The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

Paris in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. There he met Gery Diamant, and the two were later married (their marriage would last for fifty-three years). At the young age of twenty, Eisenberg, together with three of his brothers, founded a fur-trading company with offices in Paris, London, and New York. In the spring of 1940 the Nazis invaded Western Europe, and the Eisenbergs decided to flee Paris. It was in that same spring that David Reich and his family fled Antwerp for the south of France in a used black Citroën. The Eisenbergs were somewhat more well-to-do than the Reichs, and the family was able to board a ship for New York. In 1942 they settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, approximately forty miles west of Boston.
    Half a year after their blind date in New York, in the late summer of 1966, Denise Eisenberg traveled to Spain to visit Rich. Their parents had done well—the match was a success. “Marc proposed to me after two weeks of touring in the north of Spain. We had dinner in the
parador
of Santiago de Compostela. It was very romantic,” Denise remembers. Built in the fifteenth century, the
parador
is a former royal hospital with four cloistered courtyards and an impressive dining room. “I had liketwo seconds, and I said OK. I called my parents and told them I was engaged. My mother wanted to have a nice wedding in Massachusetts. Marc said no. He wanted to get married in two or three weeks. My mother said she couldn’t organize a wedding in two weeks, so they negotiated back and forth. Guess who won?” Just a few weeks later, on October 30, 1966, the couple married in Worcester’s Temple Emanuel.
    The pair flew to Jamaica for their honeymoon, where it rained the entire length of their stay. As he would tell me ruefully so many years later, Rich stepped on a sea urchin on the very first day and had to keep his infected foot raised for the rest of the honeymoon. Exactly nine months later, on August 1, 1967, Ilona was born. The young family settled in Madrid, and Denise devoted her energies to taking care of her young daughter. Gabrielle was born in January 1969.
Family Values
     
    Rich was living in the fast lane. He was working harder and longer than any of his colleagues in the office. He arrived at the office shortly past 7:00 A.M . and he was seldom home before 10:00 P.M . “He was constantly working. It was difficult sometimes,” Denise remembers. “His work was his hobby, and his family suffered as a consequence,” Ursula Santo Domingo told me. The marquesa became a close friend of the Rich family and came to know them better than almost anybody else. She told me that Denise once complained to her that Rich made too little time for his family. “ ‘I don’t have any time for you during the week,’ he told her. ‘I can give you a half hour on Saturdays and forty-five minutes on Sundays.’ ”
    The situation did not improve when Rich decided to go into business for himself in 1974. Before moving back to New York, the couple moved to London, where Danielle was born in March 1975. At that point Denise still provided her husband with a great deal of support. “He was building a business, and that’s what he had to do. I was there to support him in any way I could. He did what he had to do. I understood. That’swhat my father did. My father would always say that you have to work for money to really understand what the price of anything is, what the value is.” Marc Rich once said of himself, “I guess I’m a business machine.”
    It was the typical division of labor in those days. Despite her public image as an eccentric jet-setter and flamboyant socialite, Denise was a rather conservative mother and wife with a strong sense of family. Marc and Denise Rich wished to instill traditional values in their children. Marc Rich believed in the classic virtues. “Honesty, hard work, responsibility, and some knowledge of the Jewish religion,” he said when I asked him about what he had wished to pass on to his children. (He stopped observing the Jewish rituals at the age of fourteen, he told me. He doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t pray.) His daughters had to be well behaved, come home on time, and finish their homework right away. Because he was so wealthy, he wished to teach his children the value of money. “I never spoiled them,” he says. “I wanted to teach them that you have to work to make money.” Danielle still remembers this. “He did not just give me