New York needs more wackos like the surgery addict…
This week I discovered myself rooting for an unlikely heroine.
The Catwoman.
Remember Jocelyn Wildenstein, the late Upper East Side socialite who went under the knife so many instances she earned the not-so-flattering nickname “The Bride of Wildenstein”? The lady whose plastic surgery habit made Joan Rivers look downright smart? The wealthy girl who conspicuously resembled her pet lynx?
You know her. You love her. You’re fascinated by her.
A new documentary about the “Catwoman,” Jocelyn Wildenstein, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Corbis via Getty Images
With a face both immediately recognizable and altered past recognition, Wildenstein was a fixture in the pages of The Post in the Nineties and aughts — first for her messy 1997 divorce from billionaire French artwork seller Alec Wildenstein and then for her puffy, stretched-out mug that received more outrageous and surreal with every passing 12 months.
I miss her!
Wildenstein’s bizarre story — from jet-setting European magnificence to rich spouse to carnival facet show — is told in the new HBO documentary “The Lion Queen,” which premiered Thursday in the Tribeca Film Festival. The film, which can be particularly attention-grabbing to the uninitiated, goes out of its method to reframe the Swiss miss, who died in 2025, as a inventive free thinker who was executed soiled by the ravenous press. She apparently was East sixty fourth Street’s reply to Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan.
Wildenstein turned well-known in the Nineties for her messy divorce — and her prolific plastic surgery behavior. WireImage
“She dares to go to the extreme,” her companion Lloyd Klein admiringly says in the doc.
“I think she’s addicted to being seen,” a podcaster provides.
“I get the feeling she viewed her face as an artistic creation,” says former Post reporter George Rush.
Well, I suppose it’s artwork in the same sense that Banksy shredded one of his works and called that artwork.
But the movie’s, er, lionization of Wildenstein isn’t why I discovered myself so enthusiastically siding with her. And it definitely wasn’t because of her lavish lifestyle and informal listing of dwelling bills (food and wine: $547,000 a 12 months; massages: $22,000 a 12 months). It’s what the Catwoman represents — the breed of larger-than-life New York characters that’s gone all but extinct.
They’re just as important to the 5 boroughs as Katz’s and the Knicks. What occurred to them?
Wildenstein died in 2025. Getty Images
New York is, or it needs to be, a metropolis of personalities larger than the Empire State Building. It’s where Madonnas, Larry Davids, Curtis Sliwas and Cindy Adamses are made. Shameless perspective and brazen individuality is NYC’s calling card. Look at Robert Durst — even our serial killers have charisma.
And yet those memorable residents who lend our metropolis its distinctive taste have gotten tougher and tougher to discover. You can’t actually say they’ve been priced out and are schlepping to Louisville. Wildenstein owned houses in Manhattan, Paris, the Caribbean and a 66,000-acre ranch in Kenya.
It’s more that the provide of them isn’t 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 half the metropolis’s attribute boldness has been overtaken by loser TikTok influencers and dot truffles.
Local characters like Wildenstein have gotten tougher to discover. Getty Images for Honey Birdette
“The Lion Queen” made me nostalgic for people like Wildenstein, or as Page Six once so deliciously called her, “the feline-esque fraulein.” New Yorkers who just don’t give a rattling what anyone thinks.
A reporter says in the doc, “I don’t think she looks in the mirror and sees what we see.”
I ought to suppose not!
The Catwoman was undoubtedly a wacko. But she was our wacko. And New York needs more wackos.
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