Legend had it that Susan Gutfreund once bought a seat on Concorde for a birthday cake.
She insisted the extra seat belonged to her son and the cake rode on her lap. But in 1980s New York, people would believe almost anything about the city’s most extravagant hostess.
After all, this was a woman who rented Blenheim Palace for a party and sent $700 orchid trees to decline invitations.
When her 22-foot Christmas tree wouldn’t fit in the elevator, she had it hoisted up the building’s facade.
Her husband, John, ran Salomon Brothers, and Business Week crowned him “the King of Wall Street.”
By the summer of 1991, though, something was rotting inside the king’s empire, and when it surfaced, the city aimed its scorn at his wife.
Her husband’s disgrace would become Susan’s punishment.
As New York turned on her, Susan looked to Paris, where supposed friends like Karl Lagerfeld and the Rothschilds would decide whether she was still worth knowing.
And, for a woman who’d spent decades earning her place among them, their answer meant everything.
Her love affair with European high society took flight in the aisle of a Pan Am jet, back when she was an Air Force pilot’s daughter earning a stewardess’s salary.
Not My Time to Go
Her flying days were long gone when Susan and her second husband, John Gutfreund, settled into River House, the Art Deco co-op on the East River whose residents had included Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.
At two o’clock one morning, a formally dressed party carrying a harp turned up at the wrong apartment in the building. The Gutfreunds’ neighbor Robert Postel answered the door in his underwear and told them, “Sorry, it’s not my time to go.”
Susan was turning entertaining into something closer to stagecraft, and the Postels kept getting caught in the wings.
Susan Gutfreund’s neighbors sued over her 22-foot Christmas tree.
The tree that went up the building’s facade in December 1982 was a gargantuan Douglas fir, and it swung straight across the Postels’ rooftop terrace on the way. They weren’t even invited to the party, and suits and countersuits followed.
Yet, by Susan’s standards, the tree was a modest gesture.
The following year, the Gutfreunds rented Blenheim Palace, the English estate where Winston Churchill was born, for a Salomon Brothers ball. The invitation read simply, “Mr. and Mrs. John Gutfreund at home. Blenheim.”
Even her regrets came with flowers. When she declined an invitation, she sometimes sent a $700 orchid tree in her place.
Then Susan Gutfreund spent what would be $80 million today just to decorate her apartment.
In the mid-1980s, the Gutfreunds moved to a duplex at 834 Fifth Avenue. Jayne Wrightsman, a collector known for her expertise in French decorative arts, introduced Susan to the great Parisian decorator Henri Samuel, who advised the couple to choose the 20-room duplex over an Italianate townhouse.
Guests stepped into a winter garden and moved through rooms lined with chinoiserie panels, antique French furniture, gilt and silk.
Contemporary accounts put the decorating bill at about $20 million, roughly $80 million today, and the apartment became an enduring image of 1980s Wall Street wealth.
Susan later compared Samuel’s approach to making a flawless couture dress that needed no jewelry. The rooms he and Wrightsman helped her build made her case for her, proof of who she’d become and how seriously she’d studied to get there.
For John’s 60th birthday in 1989, she took the party to Paris and recreated Louis XV’s orangerie inside the Musée Carnavalet, the city’s museum of its own history. The planner, Pierre Celeyron, said the production took two months and 15 meetings.
And the glamour took brutal work. For client dinners in Berlin, she said, she rose at three in the morning to buy and arrange flowers at the market, worked with secretaries all day, then changed in a bathroom before greeting her guests.
“When a dinner party starts, I enjoy myself like a guest, but I kill myself beforehand,” she said.
Her husband John bankrolled the spectacle and seemed delighted by it.
“She’s enriched my life,” he told Fortune in 1984, crediting her with teaching him to notice the scenery rather than only the plot. Yet in another interview, he dismissed much of that glittering world as “frivolous.”
Years later, some would wonder whether all of it had distracted the King of Wall Street from his own business, where one of his employees would soon be quietly cheating the U.S. government.
For now, Susan stood at the top of New York society.
Then came August 1991.
While Susan summered on Nantucket, her husband’s empire began to crumble, and soon his own traders were reportedly betting on how long she’d stay married to him.
