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n Manhattan’s Upper Eagt Side, home to some of the most expensive real estate on earth, exists the crown jewel of the city’s residential town houses. With its 15-foot-high oak door, huge arched windows, and nine floors, it sits on—or. rather. commands—the block of 71st Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Almost ludicrously out of pro- portion with its four- and five-story neigh- bors, it seems more like an institution than a house. This is perhaps not surprising— until 1989 it was the Birch Wathen private school. Now it is said to be Manhattan’s largest private residence. Inside. amid the flurry of menservants attired in sober black suits and pristine white gloves. you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu. This is no mere rich person's home, but a high- walled. eclectic. imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries. The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of indi- vidually framed eveballs: these. the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England. where they were made for in- jured soldiers. Next comes a marble foyer, which does have a painting, in the man- ner of Jean Dubuffet ... but the host coyly refuses to tell visitors who painted it. In any case. guests are like pygmies next to the nearby twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior. Despite its eccentricity the house is curi- ously impersonal. the statement of someone who wants to be known for the scale of his possessions. Its occupant. financier Jeffrey Epstein, 50, admits to friends that he likes it when people think of him this way. A good- looking man, resembling Ralph Lauren, with thick gray-white hair and a weathered face, he usually dresses in jeans, knit shirts, and loafers. He tells people he bought the house because he knew he “could never live anywhere bigger.” He thinks 51,000 square feet is an appropmiately large space for some- one like himself, who deals mostly in large concepts—especially large sums of money. AN VANIT 07/26/17 Y FAIR Guests are invited to lunch or dinner at the town house—Epstein usually refers to the former as “tea,” since he likes to eat bite- size morsels and drink copious quantities of Earl Grey. (He does not touch alcohol or to- bacco.) Tea is served in the “leather room,” so called because of the cordovan-colored fabric on the walls. The chairs are covered in a leopard print. and on the wall hangs a huge, Oriental fantasv of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling li- onskin. Under her gaze. plates of finger sandwiches are delivered to Epstein and guests by the menservants in white gloves. Upstairs, to the right of a spiral stair- case, is the “office.” an enormous gallery spanning the width of the house. Strangely, it holds no computer. Computers belong in the “computer room” (a smaller room at the back of the house). Epstein has been known to say. The office features a gilded desk (which Epstein tells people belonged to banker J. P Morgan). [8th-century black lacquered Portuguese cabinets. and a nine- foot ebony Steinway ~D™ grand. On the desk, a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue was re- cently spotted. Covering the floor. Epstein has explained. “is the largest Persian rug you ll ever see in a private home—so big, it must have come from a mosque.” Amid such splendor, much of which reflects the work of the French decorator Alberto Pin- to, who has worked for Jacques Chirac and the royal families of Jordan and Saudi Ara- bia. there is one particularly startling oddi- ty: a stuffed black poodle. standing atop the grand piano. “No decorator would ever tell you to do that.” Epstein brags to visi- tors. “But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog.” People can't help but feel it’s Epstein’s way of saving that he always has the last word. In addition to the town house, Epstein lives in what is reputed to be the largest private dwelling in New Mexico. on an $18 million. 7.500-acre ranch which he named “Zorro.” “It makes the town house look like a shack.” Epstein has said. He also owns Little St. James. a 70-acre island in the US. Virgin Islands. where the main house is currently being renovated by Edward Tut- tle, a designer of the Amanresorts. There is also a $6.8 million house tn Palm Beach, Florida, and a fleet of aircraft: a Gulfstream IV, a helicopter. and a Boeing 727. replete with trading room. on which Epstein re- cently flew President Clinton, actors Chris Tucker and Kevin Spacey, supermarket magnate Ron Burkle. Lew Wasserman’s grandson, Casey Wasserman, and a few oth- ers, On a mission to explore the problems of AIDS and economic development in Africa. Epstein is charming. but he doesn’t let Page 32 of 151 the charm slip into his eyes. They are steely and calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. “Let’s play chess,” he said to me, af- ter refusing to give an interview for this arti- cle. “You be white. You get the first move.” It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has care- fully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York’s moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole. “He’s very enigmatic.” says Rosa Monck- ton, the former C.E.O. of Tiffany & Co. in the U.K. and a close frend since the early 1980s. “You think you know him and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin and there’s something else extraordinary underneath. He never reveals his hand... . He’s a classic iceberg. What vou see is not what you get.” ven acquaintances sense a curious dichotomy: Yes. he lives like a “modern ma- haraja.” as Leah Kleman, one of his art dealers. puts it. Yet he is fastidiously, al- most obsessively private—he lists himself in the phone book under a pseudonym. He rarely attends society gath- erings or weddings or funerals: he considers eating in restaurants like “eating on the sub- way”—i.e., something he'd never do. There are many women in his life. mostly voung, but there is no one of them to whom he has been able to commit. He describes his most public companion of the last decade, Ghislaine Maxwell. 41. the daughter of the late, disgraced media baron Robert Max- well, as simply his “best friend.” He says she is not on his payroll, but she seems to organize much of his life—recently she was making telephone inquiries to find a California-based yoga instructor for him. (Epstein is still close to his two other long- term girlfriends. Paula Heil Fisher. a for- mer associate of his at the brokerage firm Bear Stearns and now an opera producer, and Eva Andersson Dubin. a doctor and onetime model. He tells people that when a relationship is over the girlfriend “moves up. not down,” to friendship status.) Some of the businessmen who dine with him at his home—thevy include newspaper publisher Mort Zuckerman, banker Louis Ranieri, Revion chairman Ronald Perelman, real-estate tycoon Leon Black. former Mi- crosoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, Tom Pritzker (of Hyatt Hotels). and real-estate “AARCH 2003 Public Records Request No.: 17-295 DOJ-OGR- 00032071