Alexandra Penney, a 60 something, urbane, Manhattanite, former magazine editor, lost her life savings in the Madoff scheme. Her story is told here.
This is a tragedy, Penney has fallen a long way from a dizzying New York height and has contemplated suicide. She didn’t inherit her money, she fought hard for it as a single mother. She wrote a best selling book called How to Make Love to a Man, and now she has been royally screwed by one, Bernie Madoff.
She now faces not ruin, but having to move out of her Upper East Side apartment, selling her second home in West Palm Beach, getting rid of her Soho studio, using her reserve savings account, taking the subway for the first time in 30 years and ironing her 40 white shirts.
Its through the banal detail of ironing that within this story, an untold one surfaces, about Alexandra’s maid, Yolanda.
“She needs money. She sends it to her family in Colombia. I have more than affection for Yolanda, I love her as part of my family.”
Yolanda is presumably one of those invisible people that served at the party when times were good, but we don’t know much about her, because people like Yolanda don’t often feature in magazine profiles.
We hear from Alexandra that she will be let go. Sold off with the “high thread count sheets, old china, watches, jewelry, Hermes purses, and Louboutin shoes”, when the proceeds from these could perhaps have secured both Yolanda and her family’s future.
In doing so, this could have been a real triumph over adversity, it could have been Alexandar Penney’s finest hour, her redemption. But instead, like Madoff’s billions, she blew it.
I genuinely feel sorry for Alexandra, happiness and perceived calamity are relative. I would be devastated by a fall to the level that millions around the world struggle to live on, so it would be hypocritical to judge too harshly. But there is a difference between hard times and not enough to eat, and that is what people like Yolanda face. You cannot let them eat cake.
Poor Alexandra, poorer Yolanda.