LAS VEGAS – She was the heartbreaking face of grief – a young woman sobbing for a missing love, her loss captured in an iconic photo on the front page of The Post.
Now, five years after Rachel Uchitel lost fiancé Andy O’Grady in the World Trade Center attacks, the striking blonde has married, divorced and fallen into the arms of the man who gave her her first childhood kiss – a powerful owner of one of the hottest clubs in Las Vegas, where Uchitel has carved out a dazzling new life.
But she says she’s not yet fully out of the long, terrible shadow cast by 9/ 11.
“We fiancées are in a different place than others because we lost our planned futures,” she said. “It’s very sad, but we’re lucky because we got to experience a great love, and we also have our whole futures ahead.”
Uchitel, 31, became the face of tragedy three days after the attacks, when The Post ran a cover photo of her crying inconsolably and clutching a “missing” poster of O’Grady, 32, a managing director for Sandler O’Neill who died when the second plane slammed into the south tower.
On the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, that day and those events seem far away.
Once a planning editor at Bloomberg Television, Uchitel has now transformed herself into the VIP door hostess at the see-and-be-seen nightclub Tao, and is the girlfriend of one of its partners, nightclub heavy Jason Strauss, who is also co-owner of Marquee in Chelsea.
She has grabbed her future by the velvet rope, and followed it to a desert hotspot on Las Vegas Boulevard. On any given night, she’s manning Tao’s VIP door with a walkie-talkie squawking on her belt and a team of doormen awaiting her bidding.
When The Post spoke with her a year after 9/11, she was still struggling with the fact that O’Grady had been so violently taken from her.
And when the paper checked in again in 2004, she had found happiness with a Wall Street trader, Steven Ehrenkranz. Despite a fairy-tale wedding in front of 270 people at the Flatiron Cipriani, the marriage had an unhappy ending; the pair divorced four months after they wed.
“I made the mistake of thinking marriage would make someone stay because I was so fearful of being left again after 9/11,” she said.
Enter Strauss.
The pair had been each other’s first kiss at age 12 and had dated on and off over the years. When Strauss saw his friend struggling, he offered her a job at Tao to distract her from her failing marriage and to give her a change of scenery.
Although the pair have since become a veritable Vegas power couple, Uchitel sees things differently.
“I don’t look at Jason as a huge player in the nightclub scene. I see him deeper, as the person that hardly anyone gets to know, which makes me feel lucky to have that connection with him,” she said.
And Strauss gives Uchitel the room she needs when it comes to her past.
“It’s such a sensitive and private topic,” he said. “She doesn’t talk to anyone but her family about it.”
Uchitel still has a hard time trusting people – a side effect of O’Grady’s violent death. She’s more timid than she used to be. And she still thinks about her one-time fiancé every day.
But she said she knows he would approve of where she has traveled in the five years since they were torn apart.
“I can sleep at night knowing that Andy would be proud of what I’m doing. That’s enough for me now,” she said.