On April 7, 2011, in the Virginia foothills south of Charlottesville, a team of advisers acting for Donald Trump bid $6. 2 million for a shuttered winery: some seven hundred acres of vineyard, the winery buildings, the labels, the trademarks. The property had carried a $28 million mortgage and had once been appraised at $75 million. The woman who built it was not in the room.
Her husband, Bill Moses, was there and phoned her with the result. Trump reached the press soon after and explained the purchase without elaboration: “This place had a $28 million mortgage on it, and I bought it for 6. 2 million. It’s a Trump deal.
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The woman whose vineyard had just changed hands was Patricia Kluge, born Patricia Morin Rose in Baghdad in 1948. The press had once called her the richest divorce in the world. Two months after the auction, she filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, listing $2. 6 million in assets against $47.
5 million in liabilities. Her attorney summed up her condition in one sentence: “They are exiting bankruptcy with nothing. ”
Patricia was the daughter of Edmund Rose, a British loss adjuster who later worked as a legal translator, and a mother of half Scottish, half Iraqi Chaldean descent. The family sat squarely inside the colonial machinery of postwar Iraq.
She attended a French convent school in Baghdad, summered in Lebanon, and grew up hunting and fishing across Iraq. She later described the household as “so British I can’t even tell you. ” That world ended on July 14, 1958, when King Faisal II was assassinated in a coup led by General Abdul Karim Qasim. The Hashemite monarchy fell, and the British expatriate community began to unravel.
Patricia’s parents separated, and around sixteen she followed her father to London. He had already moved in with another woman and made clear she was not welcome. She later described the passage as moving “from the 10th century to the swinging 1960s in a single airplane flight. ” Her grandfather’s parting instruction stayed with her through every reinvention that followed: “Darling girl, get on with it.
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In London she lasted one day at secretarial college, took a receptionist job at Heathrow, then worked as a hat-check girl at a Turkish supper club in Bayswater. One evening the belly dancer was ill, and the nineteen-year-old Patricia drew on her Middle Eastern upbringing and substituted. In the audience was Russell Gay, a British glamour photographer some thirty-two years her senior who had launched a softcore magazine called Nave. He was captivated, convinced her a modeling career awaited, and she married him around nineteen.
She appeared as the dancer in the 1969 film The Nine Ages of Nakedness, posed nude for Nave, and wrote a regular sex advice column for the same publication. She later shrugged off the chapter: “I was hot-looking in my 20s. I was gorgeous. It was a no-brainer.
” The marriage lasted about five years. In 1976, Patricia arrived in New York in pursuit of a film deal. At a Manhattan dinner party, a hostess played records of Arab music and Patricia began to belly dance. The man watching was John Kluge, born Johannes Kluge in Germany in 1914, son of a man killed in the First World War and a typist mother who had brought him to New York when he was eight.
He had built Metromedia from a $15,000 Maryland radio station into the largest independent broadcasting operation in the United States. Forbes ranked him the richest American in 1989, with a documented fortune of $5. 2 billion. He was in his early sixties that evening, married to his second wife, and stood some six inches shorter than the woman dancing in front of him.
His only public remark on the moment: “Where had I been all my life? ”
He divorced his wife. They lived together for two years. He converted to Catholicism to marry her at the age of sixty-six.
On May 23, 1981, John Kluge, sixty-six, married Patricia Rose, thirty-three, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. Two senior cardinals officiated. The New York Times identified the bride only as Patricia Gay, a writer for magazines and film scripts.
Neither her first marriage nor the existence of Nave appeared in the announcement. Almost immediately the Kluges began assembling land in Albemarle County, south of Charlottesville, in the hunt country associated with Thomas Jefferson. John Kluge paid $8. 5 million for the Morven estate alone, then the largest single real estate purchase in the county’s history.
The house took four years to build and was completed around 1985. Albemarle House had forty-five rooms, eight bedrooms, thirteen bathrooms, hand-carved plaster ceilings rising twenty-two feet, antique English mantels, 1760 Waterford chandeliers, a 150-year-old English oak library, hand-painted wallpaper for which Patricia made multiple trips to India, two kitchens, a helipad, stables, cattle ponds, and an Arnold Palmer–designed private golf course covering 216 acres. The estate ran to roughly two to three thousand acres with five carved lakes, formal English gardens, and an 850-acre game preserve. There was also a Gothic chapel with a crypt beneath it, in which Patricia intended to be buried.
The first major rupture came in November 1985, when the Kluges co-chaired a charity ball at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach honoring Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Days before the event, the British press disclosed that Patricia had posed nude for Nave, written a sex advice column, and appeared in a softcore film. The ball chairwoman told the Los Angeles Times it was “certainly… embarrassing for the crown prince of England. ” Patricia resigned; she and John traveled abroad the night of the ball.
The event raised $4 million without them. She later said the scandal taught her exactly who her friends were. In April 1990, after nine years of marriage, the Kluges announced their separation. The press immediately reached for superlatives.
The Daily Express headline read “The richest ex-wife in the world. ” The settlement became legend: supposedly a billion dollars, repeated for two decades as the largest divorce settlement in American history. Patricia denied the central figure outright: “I never got anywhere near a billion dollars. ” The actual settlement, itemized by the New York Times in 2011, was approximately $25 million in cash, Albemarle House itself, and a life annuity of nearly $1 million a year, which she later sold for $5 million when her debts mounted.
Trump, who would eventually acquire what remained of the empire, said he had always heard she received income from a billion dollars, but after meeting her realized she was in huge financial trouble. John Kluge remarried within a year. Patricia kept the house and the question of what to do next. In 1999, on roughly 960 acres of the estate, with first vines planted under the supervision of Gabrielle Rouse, the assistant director of gardens at Monticello, she established Kluge Estate Winery.
She had married Bill Moses, a former global vice president at IBM, who became her full business partner. She was explicit about her ambition: they were not building a backyard winery. She brought in the Bordeaux enologist Michel Rolland as a consultant, and a French sparkling wine specialist who later left to launch one of the most celebrated sparkling wine operations in the mid-Atlantic. The flagship, New World Red, a Bordeaux blend, launched at $495 a bottle in an ebony box designed by Viscount Linley, son of Princess Margaret, in a limited release of 289 signed bottles.
The winery also produced a sparkling rosé served at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010. By the mid-2000s it was producing about 30,000 cases a year and had been appraised at $75 million. To build it, the Kluges borrowed against the estate at a scale the business could not sustain. The largest loan was approximately $34.
8 million from Farm Credit of Virginia in 2007. A second mortgage of roughly $22. 6 million on Albemarle House itself was written by Bank of America. A third facility of about $17.
4 million from SunTrust financed a luxury subdivision called Vineyard Estates, a gated community of twenty-four planned homes priced between $6 million and $23 million each. The Kluges also opened a gas station and restaurant called Fuel, conceived as the first of a chain of a hundred. Total debt reached roughly $73. 5 million.
The winery sold only about a third of what it produced. Fuel hemorrhaged about $100,000 a month before closing abruptly in 2007. Only the model home at Vineyard Estates was built. Patricia later said the banks had seen a great asset and bought in; she admitted they had expanded too rapidly.
The structure was designed to fail in a downturn, and the downturn arrived. The Farm Credit loan went into default in November 2008, the month after Lehman Brothers fell. The winery was losing upward of $500,000 a month. The flagship red, once $495 a bottle, was discounted to $24.
99. In October 2009 Patricia listed Albemarle House for $100 million, then cut the price to $48 million, then to $24 million. There were no buyers. In April 2010, Sotheby’s auctioned her jewelry for nearly $5.
8 million. In June, a two-day on-site auction of the house’s contents brought $15. 2 million. She poured every dollar into the winery.
It was not enough. On September 7, 2010, John Kluge died at ninety-five. He did not live to see the foreclosure of the estate he had given his ex-wife. That same month Farm Credit moved against the vineyard.
In December it bought the winery back at a failed auction for $19 million against its $34. 8 million lien. In January 2011 SunTrust acquired Vineyard Estates at foreclosure for about $4. 9 million.
In February, Bank of America foreclosed on Albemarle House and acquired it for roughly $15 million. In June and July, Patricia and Bill Moses filed for personal bankruptcy. She described the trustees hearing to Town and Country without softening: “I couldn’t even say a word. ”
Trump acquired what was left in stages, after an introduction from Kathie Lee Gifford.
The first and most decisive move was the smallest: he bought the 217-acre former golf course parcel, the front lawn of Albemarle House, from a trust held in the name of John Kluge Jr. “That’s the art of the deal right there,” Eric Trump told the Washingtonian. On April 7, 2011, Trump advisers bid $6. 2 million for the winery and its trademarks.
Patricia, asked for her reaction, said her “worst nightmare” was over and she was “thrilled beyond belief. ” She and Bill Moses were retained under a one-year contract, Eric Trump was installed as president of the renamed Trump Winery, and the final stage came in October 2012, when the Trump Organization bought Albemarle House itself from Bank of America for about $6. 5 million, writing off the balance of the original mortgage. The property reopened in 2015 as a ten-suite boutique hotel called Albemarle Estate at Trump Winery.
Patricia and Bill Moses left the winery in August 2017 after their contract ended. Asked what she made of the operation under its new owner, Patricia gave the answer that ended her public relationship with the Trump family: “The wine is not good anymore. He lies a lot. ”
She and Moses moved to New York, where the Times Style section found her in a Midtown office working on a jewelry line and described her as in her third act.
The actual divorce settlement had been extraordinary by any reasonable measure, and by the same accounting she had lost all of it: the cash, the estate, the winery, the annuity she sold, everything that had been sunk into the dream. What returned to her was the sentence her grandfather had given her in Baghdad more than half a century earlier, and which she has quoted in nearly every interview since: “Darling girl, get on with it. ” The crypt at Albemarle House, where she once said she would be buried, sits inside a property she no longer owns.