Never a figure of national renown, Mr. [Peter] Brant has for years loomed large in that slender niche of American culture where vast wealth meets good taste and winter tans. In Savile Row suits and with plenty of alpha-male style, he spent the last decade quietly expanding his newsprint manufacturing empire, borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars and gobbling up mills until his company, White Birch, was the second-largest player in North America.<\/p>\n
By 2008, he seemed, like our economy, to be a spectacularly efficient money-making machine \u201d\u201d a billionaire with a vast art collection and his very own polo team. His personal life appeared just as charmed. In 1995, the former Victoria\u2019s Secret model Stephanie Seymour became his second wife, and the couple and their four children shuttled to homes in Greenwich, Conn., Sagaponack, N.Y., and Palm Beach, Fla. It all looked pretty glamorous.<\/p>\n
It looks different today.<\/p>\n
There is no telling which is now costing Mr. Brant more \u201d\u201d his business or his marriage. But that is only because his business is privately held, whereas his marriage is exploding in a way that could hardly be more public. \u201cSeymour-Brant Divorce Mayhem,\u201d\u009d read a headline in June in The New York Post.<\/p>\n
So what we have here is a portrait of love and leverage gone wrong, a reversal of fortune that \u201d\u201d like so many stories of our economic cratering \u201d\u201d would have been hard to imagine a little more than a year ago.<\/p>\n