Hofmann with his Yorkie, Nicholas, circa 1982.   (Photo: Courtesy of Arie David)

Already wealthy when the war began, Hofmann parlayed his family’s money into a vast fortune after it ended. He sold wheat to China and built airplanes and ran a bank and invested in tanks. At one point, he owned 75 percent of Bolivia’s sovereign debt, he told friends. Most of Hofmann’s tales hint at underworld connections. “You ever hear the stories of the nuclear submarines being sold from Argentina to Taiwan?” one of his oldest friends asked me.

Hofmann’s central trait, according to his friends, was his sympathy for the lonely, the tragic. Or even for mere symbols of solitude: One of the first things his will provides for is a pine tree he kept in his apartment for over 35 years. “Every day when he left the apartment, he kissed the tree,” says Genevieve. “He loved that tree.”

Hofmann also cared deeply for tragic women, particularly young, beautiful ones. His first wife, Anita, suffered from depression before dying young, in the early fifties. A girlfriend named Nancy worked as a model and performed in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1957; she’s now buried near Hofmann’s parents. To another girlfriend, Elsa, Hofmann sent more than $100,000 a year until she died, alone, in 2000 in the Paris apartment he provided for her.

And then there was Genevieve.

The hosts at the Soho party were designers, and the guests stylists, models, and French expats—Genevieve’s usual crowd. She arrived fashionably late, around nine o’clock, wearing pants and a jacket. “But not jeans!” she says. “I was chic.”

Hofmann, five foot six, his receding hair closely cropped, arrived around 9:30, impeccably dressed, with Nancy on his arm. Genevieve was standing in a circle with some other French models when Hofmann—three decades older and six inches shorter than most everyone in the group—stepped up to the cadre of hotties, and introduced himself.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Hofmann,” he said in French, “and I’m living in New York.”

Genevieve considered it a bold move and let out a giggle. “We were all laughing because we were all young and he came over just like that,” she recalls. The group chatted for a while before Hofmann turned to Genevieve and handed her his card.

“I’m leaving soon for Geneva,” he told her. “When you come back to Paris, call me.” Three months later, she moved into his suite at Geneva’s Hôtel du Rhône.

A central issue in the fight over the validity of Genevieve and Hofmann’s marriage is the question of just how tight they were in the seventies. If Hofmann didn’t love Genevieve, then, the theory goes, he certainly didn’t love her when she wheeled him down to City Hall half-demented 30 years later to get hitched. Genevieve claims she lived with Hofmann, as veritable husband and wife, until 1978. David contends that Genevieve was one of Hofmann’s many girlfriends, not even a favorite. Hofmann, he says, preferred Genevieve’s younger sister, Evelyne, whom he dated off and on in the seventies and eighties.

As evidence of their relationship, Genevieve points to her passport for the years 1972 to 1977. The passport bears 124 stamps from Paris, New York, Geneva, Rome, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, Santo Domingo, Buenos Aires, Panama City, Lisbon, Morocco, Acapulco, Aruba, Athens, São Paulo, Jamaica, and points in between. Each city has its own story of their life together.

Genevieve hurried Hofmann out of his pajamas into a suit, packed his essentials into two Gucci suitcases, and wheeled him down to the taxi.

From Buenos Aires, where Hofmann maintained an apartment, he flew them in his personal plane to ski at Bariloche, swim at Punta del Este, and visit his late brother’s wife, Paulette, at her campo near Santa Fe, Argentina. Hofmann introduced Genevieve to heads of state. In 1973, when Juan Perón was celebrating his return from exile, Genevieve stood just feet away from him on the balcony of the Casa Rosada. She met Manuel Noriega when Hofmann flew to Panama to discuss building a new, alternative canal. “He was a little bit fat,” she remembers. “The skin was not nice.”

Genevieve and Hofmann dined out every night. In New York, that meant French standards—La Goulue, La Caravelle, Plaza Athénée—or, of course, the ‘21’ Club. Hofmann disdained public displays of affection, except in restaurants. He called her “Pupi,” she called him “Beto.”

“He was like my father, who died when I was 15. He was like my best friend,” she says. “Maybe I wanted to find another father.”

Eight years after the loft party, Genevieve left Hofmann because, she says, he could not father children. She had two kids with a man named Patrick Spalter, though they never married and little changed between her and Hofmann, she says—later passports show more trips to their old haunts. In 1991, with financial assistance from the then-84-year-old Hofmann—a $6,000-per-month allowance—she left Spalter. She saw Hofmann frequently over the next six years, sometimes romantically, sometimes not. On March 25, 1997, Hofmann’s 90th birthday, Hofmann asked her to move to New York, Genevieve says. They slept in the same bed until May 1999, when Hofmann’s health, and mind, began to fail.