The Metamor9h1s1s of Rachel Uchitel

[MinM]

Rachel Uchitel on 9/11

Rachel Uchitel and Steven Ehrenkranz - Wedding (20NOV04)


Rachel Uchitel, VIP Diva

[DoYouEverWonder]

Oh my, nice catch.

Ms. Rachel sure does get around and it appears she's done very well for herself 'rebuilding' are life, since her lose on 9/11.

[DoYouEverWonder]

Wonder what happened to her marriage?

Rachel Uchitel and Steven Ehrenkranz
By GERIT QUEALY

Published: December 12, 2004


ON the morning of 9/11, Steven Ehrenkranz had just finished a round of job interviews at the Cantor Fitzgerald offices at the World Trade Center. Anxious to get back to work at another brokerage firm nearby, he declined to stay for one last interview. As he reached his office, he turned to see the first plane hit. He said he learned not long after that "everyone I just interviewed with was dead."

A few days later, he was stunned when he recognized the tearful blond woman in a photo on the cover of The New York Post — holding a picture of her fiancé, James Andrew O'Grady, who was missing in the towers' collapse.

"'Oh, my God, that's Rachel,' " he recalled thinking. He knew the woman, Rachel Uchitel, from their private-school days in their early teens, but they had been out of touch for years.

Mr. Ehrenkranz had not seen her since the mid-1990's, when he and his friend Jason Strauss, who was then dating Ms. Uchitel, were partners in a party-planning venture. In a flirtatious moment, he said, he and Ms. Uchitel joked that "in another world," they would be dating. It was indeed another world in 2003 when he ran into her at a New York Halloween party.

Ms. Uchitel received confirmation in early 2002 that her fiancé had died. But she had gone though a delayed grieving process. "I was very strong after the night of 9/11," said Ms. Uchitel, who was then a television producer at Bloomberg, the business news company. But two years after the attacks, she experienced a "massive breakdown," she said. "I couldn't get through the day."

She added: "I felt like everyone else had forgotten about it. I was resentful. Lonely." Her grief rekindled old sorrows, the death of her father in 1991, and that of a grandfather who had been an owner of the New York nightclub El Morocco, in 2000. She took a leave from her job and sought therapy.

At the Halloween party, her conversation with Mr. Ehrenkranz had been casual. But they got together a few weeks later, when both happened to be in Florida. At dinner with friends in South Beach, one of them, Turney Duff, said, "you could kind of tell there was something between them."

What followed was a friendship that included "nights just watching TV for four hours holding hands," said Mr. Ehrenkranz, now 29 and a trader for Stuart Frankel & Company. Ms. Uchitel, also 29, added, "I kept thinking, `Why can't I find someone I connect with like Steven?' "

After the holidays that followed the friendship took a serious turn. It was helped along by the fact that despite Ms. Uchitel's tragic romance, "She never made me feel like I'm playing second fiddle," Mr. Ehrenkranz said.

Mr. Ehrenkranz began spending nearly every night at Ms. Uchitel's apartment; they chose hers rather than his in part because she wanted to be with her dogs, which she had acquired in the wake of 9/11. "She treats them like they hold the secret to world peace," Mr. Ehrenkranz said with a laugh.

The dogs do hold special meaning for Ms. Uchitel. She and Mr. O'Grady had purchased one about a month before 9/11. When that dog suddenly died of distemper, Ms. Uchitel said, she was disconsolate. "But Andy kept telling me, `The dog didn't know he was going to die. He had a great life with us for a month,' " she recalled.

"Andy taught me amazing lessons," Ms. Uchitel said, including how to appreciate the present moment. Echoing sentiments reminiscent of Emily's in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," Ms. Uchitel added: "It's great to have a person in your life now, to go through the joys and sorrows together. Everyone assumes you're going to live till 90 years old; it's not necessarily true."

On the evening of Nov. 20 she and Mr. Ehrenkranz were married in the Deco splendor of the new Cipriani event space in the Toy Building in New York. In lieu of bouquets, bridesmaids carried candles, placing them on pedestals, creating an inner circle under the huppah. The sylphlike bride floated up the aisle in a satin Reem Acra gown for an interfaith ceremony led by Dr. David M. Posner, the senior rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El in New York, along with the Rev. Scotty McLennan, the dean for religious life at Stanford University. A quartet played "Ode to Joy" at the end of the service as the bride raised her bouquet in jubilation.

"She's so brave to be vulnerable again," said Annelise Peterson, the maid of honor, on the day before the wedding. (She, too, lost her boyfriend on 9/11, and her brother.) "It gives the world, and me, so much hope."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/fashion/weddings/12VOWS.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&position=

Apparently, it didn't last very long.

The daughter of Palm Beach socialite Susan Bishop, Uchitel knows her way around the glamour crowd.

She hobnobs at the high-society Everglades Club and Bath & Tennis Club in Palm Beach, where Bishop owns a condo next door to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

<snip>

Uchitel was briefly married in 2004 after losing her fiancé in the 9/11 terror attacks.

http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/12/01/2009-12-01_party_girl_history_of_alleged_tiger_woods_mistress_rachel_uchitel_surfaces.html?print=1&page=all

If I was Rudy's wife, I'd keep an eye on this one.