Patricia Morin Rose Kluge was born in Baghdad in 1948, the daughter of a British insurance loss adjuster and a mother of half Scottish and half Iraqi Chaldean descent. She attended a French convent school, summered in Lebanon, and later described her household as "so British I can't even tell you."
That world ended on July 14, 1958, when King Faisal II of Iraq was assassinated in a coup led by General Abdul Karim Kassim. The Hashemite monarchy was overthrown, and the British expatriate community in Baghdad began to unravel.
Her parents separated in the aftermath. At about 16, she followed her father to London, where, according to the Daily Express, she discovered he had already moved in with another woman and that she was not welcome.
She later described the transition to the LA Times as a passage "from the 10th century to the swinging 1960s in a single airplane flight." She had no completed education, no family support, and one piece of advice from her grandfather that she carried through every reinvention that followed: "Darling girl, get on with it."
In London, she lasted one day at a secretarial college. She took a brief job as a receptionist at Heathrow Airport for British Overseas Airways Corporation, then worked as a hat check girl at a Bayswater supper club.
One evening the club's belly dancer was ill, and the 19-year-old Patricia, drawing on her Middle Eastern upbringing, agreed to substitute. In the audience was Russell Gay, a British glamour photographer roughly 32 years her senior.
Gay had launched a softcore men's magazine called Knave in 1968. He was captivated by her and set out to convince her that a modeling career awaited. She married him around the age of 19.
She appeared as the dancer in a 1969 British softcore comedy titled "The Nine Ages of Nakedness," credited as Patricia Rose. She posed nude for Knave and wrote a sex advice column for the same publication.
She explained the choice later to the Telegraph in a sentence repeated in every profile since: "I was hot-looking in my 20s. I was gorgeous. It was a no-brainer." To Town and Country in 2016, she called the entire chapter "a lark."
The marriage lasted about five years and ended in divorce in the early to mid-1970s. She briefly lived with a London society psychiatrist named Kenneth Newton, himself some 30 years her senior. She had not yet turned 30 and had already lived two distinct lives in two countries.
In 1976, Patricia Rose arrived in New York City, traveling by her own account in pursuit of a film deal. She was engaged to the London psychiatrist she had moved in with after the Gay divorce.
The dinner party that changed her life was hosted in Manhattan in 1976 by a woman named Sy Fistell. Fistell later told the New York Times exactly what happened: she played records with Arab music, Patricia arrived with a friend, and she began belly dancing.
The John in question was John Werner Kluge, born Johannes Kluger on September 21, 1914, in Chemnitz, Germany. He had immigrated to New York Harbor in 1922 at age 8, attended Detroit City College, transferred to Columbia University on a full scholarship, and earned a degree in economics in 1937.
He served in Army intelligence in World War II, bought a Maryland radio station in 1946 for $15,000, and built the broadcasting, outdoor advertising, and entertainment conglomerate Metromedia over the next four decades.
He was 61 or 62 that evening, married to his second wife, Yolanda Gallardo Zucco, and stood, the Daily Express noted, some six inches shorter than the woman dancing in front of him. He recalled the moment with the only sentence he ever publicly offered about it: "Where had I been all my life?"
He divorced Zucco soon afterward. He and Patricia lived together for about two years. Family friend Barbara Sinatra summarized the courtship in one line: "John was so in love he even converted to Catholicism to marry her."
Kluge had been raised by a Lutheran mother and a Catholic stepfather and had passed his adult life as a moderately observant Protestant. The conversion at age 66 was the most visible single concession either party made to the other.
On May 23, 1981, John Werner Kluge, then 66, married Patricia Rose, then 33, at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. The ceremony was officiated by Terrence Cardinal Cooke and Auxiliary Bishop Theodore E. McCarrick.
The New York Times announcement identified the bride simply as Patricia Gay, a writer for magazines and film scripts, daughter of Edmund C. Rose and Sylvia Rose of London. It omitted her first husband's name, his profession, and the existence of Knave magazine.
The bridegroom was identified as president of Metromedia Incorporated, then the largest independent television broadcasting operation in the United States, owner of 14 television stations, 22 radio stations, the Harlem Globetrotters, and the Ice Capades.
Metromedia would five years later be sold off in stages to Rupert Murdoch and other buyers for figures the German Historical Institute biography of Kluge summarizes at approximately $4 billion across all divisions.
Almost immediately after the wedding, the Kluges began assembling land in Albemarle County, Virginia, 10 miles south of Charlottesville, beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains. John Kluge paid $8.5 million for the Morven estate alone, which the Roanoke Times described as the largest single real estate buy in the county's history.
The architect they hired was David Easton, a New York-based designer who specialized in the grand country house revival that had effectively gone extinct in America after the 1920s. The house took about four years to build and was completed around 1985.
Albemarle House had 45 rooms, 23,500 square feet of living space by the most commonly cited measurement, eight bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, hand-carved plaster ceilings rising 22 feet, antique English rococo mantels, and 1760 Waterford crystal chandeliers.
It also had a 150-year-old English oak library, hand-painted wallpaper for which Patricia made multiple trips to India, an outdoor pool, an indoor sauna, a helipad, a wine grotto, two kitchens, stables, cattle ponds, and a log cabin.
The grounds included an Arnold Palmer-designed 18-hole private golf course covering 216 acres, a Gothic chapel where Sunday Mass was held, and a crypt in which Patricia told the LA Times in 1990 that she intended to be buried.
The estate ran to approximately 2,000 acres in the most conservative reckoning and 3,000 acres in the more expansive ones, with five carved lakes, formal English gardens, an 850-acre game preserve, and Scottish-style grounds for pheasant and quail shoots.
The Kluges also maintained an apartment in Manhattan, a house in London, a Palm Beach villa, a residence in New Rochelle, and a shooting lodge in the Scottish Highlands near Balmoral, where Patricia tried to ingratiate herself with the Queen as a neighbor.
The housewarming for Albemarle House, according to the Daily Express, featured 80 bagpipers marching across the hills. The Kluges thereafter hosted dinners for up to 500 guests with liveried staff and dancing into the small hours.
Their documented guests in the 1980s included King Juan Carlos of Spain, ex-King Constantine of Greece, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and, at a fundraiser for the Virginia governor's race, a young attorney general from Arkansas named Bill Clinton.
Patricia founded the Virginia Film Festival in 1988 as a program of the University of Virginia. A Virginia neighbor told Town and Country the house was the grandest estate to have been built in America since the 1920s. It was meant to last for generations.
The first major rupture in her American social ascent came in November 1985, when the Kluges had agreed to co-chair a black-tie charity ball at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach in honor of a royal visit by Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
In the last week of October that year, the British press disclosed that Patricia Kluge had posed nude in the 1970s for Knave, had written a sex advice column for the same publication, and had appeared in a softcore film.
Mary Sanford, the Palm Beach socialite who chaired the ball, gave the Los Angeles Times the line that ended Patricia Kluge's evening: "She must have known it was going to come out. It certainly is embarrassing for the crown prince of England."
Patricia resigned as national co-chairwoman. The German Historical Institute biography records the outcome with diplomatic compression: the British press disclosed the existence of a naked photo of Mrs. Kluge, and the couple ended up traveling abroad the night of the ball.
The ball proceeded without them and raised $4 million, double the original target, with Charles and Diana in attendance and the Kluges in an undisclosed location overseas.
Patricia later told the Daily Beast the scandal had been the best thing that ever happened because she learned exactly who her friends were. She told the LA Times in 1990 more bitterly that there was a sickness in England and that the British press picked on her because she was a woman who had become so rich.
The photographs resurfaced around the 1990 divorce, again in a 1992 retrospective in the American edition of Penthouse, and again on the open internet, where they have remained. She gave Town and Country in 2016 the only summary she ever offered: "Everything about me has been said before and not always correctly."
In April 1990, after nine years of marriage, John and Patricia Kluge announced their separation, citing irreconcilable differences. New York Times reporter Georgia Dullea characterized the proceeding in a phrase that traveled through every subsequent retelling: "It sounded like a divorce made in heaven, which was refreshing since everyone had had enough of the other kind."
Patricia later described the cause to the LA Times in her own carefully chosen words. "John's life is his work," she said. "I think with giants like him, that's always the case."
Then the figures began to appear in print. The Roanoke Times relayed word from high society sources that Patricia had signed a prenuptial agreement giving her the annual interest on $1 billion, which at conservative rates would yield approximately $85 million a year, with British tabloids escalating the figure to $160 million a year.
The Daily Mail ran a headline reading "Exit for the Queen of Excess." The Daily Express ran a headline reading "The richest ex-wife in the world." The settlement passed into American legend as the largest divorce settlement in American history, speculated to be around $1 billion.
Patricia Kluge denied the central figure of that legend in the most explicit possible terms. To Town and Country in 2016, she said: "I never got anywhere near a billion dollars. Still, it was substantial and I put everything I had into the vineyard."
New York Times reporter Geraldine Fabrikant, working from sources familiar with the terms, itemized the actual settlement in 2011: approximately $25 million in cash, the Albemarle estate itself, and a life annuity of nearly $1 million a year.
Patricia later sold the rights to that annuity to Farm Credit of Virginia for $5 million when her debts began to outrun her income. Donald Trump, who later acquired what was left of the empire those numbers had built, told the same reporter that before he met Patricia he had always heard she received income from $1 billion, and that after he met her he realized she was in huge financial trouble.
John Kluge remarried within a year, in 1991, to a German-born former secretary named Maria Tussi Kluge, with whom he would spend the remainder of his life. Patricia kept the house, the chapel, the crypt, the title, and the long Virginia driveway that wound up to the front door.
In 1999, on approximately 960 acres of the Albemarle estate, with first vines planted under the supervision of Gabriele Rausse, the assistant director of gardens at Monticello and the man often called the father of Virginia viticulture, Patricia Kluge established the Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard.
She had married the year before William John Moses III, known as Bill, a former global vice president at IBM for media and entertainment, who was approximately two years her senior and who became her full business partner in the venture.
She had paid $7 million for the initial parcel and intended to build, in her own phrase to the wine business analytics journal in 2012, a world-class winery with the kind of equipment, lab, and cellar to support it. She told the same journal with full deliberation that they weren't building a backyard winery.
The hires were Bordeaux class. She brought in the celebrated Bordeaux enologist Michel Rolland as a consultant on the red wines. She brought in French sparkling wine specialist Claude Thibaut in 2003 to consult on the bottle-fermented whites.
Thibaut and his partner Manuel Janisson would after their years at Kluge Estate leave to launch the Thibaut-Janisson label that became one of the most celebrated sparkling wine operations in the American Mid-Atlantic.
The flagship was the New World Red, a Bordeaux-style blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cabernet Franc, whose 2001 vintage entered the market in an ebony-trimmed wooden box designed by Viscount Linley, David Albert Charles Armstrong-Jones, son of Princess Margaret.
It was released in a limited run of 289 bottles signed by the winemaker and Patricia Kluge and embossed with her profile, priced initially at $495 per bottle. The estate also produced a sparkling rosé called Kluge SP, which won a gold medal in France and was served in 2010 at the wedding of Chelsea Clinton.
By the mid-2000s, the winery was producing approximately 30,000 cases per year and had been appraised at $75 million. Gabriele Rausse later told Town and Country that he admired her desire to produce the best wine possible and that all Virginia benefited from what she did.
Patricia told W magazine that Virginia had the potential to be a major wine region but needed someone to be a catalyst to show the world what we can do. It was on paper a second life that justified the first.
To build the winery she described, Patricia Kluge and Bill Moses borrowed against the estate on a scale the structure of the business could not sustain. The largest single facility was a loan of approximately $34.8 million from Farm Credit of Virginia, taken out in 2007 for vineyard expansion.
The second was a mortgage of approximately $22.6 million on Albemarle House itself, written by Bank of America against the very mansion in which she had told the LA Times she intended to be buried. The third was a facility of approximately $17.4 million from Sonabank used to launch a luxury subdivision called Vineyard Estates.
Vineyard Estates was in conception the most ambitious project of the entire venture: a 511-acre gated community of approximately 24 planned luxury homes, each with private access to small mini vineyards, priced between $6 million and $23 million per home.
The Kluges also opened in 2004 a haute cuisine combination gas station and restaurant called Fuel, conceived as the first of what Patricia told the LA Times would be a national chain of 100 such locations.
At its peak, according to Town and Country, the total debt against the project ran to approximately $73.5 million. The winery was producing approximately 30,000 cases of wine a year and selling only about a third of them.
The Fuel restaurant chain was, according to the C-Ville Weekly postmortem, hemorrhaging approximately $100,000 a month before it closed abruptly in 2007. Only the model home at Vineyard Estates had been built.
Patricia would tell Town and Country, looking back, that the banks had agreed to lend us all that money. "They came and saw a great asset and a great business plan and they bought in." She would tell the New York Times more starkly that they had expanded too rapidly.
The structure was by the autumn of 2007 perfectly designed to fail in any sustained downturn. The downturn was perfectly designed to arrive. The Farm Credit loan went into default in November 2008, the month after Lehman Brothers fell.
The winery was losing, according to Town and Country, upward of $500,000 a month. The flagship New World Red, which had launched at $495 per bottle, was discounted under a new sales manager from $50 retail to $24.99 retail.
C-Ville Weekly described the warehouse condition in a phrase quoted in every subsequent piece written on the collapse: row upon row of cases sitting forgotten, stretching as far as the eye could see, resembling the final scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Bill Moses told the New York Times with characteristic candor that once we admitted we were in default, why would anyone choose to invest in the company?
In October 2009, Patricia listed Albemarle House for sale at $100 million. She cut the price to $48 million. She cut it again to $24 million. There were no buyers.
In April 2010, Sotheby's auctioned her personal jewelry in New York, totaling approximately $5.79 million. The top lot, a Cartier sapphire and diamond panther wristwatch, fetched $686,500 against an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000.
In June 2010, Sotheby's conducted a two-day on-site auction at Albemarle House itself, the first such house sale Sotheby's had run in North America in more than 20 years. It comprised 780 lots of English furniture, Chinese paintings, books, sporting guns, designer gowns, and decorative objects, totaling $15,158,000.
The top lot, a Qing dynasty imperial Chinese table clock, sold to a Chinese private collector for $3,778,500, three times its high estimate. Patricia poured every dollar of the proceeds back into the winery. It was not enough.
On September 7, 2010, in his own home elsewhere on the same Virginia property, John Werner Kluge died at the age of 95. The Forbes-ranked richest American of 1989, who had spent his final years giving away the bulk of his fortune to Columbia University, the Library of Congress, and the University of Virginia, did not live to see the foreclosure of the estate his ex-wife had been given in their 1990 settlement.
In the same month, Farm Credit moved against the vineyard. In December 2010, Farm Credit bought the winery back at a failed foreclosure auction for $19 million against its $34.8 million lien.
In January 2011, Sonabank acquired Vineyard Estates at foreclosure for approximately $4.9 million against its loan. In February 2011, Bank of America foreclosed on Albemarle House and acquired it for approximately $15 million at auction, writing off the balance of its mortgage.
In June and July 2011, Patricia Kluge and Bill Moses filed for Chapter 7 personal bankruptcy in the Eastern District of Virginia, reporting approximately $2.6 million in assets against $47.5 million in liabilities.
She described the trustees hearing to Town and Country in a paragraph she did not bother to soften. "We walked into the trustees' big room and it was filled with media. I was so shocked. The press was there just to watch me go through this process. Why? To see how few things I have left? It was awful. I couldn't even say a word. It was not a tragic moment but a very sad one."
Her attorney, Kermit A. Rosenberg, gave the New York Times the line that ended the chapter: "They are exiting bankruptcy with nothing."
The auctions through which Donald Trump acquired the Kluge estate were not a single transaction but a sequence executed in stages between early 2011 and the autumn of 2012. They were enabled by a connection through television host Kathie Lee Gifford, who introduced Patricia and Trump after the foreclosures began.
The first move was the smallest and arguably the most decisive. Trump purchased for approximately $150,000 from a trust held in the name of John Werner Kluge Jr., the son adopted by John and Patricia in 1984, the 217-acre front lawn of Albemarle House, the former Arnold Palmer golf course parcel that John Kluge had retained for his son in the 1990 settlement.
"That was the art of the deal right there," Eric Trump told the Washingtonian.
On April 7, 2011, at the Farm Credit foreclosure auction held in Charlottesville, a team of Trump advisers led by Les Goldman and Trump Organization executive vice president Jason Greenblatt bid $6.2 million for the winery, the 700-plus acres of vineyard, and the labels and trademarks of the Kluge Estate brand.
Trump told the Washington Post that day: "This place had a $28 million mortgage on it and I bought it for $6.2 million. It's a Trump deal." He told Town and Country looking back that he had asked Patricia whether this was the land John Kluge had bought many years ago, and when she said yes, he said only that he would do it because he liked buying things from people who knew what they were doing.
Patricia, asked that week by Business Insider for her reaction, said her worst nightmare and personal Armageddon were finally over and that she was thrilled beyond belief. She added that she had given birth to the property and that Donald believed in her vision.
She and Bill Moses were initially retained under a one-year contract as general manager and consultant at a combined annual compensation of approximately $250,000. Eric Trump, then 27, was installed as president of the renamed Trump Winery and told the New York Times that Patricia had produced some of the finest wines in the nation.
The final stage was Albemarle House itself. Bank of America, which had acquired the mansion at foreclosure in February 2011 and had attempted to market it at approximately $16 million, eventually sold the property to the Trump Organization in October 2012 for somewhere between $6.5 million and $6.7 million, writing off the balance of the original $22.6 million mortgage.
Albemarle House reopened in May 2015 as a 10-suite boutique hotel called Albemarle Estate at Trump Winery, into which the Trump Organization reported having poured approximately $20 million of restoration.
Patricia and Bill Moses departed the winery operation after the initial contract in August 2017. Asked by Town and Country what she made of the winery and its new owner now that her contract had ended and she had left Virginia, Patricia Kluge gave the answer that ended her public relationship with the Trump family.
"The wine is not good anymore," she said. "He lies a lot and he knows that and everybody knows that but he can't stop himself. All of us who have known Donald in New York for a long time have always known that and you have to find a way of working around it because it's part of his makeup."
She added on the question of the winery itself that she had zero interest or feeling into how the winery is doing right now because I don't own it anymore.
The winery is operated now by Eric Trump under the corporate name Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing. The hotel is operated by the Trump Organization. The house, the chapel, the crypt that Patricia had once told the LA Times would hold her, the chandeliers, and the hand-painted Indian wallpaper are open by reservation to paying guests.
In the autumn of 2012, Patricia Kluge and Bill Moses left Charlottesville and moved to New York City. In 2017, the New York Times style section located her in a Midtown Manhattan office working on a jewelry line and described the new venture in a headline as "Patricia Kluge's third act." She was by then approaching 70.
She had been, in chronological order, a hat check girl in Bayswater, a nude model in a London softcore magazine, an actress credited as the dancer in a 1969 British comedy, the wife of a publisher 32 years her senior, an immigrant to New York, the wife of the richest man in America, the chatelaine of the grandest American country house built since the 1920s, the founder of the Virginia Film Festival, a member of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors, the producer of wine served at the wedding of an American president's daughter, a Chapter 7 debtor with $2.6 million to her name and $47 million she could not pay, and a former general manager of a winery now owned by the family of the man who would become the 45th and 47th president of the United States.
She had also been called for two full decades and across two continents the recipient of the largest divorce settlement in American history. She had denied the central figure of that legend on the record in her own words in 2016, and the legend had survived the denial.
The actual settlement, as itemized by the New York Times in 2011, had been approximately $25 million in cash, the Albemarle estate at a valuation of approximately $100 million, and a life annuity of nearly $1 million a year, the rights to which she had sold to Farm Credit of Virginia for $5 million when the debts began to outrun the income.
By any reasonable accounting, that settlement was extraordinary, proportionate to the largest American private fortune of its moment, and substantial enough to launch any second life its recipient could imagine. By the same accounting, she lost all of it.
The Albemarle estate is the property of the Trump Organization. The winery is the property of Eric Trump's wine manufacturing company. The Vineyard Estates parcel is the property of Sonabank.
The cash from the divorce, the cash from the Sotheby's jewelry sale, the cash from the on-site Sotheby's auction of the contents of the house, the cash from the annuity she sold for $5 million, the cash that flowed in from John Kluge's settlement and was sunk into the dream of a world-class Virginia winery — all of it is gone.
The only thing that returned to her in measurable form was the sentence her grandfather had given her in Baghdad more than half a century earlier and that she has quoted in nearly every interview she has given since: "Darling girl, get on with it."
She told Town and Country in 2016 that she had lost everything but had gained a partner who came in to save it all. She said she did not view the bankruptcy as the end of her life but as a chance to reinvent herself, that no one should pity her, that she had a wonderful family and a great marriage and loving children and friends, and that she was working her tail off and staying positive.
She told the New York Times that the things she had enjoyed had not defined her, that the person was an entirely different entity, that the person was private and introspective and put family before everything, and that purpose and work and creativity were what defined her and not the dressing.
It was the kind of statement that a woman who has lost a 45-room Georgian palace can either make and live by or be destroyed by. And Patricia Kluge, who had survived the 1958 Iraqi revolution as a child, the 1985 Palm Beach photograph scandal as a hostess, and the 1990 divorce as a 33-year-old who had been married to the richest man in America for nine years, made it and lived by it.
The crypt at Albemarle House, which she had once told the LA Times would receive her, now sits inside a property she does not own, in a chapel that holds the ashes of her parents, beneath a roof restored by a family she has publicly described as ones who lie.
The girl who got off the plane in London in 1964 with nothing finished and no family waiting now lives in a Manhattan apartment and works on a jewelry line and reads the trade press about a winery she does not own anymore.
And the largest divorce settlement in American history is the headline that survives her in tabloid mythology, even though she has denied its central figure and lost its underlying assets and emerged in the end with the same two things she had when she stepped off the airplane the first time: a name she chose for herself and the instruction to get on with it.