Philanthropist was dogged by rumours after the deaths of two of her husbands
Lily Safra philanthropist/socialite b December 30, 1934 d July 9, 2022
On December 3, 1999, one of Edmond Safra’s nurses staggered into the lobby of his penthouse in Monaco. Ted Maher, who was bleeding from two deep cuts, said he had fought off two intruders and that the apartment was on fire. By the time the firemen were able to break in two hours later, Edmond, who had Parkinson’s disease, had died from the effects of breathing smoke after barricading himself in a bathroom with another nurse.
As a private banker to the elites of the Arab world, Israel and Latin America, Edmond had his enemies. Yet most of the conspiracy theories sparked by his death involved his wife, Lily. Some questioned why she had been able to escape the fire unscathed
(by climbing through a window from her bedroom, which was in a separate wing of the house) and others recalled rumours that her second husband had managed to shoot himself twice in the heart. Her case was further sullied when it emerged that Edmond had carved her into his will two months before his death, starting a lengthy and unresolved battle with his three brothers, who had duly been cut out.
The media spotlight glowed still hotter when Maher confessed to having started the blaze in a wastepaper bin in an attempt to impress Edmond by saving him. The subsequent trial, at which Maher was sentenced to 10 years, was the most anticipated by high society since that of the lawyer and socialite Claus von Bulow. Yet Safra, who has died of pancreatic cancer, aged 87, conducted herself with dignity and there was no suggestion in the ruling of any wrongdoing on her part.
Since marrying Edmond in the mid-1970s, Safra had established herself as a leading hostess on New York’s fundraising circuit, but little was known of the pair outside the city’s elite. That would change with the events that led to her husband’s death and the emergence of his widow as one of the world’s richest women.
Edmond, a Lebanese-born Sephardi Jew, was said to have made US$40 million at the age of 16 in arbitrage trading between Italian and British gold. He built up his first banking empire in Brazil and after selling some of his operations to American Express created another, based in New York.
It was in London that the balding and stocky 37-year-old first became bewitched by Safra, who had come to Edmond for financial advice after her second husband, Alfredo ‘‘Freddy’’ Monteverde, died by suicide in 1969. Edmond’s brothers were, however, fiercely opposed to the enigmatic heiress who had twice been investigated by police over her husband’s suicide.
Lily, meanwhile, married her third husband, a Moroccan-born businessman of more modest means called Samuel Bendahan, in what some deemed a ploy to regain the attentions of Edmond. It worked, and Safra was married to Edmond by 1976, when she was aged 42. She used her formidable energies to turn her shy and security-obsessed husband into one of the nabobs of Manhattan’s social scene.
Lily’s lavish parties brought her husband new clients, but they naturally required proper settings. Homes were thus acquired in, among other locations, London, Geneva and the French Riviera, where the Safras bought the palatial villa that had once belonged to King Leopold II of Belgium. There ‘‘Gilded Lily’’, a nickname earned in part through the elaborate gifts she bestowed on friends, entertained such guests as Aristotle Onassis, Frank Sinatra and Prince Rainier of Monaco.
One of three children, she was born Lily Watkins to comfortably off Jewish emigres in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her mother, Annita, had fled pogroms in Ukraine. Her Czech-British father, Wolf Watkins, manufactured railway carriages at a factory near Rio de Janeiro.
An angular woman with kohl-rimmed eyes, porcelain-white skin and an assortment of glittering jewels, Safra always had a hive of suitors buzzing around her in her teenage years. Her parents considered all of Lily’s swains unworthy and, when she was 17, they shipped her off to Montevideo in Uruguay where her mother’s family lived. When she was 18 she married Mario Cohen, an Italian-Jewish manufacturer of hosiery, who was nearly nine years her senior.
Although she bore him two sons and a daughter, the marriage was rocky and by the early 1960s she had divorced Cohen and married Alfredo Monteverde, an electrical goods tycoon who had bipolar disorder. His suicide left her with a £200m fortune and a large stake in his Brazilian businesses.
To this she added Edmond’s wealth. This month Forbes estimated her fortune to be $1.3b. Villa Leopolda, the belle epoque mansion she owned on the French Riviera, was sold to a Russian billionaire for $500m in 2008, the highest price ever paid for a house at the time.
Safra was plunged into grief by the death of her eldest son, Claudio, and his 3-year-old son in a car accident in 1989. According to friends, she never recovered. She is survived by two other children from her first marriage, Adriana and Eduardo, and an adopted child from her second, Carlos.
Safra threw herself into donating much of her fortune to philanthropic causes soon after she moved from Monaco to London in 2001. She gave a considerable amount to The Prince’s Trust, having become friends with the Prince of Wales. Other donations included the building of a new synagogue on Fifth Avenue, the funding of a children’s hospital in Paris and a neuroscience centre in Tel Aviv, which carries out research into Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. She paid for the translation into French of the 73 volumes of the Babylonian Talmud.
‘‘It was with Edmond that I learnt the joy of giving,’’ Safra later said, ‘‘as well as that when you support people who are making a real difference in the world, you end up receiving far more than you give.’’
For all her verve and intellect (she spoke six languages), Safra was socially insecure in high society. However, members of her inner circle said that she felt more comfortable in London. Rumours continued to follow her, though, and in 2005 she forced the publishers of a novel by Lady Colin Campbell to pulp their stock after her lawyers claimed that the protagonist, a Latin American gold-digger who murders two of her four husbands, was a defamatory portrait of her.
To more cynical observers, what Safra made of herself was mainly the result of having married, and inherited, money. Yet as one of her sons once said: ‘‘My mother was born with something special. You do not achieve what she has purely by chance.’’ Or as Elton John put it: ‘‘When Lily asks you to do something, you do it.’’
‘‘. . . when you support people who are making a real difference in the world, you end up receiving far more than you give.’’ Lily Safra