FIRST WIFE: Socialite Anne burned by Sid’s affair. (Patrick McMullan)
(Brandon Wade)
BEFORE THE SPLIT: Oil tycoon Sid Bass — who hates wearing tuxedos and going to the opera — at the LA opera in 2007 with scene-queen wife Mercedes. (Dale/Wilcox / FilmMagic)
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The only thing more scandalous than their wild love affair — which electrified high society and upended its entire hierarchical structure — is their very recent, astoundingly expensive, most unexpected divorce.
Maybe a day after then-married socialite Mercedes Bass threw a dinner roll across a crowded ballroom at then-married billionaire oil heir Sid Bass in June 1986, the two began conducting the kind of affair that very rich people conduct:
Sid and Mercedes holed up in a suite at the Carlyle, while his financial advisers waited in the lobby, in vain, for him to make meetings concerning his vast portfolio.
Sid and Mercedes taking a private jet to Paris, cocooning themselves at the Plaza Athénée. When they finally venture outside, they strolled through the streets hand-in-hand, sure that no one they knew would see them. Until, of course, someone they knew saw them.
And so nine weeks after Mercedes, then 41, lobbed that fateful piece of bread, she called her husband, Ambassador Francis Kellogg, from her five-star Parisian hotel suite. “Goodbye, darling,” she said. “I’m marrying Sid.”
On Dec. 10, 1988 — after Sid divorced his first wife, society queen Anne, settling with her for somewhere between $200 million and $500 million — the couple married in a $500,000 gala at New York’s Plaza hotel.
“They were the top,” says David Patrick Columbia, founder and editor of NewYorkSocialDiary.com. Ask him why, though, and he laughs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, when I say they’re the top, it’s probably because he’s very, very rich.”
PREVIOUSLY: BASS BREAKUP STUNS SOCIETY
Mercedes and Sid seemed exceptionally well-matched. She was once described by People magazine as “a hearty, vodka-drinking extrovert” and elicited a more sociable, effervescent side of her otherwise subdued husband. For two people whose union had begun with such a conflagration, a scorched-earth policy that left devastated spouses, children and financial planners in its wake, they seemed truly at peace and in love, even after more than two decades together.
So what happened? Why would one of the richest men in the world — Forbes has valued Sid’s net worth at $2.1 billion — go through another astoundingly expensive, high-profile divorce at the age of 69? Why not stay together but live separate lives — quite easy to do when you own three properties in three states — and avoid all the unpleasantness? Is there someone else? If so, who’s cheating?
Friends and observers say there are very few clues. Logic dictates it would have to be Sid doing the leaving, because he has the money. As for a divorce instead of separate lives, Sid seems eager to jettison all the New York frippery. According to one account, he’s said he never wants to put on tuxedo pants again.
And without a clean break, everything Mercedes does will involve his name and fortune. When she is photographed at a gala or an auction, her presence carries his imprimatur.
That theory was bolstered by a message Sid sent to close friends, Columbia says, right before the couple announced their separation. It read, “I’m not mad at her. I just can’t live with her anymore.”
Mercedes Kellogg Bass (née Tavacoli Diba) was born in Iran to a well-off, politically connected family. She has said her father named her after his favorite car. Mercedes was educated in Europe, and met her first husband, Kellogg, while working as executive assistant to a UN official in Lausanne, Switzerland. That the ambassador — the title was an honorific; he’d served as a special assistant to two secretaries of state, including Henry Kissinger — happened to be married at the time was not a deterrent in this case, either.
Mercedes followed the ambassador, a playboy 27 years her senior, back to New York, Soon after, he left his wife of 35 years, department-store heiress Fernanda Munn, for the young girl known as “the Iranian firecracker.”
“When she met the ambassador, she was heavier than she is now, and, of course, she’s no great beauty,” says Charlotte Hays, author of “The Fortune Hunters: Dazzling Women and the Men They Married.”
“But she was the ultimate geisha. Kellogg was very erudite and loved to go to the opera, so she would study and prepare so she could turn to him and say, ‘This is the really good part.’ She’d get the cheaters’ guide.”
The two moved in together, taking up residence at the Watergate apartment complex in DC. “I knew a lot of people in the Watergate back then who worried the ambassador wouldn’t marry her,” says Hays — and that included Mercedes. But the assiduous attention she gave to his smallest wants and needs paid off; the ambassador divorced Fernanda in 1971 and married Mercedes in 1972, when she was 28.
They were happy for a while — Mercedes called her husband “my stallion” — and then they weren’t. The problem, according to sources, was the ambassador’s finances. “I remember going to their apartment, and it was unmemorable,” says one acquaintance. “It was a classic Park Avenue apartment in the $3 million range.”
Mercedes sensed she could do better. “At that level of society,” this source says, “gold-digging is perfectly acceptable.”
Another friend told Hays that Mercedes didn’t attempt to conceal her contempt. “She had seen a $28,000 jewelry ensemble and wanted it,” Hays says. “Her friend said, ‘Why not ask Fran to buy it for you?’ and Mercedes said he wouldn’t do it; he wasn’t rich enough. ‘I want to be rich,’ ” she said.
Yet among most of their friends and acquaintances, the Kelloggs were thought to have a happy and stable marriage. Such too was the case with Sid and Anne Bass, who were teenage sweethearts.
Sid’s father, Perry, co-founded Bass Brothers Enterprises in the 1930s and, not long after discovering the Keystone oil field, had control of more than 100 Texas oil fields. Sid was born on April 9, 1942, and by the time he was 10, his father was one of the wealthiest men in America.
Sid has three younger brothers, but he was the Chosen One, and when his father stepped down from Bass Brothers in 1968, the Yale-educated Sid took over. It was his investment strategy that transformed the company into a billion-dollar operation.
Three years earlier, Sid had married the well-bred Anne, and they had two children. Even though Sid was never interested in the social scene, Anne became its indisputable empress, admired and feared in equal measure, known behind her back as “the ice queen.”
She collected works by Picasso and Degas and was obsessed with the ballet. She alienated much of New York society with her uncouth bullying tactics — as the town’s richest socialite, she had the most power and was crude in using it to get her way. She was not well-liked.
“Anne was unapproachable, reserved, quiet,” says a former acquaintance. Her high profile was always an uncomfortable thing for Sid, whose entire family’s worth was estimated, by this time, at around $3 billion.
Friends say Sid was always drawn to forceful women with strong personalities, usually ceding his ground; if Anne wanted to live as one of Tom Wolfe’s vaunted Social X-Rays, so be it.
So by the time Mercedes, described by many who know her as a worldly, sophisticated woman, teased Sid Bass at that ball, and he hurriedly scrawled down her phone number before his wife could see, both were deeply unhappy.
“Sid-and-Anne remains the highest-profile, most scandalous divorce on Park or Fifth Avenue,” says one observer. “It changed the way everybody moved socially. Before, wives were considered safe — there was only suspicion of single women on the social circuit.”
Mercedes “hooking her Bass,” to quote the tabloids at the time, threw the order out of whack.
Still, it’s a measure of how well-regarded Sid was and is — he’s uniformly described as a decent man — that the bulk of New York society sided with him in the scandal. Of course, he also had the money, and in the words of one observer, “Nobody’s got the kind of money Sid has.”
Mercedes took the express elevator up to Sid’s rarefied world, with bitterness expressed only by those close to the ambassador.
“If Sid hadn’t married her, the ambassador probably would’ve taken her back,” says the longtime acquaintance. And Mercedes, he says, knew it, so there was no risk to her. “The gifts she got from Sid during the affair were worth more than the ambassador,” he says. “It was cruel in so many ways, because he was bereft. But for her, the rush was the billions and the freedom.”
“I was in his home in Bedford after she’d left,” says another friend. “He still had pictures of her everywhere.”
Mercedes took to her role as Mrs. Sid Bass with alacrity and ease, spending more than $75 million for homes in New York and Fort Worth. There were originally four houses on the Texas property; the couple combined two of them, and Mercedes had a third, which she deemed unsightly, picked up and sent across town to serve as a home for single mothers. According to the Dallas Morning News, once she realized the house across the road had a view into their property, she had Sid buy them, too.
For the New York apartment, she was inspired by the maximalist aesthetic of Donald Trump, with one person who’d seen the apartment on Fifth Avenue reporting: “I’ve never seen so much gold. Everything has been gold-leafed — the plasterwork, the cornices, even the 2-foot window reveals.” The couple also bought a home in Aspen.
Mercedes quickly and inelegantly cut off her friends from her years with the ambassador, and though unkind rumors trailed her — that she’d once worked as a courtesan in Paris was the most popular — she now socialized with Oscar and Annette de la Renta and Hubert de Givenchy.
“Sid’s sphere of social connections expanded with her — it was Lord Rothschild-this, Duke-so-and-so that,” says Columbia. “She brought a kind of excitement.”
Sid had two children from his first marriage, but he and Mercedes had none. She took pleasure in shopping, in travel, in donating money (in 2006, she and Sid gave a record $25 million to the Metropolitan Opera) and in hosting events. In the ’80s, one friend says, she’d host two lunches a week.
“At a birthday party she gave for Reinaldo Herrera in 1983, she wore a ‘Save Claus’ T-shirt in honor of one of her guests, Claus von Bulow,” says author Hays.
“This is when he was on trial for putting his wife, Sunny, in a coma. He appreciated it.”
Someone like Sid, however, most certainly would not.
“Despite his wealth, Sid Bass is kind of an average guy,” says Columbia. “Mercedes is a big opera fan, and he got sick of going to the opera. The key here is the age — he’s nearly 70. To him, it’s a luxury that he has time to pursue what’s interesting to him.”
Unlike his last divorce, this one has been freakishly civil. About a week before they announced their impending split, Sid went out of his way to be photographed with Mercedes at the opera — a highly symbolic gesture, given that he hates both the opera and having his picture taken.
Though terms of the settlement haven’t been disclosed, Mercedes will get at least as much as Anne did, if not more, and she’s been spared the indignity of having been left for another woman.
“Their lives will go on,” says the old acquaintance. “Sid won’t be mean to her. He always pays his bills. He’ll make sure he’ll keep her in the life he brought her into.”
As importantly, Mercedes will remain the Queen Bee of New York society, by now firmly installed through her decades of philanthropy.
The Basses have donated copiously to Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Mercedes serves on the boards of Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera — where the boards, too, are unnerved.
“Will Mercedes be as generous with her money,” asks her old acquaintance, “as she was with Sid’s?”
Sid Bass at a glance:
* Forbes puts his net worth at $2 billion
* Inherited Bass Enterprises Production family oil company fromhis father
* In 2005 sold one division of the company for $1.6 billion to Southern Union
* Was a major shareholder in Disney until 2001, when he sold 135 million shares worth $2.2 billion
* Has donated $100,000 to Rick Perry’s campaign
* Donated $20 million to alma mater Yale in 1990 and another $20 million in 2000
* In 2006 helped save the Metropolitan Opera with a record donation of $25 million
* Splits his time between a New York penthouse and this mansion in Fort Worth, Texas. Appraised at more than $16 million, it has an 18,270-square-foot home and acres of formal gardens.