Ron Perelman And Claudia Cohen (Of Cohen Hall Fame): Besties!
July 7, 2009 at 12:05 am
About this time last year, we were WTF-ing at the news that Logan had been rechristened "Cohen Hall." You'll recall that it even made the Styles section! We've had a year for the news to sink in, and you know, whatever, Penn has dollar signs in its eyes, did we really expect the university to behave like anything other than the higher ed hustler we all know and love?
The truly weird thing about the whole Logan-Cohen switcheroo, in our eyes, was always the fact that billionaire-playboy-trustee Ron Perelman insisted on naming the building for his ex-wife, Claudia Cohen. Like, can we imagine Madonna naming a building after Guy Ritchie now that she's divorced his ass? Nuh uh. With this in mind, we were checking out a little New York magazine write-up on Perelman from a few weeks ago, and we were once again baffled by his Claudia Cohen name droppage. Witness:
After years of being considered one of the city’s best restaurant customers, the billionaire investor (and occasional tabloid fixture) Ron Perelman has gone into the hospitality business, much to his apparent surprise ... “My best friend in the world, other than Claudia Cohen”—his ex-wife, who died of cancer in 2007—“was my associate, Howard Gittis,” who also passed away that year. [emphasis ours]Yeah, we totally stayed BFF with our second wives despite a messy divorce. We're just good friends with our third wife, though, and we hardly ever see our fourth wife these days, except for the Tuesday night divorced couple bowling league we play in, of course. They're all getting buildings when they die. It's just like, common courtesy, ya know?