Alec Wildenstein, who died February 17 in Paris, was a horse racing and art gallery mogul with few peers in either of those worlds. But he burst upon the New York scene in 1997 for the tabloid divorce of the decade, a tale shot through with bad behavior and pathologies of wealth including multiple mistresses, compulsive shopping, and face-lifts gone haywire.

It was the plastic surgery that gave the story its particular zest, illustrated by the cat-eyed Jocelyne Wildenstein: She had done it all for him, she insisted, transforming her face into a cat’s to keep her man’s interest as she aged. The grotesque result led to the memorable headline: “Bride of Wildenstein.” Along the way, Alec Wildenstein pleaded guilty to threatening his wife with a 9-mm pistol reportedly while dressed only in a towel and accompanied by an unnamed nude 19-year-old.

Despite initial demands for hundreds of thousands in monthly support, Jocelyne Wildenstein emerged as an oddly sympathetic character. She claimed that her strivings for this-worldly perfection meant that she lacked the skills even to make toast or boil water. Her erstwhile husband decamped to Europe ahead of an arrest warrant for unpaid alimony. He left behind a vault full of impressionists and old masters worth perhaps billions to concentrate on Ecurie Wildenstein, the family’s extensive French racing interests. The Wildenstein divorce was finalized in 1999 in an undisclosed settlement.

Born in Marsailles in 1940, Alec Wildenstein was raised in Manhattan, where his grandfather, Georges, had come as a wartime refugee and opened an art gallery. The family’s interest in art stretched to George’s father, an Alsatian cloth merchant who speculated in 18th-century art. George’s son Daniel, Alec Wildenstein’s father, took over the gallery in 1959 and became an internationally known dealer who produced catalogues raisonnés for Monet, Manet, and Gauguin.

With his brother, Guy, Alec Wildenstein was for most of his life overshadowed by his eminent father, although both sons were integral parts of the business. By the time of his divorce action, Alec Wildenstein could still claim with accuracy that his annual income was under $200,000, this despite acknowledging that his household budget exceeded $1 million monthly, subsidized by his father. And what a lifestyle it was. There was an apartment in Paris, a chateau in the French countryside, a Caribbean beach estate, and a 66,000-acre ranch in Kenya.

It was reportedly while in Kenya hunting lions in 1978 that Alec Wildenstein met the Swiss-born Jocelyne Perisse. She was said to be a pilot and a crack shot, though it went unrecorded whether she could brew tea. Within a year, the two were married in Las Vegas and came to live in New York in a double-wide townhouse with an indoor pool and a small menagerie including five Italian greyhounds and a capuchin monkey named May Moon. The couple had a son and a daughter, but Jocelyne began to fear that her husband was losing interest in her. Her efforts to interest him through facial reconstruction had the opposite reaction. “She has the impression that you fix a face the way you fix a house,” Alec Wildenstein told People in 1998. “I must say I have trouble recognizing her up close.”

In the wake of the divorce, Alec Wildenstein was remarried, to Liouba Stoupakova, a young Russian-born model who survives him.

Residing mainly in France, he oversaw many of the Wildenstein stable’s greatest wins at the track, although an odor of bad sportsmanship dogged him. In 2005, his horse Westerner won the Ascot Gold Cup at Britain’s Royal Ascot. Just a year before, though, when another Wildenstein horse came in second, he groused to an interviewer, “The dope testing machine must be broken.”