Who is Denise Rich? Songwriter, philanthropist, socialite - and subject of federal probes
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NEW YORK - Denise Rich, socialite and Oscar-nominated songwriter, is trying to keep a very low profile. That is not at all her style.
Usually, everything she does is over the top - most notably, her spending habits. Until recently, she was best-known for being the walking embodiment of her last name, and for throwing legendary parties attended by everyone who is anyone, including the president of the United States.
It is difficult, however, to be a social butterfly when the feds are investigating you.
The exquisitely dressed and tastefully jeweled Rich, 57, is now the focus of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney's office in New York. She also has been asked to testify before Congress. At issue is the Jan. 20 pardon of her fugitive ex-husband, Marc Rich, by her friend Bill Clinton, to whom she has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions.
What federal prosecutors and members of Congress want to know is this: Did a spend-happy maven of the haut monde buy a presidential pardon for the father of her children?
She pleads the Fifth
Clinton, emphatically, says no. Rich's attorneys say no. Rich herself isn't saying anything about it. Not to the media and especially not to Congress, before which she refused to testify, citing her Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.
On Thursday, following the announcement by U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White that her New York office is investigating whether money played a role in Clinton's last-minute pardon, a House committee investigating the same thing said it was withdrawing its consideration of immunity for Rich, which she had requested in exchange for her testimony.
"The committee will do nothing to impede the U.S. attorney's investigation," spokesman Mark Corello said.
In 1983, billionaire commodities trader Marc Rich stopped at nothing to avoid federal prosecution by the very office now investigating his pardon. In one of the largest tax-fraud cases in U.S. history, Rich was indicted on charges alleging he evaded more than $48 million in taxes and illegally traded oil with Iran during the American hostage crisis.
He already had fled to Switzerland - to be joined by Denise and their three daughters - when the indictments came down.
In a 1999 interview with New York magazine, Rich said she left her husband in 1991 after learning he was having an affair with a 48-year-old German blonde.
The early years
She had married Marc Rich in 1966, six months after meeting him on a blind date arranged by her father. Denise Eisenberg was used to having money. Her father, a furrier who fled Nazi Germany and arrived penniless in Massachusetts, nonetheless made millions from a shoe factory in Worcester.
His daughter, who had always loved music, went to Boston University and taught herself to play the guitar. As a young wife and mother, she began writing songs, often as a way of trying to reach her husband, who in many ways was her emotional opposite - reserved and obsessed with business.
It took time, but her songwriting became successful. In the late '80s, Sister Sledge scored a hit with her song "Frankie." Chaka Khan later recorded "Free Yourself." In 1995, the story goes, Bette Midler was at one of Rich's famous Fifth Avenue blowouts and heard someone sing "Love Is on the Way." The song, then Rich's latest, became the theme for Midler's new movie, "The First Wives Club."
Tragedy and philanthropy
But Rich's life has not been all about money and success.
After returning to America, her daughter Gabrielle was diagnosed with leukemia. Gabrielle died at age 27, after undergoing a bone-marrow transplant. The donor was her mother, who, on one of the last days her daughter was conscious, hired a string quartet, sat them outside her daughter's room and had them play Tchaikovsky.
Rich's parties are not just about having fun. She raises millions for the Democratic Party and for cancer research - in Gabrielle's honor - at gala fund-raisers attended by the likes of Clinton, Al and Tipper Gore, Henry Kissinger, Larry King, Patti LaBelle, Geraldo Rivera and Barbara Walters.
With strategic outlays of cash, she has gained access to the rich and famous in only a few years' time, after living abroad with a billionaire wanted by the U.S. government.
She has given more than $1 million to the Democratic Party, more than $450,000 to Clinton's presidential library and more than $70,000 to Hillary Rodham Clinton's successful New York Senate campaign.
Rivera, who has been a close friend for about 10 years, said in a telephone interview Friday that he is shocked by the "Machiavellian" rumors and accusations that now engulf Rich.
"She is the antithesis of that. If anything, she is naive, gullible, openhearted. Denise wants to be Gertrude Stein in the '20s in Paris," he said, entertaining the famous and gifted.
The only thing she is guilty of, Rivera said, is sometimes "having more money than common sense."