The tragic life of Jocelyn Wildenstein

When I saw that Jocelyn Wildenstein, aka the Bride of (art dealer Alec) Wildenstein, had died at the age of eighty-four, I began compulsively flicking through the widely-shared galleries of horror photos depicting the three-decade plastic surgery odyssey for which she was known. But the picture that struck me most — more, even, than the hideously gnarled, ferocious face with its pinched eyes looking out at the courtroom at her divorce trial — was the one of her when she was young. Namely, in her thirties, with Hollywood golden-age good looks; wonderful bone structure, bright eyes. And one more: as a gamine fifteen-year-old who looks like a supermodel in waiting.

That this beautiful girl, who went on to be a strikingly gorgeous woman (albeit one determined to marry a rich man and live a jetset life of international luxury) felt so inadequate about her appearance and what her husband thought of it, that she embarked on an obsessive, multi-million dollar, multi-decade campaign of self-mutilation, is devastating. 

Wildenstein’s awful journey shows several things. One is the futility of money as a substitute for love: the former, which her husband had to the tune of billions, and which the pair hemorrhaged, couldn’t stop Jocelyn hunting down the latter until it destroyed her and her family. Divorce followed swiftly after Alec wielded a pistol at his wife when the latter, already heavily amplified under the knife, surprised him at their Manhattan townhouse. She claimed to have glimpsed a blonde in the bed.

But perhaps the most curious facet of the Jocelyn Wildenstein grotesquerie is that it isn’t all that surprising. Despite all the improvements in women’s rights and opportunities; despite the arrival of a world in which Ms. Wildenstein could have been an airline pilot or a chief executive, many women will still pursue beauty, or its specter, over all else. Sometimes to the death — certainly the death, in Wildenstein’s case, of an earth’s crust’s worth of skin and bone. 

Wildenstein, nee Périsset, was born in 1940 in Lausanne, in Switzerland, and was subject to a more aggressive regime of gender roles in her youth than girls in Europe are today. Perhaps when feminism rolled around in the 1970s, and she was holding court on her husband’s vast Kenyan game reserve, she wasn’t interested. Many weren’t. 

But still, she lived in a time whose accruing message was that women could, even should, do more with themselves than try to please a man by looking perennially young. In Wildenstein’s case, the message got so lost that she ended up butchering herself to look more like a cat, because Alec loved tigers and leopards so much. More than her for sure, at least after a few years.

As with everything today, we live with extremes. On one hand, Wildenstein’s sick world still thrives in the obsessive self-modifying world of TikTok and Instagram influencers, from the “thinspo” crowd of anorexia glorifiers (these are a truly demented, tragic bunch) to the rib-removing “wasp waist” chasers, to the raw meat-only diet wellness crew, to those who pummel and line their faces, despite being in their twenties, with filler, botox, and all manner of tucks and nips, lifts and fixes.

On the other hand, there is the rise of body positivity, a key offshoot of an identity politics machine that is always looking to defend and lionize the next “marginalized” or “stigmatized” category of being. Aspects of this movement have admittedly been extremely welcome; there is more room now for women that don’t have swimsuit model figures to breathe and feel OK. After all, when brands from Burberry to Boohoo used overweight ladies as models, one feels a little more at ease on the beach, as if maybe one’s own podge might be not just tolerable after years of effort at acceptance but, de rigeur. 

Much of this movement has unfortunately ended up being a ghoulish celebration of extremely unhealthy shapes and sizes. Morbid obesity is not a moral problem, but it is a physical one betokening an early and horrible demise. Celebrating it as beautiful is mad. But fail to do so, and if this crowd gets wind of you, you won’t hear the end of it and could be in real danger. By just pointing out the obvious: that the chubby star of Netflix’s Bridgerton, Nicola Coughlan, is chubby, I got hundreds of abusive, evil messages from the armies of sad, weird people who live online and viciously avenge slights to their heroes, whether Taylor Swift (who is just the right kind of thin) or Coughlan (the right kind of fat, thanks, at least in part, to her extreme wokeness). 

Ultimately, there must be something between the the reality-denying paradigm of the fat positivity brigade and the tragic, pinched and parched world of the Jocelyn Wildensteins, the emaciated “thinspo” influencers and the buttlift, filler-and-botox lot thirsting to look a little more like Kim Kardashian.

That “something” surely lies in a renewed focus on first principles: that people, and therefore women, really are more, both in terms of what they feel and what they can offer the world, than their appearance. And that health, which has already been rapidly commodified as an aesthetic, confers both happiness and beauty more effectively than any knife could.