Seymour Is living nude the best revenge? Stephanie Seymour, the 41-year-old former supermodel and veteran of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, Victoria’s Secret catalogs, and, not least, two Playboy pictorials, would seem to be making that claim on these pages. (A protocol question: Is one still entitled to be addressed as a supermodel even after leaving office, like governors and secretaries of state?)
Her marriage to Peter Brant, a wealthy businessman who resembles a taller, more dashing version of Buddy Hackett, must have seemed like something out of a fairy tale back in 1995, when they tied the knot in Paris and then settled into a comfortable life that included homes in Greenwich, Connecticut, the Hamptons, and Palm Beach. She was 26, he 48. “He’s strong, intelligent, sensitive, and very masculine,” she purred while discussing her then fiancé with People magazine in 1994, on the occasion of her election as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. Brant cannot claim that level of renown, but his résumé is not shabby. In People’s words, he is “the polo-playing owner of Interview, Antiques, and Art in America,” while a recent court filing reminds us that he is also “a newsprint entrepreneur, an art collector, film producer, and owner/breeder of thoroughbred horses.”
Oh dear. Did we say “court filing”? Well, yes, Mr. and Mrs. Brant truly did have a fairy-tale marriage, or at least a fairy-tale divorce, because if you’ve recently read any fairy tales you know that they are unpleasant little narratives full of rage, jealousy, misbehavior, and vengeance. And if you’ve recently read any tabloids or Connecticut Superior Court documents, you know that the Brant split has devolved into “a real-life War of the Roses,” as the New York Post put it (chops licked), with the bitter couple continuing to share their Greenwich estate while generating a reliable stream of lurid headlines, gossip, and even ancillary court cases: a Brant security guard charged with disorderly conduct for allegedly shoving Seymour after she allegedly grabbed some papers from him and tucked them down her shirtfront; a civil suit filed, in turn, by the same guard against Seymour, claiming that he was injured after she allegedly proceeded to slam a door on his arm following the previously alleged shove; a public-disturbance charge issued against Seymour after she allegedly blocked the family driveway with her S.U.V., then yanked the keys out of another security guard’s car and threw them in some nearby bushes. (Amid tabloid despair, none of these legal actions are currently being pursued.) At issue in the divorce are not only money and property—including commissioned portraits of Seymour by artists such as Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Maurizio Cattelan (the last’s contribution is a bust of the supermodel that has been variously described as calling to mind a hunting trophy or the figurehead on a ship’s bow)—but also custody of the couple’s three children, aged 15, 13, and 5. Not to mention the family’s dignity.
Hindsight suggests there were hints of eruptions to come even before the courtship. She had been sued in 1993 by former boyfriend Axl Rose for, he claimed, having thrown a chair at him and punched him in the groin at a Christmas party. (Rose’s suit was eventually dropped, as was her countersuit, also alleging battery.) For his part, Brant spent 84 days in prison in 1990 for tax evasion, and—perhaps even more damning—some people say he is a bad sport on the polo field. Both he and she were at low emotional ebbs when they met in 1993. He swept her away to Paris and by all accounts they fell deeply in love.
And then—well, after a decade and a half of presumed bliss—it got ugly. Legal documents in divorce proceedings probably never make for happy reading, but the filings in Stephanie S. Brant v. Peter M. Brant read like a series of increasingly nasty, or sad, brushback pitches. Last April, for instance, a month after she filed for divorce and requested custody, Seymour claimed that her husband had “harassed and intimidated” the children in an effort to turn them against her and that he had instructed the family’s domestic staff and officials at their five-year-old daughter’s school to keep her away from the children. Another filing accused him of spiriting a small museum’s worth of artworks from “the marital residence” without Seymour’s consent, a haul that allegedly included nearly 50 Warhols—Brant had a long association with the artist—as well as works by Koons and Prince, not to mention some drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat that had hung in Seymour’s bathroom and a pair of Cindy Sherman photos allegedly pilfered from her dressing room. No mention was made of the Cattelan bust, which may have lost its trophy-like luster in the eyes of at least one of its owners.
