Barry Diller Doesn’t Want to Pretend Anymore

The media mogul publicly addressed being gay for the first time, while also celebrating his marriage to Diane von Furstenberg. “Today he opened to the world,” she said.

By Jesse McKinley

During his decades as a media mogul, Barry Diller has held an array of powerful titles, serving as chairman and chief executive of Fox, Paramount Pictures and, most recently, IAC. The positions have made Mr. Diller a boldfaced name and a billionaire.

Now, however, Mr. Diller, 83, has embraced a new role: that of an openly gay man.

The announcement came on Tuesday morning via an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir, “Who Knew,” published in New York magazine, which recounts his life, including his relationship with the designer and socialite Diane von Furstenberg, whom he has been married to since 2001.

“While there have been a good many men in my life, there has only ever been one woman,” Mr. Diller writes, calling his relationship with Ms. von Furstenberg “the miracle of my life,” despite it causing “confusion and lots of speculation.”

At the same time, Mr. Diller also writes of a quiet suffering he felt by hiding his sexuality, and a fear of exposure that “stunted any chance of my having a fulfilling personal life.”

He added that he “had discovered I could separate myself from anything painful or terrifying by just locking it away, putting it into a distant box and having to deal with it hopefully never.”

In the memoir, Mr. Diller says his early sexual experiences with men came during his teenage years “cruising in West Hollywood, darting in and out of side doors of bars along Melrose Avenue.”

“I never discussed my personal life, lowlight as it was, with anyone,” Mr. Diller writes, saying that despite suspicions about his sexuality, he “never wanted to make any declarations.”

“So many of us at that time were in this exiled state, so stunted in the way we lived,” he writes, adding that he “hated having to live a pretend life.”

Intent on keeping his “private life distinctly private,” as he put it, Mr. Diller says he came up with a series of rules — “my own personal bill of rights” — to guide his behavior and public persona, including living “with silence, but not with hypocrisy.”

“I wouldn’t do a single thing to make anyone believe I was living a heterosexual life,” he said. “I wouldn’t tell, and I wouldn’t allow myself to be asked.”

He added that he decided to “never bring a man as a date to a heterosexual event — not that there were many guys I was serious enough about to bring.”

“But I’d never bring a woman as a ‘beard,’ either,” he wrote.

He later came to regret those rules.

“It wasn’t courage,” he writes. “It was simply the minimum conditions of my conduct, and I recognize it now as the opposite of courage.”

Mr. Diller characterizes his relationship with Ms. von Furstenberg as one of “romantic love and deep respect, companionship and world adventuring,” including periods of separation and subsequent reunion, saying they “have spent 50 years intertwined with each other in a unique and complete love.”

Reached in Venice, Ms. von Furstenberg said in an interview that she did not see Mr. Diller’s announcement as a “coming out,” but rather as Mr. Diller simply telling the truth.

“All I can tell you is Barry and I have had an incredible life, love for 50 years,” she said. “We have been lovers, friends, married, everything. And, you know, for me, the secret to honor life, and to honor love, is never to lie.”

“Today, he opened to the world,” she added. “To me, he opened 50 years ago.”

Ms. von Furstenberg said “we never had to talk about our relationship, we lived our relationship,” including the last five years during which Mr. Diller was writing his memoir.

“He’s been private all his life, but not with me,” she said. “So for me, it doesn’t feel strange.”

A spokesman for Mr. Diller, Paul Bogaards, said the memoir, which is being released May 20, speaks for itself.

In the excerpt in New York, Mr. Diller describes a whirlwind romance with Ms. von Furstenberg after they met in 1974, including his giving her 29 diamonds for her 29th birthday a year later. “I didn’t know what to wrap them in, so I put them in a Band-Aid box,” he writes.

The couple would later separate, before reigniting their relationship and eventually marrying at City Hall in Manhattan. (The party that followed, at Ms. von Furstenberg’s Greenwich Village home, was more glamorous, drawing guests like the designer Calvin Klein, while André Leon Talley, the famed fashion editor, said the wedding was “everything that it should be for two people who have been through thick and thin.”)

Mr. Diller, who currently serves as chairman and senior executive at the Expedia Group and at IAC, a sprawling digital media and technology company, said he had “lived for decades reading about Diane and me: about us being best friends rather than lovers.”

“We weren’t just friends. We aren’t just friends,” Mr. Diller writes, calling it “an explosion of passion that kept up for years.”

“And, yes, I also liked guys, but that was not a conflict with my love for Diane,” he said. “I can’t explain it to myself or to the world. It simply happened to both of us.”

Jury selection in Sean Combs’ sex trafficking and racketeering criminal trial will begin Monday, as both the hip-hop mogul’s high-powered defense team and Southern District of New York prosecutors are expected to quiz prospective jurors on their feelings about wealthy individuals and Combs’ self-described “swinger” lifestyle. Both sides will begin the process of whittling down 150 people into a final jury pool of 12 men and women and six alternates for the celebrity criminal trial that is expected to last at least eight weeks. Jury selection is expected to last three days and opening statements are set for Monday, May 12. 

The 55-year-old Bad Boy Entertainment founder pleaded not guilty to five felony counts of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution following his arrest last September. He faces 15 years to life in prison if convicted on the charges, and has already rejected a plea deal. Prosecutors will begin Monday’s voir dire by giving general instructions and presenting a brief overview of the charges to the pool.

The heart of the government’s case alleges that Combs used his sprawling, billion-dollar business as a “criminal enterprise” that allegedly used physical violence, threats and coercion to fulfill Combs’ “sexual gratification,” which included the alleged sex trafficking of two former girlfriends between 2009 and 2024.

Potential jurors have already been given a lengthy questionnaire about their general knowledge of the case. They were asked if they watched crime shows, where they gathered their news from and if they had an opinion on hip-hop. Other questions included if prospective jurors had ever experienced a traumatic event and if they “believe that wealthy people get away with things that the less wealthy do not.” 

Combs’ defense team also probed people’s thoughts regarding what some would consider taboo / nontraditional sexual habits. “There may be evidence in this case about people having multiple sexual partners,” came one question. “Is there anything about this that would make it difficult for you to serve as a fair and impartial juror in this case?” 

The line of questioning seems to be central to Combs’ defense. His lawyers have claimed that the alleged criminal sexual encounters — referred to as “freak-offs” — were not only consensual, but part of his alternative lifestyle. “There’s a lifestyle, call it swingers or whatever you will, that he thought was appropriate because it was common,”

Combs’ lead defense attorney Marc Agnifilo argued in a pretrial conference last month. “Many people think it’s appropriate because it’s common.”Possible jurors were also given a list of witnesses and alleged victims who might be called to testify. Prosecutors asked if they personally knew anyone on the list, of if they or any immediate family members had dealings with anyone on the list.

Likely on that list of names is R&B singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, who is expected to testify against her longtime ex-boyfriend Combs. Ventura has been at the center of prosecutors’ case (identified in court papers as Victim-1), who was allegedly sex trafficked between 2008 and 2018. The timeline aligns with dates that Ventura detailed in her since-settled civil lawsuit against Combs. 

Over the course of their decade-long relationship, Ventura claimed her music label boss routinely forced her to have sex with male escorts while he watched and masturbated. During these encounters, Ventura alleged she was supplied copious amounts of alcohol and illicit substances, including Ecstasy, ketamine, GHB and cocaine. If she refused to participate, Ventura alleged, Combs would beat her Prosecutors have painted Combs as dangerous and abusive, claiming Combs forced at least two romantic partners to submit to his will and sexual fantasies through manipulation, coercion, threats, and violence, including once attempting to beat down a woman’s door with a hammer.

He is also accused of forced labor and abusing his staff, maintaining control over certain employees’ lives by leading them to “believe they would be harmed — including by losing their jobs — if they did not comply with his demands,” according to prosecutors.Combs’ team denied the accusations, saying they have former employees who could speak of their positive working experience with Combs.

They also have claimed that despite Combs’ self-admitted history of violent behavior in regard to his treatment of Ventura, that Combs is coming to court a changed man.

The father of seven is said to have sought professional help and gone to rehab years prior to address his substance-use issues. However, a Rolling Stone investigation from January found Combs was still volatile, still taking altering substances, and was still allegedly sexually abusive up until his arrest. Rolling Stone also previously uncovered a pattern of abusive behavior dating back to Combs’ time at Howard University.

Ever since the 2021 collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, Miami, every high rise in South Florida had to be inspected and repaired to make sure that tragedy never happens again. Buildings three stories or taller, especially those near the coastline, are subject to mandatory milestone inspections, often every 10 years, to ensure structural integrity. These inspections, mandated by Florida Statute 553.899, help identify potential safety hazards and ensure buildings meet structural safety standards.

Everyone is grateful that we have these new rules and regulations. However, we all have been living in a constant construction zone for almost two years with perhaps another year to go. That means our windows were covered over, our balconies were closed off, no use of pools or other outside amenities, and several hours a day of loud disturbances from hammering and drilling.

The most dramatic event for many of us is when a helicopter is flying very close over our building to deliver necessary equipment. It’s unnerving to hear the roar of the engines and the winds that are created directly over our heads.

On Wednesday, April 30, 2025, there was a helicopter flyover and mobilization of equipment taking place at our property, This was in preparation for the elevators modernization project. The Miami Beach Police Dept.was on hand to assist with coordination and safety measures throughout the event. This is how we were notified and  prepped.

Murano at Portofino – Helicopter Flyover and Mobilization – Important Update – 4.29.25

Time: 9:30AM – 12:30PM

*Weather permitting

What to Expect: 

• Main Entrance – The main entrance and circular driveway will be temporarily closed and there will be a temporary access point to the building during the mobilization. Our staff will be stationed to direct visitors and residents to the main lobby.
• Garage Exit – Residents must use the rear gate located on the north side of the building to exit the garage during the helicopter mobilization. Please proceed with caution when exiting the garage.
• Valet Service: Our valet team will be temporarily stationed away from the front entrance of the building to ensure safe access to the vehicles.
• Front Gate – The front gate will be used only to enter the garage, please note our valet staff will be stationed at the front gate during the closure of the circular driveway. Please proceed with caution when entering the garage.
• Visitors & Guests – Please note our team will be directing guests to Tower 1 to reach the lobby level while the front entrance is closed due to the mobilization.
• Beach Club – Access to the Beach Club will be restricted from 9AM – 12:30PMwhile the helicopter performs multiple drop off’s.
• Dog Park – Access to the dog park will be temporarily restricted starting at 7:30AM to allow our elevator company to stage their equipment safely, and will reopen after the mobilization has been completed.
• Marina Boardwalk: Some areas will be temporarily closed, and pedestrian traffic will be detoured during the flyover. These areas will reopen once the helicopter operation is complete.
• Please be aware that you will likely experience increased aerial activity and temporary noise during this time. We recommend closing your shades/blinds during this time for privacy.
• We kindly ask all residents with balconies overlooking Fisher Island to remove or secure any loose items from their terraces before the event, due to the helicopter’s proximity and potential downdraft.

If you have any questions please contact the Management office. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding during this time. It hasn’t been an easy process for everyone in South Florida, but we had no choice. Better to be safe than sorry

Andrew Gross, Best-Selling Writer of Thrillers, Is Dead at 72

A successful New York apparel executive, he switched gears in midlife and became a novelist, writing numerous best sellers, including five with James Patterson.

By Alex Williams

Andrew Gross, a member of a prominent New York apparel family who abandoned a career in the rag trade to write nearly 20 crime and political thrillers, including five with the fiction juggernaut James Patterson that hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, died on April 9 at his home in Purchase, N.Y. He was 72.

The cause was a rare form of bladder cancer, his wife, Lynn Gross, said.

In his solo career, Mr. Gross was known for works such as “Eyes Wide Open” (2011), “15 Seconds” (2012), “No Way Back” (2013) and “Everything to Lose” (2014), as well as his popular series featuring the character Ty Hauck, a detective who probes the dark doings behind the mansion gates of Greenwich, Conn.

He later turned his sights from high-adrenaline contemporary potboilers, often involving ordinary people sucked into a whirlwind of criminal intrigue, to historical thrillers.

His 2016 effort, “The One Man,” centers on a young Jewish man who escapes the Krakow ghetto early in World War II and later joins an American intelligence effort to rescue a renowned physicist from the Auschwitz concentration camp. Booklist called it “as moving as it is gripping” in a starred review.

Ultimately a prolific writer, Mr. Gross started late: He was in his 40s when he decided to trade the spreadsheets and quarterly reports of the business world for the long, lonely hours of a literary career.

Mr. Gross was a grandson of Fred P. Pomerantz, the founder of Leslie Fay Inc., whose dresses and sportswear were being sold in more than 13,000 stores around the country when Mr. Pomerantz died in 1986.

For a time, Mr. Gross served as senior corporate vice president of the company, running its sportswear division, as well as president of its Head Sports Wear subsidiary, known for its ski, golf and tennis apparel. He later became a top executive at Le Coq Sportif and Sun Ice, a Canadian sportswear company.

Wearying of the corporate world, Mr. Gross decided to perform a career about-face. “Basically,” he said in a 2015 interview published on the website LinkedIn, “I came home without a job one night and announced to my wife and three kids that I wanted to write a novel.”

Easier said than done. It took three years to write, edit and attempt to sell his first novel, “Hydra,” a political thriller that was never published. Late in the process, after double-digit rejections, he recalled in a 2017 interview, he was sitting in his den and wondering “what cliff to drive our S.U.V. off” when he received a call from Mr. Patterson’s publisher asking if he would be willing to talk to Mr. Patterson.

An editor at the publishing house, he learned, had sent Mr. Gross’s manuscript to Mr. Patterson, a veritable fiction factory in human form. (As of this year, he has churned out more than 200 books in various genres, including thrillers and children’s books, and sold more than 400 million copies.)

Mr. Gross, who spent part of the year in Palm Beach, Fla., recalled in a 2016 interview with The Palm Beach Post that the editor had written on the manuscript, “This guy does women well!”

Mr. Patterson soon invited Mr. Gross to breakfast, telling him that “he had several projects he wanted to write and not enough time to do them,” Mr. Gross recalled on his professional website. “I had the incredible foresight to say yes.”

Their first book together, “2nd Chance” (2002), was the second installment of Mr. Patterson’s highly regarded Women’s Murder Club series, about a group of women in San Francisco, including a police detective and a newspaper reporter, who band together to crack murder cases. (In 2007, the series was spun off into a short-lived ABC drama starring Angie Harmon.)

To a literary neophyte, Mr. Patterson’s tutelage was invaluable, Mr. Gross wrote on his website: “It was like a combination MFA and MBA rolled into one.”

As for the writing itself, “we always began with a concept and an outline that came from him, which we fleshed out into a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline,” Mr. Gross recalled. “No writer’s block here, the road map was always there.

Thanks to Mr. Patterson’s clout, he added, “my first book was a No. 1 best seller” on the Times list.

Howard Andrew Gross was born on May 18, 1952, in Manhattan to Aaron Gross, who ran an active-wear company, and Leslie Fay Pomerantz, whom the family apparel company was named after.

After graduating from the Barnard School for Boys, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, Mr. Gross enrolled at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1974. In 1982, he earned a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia Business School.

His fruitful partnership with Mr. Patterson included “Lifeguard” (2005), about a Florida lifeguard lured by love into a multimillion-dollar robbery, and “Judge & Jury” (2006), about an aspiring actress whose life spins out of control after she lands on the jury in the trial of a brutal Mafia don. (The story was inspired by Mr. Gross’s own experience as a juror in a mob trial.)

Mr. Gross struck out on his own in 2007 with “The Blue Zone,” a novel about a woman whose seemingly perfect life unravels after her father is arrested and charged with laundering money for a drug ring.

In addition to his wife of 42 years, Mr. Gross is survived by their daughter, Kristen Gross Magyar; their sons, Matthew and Nicholas; a half sister, Liz Scopinich; and five grandchildren.

In 2018, Mr. Gross published what he considered his most personal work, “Button Man,” about someone from a poor Jewish family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who fights his way up the ladder in the garment trade only to find himself in a Depression-era standoff with vicious Jewish mobsters. (“Button man” is not an apparel term, he explained in a 2020 video interview, but mob slang for a hit man.)

“It’s a tribute to my grandfather,” Mr. Gross told Publishers Weekly, referring to Mr. Pomerantz. “He was as tough as any gangster you’ll read about in the novel. He was single-minded and driven and set a high bar for himself, and he succeeded.”

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(A friend of mine swears by the full-body MRI Scan. He urges people to get it. Here are some other thoughts about whole body MRI’s. —LWH)

BY Matt Fuchs

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Calvin Sun was a healthy 37-year-old when a full-body MRI scan showed a cyst in his kidney. Sun saw a urologist who was cautiously optimistic that it wasn’t cancerous and offered him a surgery appointment several weeks away to inspect the kidney and operate if necessary. “I was like, how about tomorrow?” Sun recalls.

As an ER doctor, Sun is used to decisive problem-solving. It’s the “right mindset” for undergoing a whole-body MRI, he says. “You have to be willing to take 100% responsibility for the consequences, good and bad.”

Instead of traditional scans, like CTs or MRIs of a specific part of the body, full-body MRI scans require just an hour to image you from head-to-toe. Celebrities and influencers are holding them up as a pillar of preventive health to catch problems early on, wherever they’re hiding—before they become hard-to-treat diseases. Dwyane Wade, for example, recently credited a whole-body MRI with alerting him to an early-stage kidney cancer.

However, most medical experts are more wary. “The odds that you’re going to be hurt are higher than the odds you’re going to be helped,” says Dr. Matthew Davenport, professor of urology and radiology at the University of Michigan. 

Here’s what to know about this relatively new technology—both its promise and shortcomings.

What is a full-body MRI scan?

First offered in the early 2000s, a whole-body MRI is like looking at a city from a distance, says Dr. Heide Daldrup-Link, professor of pediatric oncology at Stanford. “You might always find a high-rise building, but you won’t find a spider,” she says.

With this panoramic view of the body, doctors may spot big problems, like a large tumor. “But we can very easily miss small tumors” without scans that zoom in, Daldrup-Link explains. CTs or organ-specific MRIs are needed to fully investigate health issues like cancer and most brain abnormalities, she says.

An advantage of whole-body MRIs over CTs is that they use magnets and radio waves, which eliminate the type of radiation linked to cancer. But that doesn’t mean they’re risk-free or the right choice for everyone, Davenport says. 

Who benefits?

For nine years, Dr. Dan Durand oversaw an outcomes-focused health care network in Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods. Some people are incredulous, he says, that he’s now the chief medical officer at Prenuvo, a company specializing in whole-body MRIs starting at $2,500 a pop (and not covered by insurance for the average, symptom-free person). 

But Durand and others view whole-body MRIs as key to the future of health for everybody, not just rich bodies. “We’ll look back on whole-body MRIs the same way as your cell phone or computer,” he says.

They’re already beginning to change health care, he says, by detecting “silent killers lurking,” like aneurysms or cancers. “We can find Stage I cancers before symptoms appear,” he says. The technology is advancing, becoming faster and more accurate.

Daldrup-Link agrees that whole-body MRIs can “detect diseases in early stages.” Dwyane Wade’s case “may underscore the potential benefits of early cancer detection.” But the patients who benefit most have unique risks, such as people born with certain genetic syndromes that cause random cancers throughout the body. “Whole-body scans are really helpful” to identify these cancers, she says.

Such syndromes are relatively rare, though Daldrup-Link gives about two whole-body scans per week and sees a wide variety of cancer predispositions like Li Fraumeni syndrome and retinoblastoma.

Full-body MRIs provide information about some other conditions besides cancer and brain pathologies, she notes, like certain skin and muscle infections, and disorders involving abnormal blood vessels.

People with such known conditions or risks get “even more value” from the images, Durand says, but this type of MRI can raise awareness about anyone’s state of health, he adds. His own scan picked up on joint inflammation and damage, which he’s now treating to keep in check.

They can also show excess visceral fat before heart disease and other chronic illnesses develop. Such findings provide benchmarks for tracking how interventions are working. Prenuvo recommends adults under age 40 get scans once every two years if their first scan didn’t show a problem. If you’re older or your first scan did find an issue, the company advises scans yearly or even more often. However, these are just the company’s recommendations; major medical groups do not currently recommend whole-body MRIs for the general population. 

The drawbacks

If you have no symptoms or unique risks, the drawbacks of whole-body MRI scans outweigh the benefits of early detection, some experts have found. “Metaphorically, you could go to Vegas and win the jackpot,” Davenport says, “but the average expected result is losing money, especially if you’re gambling regularly.”

Sun, the ER doctor, had no family history of cancer. He exercised, ate a plant-based diet, and was “super healthy.” When his Prenuvo scan found the cyst—and a more targeted follow-up MRI showed it in more detail—he knew it might still mean nothing. Even so, he persuaded his doctors to expedite surgery to avoid “spending months stewing and ruminating” about worst-case scenarios.

His care team prepared to potentially remove a small part of his right kidney as a precautionary measure. Every expectation was that it would be benign.

When Sun woke up five hours later, he learned the kidney was “completely gone,” he says. The surgeons removed it because they thought the surface looked malignant. 

Sun had no complications from surgery, but at 37, he recognizes he’s less vulnerable than some. Older people tend to be less protected due to age-related changes. Having an unnecessary surgery, which could involve serious consequences, is one risk Davenport cites. “Every time someone does an endoscopy, biopsy, or surgical procedure, risks include a bleeding complication or difficulty with anesthesia,” he says. “It can be life threatening.” 

Davenport is underwhelmed by the potential benefits, at least for people without any known health issues. About 15-30% of whole-body MRIs show a red flag, but the vast majority of these concerns end up being nothing to worry about. Even when cancer is ultimately removed, it’s often unclear if it would’ve grown or how fast. “Both patient and doctor are happy because they found cancer early, but 15 years later, when you look at the data, it didn’t improve mortality,” Davenport says.

Larger studies are needed, and several are trackinghow interventions based on whole-body-MRIs contribute (or not) to longer, healthier lives. But researchers must follow people for decades to see a survival benefit. Without more evidence, the leading associations of radiologists, the American College of Radiology and the Radiological Society of North America, haven’t recommended whole-body MRIs for the average healthy person.

Another risk is giving someone a false sense of reassurance after full-body MRIs come back clean. It’s a mistake to then assume that health screening measures, like colonoscopies, aren’t necessary. Full-body MRIs show some organs better than others. “The kidney and liver are very well depicted,” Daldrup-Link says, but the scans less reliably image colon cancer, lesions in the prostate, and small lung cancers. “That’s a big caveat,” Daldrup-Link says.

Durand agrees, while noting that recommended screenings can’t catch everything. “Whole-body MRIs don’t replace primary care doctor visits and consensus-based screenings. They’re on top of these screenings.”

Sun was shocked and worried to learn his kidney was removed. “What if they literally took out my kidney for no reason?” he kept thinking. 

Yes, the organ had looked diseased, but a biopsy would need to confirm that. Thus began a week of agonizing over the possibility that it wasn’t cancer. “That is the danger of doing full-body MRIs,” Sun says.

The results of full-body scans are frequently hard to interpret, difficult to act upon, and detrimental to mental health, Davenport says. “Someone who identifies as a normal, healthy person is quickly converted into a patient,” even though they might be perfectly healthy. “This creates anxiety that is meaningful and measurable.”

A week after surgery, Sun got the call. “I don’t know what possessed you to get that scan,” his surgeon told him, “but you saved your life. It was an aggressive cancer.”

Sun felt reassured. At least his kidney hadn’t been robbed without justification. Then confusion and sadness sunk in as his identity suddenly reconceptualized as both a cancer patient and survivor. How could this happen to a healthy 37-year-old?

Maybe a line can be drawn in the sand dividing people with high cancer risk and people without such risk, but it’s wind-swept and covered with footprints. Cancer is often caused by interactions between various genes and environmental factors, and many of them aren’t well understood. “We will never know with 100% precision which patients are most at risk,” Davenport says. 

The mysterious rise of cancer in young adults is the subject of myriad theories and debates. Relatively few people have been diagnosed with genetically-rooted cancer syndromes, yet scientists are “constantly discovering new types” of these syndromes, Daldrup-Link says. 

To better understand your personal risk for cancer and other diseases, speak with your doctors about family history. Regular blood tests can show elevated markers associated with diseases and genetic risks for cancer and heart disease. (Sun’s test, however, showed no genetic risk.) This information may warrant individualized, targeted screening, including detailed CTs of relevant organs. 

Meanwhile, the technology for whole-body MRI scans continues to improve. “The genuine interest to want to know what’s inside the body is totally understandable,” Davenport says. “Whether you get a whole-body MRI is a personal decision, but it’s important to consider the risks as well as potential benefits.”

Reinaldo Herrera, Arbiter of Style for Vanity Fair, Dies at 91

Both old school and Old World and married to a celebrated fashion designer, he helped define Manhattan’s high life for many years.

By Penelope Green

Reinaldo Herrera, a dapper Venezuelan aristocrat, married to the fashion designer Carolina Herrera, whose social connections made him an indispensable story wrangler and all-around fixer for Vanity Fair magazine, where he served as a contributing editor for more than three decades, died on March 18 in Manhattan. He was 91.

His daughter Patricia Lansing confirmed the death.

Mr. Herrera was born into South American nobility and grew up between Caracas, Paris and New York. After attending Harvard and Georgetown Universities and working as a television presenter for a morning show in Venezuela, he joined Europe’s emerging jet set, mingling with Rothschilds and Agnellis, Italian nobles and British royals.

Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth II’s sister, was a pal. He dated Ava Gardner and Tina Onassis, the first wife of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle, and in 1968 he married his younger sister’s best friend, Maria Carolina Josefina Pacanins.

He was old school and Old World. He wore bespoke suits with immaculate pocket squares; his jeans were always crisply pressed. His manners were impeccable. He spoke classical French without an accent. Graydon Carter, a former editor of Vanity Fair, described his voice as a combination of Charles Boyer, the suave French actor, and Count von Count, the numbers-obsessed Muppet.

ImageMr. Herrera with his wife, the fashion designer Carolina Herrera, in 1983.

By the late 1970s, the Herreras were part of the frothy mix that defined Manhattan society at the time — the socialites, financiers, walkers and rock stars, along with a smattering of politicians, authors and artists, who dined on and off Park Avenue and danced at Studio 54. (Steve Rubell, the club’s rambunctious co-owner, used to slip quaaludes into Mr. Herrera’s jacket pockets; Mr. Herrera, who loved a party but not those disco enhancements, would throw them out when he got home.) Robert Mapplethorpe photographed the couple for Interview magazine, Andy Warhol’s monthly chronicle of that world.

In the early 1980s, a few months after Tina Brown became editor of Vanity Fair, Bob Colacello, a former Interview editor who was then writing for Ms. Brown, brought Mr. Herrera into the office. He was so entertaining, as Ms. Brown wrote recently in “Fresh Hell,” her Substack newsletter, that she hired him immediately.

Ms. Brown knew the news value of a man like Mr. Herrera, the currency of his social chops. He called her “Fearless,” short for “fearless leader,” and, she wrote, “like a golden retriever in a dinner jacket,” he brought her dispatches each morning from the evening’s parties.

He was good with the wives of despots, who were among his intimates; he once persuaded Imelda Marcos, the disgraced former first lady of the Philippines who was then in exile in Hawaii, to sit for a profile written by Dominick Dunne. (Mrs. Marcos was not pleased with the result.)He was able to nail down an interview with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafatfor the writer T.D. Allman on Mr. Arafat’s private jet because Mr. Herrera and Mr. Arafat shared a barber.

Mr.Herrera, right, in 2005 with Bob Colacello, a writer for Vanity Fair.

Mr. Herrera, right, in 2004 with Graydon Carter, who took over Vanity Fair in 1992.

He performed the same service for Mr. Carter when he took over the magazine in 1992. In 1996, Mr. Carter was eager for the writer Sally Bedell Smith to pursue a piece about the Rothschilds, the European banking family, and he thought the funeral of one of its scions, who died by suicide at a hotel in Paris that July, might be the way in. But how to sneak Ms. Smith into the service? Mr. Herrera knew just what to do.

“Hire a small dark car with a driver, wear a simple black dress, a plain black hat, black gloves, all for ‘the look.’ Just walk in and be yourself,” he told Ms. Smith. It worked.

“The only time we had a tiff was when Christopher Hitchens did a story that was hard on Mother Teresa,” Mr. Carter said in an interview. (In 1995, Mr. Hitchens excoriated Mother Teresa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and would later be canonized, as a “Vatican fundamentalist,” lover of dictators and “presumable virgin,” among other things.) “Reinaldo stormed into my office and declared, ‘You’ve gone too far. I’m canceling my subscription.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that, you’re on the comp list.’”

Mr. Herrera also taught Mr. Carter how to entertain Princess Margaret (bottles of Famous Grouse whisky and barley water were important) for a dinner he persuaded Mr. Carter to hold for her at his apartment, saying she would be helpful in promoting the European edition of the magazine.

Since protocol, as Mr. Herrera had patiently explained, required that no guests could leave before the princess, and since she stayed past midnight, the evening was a bust, Mr. Carter wrote in his just-published memoir, “When the Going Was Good.” Once everyone was released, he added, “The relief on the faces of the other guests,” among them the entertainment mogul Barry Diller and Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist, “was the sort of look that survivors of a difficult airplane landing have when they step out onto the tarmac.”

Mr. Herrera was very good with royals. He used his title — he was a marquis — only in countries that had functioning monarchies. “We didn’t know he had a title until we launched the U.K. edition of Vanity Fair,” Mr. Colacello said.

Mr.. Herrera at a charity event at the United Nations in 1988.

But the Vanity Fair writer Amy Fine Collins recalled a time when Mr. Herrera was stumped by a queen.

It was a committee meeting, sometime in the early 1990s, of the International Best Dressed List, an annual tradition created in 1940 by Eleanor Lambert, the influential fashion publicist. “I do remember there being a bit of confusion among Reinaldo and his cohort when someone mentioned Queen Latifah,” Ms. Fine Collins said. “Was it possible there was a royal they hadn’t met?”

He was good with protocol in all sorts of areas, as the Rev. Boniface Ramsey recounted at Mr. Herrera’s funeral Mass at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue. Father Ramsey recalled being corrected by Mr. Herrera, an ardent Catholic, who pointed out that the yellow and white Vatican flag outside the parish was hanging upside down.

Mr. Herrera shone at parties, and he believed that a successful evening should always include a controversial figure. He relied on friends like Claus von Bülow, who was acquitted of the attempted murder of his heiress wife, to bring the requisite chemistry. “Claus is a great catalyst,” he told The New York Times in 1987.

He noted that his dream dinner party would include Ivan Boesky, the corporate raider charged with insider trading, and Jean Harris, the headmistress who murdered her ex-lover, Herman Tarnower, the inventor of the Scarsdale Diet — though both were unavailable, since they were in prison at the time.

Charlotte Curtis of The Times once described the Herreras as “hopelessly civilized.”

Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera at the Carolina Herrera fashion show at Lincoln Center during Fashion Week in September 2014.

Reinaldo Herrera Guevera was born on July 26, 1933, in Caracas, the eldest of four children of Maria Teresa Guevera de Uslar and Reinaldo Herrera-Uslar, otherwise known as the Marques de Torre Casa. Young Reinaldo grew up in the family home, Hacienda La Vega, which was built in 1590 and is apparently the oldest continuously inhabited house in the Western Hemisphere. He graduated from the St. Mark’s School, in Southborough, Mass., and studied history at Harvard and Georgetown.

In addition to his daughter Patricia and his wife, Mr. Herrera is survived by another daughter, Carolina Herrera Jr.; his stepdaughters, Ana Luisa Bruchou and Mercedes Mendoza; a brother, Luis Felipe Herrera Guevara; 12 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

“Over the years, I came to see Reinaldo’s impeccable comportment as a moral quality,” Ms. Brown wrote in her newsletter. “He felt it was on him to elevate the room and leave people feeling better about themselves.”

Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Penelope Green

We know the owners. We are on the Board of Fountainhead Arts together. Everyone who has ever seen the house says it’s a dream home. I put this in my blog because it’s not very often you get to see something so glamorous.

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Prominent art collectors and esteemed New York attorney Ian Krawiecki Gazes, whose friends include Keith Haring, alongside his husband, Serge Krawiecki Gazes, have unveiled their luxurious Coral Gables mansion to the market, priced at $16,700,000. Nestled within the prestigious Ponce Davis neighborhood at 4780 SW 86th Terrace, the tropical modern masterpiece was envisioned by the acclaimed architect Alberto O. Cordovez and is listed with Lourdes Alatriste of Douglas Elliman.

The residence spans over 12,000 square feet on a generous one-acre lot, offering seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and an array of upscale amenities. Features include wood paneling, limestone floors, a state-of-the-art kitchen equipped with Wolf appliances, and a 200-bottle capacity wine cellar. The outdoor area showcases a stunning 40×15 infinity pool, complemented by a fully equipped gym and a three-car garage with potential for lifts. Smart home automation ensures seamless control of lighting, climate, and security, epitomizing modern luxury living.

A legacy of art and culture, the Gazes duo is celebrated not only for their professional achievements but also for their profound contributions to the art world. Their journey as collectors commenced in the early 1980s in New York’s East Village, where they immersed themselves in the vibrant art scene alongside luminaries like Keith Haring. Their collection, which began with a Keith Haring print from his ‘Fertility’ series (1983), has since flourished, reflecting their dedication to supporting emerging artists and capturing diverse cultural narratives.

Images via Element Image