The Billionaire’s Wife : Patricia Kluge Raises Her Social Profile With a Big L.A. ‘Debut’

Patricia Kluge can’t understand what all the fuss is about.

“After all, I’m not a businessman. I’m not a politician. I’m not a movie star,” says the 39-year-old socialite, giving her first sit-down interview. “I’m just a little housewife in Virginia, minding my own business, doing my bit for the world.”

She pauses to reconsider.

“Well, maybe not such a little housewife.”

Second-Richest Man

Certainly not in stature, because she is a statuesque 5-feet-10. And certainly not in status. Not when she’s married to the second-richest man in America, Metromedia chairman John Kluge, 73, who according to Forbes magazine is worth something in the neighborhood of $3 billion.

Not when she wines and dines American presidents, European royalty, titans of industry and world-class celebrities. Not when she’s the mistress of an eye-popping 6,000-acre, English-style estate in the Virginia countryside, complete with 45-room mansion, private chapel, Arnold Palmer-designed golf course and helicopter landing pad. Not when she herself has led a most unusual life that resembles both a fairy tale and a nightmare.

Still, Kluge can’t understand why the news media, both here and abroad, constantly pester her with requests for interviews. In her mind, she’s still just a wife and mother and overseer of the family farm, worried more about their prize herds of Simmental cattle than about whether she should pose for the cover of Vanity Fair.

She must be kidding. With her husband’s money comes responsibility and power, and people are intensely curious to see how the third Mrs. Kluge plans to use it, socially and philanthropically. Already, the groundwork has been laid for her to become one of the most influential women on the arts and charity circuit.

“I think she wants to do something meaningful with her money,” says Beverly Sills, New York City Opera’s general director and one of Kluge’s best friends. “But she’ll give very careful thought to what she wants to do with it all. I don’t think she’ll ever turn into a luncheon lady. She’s not a frivolous woman.”

For the first time, she is taking on the kind of high-profile causes that thrust her into the spotlight--raising money for AIDS research, the NAACP and Virginia’s fledgling arts community.

Choosing Los Angeles for her unofficial debut, she threw a star-studded party last Thursday at the Bistro Garden to announce a weeklong film festival in Virginia next October. On Tuesday, she’ll play high-powered hostess again--this time a mix of Reagan “kitchen cabinet,” Southern California society and just plain VIPs--at an invitation-only gala at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, celebrating “The Lagoon Cycle,” a photographic exhibition funded by her husband.

A ‘Curious’ Position

Kluge acknowledges that her position is “really rather curious. You can’t imagine how hard everybody else makes it for you, because everybody expects so much. Sometimes, someone asks: ‘What does it feel like to be married to the second-richest man in America?’ And I say: ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. I’ll have to rush back and tell John, “By the way, you’re the second-richest man in America.” And we’ll both laugh.’ ”

You expect her to put on airs, to litter every sentence with names of the famous or at least to flash her 20.5-carat diamond engagement ring. And when she doesn’t, you can’t help but be slightly disappointed. But perhaps that comes from having led what she describes as a riches-to-rags-to-riches life.

Born and raised in Iraq, the former Patricia Rose is quite proud of what she describes as an exotic heritage as the daughter of a British businessman and a Scottish-Iraqi mother. Though educated in a French convent and then in American schools, her sentences even today are scattered with unusual adjectives and phrasings that hint at her background in a non-English-speaking nation.

“My childhood was extraordinary,” she recalls somewhat wistfully. “When you lead a colonial life, you really live in a land of Shangri-La. An ideal world of uniforms and tea garden parties and balls and men who looked so gorgeous.”

And a world that ended abruptly when revolution swept through Iraq, forcing her family to flee Baghdad for London. “We had a lot of land and property but suddenly it didn’t belong to us anymore,” she says. “And because no one had thought to put anything away, we lost all our money. When we came to England, there was only a minuscule amount left.”

Her parents divorced, and she and her younger brother went to live with their mother. Their new life was “very difficult,” she says. “It really was. We were living in a tiny London flat as opposed to a grand house with gardens and staff.” The worst shock for her was the effect on her mother. “Here was a woman who was raised to paint and to look beautiful and to be social and to play the piano. And suddenly she has to go out and work. Can you imagine? It was appalling, absolutely appalling.”

So Kluge made a vow. “When I saw how shattered my mother was, how she felt she had lost her identity, I remember deciding there and then that whatever happens to me in life, I will always depend on me. I will never talk about my long lineage, or grand ancestry or who my grandfather was . . . Who you are and what you are as a person--and not where you come from or who you know or how much money you have--is what’s important.”

For someone raised in the Middle East, London in the 1960s was thrilling. “My God, I felt like I had come from the 10th Century,” she recalls. “There was actually a country where men and women could be in the same room, where you could go to any supermarket and buy bacon instead of waiting for that rare can to turn up at the special store.”

Acquainted With Hardship

At the same time, she was just getting to know life’s hardships. She left Holburn College after her mother told her there was no more money. “My mother said: ‘You know, Patricia, you really have to go out and work,’ ” she recalls. “But what could I do? I just wanted to go out and have fun like all teen-agers. And she said: ‘You’ve got to at least learn to be a secretary. Then you can do that anywhere in the world.’ ”

She enrolled in secretarial school but lasted less than a day. “I walked into that class and I saw pale, sallow faces. And I thought to myself, ‘I am not like them, nor will I ever be like them.’ So I walked out of that class and never walked back again.”

Instead, she went to work as a hotel receptionist, as a waitress, as a clerk. And, when she turned 19, Russell Gay, the wealthy publisher of British skin magazines, came into her life. “He absolutely swept me off my feet,” she recalls of the night they met at a nightclub.

Today she speaks of that period of her life, which would eventually cause her so much pain, dispassionately, almost matter-of-factly. “He was everything I was brought up not to get involved with,” she says. “My family, of course, didn’t like him at all. But that didn’t matter because I was simply rebelling.

“Just consider the situation,” she says like a defense lawyer addressing the jury. “Here was a girl brought up with a certain set of values, in a strict Catholic family where everything was proper and your whole future was laid out before you. And suddenly circumstances change. But your family still wants you to be that person even though it just no longer seems very natural. I just felt they can’t possibly be right. There must be another world out there--one that I can call reality.”

That world was Gay’s world--a seductive blend of ‘60s mod, mini-skirts and men’s magazines. By Kluge’s account, Gay was the first man in her life to tell her “how incredibly attractive I was.”

Soon he insisted that she pose nude in his magazines. Why? “Because Russell thought I was so beautiful. Can you imagine how mesmerizing that was to a simple 19-year-old?”

She didn’t think about the consequences. “Not at all,” she says. “It was something that happened when I was very young and very much in love and very naive and I’m not ashamed of it.”

She pauses for a moment. “It was very amusing, I have to say.”

But not amusing at all when, nearly two decades later, the British press trumpeted her “skin-rag to riches” past just as she was about to host a $50,000-a-ticket charity ball in Palm Beach, Fla., for Prince Charles and Princess Diana during their first American tour. Palm Beach society was aghast, and Kluge graciously resigned as co-chairman of the event.

Looking back, she feels the scandal was “the best thing that could have happened” to her. “First, you know you have to be secure in yourself to be able to come out of a thing like that well,” she notes. “And then I suddenly realized how many friends I had.”

She received “beautiful letters of support” from a surprising number of people, she says, including “people I’d known in New York society and all over the world but had not known well.” She also received a “lovely note” from Charles himself.

Her five-year marriage to Gay ended in divorce. On her own once again at age 25, but this time with some cash, she formed a film company to make low-budget comedies for foreign markets.

At a New York dinner party, she met John Kluge. It was her first visit to America, and she had been about to marry a London psychiatrist. “I remember thinking about John that this is a brilliant man. I was absolutely enthralled by his mind,” Patricia recalls. “But he was married and I was engaged. We were certainly not interested in each other at all.”

Soon, however, John Kluge was divorced. He flew over to London to see her and her fiance while they were planning their wedding. “And I’m happy to say that’s when he fell in love,” she notes.

Kluge was foreign-born himself. He came to Detroit from Chemnitz, Germany, in 1922 at age 8. While attending Columbia University on full scholarship, he reportedly accumulated $7,000 upon graduation from illegal campus poker games. After buying his first radio station in 1946, Kluge went on to acquire Metromedia Broadcasting and built it into a vast empire. In 1984, already known for his reclusive ways, he took the company private.

Almost immediately, John and Patricia began living together in his spectacular penthouse apartment above Metromedia’s Midtown Manhattan offices. They went together for 11 years before they married.

“I didn’t have any problem dealing with being his girl friend,” Patricia says. “But I wanted a family, I wanted to be a wife and I wanted to be able to say he’s my husband. I was after him every day, but he just wasn’t convinced it was a good idea.”

‘Such a Special Person’

John Kluge explains that two marriages--and two divorces--were enough. “I thought it was an institution for the other fella.”

The marriage is “as comfortable as a wonderful old shoe,” in the words of Barbara Sinatra, who is godmother to the Kluges’ adopted son. “John was so in love, he even converted to Catholicism to marry her.” They were wed in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Of course, she thoroughly enjoys being the pampered much-younger wife of a fabulously wealthy man: The 125-foot yacht and private jet, the robin’s-egg-sized gemstones (“Before I met John, I thought a gold chain was overdressing”), the 18th-Century livery costumes for her household staff, the cruises with former President Jimmy Carter and intimate dinners with Spain’s King Juan Carlos.

But that doesn’t mean, she says, that the billions have changed her. “Our wardrobe is bigger. Our house is bigger. But we’re still the same people,” she contends. “And yet the world expects that because you’re in that position now, maybe your opinion matters for everything . . . But, no, you’re just the person who has been chosen for this privilege. It’s really as simple and as basic as that.”

These days, the Kluges spend nearly all their time at Albermarle Farms, the Georgian country home they built outside Charlottesville, Va. People are still talking about the weekend party in 1985 when cocktails were served in the chandelier-decorated cattle house. The cows had been fed a special dry hay mixture so they wouldn’t mess their stalls.

Daily, Patricia pushes up the sleeves of her London-tailored tweed jackets, changes from Scaasi ball gowns into blue jeans, and spends hours managing her staff of 120. “She’s not a woman sitting there ordering pretty antiques,” notes Beverly Sills. “When she takes you on a tour, she talks knowledgeably about poultry and plantings.”

With her two secretaries, she also sifts through hundreds of solicitations for money, for parties, for use of their names. “When we don’t want to be involved in something, we just tear the thing up and throw it in the bin. We don’t even bother to reply,” she says. “You learn to do that. To edit.”

She’s also learning about what it’s like to go public. “You know what you discover when you’re in the public arena? That what people think counts very little in the long run,” she says. “Because a lot of people have all sorts of ideas about who you are and what you are. And they just find out along the way whether it’s true or not.”