Hell hath no fury like an assistant scorned, and Bernie Madoff’s ex-secretary Eleanor Squillari is pissed. She coauthored a 20,000-word piece (!) in this month’s Vanity Fair about what it was like working for the man who ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history. Among the highlights:
- The way Madoff handled stress was “by saying something nasty: You look terrible. You’re gaining weight. You’re stupid. I never took anything he said to me personally, because I knew it wasn’t about me, it was about him.”
- Madoff was flirtatious and had a habit of making sexually suggestive remarks: “‘Oh, you know you’re crazy about me,’ he would say to me. Sometimes when he came out of his bathroom, which was diagonal to my desk, he would still be zipping up his pants. If he saw me shaking my head disapprovingly, he would say, ‘Oh, you know it excites you.’ If a pretty young woman came in, he’d say, ‘Do you remember when you used to look like that?’ I’d tell him, ‘Knock it off, Bernie,’ and he’d go, ‘Ah, you still look good.’ Then he’d try to pat me on the ass.”
- Squillari once caught him perusing the escort ads in the back of a magazine, and he frequently visited massage parlors. “Once, I looked in his address book and found, under M, about a dozen phone numbers for his masseuses. ‘If you ever lose your address book and somebody finds it, they’re going to think you’re a pervert,’ I said.”
- In the days after her husband’s arrest, Ruth Madoff called Squillari multiple times and encouraged the secretary to provide her with certain information without notifying the bankruptcy trustees, which Squillari said she couldn’t do. “Instead, I told the F.B.I. what had just happened. I was working for them now, not for Ruth and Bernie Madoff.”
It continues to get awesomer and more fucked up. Squillari has a video on Vanity Fair’s website where she tells more stories. It’s absolutely worth checking out.
Gawker.com is reporting that publishing behemoth Conde Nast (home to Vogue, Vanity Fair, and other illustrious titles) is laying off almost all of their receptionists.
Tipsters tell us that the receptionists—who sit on each floor to greet and announce visitors, receive packages, and answer phones—will have their last day on Friday. Sad! They’re naturally some of the most popular people in the building, being the only ones with a professional obligation to smile at everyone and act civil and useful.
On top of that, this move is probably a part of CEO Charles Townsend’s latest round of company-wide cutbacks, but it can’t be saving Conde that much money—the receptionists are some of the lowest-paid (if not the lowest-paid) people in the whole building.
Sounds like a sad day over at Conde Nast - just last month they tightened the budgets of already-overworked assistants. If you’re one of the laid off receptionists and want to share your story, email me at contact@savetheassistants.com. I wonder why it is that the people who get fired are always the underpaid admins, not the overpaid executives whose bad business decisions got the company in trouble in the first place?
Remember how Vanity Fair whored out one of their editorial assistants? Well, said assistant, Bill Bradley, went out on a date to glamorous restaurant Waverly Inn with a lucky reader named Julia–and documented the whole thing for VF readers.
So, how did it go?
Julia says:
Upon seeing the menu, I was a little nervous about what I could order—was it just the mac & cheese, or could I drink too?—but Bill quickly assured me that the magazine was sparing no expense. We then proceeded to squeeze the most out of the V.F. dollar, ordering cocktails, a bottle of wine, mussels, tuna tartare, risotto with truffles, steak, and bananas foster and a nice liqueur for desert. By the time Emil Varda, the restaurant’s owner/manager, came over to check on us, I felt like a million bucks.
And as for our intrepid assistant Bill:
Continue reading ‘vanity fair assistant will date for food’
I like Vanity Fair and think they do good reporting, but the two things that have always sort of bugged me are a) they sometimes read like Us Weekly for super-rich people, and b) they have an annual ‘green’ issue that always uses an absurd amount of paper.
But now they may have gone too far. On June 2, an editorial assistant named Bill Bradley (not to be confused with the basketball-player-cum-Senator) posted to vanityfair.com that he had been tasked with getting 10,000 people on Facebook to become a “Fan” of the magazine. Oh, and his deadline? August 5.
Poor unsuspecting, eager-to-please young Bill, as so many assistants do and have done, said ‘OK,’ because he had no choice. And thus he began begging, pleading, bribing, stalking, and doing whatever he had to do to get people to add VF to their Facebook profile.
Continue reading ‘‘vanity fair’ whores out editorial assistant’