have been rich, really rich, unimaginably rich, people would say 'filthy rich', for three times that long. We aren’t famous in a tacky new money entertainment way, though our last name is a household word in a very literal sense, but people don’t, or I should say didn’t, recognize us as individuals until I made us famous.
There is almost no one alive who hasn’t added to my family’s money. If there is a headache, or depression or a surgery going on anywhere in the world, then it’s a good bet that a Kelleher Pharmaceutical is being used to make someone feel better, or to make someone unconscious, which is usually the same thing.
The genius of my great-great grandfather is that he understood even before people did themselves that they were going to need pharmaceuticals to help them get through their lives. My family’s drugs do that and the money rolled in like water down a fall, creating an American dynasty built on human pain. All-in-all that is a pretty fair analogy for my life story.
My father, Kells, is the direct descendant of the first John Kelleher, also called Kells. There is always only one Kells Kelleher and, like a king in the old storybooks, all gifts and punishments rain down from the current Kells.
My cousins are descended from another Kelleher, David Kelleher. He was a wild man even by standards in my family, and that is saying something. When he was in his eighties, he married a twenty year old non-English-speaking Latino maid and left her nearly all of his three billion dollar fortune. His heirs have since been forced to live out their lives on the remainders of their trusts. Even the richest amongst them is only worth seven hundred million or so to this day. We call them the poor relations. It’s a little inside family joke but really I think they agree with it, as do those of us on the Kells Kelleher side.
In my family money is no laughing matter.
Since my father is a direct line Kells, we are all much richer or will be, or might be, as Daddy, the ruling Kells, decides. My father’s net worth, his personal fortune, is estimated at a conservative fifty billion dollars.
That is just cash and holdings because he still retains a third of the publicly held stock of Kelleher Pharmaceuticals, and as long as people remain in pain, the money will never stop. Most people don't think about families like mine. When they think about money, they think of the Sultan of Brunei or Bill Gates, even Donald Trump. But they forget that every time they pop a pill, or pump their gas, or eat a bowl of cereal, that some living person somewhere must have invented it and that daily, all across the world, all the people using these ordinary things are giving more money to families like mine.
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I was born at our family’s Palm Beach compound. It’s called Kelleher’s Rest. In the family we just refer to it as 'The Rest'.
The main house all fifty thousand feet of it, sits perched upon a man-made hill looking out over the ocean, surrounded by one mile of private fenced and patrolled grounds. When I was really little, I thought my father also owned the ocean which is not as wild as it sounds because he does own most of the beach and you can't have an ocean without a beach, just like you can’t have envy if there is no one better off than you. My father, who had graduated from Brown University a few years before with a useless degree in Art History, met my beautiful mother at a party in SoHo. At the time he decided to marry her, he believed that they would be happiest living at The Rest, where he could indulge his passion for painting bad seascapes that he never allowed anyone to see. It was assumed, with so many pleasures available to her, that my mother would develop passions of her own to fill her days until she gave birth to the next Kells, at which time she would become a devoted mother by carefully overseeing the selection of staff and furnishings for the nursery.
At the time my mother, Ellen, married my father, Kells, she was a successful model for Dior and her passions, if she had any, probably revolved around clothes and nightclubs. But once a Kelleher, she adapted with lightning speed to Daddy’s life and became an accomplished