Ronald O. Perelman

WHEN I MENTION to Revlon Chairman Ronald O. Perelman that in 2003 an article cited that nineteen of the Forbes 400’s twenty-five New York City billionaires were Jewish (including him), he doesn’t look surprised. “Look, I think Jews are very aggressive,” he says, leaning back in a loden green armchair in his spacious office off Madison Avenue. “I think that by nature we’re high achievers. And I think by nature we’re smart. I don’t think we’re smarter than anybody else. I think we have to try harder than anybody else.”

Why harder?

“Because I think people expect more from us than from anybody else. And I think that we’ve got to deliver that or else we’re viewed negatively.”

This compact sixty-one-year-old, who appears thick in photographs but is actually trim in person, has over the years been portrayed negatively, and doggedly, by the New York tabloids; it seems they can’t get enough of his marriages, divorces, remarriages, and dustups in the courts—be it the 1997 custody battle with his ex-wife Patricia Duff over their four-year-old, Caleigh, or a 2004 noise dispute with a café across from his East Side town-house. I ask him whether his religion helps him keep things in perspective. “A lot,” he says with a nod. “I believe that a large part of how we all get to where we are is not entirely our own doing. I am a great believer in that.” In other words, moments of adversity are meant to be? “I think you’ve got to learn from them, deal with them, grow from them.” He nods. “That’s easy to say; it’s more problematic when you’re going through them.”

I tell him that many of the people I interviewed don’t feel that Judaism offers the tools for coping with crisis. “Oh I think it does,” he says. “At least for me.”

Perelman doesn’t just turn to Judaism in the rough patches; he’s incorporated it deeply into his daily life. He davens every morning with tefillin (the leather cubes containing scripture that are worn on the head and arm during morning prayers), keeps kosher, goes to synagogue every Shabbat morning, and imports a minyan when he’s in the Caribbean. I ask if he finds that it takes work to make time for observance. “No, it’s just the opposite, I think,” he says. “Take shabbos, for instance: It becomes this great island that transforms the whole family for that period of time.” (In addition to Caleigh, Perelman has five other children—four grown kids by first wife Faith Golding and a daughter, Samantha, twelve when we meet, by ex-wife Claudia Cohen. He is currently married to actress Ellen Barkin, fifty, who is also Jewish and has two children by her marriage to actor Gabriel Byrne.)

“On Friday nights, whenever the kids are around, we’ll have dinner together,” Perelman explains. “The girls will light the candles. We’ll say the blessings over the wine and the bread. And then we’ll have dinner and just hang around. And then Saturday, I let them do a lot of stuff, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff that they can’t do and they know that. For me, I go to synagogue every Saturday morning, I finish up around noontime, and then we’ll just hang around; read, watch a movie. It’s this great block of time that’s so peaceful and so spiritual for me and so different that I just love it.”

I wonder if he understands why many Jews I spoke to say that they don’t feel moved in synagogue. “Really?” he asks. “I feel moved every time I go.” Is he stirred by the prayer text itself, which I’ve heard some describe as fairly lifeless? “I think if you’ve got a great chazzan [cantor], it can make it alive,” he says. “Like Joseph Malovany, who we have at Fifth Avenue Synagogue—he’s unbelievable. But it could be just a kid who is energetic. You go to a Hasidic Saturday morning service: It is fabulous. It’s so full of energy and spirit and joy.”

So he wouldn’t call it somber? “No, that’s a Reform service,” he says with a smile.

He keeps kosher at home, and his children have followed. “They’re very aware of what they’re eating. They’ll ask a waiter what’s in it. If they’re having pasta at a restaurant, they’ll ask, ‘Is there any fish stock?’ Even my nine-year-old [Caleigh] will ask questions as to what’s in it. After school, I’ll say, ‘What did you have for lunch?’ She’ll say, ‘Well they served meatloaf, but I wasn’t sure what was in it, so I didn’t eat it.’ Same with my twelve-year-old. Very aware. And aware of being respectful on shabbos.”

When the family travels, Perelman always finds the nearest Chabad House (a Lubavitch shul) within walking distance; or rather, his office finds it for him. “I was in South Beach with my kids this past weekend,” he says. “Ellen, my wife, wanted to go to Canyon Ranch for two days. So rather than stay home with the kids, I said, ‘Let’s go away someplace.’ I asked my kids, ‘Where do you want to stay?’ And my eldest daughter wanted to go to South Beach. She said, ‘I hear the Shore Club is the hippest place to stay.’ There was this Chabad House like a mile and a half away from the hotel. So on Saturday, I walked over there.”

Perelman hasn’t always been this devout. “My turning point came when I was eighteen years old; we took a family trip to Israel. It was the first and only time I’ve been there. It just had this strong impact on me. I felt not only this enormous pride at being a Jew; I felt this enormous void at not being a better Jew. So I decided then to begin being a better Jew. As soon as I got married, we kept a kosher house, we became much more observant. We moved to New York shortly thereafter and joined an Orthodox synagogue and the kids grew up with much more Judaism surrounding them than I ever did.”

I ask why the Israel trip was so pivotal. “It was seeing a country where everybody was proud of being a Jew, where everybody had the Jewish traditions and religious aspects of their life blended into the social and environmental aspects of their lives. Even when they were not terribly observant they were observant. And they were the happiest, most content, focused, proudest people I’d ever met.

“I went from there—I’ll never forget this—to Austria, which I just hated. I wanted to leave after the cab drive to the hotel and go right back to Israel.” Why was he so turned off? “Too Germanic. Going from this proud, energetic young country to this very staid, institutionalized, pompous, strict, harsh environment.”

He says he hasn’t returned to Israel in forty-eight years, mostly out of “laziness” and security concerns. “I always think it’s two hours too far,” he says. “I’m not a great traveler. I’ve never been to most parts of the world.”

He prefers to stay closer to home—or homes; he has mansions in New York, East Hampton, and Palm Beach. Despite his wealth and stature, Perelman belongs to none of the tony private clubs that he characterizes as anti-Semitic. “New York, which is probably the most open society in America because it’s so big and achievement oriented, is probably still one of the most restricted,” he says. “You go to the Hamptons or Palm Beach, which are probably sixty percent Jewish now, and you’ll see private clubs that are restricted. But none of them will acknowledge that. They’ll say, ‘We have Jews here.’”

He seems genuinely blasé about this vestige of prejudice—almost proud to be excluded. “There was never a time that I wanted to be where I wasn’t wanted,” he insists. “And I was never bothered. If someone doesn’t want you around, why be around them?”

He doesn’t feel the same gentile exclusivity in the country as a whole. “I think this is the greatest place for Jews ever in the history of the world,” he enthuses. We happen to be talking just a few weeks after the 2004 election, and many Jews I know feel wary about an Evangelical groundswell. Perelman is unperturbed: “I think George Bush has been a fabulous president for Jews—far better than any president in my lifetime. As long as you don’t get the nuts—the Jerry Falwells—driving the truck, then the world is a fine place. You start getting them with too much power and you could be in a little bit of danger, but I think the country is too centrist to give too much power to those kinds of people.

“I think Bush has been the best president for Israel in history. He’s allowed us to defend ourselves! He hasn’t held us back. No other president would have let us do this. Every other president said ‘no retaliation for terrorism.’ He’s the first one that said, ‘Okay, you do what you have to do to protect yourselves.’”

Obviously Perelman embodies not only the unapologetic Jew, but the visible, prosperous one. When I ask him if he bristles at the persistent stereotype that rich Jews control the media and Wall Street, he scoffs. “The truth is that we rely on the gentile establishment for our lifeblood: both the banking and advisory world, and to a large extent, the media, which everybody says is Jewish controlled, but that’s nonsense. Jews still today are heavily reliant on the gentile establishment. Who are the big banks in the world? Barclays, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley. They’re all predominantly gentile institutions.”

So when he still hears the “Jews-run-the-world” adage, it doesn’t ruffle his feathers? “No. I mean, if someone called me a ‘Jew bastard,’ that would ruffle my feathers. I was at a restaurant two years ago and at the table next to us were these Germans; I think they had just come from seeing The Producers on Broadway and they were talking derisively about Jews—‘Jews this and Jews that, Jews this and Jews that.’ Finally I got up and said, ‘I have never seen such a bunch of fucking assholes as you people.’ And I very rarely do that. I said, ‘You guys don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, and if you don’t like it, you should get the fuck out of here.’”

Perelman is bullish not only about his personal Judaism but about the religion’s long-range survival. “Jews have a certain value system that has been the platform for a big part of the world for four thousand years,” he asserts. “I think it is important for an individual to have the stability that comes from the belief there is a God and that that God has a great impact on his destiny. I happen to be a big supporter of Lubavitch [a Hasidic sect] primarily because of the continuity issue. I think Lubavitch has been probably the best organization in supporting pure traditional Judaism around the world and getting more young people oriented to that. More young people are realizing the importance of their Jewish heritage and they’re leaning more toward the purer aspects of it in Orthodoxy than the Reform aspects of it. If you look at the strength of the two movements, you’ll see that Reform strength has declined and Orthodoxy is increasing. I think it’s in large part because Reform doesn’t give you much to believe in. I mean, you may as well not be Jewish because they rationalize away everything that is the essence of Judaism.”

For instance?

“Well, you don’t have to be kosher because of refrigeration. You don’t have to celebrate Yom Kippur all day because they can start eating in another time zone fifteen minutes earlier. When you get all done, there’s nothing there. And I think that kids today—what is it, the fourth or fifth generation here?—are looking for something that is more real, more established, and more substantial. I think that’s what is orienting them back.”

He also prefers his Judaism the old-fashioned way: adhering to strictures of Orthodoxy. I ask how he reconciles the division between men and women; for example the requirement to sit separately in shul, or with women upstairs. “I think it’s great,” he says. “For me, it allows for more concentration, more focus on what we’re there for. There’s less socializing and social requirements than would exist if both sexes were together. And it’s not like we put the women in the basement; we put them above us. That’s significant, I think, in terms of how Jewish women are thought of; they are really the head of the household.”

But not the heads of congregations. Perelman sighs when I ask how he feels about women rabbis. “You know, you start getting into real issues there, because you get into who can read the Torah. And I, for one, am a purist.” In other words, women shouldn’t. “I feel most comfortable that way.”

An avowed traditionalist, he wasn’t thrilled at the bar mitzvah of Ellen Barkin’s son, when the customary rites were relaxed. “When my stepson was bar mitzvah at Central Synagogue,” he explains, “he read from the Torah, his mother got an aliyah [the blessing over the Torah], and his father got an aliyah. His father [Gabriel Byrne] is not Jewish! True, they didn’t give him a bruchah—they gave him just a “come up to the bimah.” But here you have a non-Jew standing on the bimah! Which I thought wasn’t—” He looks for the right word. “That kind of thing bothers me. I think that’s one of the reasons that you see the Reform movement waning and the Orthodox movement growing. I think the Jewish youth of America looks at it and says, ‘What is this? It’s so diluted that it’s meaningless.’”

Since intermarriage is considered another dilution by many Jews, I figure I’ll ask a veteran: Does Perelman, who was once married to a Catholic, think differing faiths can be negotiated in a marriage? He’s more forthcoming than I expected. “I’ll give you my point of view.” He leans forward. “I happen to have been married four times: three to Jewish girls and one to a gentile girl who converted to Judaism in an Orthodox conversion, prior to our getting married and to our child being born.” He’s speaking of Patricia Duff, the striking former Bill Clinton fund-raiser who was married to Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy before Perelman. “What I can tell you is that the difference in orientation was very significant,” Perelman says, “as was the view of family and kids and life. I’m not saying one’s right and one’s wrong because there’s no right and wrong in this—but it’s different. It’s like being an electrician or being a plumber; they’re both good things, but they’re different. I think it makes it very, very difficult for the couple.” He pauses. “And I think it makes it very, very difficult for the kids of that couple to know who they are and what they are. There’s enough that we all have to deal with. That’s not a burden that should be put on a relationship. This is a very personal point of view.”

He’s shared his perspective with his older children. “I’ve constantly said how important it is to me and to them to marry a Jewish spouse. And they sort of get it. I don’t think they think differently.” Although they don’t let him forget he once broke his own rule. “Once in a while, jokingly, they’ll say, ‘But what about you?’ I’ll say, ‘Well, she converted!’ But they saw the problems too.”

The “problems” boiled over when Perelman and Duff split. Newspapers obsessively chronicled their custody battle over Caleigh, a standoff Perelman ultimately won. There was the tidbit that Duff sought $1.3 million a year in child support, Perelman’s stipulation that Caleigh be raised as a Jew, and reports that Duff had baked cookies with Caleigh during Passover week, a period when no leavened food, such as flour, is to be touched.

Today, Perelman describes Caleigh as a conscientious Jew who will likely be bat mitzvah, although he says he won’t insist upon it the way he did for his older boys. “For the Orthodox, it’s not required for girls,” he says. “In fact in Orthodox observance, there’s not really a service.”

Though Perelman’s standard of Jewishness is high, he is surprisingly forgiving of those Jews who don’t practice at all. “I’d like it to be different because I think it does them and their families—particularly their children— a disservice. It bothers me when you see Jews go out of their way to be so assimilated. But they’re still Jewish because they’re born Jewish and they feel the pride of being a Jew.”

And he thinks that counts? “It doesn’t count for me,” he acknowledges. “Because I need more than that. I actually think if they were exposed to it, they’d want more than that too.” But Perelman acknowledges that he’s an exception among his friends. “They’re not like me,” he says. “But some of them are. And when I go to synagogue, they all are. And they look at me and say, ‘You’re not religious enough.’”

And when he sees a Hasid on the street, does he feel connected or alienated? “I feel neither,” he replies. “I say to myself, ‘There’s another Jew.’” He gestures toward me. “Just like you; you’re another Jew. I just say, ‘There’s another Jew.’”