This week I found myself rooting for an unlikely heroine.<\/p>\n
The Catwoman.<\/p>\n
Remember Jocelyn Wildenstein, the late Upper East Side socialite who went under the knife so many times she earned the not-so-flattering nickname \u201cThe Bride of Wildenstein\u201d? The woman whose plastic surgery addiction made Joan Rivers look downright sensible? The rich lady who conspicuously resembled her pet lynx?<\/p>\n
You know her. You love her. You\u2019re fascinated by her.<\/p>\n
A new documentary about the \u201cCatwoman,\u201d Jocelyn Wildenstein, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Corbis via Getty Images<\/p>\n
With a face both instantly recognizable and altered beyond recognition, Wildenstein was a fixture in the pages of The Post in the 1990s and aughts \u2014 first for her messy 1997 divorce from billionaire French art dealer Alec Wildenstein and then for her puffy, stretched-out mug that got more outrageous and surreal with every passing year.<\/p>\n
I miss her!<\/p>\n
Wildenstein\u2019s weird story \u2014 from jet-setting European beauty to wealthy wife to carnival side show \u2014 is told in the new HBO documentary \u201cThe Lion Queen,\u201d which premiered Thursday in the Tribeca Film Festival. The movie, which will be especially interesting to the uninitiated, goes out of its way to reframe the Swiss miss, who died in 2025, as a creative free thinker who was done dirty by the ravenous press. She apparently was East 64th Street\u2019s answer to Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan.<\/p>\n
Wildenstein became famous in the 1990s for her messy divorce \u2014 and her prolific plastic surgery habit. WireImage<\/p>\n
\u201cShe dares to go to the extreme,\u201d her partner Lloyd Klein admiringly says in the doc.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think she\u2019s addicted to being seen,\u201d a podcaster adds.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get the feeling she viewed her face as an artistic creation,\u201d says former Post reporter George Rush.<\/p>\n
Well, I suppose it\u2019s art in the same sense that Banksy shredded one of his works and called that art.<\/p>\n
But the film\u2019s, er, lionization of Wildenstein isn\u2019t why I found myself so enthusiastically siding with her. And it certainly wasn\u2019t because of her lavish lifestyle and casual list of living expenses (food and wine: $547,000 a year; massages: $22,000 a year). It\u2019s what the Catwoman represents \u2014 the breed of larger-than-life New York characters that\u2019s gone all but extinct.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They\u2019re just as essential to the five boroughs as Katz\u2019s and the Knicks. What happened to them?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wildenstein died in 2025. Getty Images<\/p>\n
New York is, or it should be, a city of personalities bigger than the Empire State Building. It\u2019s where Madonnas, Larry Davids, Curtis Sliwas and Cindy Adamses are made. Shameless attitude and brazen individuality is NYC\u2019s calling card. Look at Robert Durst \u2014 even our serial killers have charisma.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And yet those memorable citizens who lend our city its unique flavor are becoming harder and harder to find. You can\u2019t really say they\u2019ve been priced out and are schlepping to Louisville. Wildenstein owned homes in Manhattan, Paris, the Caribbean and a 66,000-acre ranch in Kenya.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s more that the supply of them isn\u2019t being replenished. Younger generations are boring and forgettable. Every so often an Anna Delvey comes along to remind us of our more eccentric past, but for the most part the city\u2019s characteristic boldness has been overtaken by loser TikTok influencers and dot cakes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Local characters like Wildenstein are becoming harder to find. Getty Images for Honey Birdette<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Lion Queen\u201d made me nostalgic for folks like Wildenstein, or as Page Six once so deliciously called her, \u201cthe feline-esque fraulein.\u201d New Yorkers who just don\u2019t give a damn what anybody thinks.<\/p>\n
A reporter says in the doc, \u201cI don\u2019t think she looks in the mirror and sees what we see.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
I should think not!<\/p>\n
The Catwoman was definitely a wacko. But she was our wacko. And New York needs more wackos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week I found myself rooting for an unlikely heroine. The Catwoman. Remember Jocelyn Wildenstein, the late Upper…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[157,102945,158,9,24,55,54,56,102946],"class_list":["post-265878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-entertainment","tag-jocelyn-wildenstein","tag-movies","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-tribeca-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}