neighbors, escaping homes surrounded by downed power lines, made the hotel their home that week. They were my source of sanity, laughter, and comfort. Thank you Lacey Black, Yacine Tilala Fall, Dominique Muñoz, Anne Clare Rogers, Jada Renée Allen, Nico Amador, Domenick Ammirati, Tess Oldfield, Pio Arango, Connor Greer, Robbie Herbst, Ariel Miller, Ashley Danielle Moore, Kevin Brisco Jr., Ty Raso, and Emma Fiona Jones.
“It’s like the Brady Bunch in here!” declared one neighbor as she stomped snow off her boots at the front door. There was some Brady Bunch-level mayhem. “When I accidentally set off the fire alarm,” said Domenick, a FAWC writing fellow, “they responded with both alacrity and good humor, which I doubt I could have managed in the circumstances.”
Paul Rizzo, a painter whose work is at Four Eleven Gallery, found his way to White Porch each night to warm up and charge his devices. Inside the storm, he made marks in his sketchbook, and some of us sitting around the kitchen table got a glimpse. Looking at the Stars is a favorite, as are his videocassette pieces.
After those days together, I keep thinking of the new constellations of people in my life. I know the light here, the natural light, is unprecedented and distinct. I am new to town, but I think the people illuminate the sky in a whole other way. There is care in each connection. We listen to what is not said, question from the heart, and commit to support one another.
I know the novelty of the Pop-Up at White Porch is wearing off with each passing day, but the memory and the magic of it will endure. New patterns of connection are now conduits to belonging and solidarity, two beloved dynamics of this town.
Mary Beth Bongiovanni is the general manager of the White Porch Inn in Provincetown.
We were so honored this afternoon to be in the company of so many luminaries who make Provincetown the oldest and greatest art colony in the United States. We all gathered to celebrate the great success of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum at Land’s End situated on the most picturesque spot on Cape Cod.
Pictured here: Art Collector Debbie Bowles, Lise Motherwell (daughter of iconic artist Robert Motherwell, and equally legendary stepmother Helen Frankenthaler), Chris McCarthy, Chief Executive Officer of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) since 2001, and major gallerists Gail Williams and Dawn McCall of Williams McCall gallery, and art advisors Lisa VanZant and Julia Courtney.
FYI—Lise Motherwell, PhD, PsyD is a retired licensed psychologist and President of the Board of Trustees of PA.
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If you have art in your life you meet new friends all the time, many last a lifetime. In the summer we meet up with Grace Hopkins and Laura Shabott of the Berta Walker Gallery in PTown. We see them in Miami in the Winter too. Both are artists, educators, and gallerists. Our conversations are one continuous curiosity and update sessions. We are always surprising each other. Today we were all together at the PAAM event at Land’s End.
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She posted four pages of a manuscript on a newly started Substack newsletter on Saturday and said that the novel would be released serially throughout August.
Theodore Schleifer has covered MacKenzie Scott since 2019.
Aug. 8, 2026
MacKenzie Scott, one of the world’s most scrutinized billionaire philanthropists who has scrupulously managed her profile, is making a return to the public eye.
Ms. Scott, the former wife of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, announced Saturday that she had written a new novel, her first book since 2013. The novel is sure to draw more attention to Ms. Scott, an intensely private person who has only spoken through annual or biannual blog posts since 2020, when she began giving away billions of dollars a year and upending philanthropy.
The novel is titled “Last Days in Two Nations (A History in Eighteen Minds)” and runs 80,000 words and 317 pages, according to the four pages of a manuscript that Ms. Scott posted on a newly started Substack newsletter on Saturday. Befitting her at-times cryptic communication style, Ms. Scott offered few details in the post beyond some of the manuscript’s so-called front matter: its title page, table of contents, character list and epigraphs.
Ms. Scott appears to be self-publishing the work on her Substack newsletter, whose name is the same as the manuscript. On Instagram, Ms. Scott encouraged her followers to “read and subscribe” at the Substack link, and posted a “Release schedule” that says the novel will be released serially throughout August. An aide to Ms. Scott did not immediately respond on Saturday to a request for any additional details.
Ms. Scott studied at Princeton University under the novelist Toni Morrison and won critical acclaim for her 2005 debut novel, “The Testing of Luther Albright.” Ms. Morrison wrote a blurb for it. Ms. Scott wrote a second novel, “Traps,” in 2013, and sat for a rare profile with Vogue. At the time, she was still married to one of the richest people in the world, whose company had disrupted the world of book selling.
Ms. Scott has cultivated an air of mystery in the 13 years since, granting almost no interviews even as she became a subject of fascination in the worlds of philanthropy and business. She finalized her divorce from Mr. Bezos in 2019, and almost immediately began giving away billions of dollars a year, with $7 billion in gifts awarded last year. She also briefly remarried.
Nonprofits that receive these enormous donations never hear from Ms. Scott directly, often only through intermediaries who take pains to avoid mentioning the name of their client. Since 2020, Ms. Scott has written a number of closely read, literary posts on a blog describing her approach to philanthropy and listing recent grant recipients.
Still, Ms. Scott, who is a major shareholder in Amazon and whose net worth now is estimated at over $38 billion, has often appeared uncomfortable with the amount of attention her unusual approach to philanthropy has attracted, regularly criticizing the news coverage.
“A belief in a diversity of voices drives my own communication choices as well. It’s what inspired me to override a personal preference for privacy and write a series of essays that bring attention to the work of these organizations,” she wrote in one post in 2022. “It’s what underlies my approach to press inquiries — respecting the autonomy and role of journalists by doing nothing to try to influence or control what they report.”
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Three years ago, on August 7th, we lost Richard Ekstract. Here he is with his wife Eileen.
We miss his creativity, and wisdom—and the way he made life more exciting for everyone around him.
So many of us looked to Richard as a guiding light. Now we’re on our own in a world that is filled with hate and despair.
He got out just in time but we believe had he stayed — he would have figured out a way to make people realize that they really wanted a life filled with hope and joy rather than misery and revenge.
He is deeply missed.
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After 23 years of a very tight relationship with architect Rene Alberto Rodriguez Bellucci and Dr. Howard Stark, we got to be the first to celebrate Rene’s birthday tonight at Prime Italian. We all met walking our dogs on the marina path adjacent to our condos. The dogs said hello first and we all knew we were destined to be together too. TV personality Steve Greenberg was with us from the start too. Happy Birthday Rene. Love Lois and Eliot Hess.
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How Roy Cohn Taught Donald Trump Everything
How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything.
Read in The New Yorker: https://apple.news/AKyID-22bTOarBg-tD0OMfw?highlight=and
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DigiDame 