Welcome back to Dry Powder. I’m Bill Cohan.

When I wrote a piece in August 2020 about billionaire Ronald Perelman’s massive deaccessioning—Ronald’s fortune has dwindled from around $20 billion in 2018 to something like $1 billion today—he gave me a rare statement in which he said that he wanted a “simpler life.” Is it possible that a terrifying health incident, which I discovered took place in the late aughts, was behind the shift to his present, Zen-like mind state? More on that, below.

But first, some news and notes from my partner, Marion Maneker, who is over in London covering the finicky art market. As always, sign up for Marion’s brilliant private email, Wall Power, by clicking here…

• Dorothée Lalanne’s second sale of her father’s work totals $59 million: As we discussed a few weeks ago, one of Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne’s four daughters and heirs, Dorothée, decided to hold her second sale of work from her late parents’ estate. Since Claude’s death in 2019, there have been several sales of both Lalannes’ works—they were creative partners but rarely collaborated on individual pieces—but every time there’s a new sale, it seems to excite more interest in the market rather than satisfy demand. The 100 percent sold, 70-lot auction held at Christie’s on Thursday was no exception.

  The Lalanne heirs have the luxury of being able to set estimates well below the market price for their parents’ work. This second sale by Dorothée used that strategy to get 97 percent of the lots sold above the high estimates, leading Lalanne dealer Ben Brown to quip that he was “obviously delighted” when people bid more at auction for things available directly from the gallery for less. Nevertheless, there were several stone sheep in the sale, a bellwether for the Lalanne market, which all sold for around $500,000, or a price consistent with the Lalannes’ private market.

• There’s always a bull market somewhere: The success of the Lalanne sale is a good reminder that, for all of the perseverating about the health of the art market one heard at Frieze, it only takes a few good sales to ignite a new phase of buying. Indeed, private sales at the auction houses show no sign of slackening. Alex Branczik, who heads modern and contemporary art for Europe at Sotheby’s, told me that the auction house’s private sales are on track to post a record number. That validates some of the things I’ve been hearing from dealers recently about how the current art market recession is really an auction supply recession.

  Talk of a supply recession reminded me of a conversation I had earlier this year with Mitchell Zuckerman, the man who invented Sotheby’s Financial Services and used to run the auction house’s guarantee book. In the spring, I had suggested to Zuckerman that there was a chance we were seeing a secular shift away from art collecting. His response was that these market downturns always feel like a secular shift. Remember: Zuckerman was in the thick of it through the big daddy of downturns in the 1990s. So I took note when he said, “The market always recovered because what we are actually witnessing is a reduction in supply, not demand.” And I was thinking of that conversation as I traipsed across the Cotswolds footpaths yesterday.

  As luck would have it, Zuckerman was also reminded of the same conversation when he read about the results of the Lalanne sale on Thursday. In an email, Zuckerman suggested that the Lalanne sale was the kind of event that shows “a strong result for a quality consignment” that “inspires other potential sellers to place rare, fresh, and attractive property in sales.” His point was that these supply shocks don’t last forever—even if it sometimes feels as though they might.

  So far, the success of the Lalanne sales have not translated into the broader art market, perhaps because the work of Les Lalannes straddles the fence between sculpture and design. But setting that aside, let’s give Zuckerman the last word on the matter. Remember, the last market cycle actually ended in 2015, and the market has mostly traded sideways in terms of volume and price level since then, excepting the post-pandemic blip two years ago. “In my 50 years,” Zuckerman wrote, “the cycle has consistently been an 8-10 year pattern.” —Marion Maneker

Now, to the main event…

A few years ago, I spoke with one of Ronald’s close friends who told me that he had had “some health issues over the last decade” but that he was also “one of the greatest non-complainers I have ever met,” despite his medical issues. “I mean, I fill out a living will when I go to the dentist. Not once have I heard him complain about anything. Ever. I admire that.” He elaborated that Ronald has had both “a foot problem” and “a back problem,” but through it all he’s managed to retain his sense of humor and “a really interesting mind.”

After my piece about him on October 2, I got a call from Eric Rose, a celebrated cardiothoracic surgeon at two of New York’s most prestigious hospitals: Mount Sinai and what is now Columbia Presbyterian. Rose was the first doctor, in 1984, to perform a successful pediatric heart transplant, at New York Presbyterian Hospital. In October 1996, Rose, along with Mehmet Oz, led the successful heart transplant for Frank Torre, the brother of New York Yankees then-manager Joe Torre. He was the chair of surgery for 15 years at Columbia Presbyterian.

Rose was friends with Donald Drapkin, a key member of Ronald’s inner circle for 20 years before the two men had a falling-out. Rose and Drapkin would bike together in and around Alpine, New Jersey, when Drapkin lived there and Rose lived in Tenafly. They went on rafting trips in West Virginia and went skiing together. (Drapkin died in a skiing accident in Aspen, in February 2016. He was 67.)

Circa 2000, Drapkin asked Rose to look at Siga Technologies, a biotech company in which Ronald has a $165 million stake. (As I reported last week, Ronald still owns 34 percent of the company, which has developed an oral treatment for smallpox and also a leading treatment for monkeypox.) He was especially impressed by Siga’s chief scientist, Dennis Hruby, who Rose said knew more about smallpox than any other person on the planet. In any event, soon thereafter, in April 2001, Ronald put Rose on the Siga board of directors. He was elected chairman in January 2007.

Two months later, Ronald decided to make Rose the C.E.O. of Siga to see if he and Hruby could work together to create a drug for smallpox, to replace the vaccine that many Americans of a certain age (myself included) received when they were growing up. Rose served as the C.E.O. of Siga between March 2007 and October 2018. During that time, Siga was successful in developing the smallpox drug, the biggest customer for which is the U.S. federal government, which has stockpiled some $1 billion worth, even though smallpox has been pretty much eradicated.

About three weeks into his tenure as Siga C.E.O., Rose told me, he got an urgent call from Ronald’s people to go immediately to the Hospital for Special Surgery, on East 70th Street. “Ronald’s there,” he was told, “and they need you immediately.” Rose told me he was “wondering what the hell was going on” because Ronald was “in pretty good shape” then. He had been in the hospital for treatment of a herniated disk, probably caused, Rose thought, “by working out too much.”

The doctor at HSS, whom Rose described as “the pain doctor to the stars,” had injected a pain-relief shot of some kind into Ronald’s spinal cord that probably went into a blood vessel by mistake. The injection caused a spinal cord infarction, a rare but serious neurological condition that occurs when the blood flow to the spinal cord is interrupted. Ronald was rendered paraplegic, his legs paralyzed, Rose said, “and he stayed that way for months.” (A source close to Ronald confirmed this story is “true and accurate.”)

It was kept very quiet. Rose remembered going to see Ronald in the hospital one morning, three days or so after the incident. “I still hadn’t broken the habit of a cardiac surgeon,” Rose said. He walked into Ronald’s room and there, lying next to him in the hospital bed, was Anna Chapman, his girlfriend of two years at that point. “She was great,” Rose said. (She and Ronald married three years later, in October 2010. They have two children together.)

In a final ironic twist, around 2011, Rose’s back started hurting something fierce. It turned out he had multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that affects plasma cells. After he was diagnosed, Ronald asked him to come to his office. “Look, I know this is going to take a while,” Ronald told him. “Do whatever you need to do. Don’t worry about work, and we’ll get you through this.”

He lent Rose the use of his private jet to get his chemotherapy treatments, which included the drug Velcade. Unfortunately, Rose developed “peripheral neuropathy,” one of the side effects of Velcade, which rendered him paraplegic. And while the Velcade “arguably cured me,” Rose said—he’s been cancer free for 13 years—it took him eight months before he could walk again.

Around 2018, Rose said Ronald “retired” him from the C.E.O. job at Siga— “He thought he needed a businessman running it”—and Rose was named executive chairman of the Siga board. In 2020, Ronald fired him from that position, essentially because he didn’t like the fact that Rose had been talking to Siga’s second-largest shareholder, John Latané Lewis IV, who owns 7.4 percent of the company. Rose said he went to visit with Ronald about two months ago, at his apartment on East 62nd Street, above the restaurant Fleming by Le Bilboquet, of which Ronald is a co-owner. Siga’s offices are in the same building. “He was friendly,” Rose said.

And, of course, in the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, one of the people who replaced Rose in a senior role at Siga was Dr. Jay Varma, who was Siga’s executive vice president and chief medical officer. During the Covid pandemic, Varma was New York City’s Covid czar, working closely with then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. In September, Varma admitted that during the height of Covid, when he was warning New Yorkers to isolate themselves from others to prevent the spread of the virus, he’d attended a dance party and two sex parties, one of which he hosted with his wife. On September 24, Siga fired Varma.

When I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair in August 2020 about Ronald’s massive deaccessioning, he gave me a rare statement in which he said he wanted a “simpler life.” We now know that all that selling was prompted by his banks putting the squeeze on him to get paid back. But after the health trauma he experienced back in the day, a simpler life doesn’t sound all that bad.