The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

don’t.” Nevertheless, after twenty years of marriage during which Denise had ignored her own ambitions, she was finally ready to move on. “It’s my turn now and I’m gonna do it,” she said.
That Tall Blond German Woman
     
    The better things went for Denise, the worse they got for Marc. “Marc was depressed, but I didn’t want to hear about being depressed. It wasn’t my fault we had to leave the country,” she explains and throws a look at Danielle. It was the classic crisis that many couples experiencewhen one partner finally decides to step out of the other’s shadow. Either they adapt to the new situation or they go their separate ways. In order to cheer him up, Rich’s family suggested he get out to the mountains more often and go to St. Moritz. Denise shakes her head at how naive she was back then. “I had no clue,” she tells me. “There were women up there in St. Moritz reading
Forbes
, you know, looking for a husband.” She assures me that Rich had never had an affair up until that point. “I was a blessed wife. His big affair was his business,” she says.
    Denise was, at first, not worried about the many good-looking, long-legged young women who tended to congregate in St. Moritz. She had failed to recognize that times had changed and that her husband was suffering more as a result of his voluntary exile than he was prepared to admit. They had been living in Switzerland for six years. It is a beautiful country, but it is also small and provincial. Rich, who loved to travel, could no longer go where his will took him. She, on the other hand, could travel the world. She recorded songs in London and went to Brazil to record a sound track for a film about the legendary mail train robber Ronald Briggs. She had the time of her life. “It was not a good time for Marc,” she says. “Things started falling apart.”
    It was around that time, in late 1989, that people began to notice the tall blond German woman at Rich’s side at the social events he attended. Gisela Rossi, née Reininger, was originally from Munich and was the widow of a rich Italian industrialist. She was a member of the European jet set that spent their winters skiing in St. Moritz and their summers in St. Tropez on the French Riviera or in Marbella on the Spanish coast. Rich met Rossi on a trip to St. Moritz.
    “Of course, it was a dangerous situation,” remembers Ursula Santo Domingo, who often spent her winter holidays with the Rich family in St. Moritz. “There are all these women who come to St. Moritz and end up comforting all the unaccompanied men. Along came Gisela, and she caressed him and ran her fingers through his hair and did everything hewanted.” It was the beginning of the end for the marriage. “He fell for her hook, line, and sinker,” Denise says. “He was very naive about women. He wasn’t cheating, he had no girlfriends. My father always said, ‘When you are that naive and that green, you fall into the first trap.’ ”
    The affair began while Denise was in Worcester to be at her mother’s deathbed. Danielle found out about the relationship and alerted her. Denise would fight to save their marriage for two years, even though her father had told her, “You won’t be able to reverse this.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Denise replied. “It’s over twenty years of marriage.” A divorce was out of the question for Denise. That was not the way she had been raised. Her parents had been married for fifty-three years. She thought the affair would remain an affair and her husband would soon come back to his senses. “I wouldn’t leave him,” Denise says and interlaces her fingers. “I stayed for two years. I did whatever I could. I loved him. I didn’t want my kids living in a broken home. Our family made a commitment to stay together. I was trying very, very hard. I really was. But he couldn’t get out of it. She was doing everything he wanted, and she was there all the time. She was always on time. This woman was so street-smart and manipulative. So manipulative. She also had a lot of friends helping her. It was fun for them to steal a husband. ‘Let’s see if we can get this Rich guy,’ they would say to themselves. He fell into the trap and he couldn’t see it. It happens to men, it just happens.”
Don’t Be Late
     
    Whereas Denise had spoken from the heart, Marc Rich tried to remain diplomatic when I asked him what had gone wrong with his marriage. “I became unhappy with