@HereAndGone2 comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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HereAndGone2 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

Epstein wasn't gay, but Wexner could have been closeted*. His mother ran him, he married very late, and wasn't linked with a playboy lifestyle of arm candy before marriage. It wasn't an affair as such, but Epstein seems to have been genuinely charming and Wexner practically made him the majordomo of his wealth, and because Epstein seems to have managed that properly, he was able to use that backing to pretend to have (and really to have) more contacts and wealth of his own than he really did.

Epstein's genuine talent seems to have been in networking. He was able to make connections with the right people at the right time to get him into better and better positions where he was able to get closer to real money, and to make deals that (a) made him rich (not mega-rich, but rich) and (b) when those went sour, there was always somebody higher up and of greater status willing to be his backer and support to protect him.

*This article from 1985, when Wexner was 48, comes as close to flat-out saying it as it can, even though it comes with Wexner's own denial of being gay. There's mentions of girlfriends, but no specific names, and when the interviewer is touring one of Wexner's houses there is no mention at all of a 'lady of the manor' or any long-time companion. Interested in the arts, working in fashion, and the killer phrase "confirmed bachelor". Wexner was clearly more comfortable in the presence of men he trusted, and once Epstein managed to wangle that position of trust, he had it made:

And there is his widowed mother, Bella Wexner, the secretary of the company.

Bella doesn’t like her place and has her seat shifted next Morosky, closer to Les. She wears a white suit, and her black hair is pulled up tightly from high Slavic cheekbones into a bun. She holds herself in a careful way, like a taller Helena Rubinstein, with that instantly acquired czarina majesty some Jewish women take on with age and great fortunes. “This is a woman who was buying dresses 22 years ago and now has a personal net worth of over $100 million,” Wexner says, explaining his mother’s reluctance to talk. Les gave his mother 10 percent of the company. He also gave 10 percent to his younger unmarried sister and to his late father, whom he’d made chairman of the board.

“He was the son at all times,” says his friend Pete Halliday, “early, middle, and late. He always gave the floor to his father.”

…He is half in love with it, half in love with the other worlds that success has led him to. Not only finance, real estate (besides the Gurney house, he owns small chunks of New York), giant schemes, and takeovers, but art and philanthropy. He is on the boards of Sotheby’s and the Whitney, about to leave the American Ballet Theatre’s. However painful it may be for him, Leslie Wexner is inevitably emerging. He has had an apartment in New York for fifteen years, but suddenly he finds himself discovered, written about in “Suzy.” Ann Getty is on the phone before 8 a.m. He has lunch with Liz Rohatyn and her daughter, Nina Griscom. He is courted by women, for he is tender and gentle and a billionaire alone, and by charities, because he gives massively. He puts a trompe l'oeil mural of Fifth Avenue in his office in Columbus, but then he pulls back, flies out, disappears to the little dinners in the little city he says he prefers.

…And they crowd in on him, all the high-school kids from the suburb of Bexley who got the red cars on their sixteenth birthday when he, the only “tuition” student from outside the district, had to run for the streetcar; all the pretty girls who never noticed him but now stand very close and knot their fingers behind their back when they talk to him and look wham into his mournful eyes, trying hard while Bella Wexner watches her 47-year-old bachelor son; the friends from Ohio State; a few fashion V.P.’s shooting their white cuffs as the national business reporters and stock analysts run to the phones.

…It is why he goes to Vail for a single night to look out at the mountain and hold the woman he has had flown in in his arms. It is why he isn’t married, though after knowing him a year, one girlfriend converted to Judaism and actually changed her last name to Cohen (which Wexner insists was not because of him or because of what it would do to his mother if he married a Christian).

… Wexner is what used to be known as a “confirmed bachelor.” He doesn’t feel alone. He doesn’t seem to want a child, and, despite what he says about the perfect woman—Ali MacGraw as she was in Love Story, someone who is “very, very pretty” and not aggressive—he seems to be waiting to achieve some mystical harmony and balance in himself first. “A lot of people think because I am not married I am asexual or homosexual, but I enjoy a relationship with a woman,” he says sometime later, hating to discuss this, known for keeping this part of his life very tucked away. Of course, like his social absence, this increases his mystery and allure. Only Alfred Taubman, among his friends, still constantly tells him to get married, but Wexner, whenever asked, says, “Me and the pope.”

Les insists on his own things in place—the Wexner possessions—and, if he is across the country and knows they are laying a carpet in one of his homes, it bothers him. It’s a deep fussiness—he gets a physical on every birthday, does cardiovascular exercises, puts snow tires on his cars. He has always had a sense of how things should look, from the time he decorated his first room, when he was a boy. “He would have been an interior decorator if he was not in this business. Fashion, fabrics, colors—this is what he likes,” says his friend Rabbi Herbert Friedman.

…“Most people can’t figure Les out,” says Professor Cullman. “He’s the enigmatic but energetic leader. He’s the product of a female-dominated childhood—his mother, assertive, effervescent, bright, and action-oriented. His dad was contemplative and rather shy, uncertain of himself. As a male in a female-dominated household, he became both shy and dominant at the same time. A very unusual combination.”

...Though now Bella Wexner is often in Florida, and they no longer go on buying trips to Europe together, her office in Columbus is right next to his, and she is a force. It was Bella he asked to make the motion at the board for the tender offer for Carter Hawley Hale. Ask Les what is new in his life and he will say, “Mother just gave $3 million to the children’s pediatric hospital in Columbus.” He has not forgotten how she used to come home at night and start all the housework after her day in the store, how everything in his house was always clean and right in its heart.

Paging Dr. Freud, indeed. "The woman he has had flown in" is one hell of an awkward phrase. Does that sound to anyone here more like a description of a girlfriend, or more that of a paid high-class escort who may be more of a geisha/hetaira there for company, conversation, entertainment and some intimacy but not necessarily sex? More to quiet those rumours of "is he gay?"?

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