Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 14, 1990 TAG: 9005140041
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-3 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: TONY GERMANOTTA LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Long
But the pending divorce of John and Patricia Kluge, America's richest couple, has caused hardly a ripple in this stately town of Jefferson and Monroe.
The Kluges, who own 10,000 acres and several mansions just down the road from the historic Monticello and Ash Lawn estates, announced late last month that they were amicably ending their nine-year marriage.
The Daily Progress in Charlottesville broke the story April 21, reporting that John W. Kluge, the 76-year-old billionaire, had retired from the palatial 45-room Albemarle House to his nearby Morven estate and stud farm.
"They have reached a firm settlement," Patricia Kluge's lawyer told the Charlottesville paper. "Obviously, she received assets."
Almost immediately, speculation began on the size of the settlement.
In New York, word leaked from High Society sources that the Mrs. had signed a pre-nuptial agreement giving her the annual interest on $1 billion.
If true, that would conservatively amount to $85 million a year for living expenses. And, the reports said, she gets to live with their 6-year-old adopted son in Albemarle House, a massive brick mansion set into the woods on the side of a rolling hill and fronted by their private golf course and cattle ponds.
Town and Country magazine has referred to the home as "the grandest estate to have been built in America since the '20s."
Across the Atlantic, the British tabloids were trumping their American counterparts. They dragged out unsavory 20-year-old nude pictures of Patricia Kluge, 41, and played the marital troubles on their front pages.
"Exit for the Queen of Excess," blared an April 24 centerfold spread in the London Daily Mail. "A billion-dollar divorce payoff for Patricia Kluge, the social climber driven by a royal obsession," another headline said.
The London Daily Express of the same day was only slightly more restrained. Its front-page story was headlined: "The Richest Ex-Wife in The World."
The story declared that "Ex-belly dancer Patricia Kluge, who once dispensed explicit sex advice in a Soho magazine, could eventually become one of the world's wealthiest women."
According to their account, Patricia Kluge would net about $160 million a year in her divorce payoff.
The British papers seemed to revel in what they considered Patricia Kluge's downfall.
They described her as a "social climber . . . whose ambition was to be publicly greeted by the Queen."
They said the tall, strikingly beautiful woman towered over her husband in more than just height. It was Patricia Kluge, they said, who taught her husband how to enjoy his enormous wealth and persuaded him to build a palace near Charlottesville.
And the British papers rehashed her first marriage to a porn publisher, for whom she posed nude and wrote an advice column.
Patricia Kluge, who recently was appointed to the Board of Visitors for the University of Virginia, long ago dismissed such backbiting, telling one reporter that she was deeply in love with her first husband when she posed for the photos and did nothing of which to be ashamed.
The Kluge divorce seemed to stun the social set more than any of the old scandals.
Newsday's columnist, James A. Revson, reported on April 23 that "New York society is reeling" from the news of the divorce. Even the staid New York Times jumped on the Kluge divorce bandwagon last weekend, but the Times' treatment was much more reverent.
"On the social circuit this week," it said, "there was talk of the attractive way John and Patricia Kluge. . . are dissolving their marriage of nine years."
In Charlottesville, where academia, agriculture and the jet set meet at the edge of the Blue Ridge, the divorce has been accepted calmly.
"A lot of people kind of expect it of the very rich," said Del. Mitchell Van Yahres, who owns a tree surgery business in Charlottesville that counts most of the nearby estates as customers, including the Kluges' grounds.
"I don't know that they're very active socially around here," he said, adding that the divorce was probably more the talk "of that group from Hollywood, New York, Palm Beach and Scotland."
Paul Saunier, a prominent Charlottesville conservationist and former University of Virginia official, agreed that the breakup seemed to be a bigger story everywhere else.
"It's not that we are so used to things like this," he said. "Although there are a tremendous number of wealthy and famous people up here." Saunier cited actresses Sissy Spacek and Jessica Lange as just two of the celebrities who have moved to the area.
The Kluges have been among the area's biggest benefactors, donating to a wide variety of large and small causes in Charlottesville.
But there is no fear that they will abandon Albemarle Farms, both men said.
"She likes the outdoors, the farm, the hunting and so forth," Saunier said.
Van Yahres noted that John Kluge had just purchased the Morven estate. At the time, the $8.5 million purchase was called the largest single real estate buy in the county's history.
"I think they're here to stay," Van Yahres said.
Supporting that notion are reports that work is continuing on an extension to the $25 million Albemarle House - a wing for a gallery for the couple's Middle Eastern art collection.
Plans reportedly include a garden atop the gallery with lily ponds that will serve as its skylights.
by CNB