The lion hunter who got addicted to plastic surgery

WHEN Jocelyn Périsset was a child in Lausanne, she was regarded as beautiful. She grew up in a middle-class family and in a traditional Swiss environment. In the summer months she swam in the local lakes and during winter she went skiing in the nearby mountains.

On photos of her when she was young, one notices her fragile Nordic appearance, wavy hair, beautiful skin and tempting mouth. Her eyes an inspiration for poets.

Somewhere in her teenage years, however, she began to turn into the epitome of man's longing for money, fame and especially eternal youth. Until her death nothing was ever enough, she just wanted more of everything.

She was also the victim of a society that pushed away women who were getting older and of a man whose love for her waned as she grew older and who began to seek out younger women. She was wounded and could never come to terms with it.

Over the decades, she had her face operated on almost 20 times and transformed it into a grotesque mask that later gave it the appearance of a big cat's mug. She did it for her husband, Alec Wildenstein, a billionaire art dealer. He had a passion for lions and tigers and she believed if she looked like one, she would be able to win him back.

Yes, sometimes life writes its own script, because if her life were a movie, no one would consider the storyline credible. She was nicknamed “The Lion Lady", “Catwoman" and “Bride of Wildenstein".

Body shaming is not the aim of this article; I've come up for Madonna when people mocked her for her Botox face in The Madonna Debate: Do You Vote Yes or No? 

However, Jocelyn Wildenstein turned herself into Frankenstein's monster who, like a distressed cat, made anxious leaps for acceptance, love and gentleness – but those are things which surely we all long for.

That she suffered from body dysmorphic disorder is beyond doubt and that no one helped her stands as a searing indictment against the coterie of banal and superficial people she surrounded herself with, not to mention the greedy plastic surgeons.

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When Wildenstein was young, her ambition early on was to marry a rich and smart man. She gained access to the financial elite by learning to fly and to hunt game. The Telegraph writes the golden opportunity came in 1977 when arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi invited her to visit his Kenyan farm. He arranged for her to hunt lions with his neighbour, Alec Wildenstein, an art dealer with $10 billion to his name.

Wildenstein was so impressed with Jocelyn's lion-hunting skills that he took her for a motorcycle ride through his estate the next day. They shared their first kiss early in the morning on a hill while the sun was rising.

This couple got married in 1978 during a lavish and extravagant ceremony in Las Vegas, after which Jocelyn began her career as an art dealer and excellent social networker. Her addiction to cosmetic surgery began after a few years of married life and the addition of two children.

The Telegraph writes that her fear of losing her husband began when he told her he hated old people. After that, she started with many collagen injections in her lips, on her cheeks and chin. She had her eyes worked on and began with a string of facelift operations.

There was no stopping her. Later, her skin was stretched so tightly over her face that she looked as if she had just come out of a wind tunnel. She couldn't blink anymore and her lips were so thick they resembled artificial rubber.

When her husband saw her after her first operation he reportedly screamed. He wasn't the only one. During a visit to her surgeon, the people in the consulting room got up and walked out because they were afraid they would look like her.

Apart from dealing in works of art, she kept an eye on their many properties around the world. There was the enormous farm in Kenya, a luxury apartment in Paris, a home in Lausanne and several beach houses.

The Telegraph reported that on their farm in Kenya, there were herds of giraffes, leopards, lions and white rhinos, some of which had been raised in South Africa. There were 55 artificial lakes, a swimming pool with rocks and waterfalls, a golf course, a racetrack and a tennis court with floodlights so sharp you could see them from the sky if you flew over in a passenger plane.

Jocelyn also had a horde of big cats, including a couple of tigers kept in glass cages by the pool. Her passion for these animals not only inspired her later plastic surgery but also the designs of her enormous collection of jewellery.

Despite lives that sound like something from Seven days at the Silbersteins or The Great Gatsby, things went downhill fast after 20 years. She arrived unexpectedly from their game farm with two bodyguards at their five-storey limestone house in Manhattan, only to catch her husband naked in bed with a blonde Russian model. Alec pointed his Smith & Wesson at her and threatened to shoot her. He had to spend the night in jail.

Their bitter and vicious divorce yielded great headlines in the media, where she appeared every day like a strange space creature with leather pants, enormous cats, wild lips, mane, sky-high stilettos and jewels in the form of golden lions and tigers.

This burlesque extravagance was indicative of a society where money, abundance and luxury were the plasters for pathos and emptiness. The New York Times reported that their monthly expenses came to $1 million. A Chanel dress she bought cost $350 000.

In their house in Manhattan, they kept a black leopard and a red cat, as well as a sand shark in a tank with a high glass wall. They reached a settlement that was so outrageous that many refused to believe it was real.

She got $2,5 billion, the 66 000 ha farm in Kenya and a $100 million alimony for 13 years. However, the judge warned her that none of the money should ever be spent on plastic surgery or hair transplants.

At 65, she began a relationship with the 37-year-old fashion designer Lloyd Klein. From a TV interview with them, it was clear that he did not shy away from lip injections and wrinkle removal operations either. At one point he lost his temper with the interviewer and started shouting at him and then dashed off the set.

They lived in Trump World Towers with a monkey and the relationship was stormy. One day she stabbed him with a pair of scissors and scratched him all over his body with her long nails. 

In 2018, after squandering her fortune on parties, pills, bodyguards, dining out, jewellery, clothes, limousines, clubs and who knows what else, she was declared bankrupt. Until the end of her tragic ghost life, she denied that she had ever had work done on her face.

According to Paris Match, Jocelyn Wildenstein left $344 000 of debt – which could have landed her in jail if she returned to Miami, where she had reportedly stolen gems from the Regal Jewelry and Gift Shop in Miami. She had lost her apartment in Trump World Towers. Jocelyn Wildenstein died in poverty in Paris with a potential prison sentence hanging over her head.

• Jocelyn Wildenstein (née Périsset), born August 5, 1940, died December 31, 2024. She is survived by two children and three grandchildren. Alec Wildenstein died in 2008.

♦ VWB ♦

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