This week I found myself rooting for an unlikely heroine.
The Catwoman.
Remember Jocelyn Wildenstein, the late Upper East Side socialite who went under the knife so many times she earned the not-so-flattering nickname “The Bride of Wildenstein”? The woman whose plastic surgery addiction made Joan Rivers look downright sensible? The rich lady who conspicuously resembled her pet lynx?
You know her. You love her. You’re fascinated by her.
With a face both instantly recognizable and altered beyond recognition, Wildenstein was a fixture in the pages of The Post in the 1990s and aughts — first for her messy 1997 divorce from billionaire French art dealer Alec Wildenstein and then for her puffy, stretched-out mug that got more outrageous and surreal with every passing year.
I miss her!
Wildenstein’s weird story — from jet-setting European beauty to wealthy wife to carnival side show — is told in the new HBO documentary “The Lion Queen,” which premiered Thursday in the Tribeca Film Festival. The movie, which will be especially interesting to the uninitiated, goes out of its way to reframe the Swiss miss, who died in 2025, as a creative free thinker who was done dirty by the ravenous press. She apparently was East 64th Street’s answer to Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan.
“She dares to go to the extreme,” her partner Lloyd Klein admiringly says in the doc.
“I think she’s addicted to being seen,” a podcaster adds.
“I get the feeling she viewed her face as an artistic creation,” says former Post reporter George Rush.
Well, I suppose it’s art in the same sense that Banksy shredded one of his works and called that art.
But the film’s, er, lionization of Wildenstein isn’t why I found myself so enthusiastically siding with her. And it certainly wasn’t because of her lavish lifestyle and casual list of living expenses (food and wine: $547,000 a year; massages: $22,000 a year). 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 essential to the five boroughs as Katz’s and the Knicks. What happened to them?
New York is, or it should be, a city of personalities bigger than the Empire State Building. It’s where Madonnas, Larry Davids, Curtis Sliwas and Cindy Adamses are made. Shameless attitude and brazen individuality is NYC’s calling card. Look at Robert Durst — even our serial killers have charisma.
And yet those memorable citizens who lend our city its unique flavor are becoming harder and harder to find. You can’t really say they’ve been priced out and are schlepping to Louisville. Wildenstein owned homes in Manhattan, Paris, the Caribbean and a 66,000-acre ranch in Kenya.
It’s more that the supply 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 part the city’s characteristic boldness has been overtaken by loser TikTok influencers and dot cakes.
“The Lion Queen” made me nostalgic for folks like Wildenstein, or as Page Six once so deliciously called her, “the feline-esque fraulein.” New Yorkers who just don’t give a damn what anybody thinks.
A reporter says in the doc, “I don’t think she looks in the mirror and sees what we see.”
I should think not!
The Catwoman was definitely a wacko. But she was our wacko. And New York needs more wackos.
