The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

money or let me buy whatever I wanted as my mother would have done,” she says. “Instead I was given an allowance and had to work hard for it. If I wanted a raise, I had to prove that I both deserved and needed one.”
Demanding Father, Dominant Mother
     
    Rich admits that he was a strict father. He can also be a strict grandfather, as I myself witnessed during our skiing in St. Moritz. Rich’s daughters had come to visit along with their families, and on that day we all sat down to lunch together in Rich’s chalet. One of his grandsons kept acting up; he refused to sit still at the table, and no one could get him to calm down. After this had gone on for some time, Rich began to scold the boy. “Listen to your mother! If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll send you to the kitchen.” “Then I’ll have to eat in the kitchen?” the boy asked. “Who said anything about eating?” Rich dryly replied.
    If you ask friends of the family about Marc Rich’s values, they refer to the special relationship that he had to his parents as an only child. “Denise always said, ‘His mother comes first, and then it’s a while before he gets to me,’ ” Ursula Santo Domingo commented. Another friend said his mother was too dominant. “He dressed the way she wanted.” Denise herself says only, “She was very, very, very controlling. She wasn’t too crazy about me.” According to Rich’s cousin René Traut, an eye specialist in Antwerp who kept in close contact with Paula Rich, Marc telephoned his mother almost daily, and it was the highlight of her day. David Rich, on the other hand, was very strict with his son as a child and expected a lot of him, Ursula Santo Domingo says. She believes that Rich’s relationship to his parents was one of his driving forces. “He wanted his parents to be proud of him. He always wanted to prove to his father that he could be as successful—or even more successful—than he was.”
Denise, the Songwriter
     
    By the early 1980s Marc Rich had indeed achieved this success. He was a giant of the commodities trade, earning100 million to200 million a year. The family now lived in a ten-room apartment at 625 Park Avenue. Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, the twin sister of the ousted shah, owned a three-story, twenty-five-room penthouse in the same building. Rich’s daughters went to the best private schools, and the family spent their weekends at their beach house on Long Island’s Lido Beach. Their life would never be the same after Rich fled to Switzerland in June 1983. It meant a massive readjustment—even more so as they were caught totally unawares. The family moved from New York, widely extolled as the “capital of the world,” to the small village of Baar, Switzerland. It was not exactly the glamorous cosmopolitan hub that the Riches were used to.
    Rich was able to continue doing what he loved to do: working from early morning until late in the evening. The children attended eliteboarding schools in the French-speaking area of Switzerland and the American International School in Zurich. Cut off from her circle of friends, Denise—the only member of the family who was born in the United States—had to reinvent herself. She tried to make the best of the situation. “I started writing songs professionally at that point also because I was so alone so much of the time,” she says. She had been writing songs for years and liked to compose with her acoustic guitar while in the bathtub. She was now ready to seek a wider audience for her music.
    She found amazing success. Sister Sledge, famous for their song “We Are Family,” recorded one of Denise’s songs in 1985. “Frankie” was an international number one hit and sold over 750,000 records. With the success of her own album,
Sweet Pain of Love,
one year later, Denise became a much sought-after songwriter. The list of artists who have performed her songs reads like an all-star lineup of R&B: Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Patti LaBelle, Natalie Cole, Marc Anthony, Céline Dion, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Chaka Khan, and Grover Washington Jr. Denise increasingly traveled to London, New York, and Philadelphia—the heart of the Philly soul that she so loved—in order to pursue her career as a songwriter. She was happy that her husband was proud of her success. However, she was also aware of the fact that he was not so happy with her frequent absences. “He doesn’t like to be alone,” she told me. “Those kind of men