Lunch with the FT: Denise Rich

Denise Rich, Grammy-nominated songwriter, record-label owner, founder of a cancer research charity, friend of presidents, and an international socialite has a thing about numbers.

This is, perhaps, not surprising given that numbers – hidden, disputed and extremely large numbers – were, for a long time, one of the more sensitive areas of her life. For, until filing for divorce in 1993, Denise was married to Marc Rich, a financier who in 1983 became one of the world’s most wanted fugitives after being indicted in the US for evading $48m in taxes, wire fraud, and making false statements.

While Marc Rich was pardoned in 2001 by Bill Clinton as one of the president’s last acts in office, rumours flew about whether the pardon might have been granted in exchange for Denise’s contributions to the Democratic party and the Clinton Library; at a congressional hearing that same year she invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and ever since has denied any wrongdoing.

But though her marriage to Rich ended more than 15 years ago, the relationship, and the numbers, still have a way of resurfacing, no matter how many pop hits she crafts or how many charitable grants she makes. In 1996 her song “Love is On the Way” was included in the soundtrack album for the film The First Wives Club , the same year as the marriage was officially dissolved. Three years later she was Grammy-nominated for “Don’t Waste Your Time”, a duet between Mary J. Blige and Aretha Franklin, but then – boom! – Clinton issued his last-minute reprieve for her ex- and she was at the centre of a scandal. Over the years, as she continued with her songs, working with everyone from Patti LaBelle to Jessica Simpson and Sharon Stone, and as the cancer research charity grew by leaps and bounds, press interest in the relationship waned. But then, earlier this year, boom! The scandal was dragged up once more when Barack Obama nominated Eric Holder, who had been involved in the pardon, as his attorney-general .

It is not impossible, I suppose, that the renewed focus on the controversy is part of the reason that Rich, 65, has proposed lunch – to direct attention away from that side of her cv and towards the charity she founded in 1998. Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation for Cancer Research was established in memory of Rich’s daughter Gabrielle, who died of leukaemia at the age of 27. Today the charity is one of the largest sources of non-governmental funding for leukaemia research in the US, and, I imagine, Rich would rather talk about those numbers than about donations to the Clintons.

Denise Rich, it turns out, believes in symbols and signs of all kinds. And she doesn’t really believe in random coincidence. In her life, presumably because of her life, nothing is how it looks on the surface. When the man you married in your twenties turns out to have been one of the most wanted corporate bad guys of the late 20th century, when a daughter who is beautiful and young dies, how can you accept anything at face value again?

And if she doesn’t, then why, I wonder, should I?

So I ask Rich where the name of her music company, 785 Records, comes from, and she says: “Seven plus eight equals 15 – 15, 16, 17, 18. Eight plus one is nine, that’s my lucky number.” This is such a bizarre answer that she later admits she made it up on the spot; she doesn’t actually want to explain where the name comes from.

That’s just the beginning. “One” is the position reached in the UK charts in summer 1985 by her first song “Frankie”, sung by Sister Sledge; “76” is the percentage of money raised by her charity that is awarded each year to junior researchers; “10” is the number of millions of dollars that the charity has so far distributed. And “six” is the number of cookies Rich is allowed each day on a “Smart for Life cookie diet” that involves eating a number of appetite-suppressing nutrient-filled cookies a day and having just one meal. Presumably, this is why she has invited me to have lunch at her house. It’s kind of hard to go to a restaurant and bring your own cookie.

On the other hand, it’s also deeply weird to be served a fancy French three-course meal by someone – or the butler of someone – while your host is eating one chocolate cookie (also available in oatmeal raisin, blueberry, banana and coconut flavours). “But your meal is very healthy,” she assures me after my first course, eggplant tartine, has been taken away, and replaced by “chicken char suey”, a Chinese-inspired barbecue. It’s at this point I realise that all my host’s plates are gone and the cookie was not just a first course but her only course.

So back to the numbers: “three” is not just how many plates I have but the number of children Denise had (Gabrielle was the middle child; the eldest, Ilona, is a former fashion designer and artist who lives in London and is married to the artist Kenny Schachter; the youngest, Daniella, is an actress; together they have given Rich five grandchildren). “Three” is also the number of languages in which Rich writes her song lyrics – English, French, and Spanish. She can also speak Italian and German. And “three” is the number of close family members Rich has lost to cancer: aside from Gabrielle, her elder sister Monique died of breast cancer, as did her mother Gerry, who with her husband Emil Eisenberg, a shoe manufacturer, raised Denise in Worchester, Massachusetts. Rich firmly believes they are all looking down on her and watching out for her. “They are there for me,” she says.

“I’m a very optimistic person. I always see the bright side of things,” she continues. “When one door closes, another one opens. Life can go one of two ways: you can either be depressed, or live. I don’t spend time wishing they’d had this drug Gleevec when Gabrielle was alive, even though it would have saved her life. I’m just thrilled about all the lives it saves now. My daughter would be so proud. I really believe she feels this from the other side. She is an angel.”

One of Rich’s biggest hits, sung by Céline Dion, was “Love is On the Way”, which contains the refrain “Love is on the way on the wings of angels.” Angels and love are a bit of a theme, in her music and in her life. On her CD Denise Rich Songs the titles of seven of the 17 songs contain the word “love”, among them “Love is a Crime”, “Livin’ for Love” and “Love On & On.”

Rich says her first song, the one that launched her career, was “given” to her by her sister, though she “can’t prove it. I was on a plane and I had been asleep and I just woke up with this song in my head that went, ‘’Cause I remembered I loved you so much./Way back then we were friends,/ Goin’ together, but then you left me./Frankie – do you remember me?/Frankie – do you remember?’ and I started singing it on the plane into a tape recorder because I didn’t want to forget it. Everyone around me was like, ‘Be quiet!’ and then Sister Sledge recorded it, and I told my daughter, who was 10 at the time, and she said ‘Mom, Sister Sledge! Sister!’ and I thought, ‘Oooh. My sister!’”

Another song, which Rich wrote with Gary Barlow of Take That, came to her on a helicopter flight over London, “We were in the clouds, and I thought, ‘Will someone catch us if we fall?’ and that became ‘I Know You’ll Catch Me.’” “Remember Me”, which Marc Anthony sang, was written for Gabrielle. “I write very much from the heart,” Rich says. “And before I do, I always pray to the angels and call the angels in. I feel songwriting has connected me to the angels.”

Looking at Rich in her jeans and silver lamé Missoni sweater set, diamonds in her ears, lush golden brown hair tumbling down tanned shoulders, sipping her green tea in front of her Julian Schnabel plate portrait in her Fifth Avenue duplex penthouse, complete with Chagalls and Basquiats on the walls, garden on the roof and recording studio underneath, she seems more jet set than yogic (she takes her superyacht, Lady Joy, to Cannes every spring and spends most of the winter skiing in Aspen). But then there’s the silver amulet around her neck etched with the portrait of a young woman, wavy hair streaming out like an art deco goddess. “It’s Gabrielle,” says Rich. “It was minted in London by the Royal Mint for our foundation. I also have it in gold, to wear to black-tie parties. It helps define my priorities. When I picked the coins up, Gabrielle’s maquette was sitting next to that of the Queen of England. And I just started crying. I don’t know what it means, but I am sure it means something.”

Like many things in her life, Rich is not quite as she appears. She appears as comfortable hanging out with, for example, rappers such as LL Cool J, with whom she is pictured on the photo gallery outside the studio, as she is with world figures, such as Nelson Mandela and the Clintons, pictured in the library upstairs. She combines both worlds in her role as the host of the Angel Ball, which she throws every other year at the Marriott Marquis in New York for an average of 700 people who pay between $100,000 for a table and $1,250 for a ticket. In the past it has been attended by the Clintons, the Duchess of York, Mikhail Gorbachev, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. This year’s the performers include Jennifer Hudson and Estelle.

“I love connecting with people and getting into their minds,” Rich says. “Cancer knows no boundaries, and the spiritual side of music is something everyone understands, whether they are rappers or pop. Once, for example, I was writing a song with Kashif from Kool & the Gang, and he just wasn’t getting what I was doing – I always stay on the beat for some reason, it’s a rhythm I was born with – and his girlfriend, who was there, just said, ‘What she’s saying is …’ and put it in a slightly different rhythm and he said, ‘Oohhh.’ And that became “Step Into My World,” because that’s what we were doing. In the same way, I think everyone understands what we are doing with the foundation.”

At the moment she is working on enlarging the board of the foundation, which includes Stephen Nimer, chief of haematology at Sloan-Kettering, and Jerome Groopman, of the Harvard Institute of Medecine and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, among others. She has also signed Tiffany Giardina, 14, to her record label and her first video, “Hurry Up and Save Me”, which was filmed on Rich’s roof, made its debut in the top 30 in the Disney radio charts.

And right now, Denise Rich is working on a new song. “It’s called ‘Doing it the Right Way,’” Rich says, putting it on the sound system in her studio. “It’s about how important it is to stay positive. I believe in destiny, but I also believe you make your own destiny.” She smiles and starts to jiggle her head to the music and hip-hop up and down on her knees, working off the cookie.

“I don’t regret anything I’ve done,” she says. “Only what I haven’t done.” You can practically hear her counting the beats in her head as she hums.

Vanessa Friedman is the FT’s fashion editor

The Angel Ball 2009 takes place in New York on Tuesday, October 20

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Denise Rich’s penthouse
Fifth Avenue, New York

Chocolate “Smart for Life” cookie
Eggplant tartine with scallops
Chicken char suey
Strawberry tart
Fiji Water x 2
Green tea

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High society: At home with New York’s great and the good

David Patrick Columbia has been chronicling New York society for 15 years, first as editor of Avenue magazine, the house organ of the Park Avenue/Fifth Avenue set, and now via www.newyorksocialdiary.com. Dubbed a “society darling and scribe” by The New York Observer, Columbia can be seen almost every night reporting amid the diamond-bedecked revellers. He knows, perhaps, more than anyone since Edith Wharton about New York’s social and charity scenes. He shares his insights below.

“People are always trying to define what society is in New York. The world is changing so dramatically that there isn’t a ‘society’ as we know it, as in the US we have an ‘upper-income class’. The only real tradition we have here, apart from some families that have lasted for four to five generations and have maintained their wealth and social promise, which is very rare, is that we have commercialism.

The charity season starts in September and it runs until December 15, with a slight pause for Thanksgiving. After mid-December, it slows down and it’s quiet until the end of February, when it picks up again until the end of May.

The best way to break into the New York charitable society is to volunteer for a charity, depending on your interests, and to work your way up. One thing about New York is that it’s very mobile – if you are really interested and willing to work, you can go far.

There is a group of well-connected and well-married women who are involved in many charities. They are on the same committees and have a network of mutual support by attending each other’s events. Women such as Muffie Potter Aston [former vice-president of public relations for Van Cleef & Arpels and wife of the plastic surgeon Sherrell Aston], Somers Farkas [the third wife of Jonathan Farkas, real estate magnate and heir to the Alexander’s department store fortune], and Liz Peek [first female partner of Wertheim Schroder, the investment house now part of Citigroup, and vice-chairman for the general director’s council of New York City Opera]. These women and their friends have a lot of influence in many of the charitable activities and are the core of social life in New York.

Dinners and concerts are what makes the most money but a celebrity guest is key. For example, the New Yorkers for Children charity had a dinner where they honoured Mary J Blige, while the National Art Awards honoured Robert Redford. New Yorkers love movie stars – they are snobbish about Hollywood but, if you bring a movie star, they all want to see them.

One of the main events of the season is the Memorial Sloan-Kettering dinner [in aid of the world’s oldest and largest private cancer centre founded in 1884 as the New York Cancer Hospital]. The memorial’s charity is very prestigious, and it’s not easy to become a member of the committee, as they really put you to the test.

Other important events during the season are the opening of the Opera, the opening of the American Ballet Theatre, the opening of Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic. Those are the places where you go to be seen. In New York it’s good to be involved in the cultural aspects, as they draw a wide variety of people, so museum events at the Met [including the prestigious Met balls], the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney are big attractions.”

Interview by Valentina Zannoni