NEW YORK’S PRINCE HARRY
A Tribute to the 2021 Winter Show
People in their 30s look great and it seems that you have your life together.
Just 24 when he died abruptly one week ago, HRH Harry Joseph Brant, by virtue of wealth, position, beauty, charm and notoriety, in every way possible, was a prince of the realm, at the hub of the universe. Certainly, described in the New York Times as, a “founding member of the next-generation jet set…a new-look “It boy”, he was the very Von und Zu of high-style, with a sybaritic sensibility.
Leading a glittering, highly social existence from an early age, his family were his constant companions. Seemingly inseparable, en-mass, the Brants embarked on an endless round of the best international parties. Their presence, attesting to the aplomb of reoccurring seasonal couture shows and benefit exhibition previews, was relied upon. Ever increasingly the ability to determine the success and exclusivity of any event, based solely on their attendance, was especially attributed to Harry and his older brother, Peter Brant, ll. Like the fabled Princes in the Tower, they were only three years apart. Deposed King Edward V of England and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, were murdered by their uncle at 12 and 9. But season after brilliant season, notwithstanding real enough travails and tragedy, it seemed, from a distance at least, that Harry Brant and Peter Brant, both might live forever, evolving with each new decade to become more and more, if differently, lovely.
Together the pair adopted a personal aesthetic akin to the ambivalent, always elegant, heros seen in Visconti films.
When New York Magazine referred to these always exquisitely dressed and perfectly posed princes of Manhattan Island as “NYC’s Most Beautiful Teenage Brothers”, few disagreed. Invariably, they were pictured together. Yet sometimes, as with Prince Charles and the Princess of Wales, they seemed to compete for the camera’s attention. More drawn to flaunting gender norms, Harry’s look, somewhat at odds with an appearance of angelic innocence, seemed more subversive. First invited to the Metropolitan Museum’s Fashion Institute Gala at age 16, Vanity Fair teased Harry as a “Little Lord Fauntleroy”. But, like his parents and brother, he seemed utterly unapologetic concerning his good fortune. Indeed sometimes, feeling cornered, he could seem rather entitled and even arrogant, as if rule-breaking were a perquisite of privilege, one that was essecential for his enjoyment .
Like thousands who have left tributes on his Instagram page, admiring the young beauty from afar, I never actually had the pleasure of meeting Prince Harry. Inasmuch as New York offers all a magical level of proximity, making it likely that eventually one might encounter those one desires most, his parents, with his brother Peter, came my way soon enough. One long-ago Winter Antique Show opening night, I felt compelled to photograph a Byronic-looking youth in Coach boots. “What name please?” I asked, transfixed but calm, “Peter Brant, Jr.!” said a beautiful woman who was obviously his mother emphatically. Mere months away from launching the divorce suit of the century, in retrospect it seemed like a tactical reminder of her heir and a spare.
As to Harry’s and Peter’s half brother Ryan A. Brant, who died aged 47, three years ago, he briefly lived in my West Harlem neighborhood. By chance he acquired the decorous house of my friend Dr. Richard Dudley. A co-founder of Take-Two Interactive Software, whose portfolio includes the denigrating game Grand Theft Auto, Brant proceeded to transform his dwelling into the most beautiful house in the city. With Morris papers and carpets as a backdrop, he amassed an incomparable collection of Aesthetic Movement furnishings, placing them artfully in an ideal setting. Ever on the lookout for exciting houses for the since-suspended Hamilton Heights House Tour, Brant was asked to participate. Agreeing, he was charm itself. Sadly, once he sold his Harlem house, the astounding historically accurate decor, a setting for Tiffany lamps, Goodwin silver and Herter Brothers chairs, was destroyed heedlessly.
In our time, being celebrated trumps mere pedigree, lineage or accomplishment, for that matter. Imagine another era when the likes of Donald Trump could become President, offering to the masses what Fran Leibovitz aptly characterized as “A poor person’s idea of a rich person”? By contrast, Harry Brant’s father, the senior Peter M. Brant, possesses all the time-honored assets associated with reigning monarchs. Discernment, irony, a certain subtlety, and an unencumbered $800-M fortune, with another $2-B worth of astonishing artworks besides, all this is at his fingertips. Veritably, the publisher of Interview is a mercantile and cultural king. This said, it’s hopeless looking to today’s House of Windsor, as a reference from which to access the House of Brant. For, notwithstanding the ordeals of Princess Diana, Royal divorce and Prince Andrew’s bad behavior, today’s British royalty, all-in-all, behaves rather like the rest of us. One must seek out, instead, Plantagenets and Tudors, de’Medicis and the Valois-Angoulêmes to discover sovereigns as cunning and as conflicted, as flawed and as glorious as this dynasty.
Harry Brant’s father is an industrialist, an art collector, an art patron, art publisher, a philanthropist, and a producer. Adept at taking risks, married for nearly a quarter century to Stephanie Seymour, he is also a champion polo player. King Peter’s saga, his two marriages, his second nearly calamitous foray into the divorce courts and his nine children, are all prodigious. His is a biography worthy of a Shakespearian drama or a trilogy by Anthony Trollope. Brant’s swashbuckling financial empire-building was replete with questionable setbacks and victorious triumphs. A Martha Stewartesque prison stint represents His Majesty’s nadir. So did his son Ryan’s suspended sentence. And such dramatic highs and lows serve to remind one most that Prince Harry’s dad grew up in the same Jamaica Estates milieu in Queens, as the wheeling-dealing grifter of all time, Donald Trump. Trump was even among King Peter’s childhood classmates.
What fairer consort could there be than Prince Harry’s mother, the super-model-turned-trophy wife? All evidence shows that Stephanie Seymour is as devoted a mother as one could hope for. She was her children’s queen of hearts, particularly Prince Harry’s.
So, who or what was the bad fairy that cursed the gold-glowing, flower-strewn progress of the late lamented Harry, our beloved, bedazzling little prince?
“We will forever be saddened that his life was cut short by this devastating disease,”
read a mournful statement announcing Prince Harry’s sad end from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.
“He achieved a lot in his 24 years, but we will never get the chance to see how much more Harry could have done.”
Prescription drugs, the scrounge of the multitudes, along with drink, a challenge Harry Brant’s mother struggled to overcome, has set back a generation. What a loathsome leveler addiction is.
One is at once struck on examining the avidly-followed Instagram pages formed by Harry and Peter Brant, and their mother, too. One is surprised most by, beyond not being private, how alike they are. Mostly, each has posted alluring, flattering, beguiling images of themselves. These are augmented by a smattering of photographs of each other, select friends and some of the world’s beauty spots, from Versailles to the Brant estate, White Birch Farm in Greenwich. By contrast, the page of the founder of the feast, their father, his page is different. Family and art work predominate as Peter Brandt’s page presentation. Of course it might be said, that for a king, as even for an ordinary father, husband and collector, family and possessions are as representative of one’s persona as a full-length portrait might be.
On Harry’s page, one discerns a decisive difference. Over and over again, there are film clips of aspirational femme-fatals, from a to z. The material girl herself is there and so is Marlyn Monroe, as Lorelei Lee, singing Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend. Eartha Kitt intones how much she wishes to be “Evil!” Audry Hepburn, as a metamorphosed Elisa Doolittle, ravishingly radiant in pink organdy, sings of a new-found resolve. She tells off Professor Higgins, insisting that in his banishment, there will still be crumpets and tea, each day, at four o’clock. What might such posts portend for so fair and fey a youth? Displaying no candid shots of some beau or girlfriend, might one to describe these plotting women as Harry Brant’s alter egos? Do they express identification with his mother, whose married life and maturity seem less infinitely limitless contrasted with her eventful head-turning youth?
With some seventeen thousand-plus views to date, Harry’s following has landed on a particular video. It was posted last March at the pandemic’s onset. In it, Michelle Pfeiffer as Elvira Hancock, poised with her cigarette and cocktail, ravenously snorts and ingests a great quantity of cocaine.
”Contemplating my own mortality”
Prince Harry captioned the clip. It’s from the 1983 film which saw Pfeiffer’s breakthrough as a star: Scarface.
One wonders, like Elvira Hancock, was Harry ever berated by someone he cared for, for the depths of his addiction? Was his underlying depression, ever dismissed as well, as mere laziness?
Among 500 who commented on another post, one on Facebook, announcing Harry’s death in the Daily News, quite a few were as merciless as the infamous “Tricoteuses”. This was the group of morbid women who met daily to dispassionately knit and sneer. Sitting up close beside the scaffold, from September 5, 1793, to July 27, 1794, they exulted in witnessing the execution of 17,000 condemned to death during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.
He looks like a baby. Too much, no supervision.
Began one judgmental paragon of virtue.
I did some stupid stuff at 24 years of age — but putting on makeup and trying to look like a girl while stuffing pills down my throat; at least I avoided that trifecta of accomplishment. Still, it is sad when a parent’s encouragement of eccentricities contributes to the death of their child. Even the 1%-ers have feelings, too…
Some at least were dismayed.
Wow. Very sad. I was just talking about him and his brother, who were the “It” guys of NYC a few years ago
Others seemed to feel smugly vindicated by self-satisfied prudence.
I can only guess they think they are smarter or will be luckier than all the others that suffer the consequences of drugs. How anyone can take up drugs after what they see others go thru I do not understand especially when their lives seem to be going so well.
A few were more dreadful still in their lack of either empathy or compassion. One ventured:
But my instinct is that if Dad had been a welder and mom a waitress in a diner — their kid would probably still be alive and quite content ….not drug addicted and dead.
Sure, as if prescription drug addiction was not an epidemic, effecting many millions? But another asserted:
When someone does something completely avoidable like this to themselves, I find it difficult to be sympathetic. I think these things need to happen sometimes. In order to save the few who understand the idiocy, and self destructive possibly of their own actions.
More than a few concurred.
This can happen when you have so much money that you don’t need to get up in the morning to be productive. You can sleep all day and party all night, everyday of your life.
For some, just because of his family’s great wealth, Prince Harry’s untimely demise seems to have been completely warranted.
At 24 what pressure did he have? He was rich…..white…..young…and did I say rich? Hell if that’s the case suicide rates would be extremely high in the ghetto because there is nothing except depression.
Blessedly, empathic people do exist.
Those of us left behind often have to deal with insensitive comments made from a place of ignorance, by people I hope never need to know the pain of not being able to help those we love, or the understanding that love doesn’t conquer all, especially not someone else’s demons.
Having attended Bard College, like his brother Peter, our Prince Harry failed to graduate. With much to live for beyond his affliction, he planned to enter a new drug rehabilitation center. Having proven himself as a marvelous model and talented as a stylist, reformed, he hoped to assume a substantive creative role at Interview magazine.
How extraordinary was Harry Brant’s too-brief appearance. In a supporting role, he gave a star performance. His memorable turn was akin to the way Jean Harlow, playing Kitty Packard in Dinner at Eight, steals the show. Partly her success derived from just being beautiful. But even seeming unaware, her aspirations for great attainment as a social force, not in staid Washington but at the epicenter in our beloved Gotham City, shines through.
Harry’s paternal grandparents were Bulgarian Jewish immigrants. They arrived in America at the dawn of the last century, when Jews were unwelcome. Within living memory, neither the most select cooperative apartment buildings on the Upper Eastside, nor the city’s most important cultural and philanthropic boards, were inclusive in the least. But things happen, and unbelievably, the 10021 zip code’s supreme cachet, it is but a memory. Similarly, the desirability of formerly sought-after addresses like River House and One Sutton Place, have paled, compared to unknown buildings in Tribeca and Park Slope. Prince Harry’s parents helped to lead this insurrection. Collecting Warhols, Koonses and Basquiats, his father helped to destroy the hegemony Van Dyke and Gainsborough ancestor portraits once held over the art world. Such works depicting aristocrats and royal heads, were not valued due to beauty alone. It was the same as when Kehinde Wiley dresses a rapper in silks and parade armor, mounted on an Arabian steed.
Their worth lay largely in the faith tycoons like Jules Bach, Willam Randolph Hearst, Otto Kahn or Henry Clay Frick had in their ability to lend them regal stature and luster.
Neither African Americans nor Jews are viewed as suitable candidates to be sovereigns amidst the modern world’s systemic and enduring white supremacy. But, like Bridgeton, the Princes Harry and Peter have helped to lay waste to this tired dynamic. Harry, mining the style, the taste, the brio and bravado of every realm and any age, feigning obliviousness, while exhibiting a slyly knowing sophistication, defying being labeled, as but another poor little rich bi*ch, offered as much joy and delight to many as a waving heir-presumptive in a passing gilded coach.
Some will say his gift to the world was inconsequential. But as for me, having gained a new respect for a young man who always, even during the most trying moments, sought to be absolutely fabulous, I say, “Well done, farewell, sweet Prince.”
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