After filing for bankruptcy in June, she has a day job.
Not an ordinary job though. She is working for Donald Trump, who scooped up the winery and vineyard that she had built on the Virginia estate — a high-risk venture that drained all her money until she had to seek protection from her creditors in court.
And she is living no ordinary life. Instead, she rents a 6,000-square-foot home with a swimming pool and five bedrooms decorated by a celebrity designer, David Easton, in what was intended to be the first house in an exclusive gated community down the road from her old mansion.
Her vision for an estate and business and gated community was certainly outsize. But the undoing of Ms. Kluge (pronounced KLOO-gy, with a hard “g”) was not so different from that of many Americans who maxed out their credit cards and their home loans during boom times. She borrowed heavily. It’s just that she had so much more to leverage.
While her financial straits have been documented as banks closed in on her, she is speaking publicly at last about her bankruptcy, sounding resolute, reassuring herself about the future — without the liveried servants that once attended to guests at her hunting parties.
“I loved the life I lived at Albemarle. Are you kidding? But it does not define who I am,” she says, dressed in cotton slacks and a T-shirt from the Mount Kenya Safari Club. “If you can get a job, you can build another fortune,” she adds. “That is what I focus on.”
For now, Ms. Kluge, 62, and her husband, William Moses, 64, will make about $250,000 under a one-year contract to work for Mr. Trump at the winery. She handles winemaking, bottling and marketing, and Mr. Moses oversees legal and other matters part time. Roughly a third of their money goes to rent.
Lest anyone think that Ms. Kluge’s worries are entirely over, her lawyer points out that the future is unclear. “They are walking out of bankruptcy with nothing,” said the couple’s lawyer, Kermit A. Rosenberg, a partner at Butzell Long Tighe Patton. When they filed for bankruptcy, the couple listed $2.6 million in assets and $47.5 million in liabilities.
From her living room, she points to the few items that are hers: the photographs — her son in St.-Tropez two decades ago and her 2000 wedding to Mr. Moses — and her dogs, a Labrador retriever and a Tibetan terrier.
“No one should feel sorry for us,” Ms. Kluge added later. “I have a great family, a wonderful marriage and loving children and friends. We are not looking at this bankruptcy as if our life has ended. We see this as an opportunity to recreate ourselves.”
In business, she says, she went down a familiar path learned from Mr. Kluge. During the 1980s, he sold his highly leveraged media properties to a variety of buyers, most notably Rupert Murdoch, for more than $3 billion. “John was a huge borrower,” Ms. Kluge recalled. Her strategy was similar, attract equity investors to pay off the debt, make the business cash-flow positive and then sell.
Over a decade, she bet more than $65 million, using her own money at first and then borrowing more, on the winery, a notoriously risky and capital-intensive business. When the economy turned down, she could not make her payments, and the banks forced her to sell her estate, her winery, her jewels and the land she had acquired for the gated community. The jewelry and home furnishings raised nearly $20 million in a pair of auctions.
“It is Shakespearean in that Patricia aimed so high and did not make use of the kind of financial advice that would have increased the chances of making the vineyard work and minimized her financial exposure from the outset,” said Les Goldman, a business adviser and former partner at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher Flom.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0ebd0f603019212247b79834fb3861f3
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