Traveling in Different Circles

A few hours with newspapers yesterday once again drove home the point that there are those whose lives are decidedly different from mine. I won't say better, but I will say different.   

The always informative WSJ A-Hed piece from Wednesday basically tells us that you can own a dinosaur skeleton. Legally.  Not cheaply, for sure. But a fully assembled, full size—not a kit—dinosaur that is 80% original bones. 

I'm not a dinosaur aficionado, but I do however know that the ones you see in museums are not the bones from a singular dinosaur. They are authentic to the species of dinosaur, but might have been assembled from different excavations, and certainly different bodies..

It is somewhat like whole Perdue chickens. I once read that the giblets stuffed in one of those dead birds are not necessarily the giblets from that bird. The production line in DelMarVa is such that giblets and the rest of a bird are separated, then put into any other bird that comes along. Personally, I don't eat the giblets, and don't care which bird they came from. The cat doesn't care either. 

The A-Hed piece is an eye-opener into what can be bought, and what a windfall dinosaur auctions are worth to auction houses like Sotheby's. My understanding is that there is a 25% premium added to the hammer price, in effect the auction house's commission. 

The record-setting price paid for the above skeleton was $44.6 million, auctioned at Sotheby's on July 17, 2024. A 25% commission would top out at a little over $11 million. That's a lot of lettuce to the auction house for hiring some movers and using the freight elevator. Nice work if you can get it. And then I'll assume there's NYC sales tax. The mayor's smiling. He's always smiling.

Initially the buyer wasn't identified, but the WSJ tells it was a hedge fund guy, Ken Griffin, not a household name to me, but then again, I'm not in what would be his circle of friends.

If there is a buyer, there must be a seller in the equation. Not identified. I wonder if the Neiman-Marcus holiday catalog lists fossils for sale. Apparently it's become quite the trophy to have amongst celebrities. Names dropped are Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicholas Cage.

I must admit, I've yet to see one of those glossy real estate inserts that come with the weekend papers that show off a high floor Tribeca condo with floor-to-ceiling windows (who cleans those windows on the outside?) overlooking New York Harbor with a dinosaur skeleton tucked away in the corner next to the tripod mounted telescope. Usually it's a grand piano. 

The A-Hed piece tells us of excavations taking place on farmers' land in South Dakota that offer a cut of any proceeds to the owners of the land. 

The Journal's piece tells us Mr. Griffin has donated more that $300 million to museums since 2018, and says he plans to lend the Stegosaurus to a U.S. museum. You can bet there's a tax angle in there somewhere.

The other piece of evidence that I'm not in an A-list circle was driven home when I read the obituary for J. Stanley Pottinger, 84, Official Who Figured Out the Identity of 'Deep Throat.'

No, not Linda Lovelace, but the mole who was feeding Bob Woodward vital Watergate information in a parking garage in the mid-70s. Those old enough to remember the '70s will know that Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's pieces in the Washington Post are part of newspaper legend. The story eventually lead to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974.

The mole was a Deputy Director of the F.B.I., W. Mark Felt, who passed away in 2008. Mr. Pottinger was a Department of Justice lawyer who was present when Mr. Felt was being questioned in a grand jury proceeding  From Felt's hesitant response and body language after being asked if he was 'Deep Throat', Mr. Pottinger correctly surmised Mr. Felt was 'Deep Throat.'

But it isn't the 'Deep Throat' that caught my muse in the obituary, it was Mr. Pottinger's dating love life in NYC in the 1980s after he was a lawyer in private practice and running a boutique investment firm that made a fortune trading in New England real estate before it went bust in 1987.

But when he was riding high on returns, he was squiring around the city A-list women like Gloria Steinem (the 'It' girl who came to New York to write), newscaster Connie Chung, and Kathy Lee Gifford, presumably before Kathy Lee married New York football legend Frank Gifford and became a morning show fixture with Regis Philbin.

Where do these people meet? Hanging out at Elaine's when it was open? Who gets to buy J-Lo a drink in between marriages? Certainly not me.

Sure he was a good looking guy, Harvard Law and all, which certainly help ensure the circles he would travel in. And at the time, rich, which always helps. Seen in the photo accompanying the obit Mr. Pottinger is next to Gloria Steinem, with whom it is described he had a romantic affair with for years. Also in the photo is Phil Donahue and his wife Marlo Thomas. It's obviously a formal affair by the way they're dressed, which gives me a clue why I'm never in a circle like that. The only time I've ever been in a tux (rented) has been when I was in a wedding—and not even my own.

And what is it with that affectation of using a single letter as your first name, "J." He was born John Stanley Pottinger. What's wrong with John? Maybe since he was in the Justice department he was riffing off the boss, J. Edgar Hoover, whose first name was also John.

This whole thing about circles people travel in has been an observation of mine for a while now. How did Tiger Woods meet the skier Leslie Vonn? There are lots of hookups like that that make me wonder.

But the biggest one of late has been how did a nonagenarian (93) billionaire media mogul like Rupert Murdoch get to marry a sexagenarian (67) retired Russian molecular biologist, Elena Zhukova?  Did Rupert use an exclusive dating site?

From their wedding photo taken at Rupert's vineyard estate in California it looks as if Elena's got her hands full with trying to hold the towering Rupert up. What keeps this guy going, this being his 5th marriage?

I'll have what he's having.

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