A great deal more would happen after Denise settled into life on the lam, only to realize that her marriage was beginning to fall apart -- abetted by the discovery that her husband had a 48-year-old German blonde on the side. "Oh, yes," says Denise. "There was that too." It's a topic she has kept from addressing all these years, but today, as she sits curled up on a sofa in her penthouse, her breakup with Marc is one of the few topics that doesn't make her cry. "That started, um, actually, the day my mother died." She pauses. "I mean, I understand, he was not happy at the time because of everything that was coming down on him. And I was traveling so much, and so he was alone quite a bit . . ."

Unlike her husband, Denise could return home without getting arrested, and when her mother was dying of cancer (which also claimed her only sibling, a sister), she traveled to her hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, to be at her bedside. "And I remember, the day she died, I called Marc to find out how he was. And he was like, 'Don't worry, I'm with people and friends and they're taking care of me.' " She didn't know just how well he was being taken care of until some friends clued her in.

Denise had been married to Marc Rich since 1966. "I was young, sooo young, and I had a baby, like, immediately," she says. The couple met on a blind date arranged by her father and were married six months later. "I just knew," says Denise, "that I would have a fascinating life with this man." Marc was already a mini-Master of the Universe when he married Denise Eisenberg, but in many ways it was he who'd married up. Denise's parents were Holocaust survivors who left a family fur business in Berlin when they fled Hitler. Penniless when he arrived in Worcester, her father started a shoe factory that would eventually make millions. "I think that's where I get my shoe fetish from," says Denise. In any event, "it was my father," says Denise, "who gave Marc the money to start his own business."

After she discovered her husband's girlfriend, Denise hung in for almost two years, hoping that if she ignored the mistress she would go away: "I fought so hard. But she was very aggressive, you know? It was sort of an Ivana kind of situation."

Denise first tried her hand at songwriting "as a way to communicate with" Marc Rich. "Like, when I would fight with him, I would get so emotional. Because he was all about business. And I was about, you know, feelings and love. I had a hard time putting my feelings into words. So I put them into songs."

It didn't exactly work. "I remember her telling me how she'd come up with these wonderful songs and lyrics," says Zarem, "and he would turn up the radio in the car to drown her out."

She soon discovered a more appreciative audience. By the late eighties, she already had a No. 1 hit, "Frankie," a song that came to her "in a dream on an airplane" after she visited her dying sister in 1984. Though it was one of the first songs she'd ever written, it was picked up and recorded by Sister Sledge and soon topped the international charts. ("Sister, see? There are no coincidences," says Denise, who has a tendency to divine deep spiritual significance from the most mundane events.) Her husband called it a fluke, "which really pissed me off."