Manhattan writer Suzanne Corso, 46, was once a card-carrying member of the 1 percent — until her financier husband lost their $100 million nest egg in the 2008 fiscal meltdown. Here, the mother of one, who has just published her third novel, “Hello, Hollywood,” tells The Post’s Jane Ridley her very New York story of survival.
My 6-year-old daughter doesn’t think twice about calling room service from our luxury residential hotel to order a $25 cheeseburger for herself.
It’s November 2005 and we’ve been living in an 11-room suite at the Ritz-Carlton on West Street for a little more than two years. And first-grader Samantha has developed quite the habit of ordering in.
Far from finding it cute, I’m appalled — I grew up on welfare in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, so the charm and appeal of the whole “Eloise at the Plaza” scenario is wasted on me as I consider that we might be raising a spoiled child.
How ironic, then, that just three years later that privileged lifestyle would come crashing down around our heads. My husband, Anthony, now 52, lost his entire fortune — more than $100 million — in the Wall Street financial crisis, leaving us wondering where our next rent check would come from.
Looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened. Hanging out with the uber-wealthy was dull and empty. If someone handed me $100 million today, I’d give it back in a heartbeat. Why? Because I’ve found the fulfillment I’ve craved since childhood.
I call meeting Anthony 19 years ago my “Cinderella story.” Born to a teenage mom, I was raised on food stamps. It was tough growing up in Bensonhurst and, when I was 16, my grandmother bought me a secondhand Smith Corona typewriter. Since I loved writing, she told me “to write myself out of this story.”
She was right to be concerned. A year earlier, I’d gotten involved with a mobster. We were together for eight years, during which he abused me, physically and emotionally, and forced me to leave high school (though I got my GED behind his back). My escape was to write about my life, stuffing the manuscript under my mattress.
When he finally went to jail in 1991 for manslaughter and weapons possession, my own prison sentence lifted.
Anthony couldn’t have been more different from my violent ex. I met him on March 7, 1996, when I was 28. I was working as a temp for Chemical Bank and was running along Exchange Place to get to the office. Some guy came over to me, patted me on the shoulder and said: “Excuse me, miss, I think you’re beautiful. Can I take you for dinner or brunch?”
“What’s brunch?” I replied. We didn’t do brunch in Bensonhurst.
At the time, Anthony, then 33, had just become a managing partner of a specialist firm on the New York Stock Exchange. Specialists were the middlemen between the brokers and the companies (who have since been replaced with algorithms). He made a lot of money.
Our first date was cocktails at the Top of the Tower in Midtown East, followed by front-row seats at “The Phantom of the Opera” and dinner at Le Cirque, with limos in between.
Six weeks later, on a vacation in Bermuda, he proposed. He didn’t have a ring, but he got on one knee with a $20,000 Rolex watch.
I’d never seen such an expensive watch before but, if I had, it was stolen off a truck. I immediately said yes. Anthony later bought me a proper engagement ring — a beautiful 5-carat emerald-cut diamond from Cartier.
I quit my job and moved into Anthony’s apartment in Tribeca. He said: “You wanna be a writer? So why be a temp?” I had all the intentions of writing books and had kept my manuscript from my teenage years in Brooklyn. But part of me was still scared of my ex-boyfriend in jail. Besides, I was too busy living the high life.
We went back to Bermuda for our $350,000 wedding in November.
The chairman of the NYSE was there, and Renee Graziano (later the star of Bravo’s “Mob Wives”) was my maid of honor, since we were raised together and look at each other as sisters.
After that, my life was one big party. We’d take private planes or yachts for trips abroad. There were exotic safaris and cruises. Our social life revolved around charity galas and Yankees games, where we had Legends seats behind home plate and sat with the likes of Lorraine Bracco (another good friend), Penny Marshall and Lorne Michaels.
In August 1999, the same year our daughter was born, my husband’s company went public. It brought him a massive windfall and he made a series of what we thought were smart investments. At one stage, we owned four homes: our so-called “minimansion” at the Ritz-Carlton, two houses in the Hamptons and one on the North Fork.
Our daughter went to a top Upper East Side prep school and we had a live-in nanny. We even had a twin-engine helicopter to fly us back and forth to the Hamptons.
By the mid-2000s, however, I was bored out of my mind. I’d produced some plays and a documentary, which Bracco narrated for me, but mostly I went shopping on Madison Avenue.
I loved getting dressed up in Dolce & Gabbana and Gucci, but I felt hollow inside. I’d be sitting at some charity event where the tables were $100,000 each, trying to relate to these women who could only talk about their kids’ schools and whether their husbands were cheating. I was an outsider, a Brooklyn girl at heart.
And then the financial crash of 2008 happened. Anthony would come home stressed every night. After a while, he said: “You know, we’re going to have to get rid of the helicopter.” We started to cut back — I took my clothes to consignment stores and sold one of my Birkin bags to settle one AmEx bill — but there was too much being leveraged. Anthony is a brilliant guy, but when you buy stock, and then all of a sudden it drops, what are you going to do?
I’ll never forget the morning Anthony said to me: “I’m sorry, Sue, but we have to sell your Rolex” — the one he’d proposed with.
But you know what? I happily handed it to him, because it was only a material thing.
In December 2008, Anthony told me that we’d lost everything — around $100 million, including his salary (his firm got whittled down and then sold) and investments. Although I was upset at first, I kept to my mantra: “Money doesn’t define you.”
The last straw was leaving the Ritz-Carlton and moving into the two-bedroom rental in Battery Park City, where we live now. There was a lot of strain and many arguments about how we could afford to pay the rent. Anthony fell into a depression. We had therapy, but all he would say was, “I’ve got to get back on my feet.”
Luckily, we’d helped a lot of people before, and some of them returned the favor when the bad times hit. As soon as the s–t hit the fan, a handful came out of the woodwork to help us, including paying for Samantha’s school. I love that school — the only thing I really cared about was Samantha having consistency in her education. Now, she’s a straight-A student.
As for me, the answer came a year later, shortly after my 41st birthday, when I dusted off that old manuscript about my days in Brooklyn. Getting it published had been in the back of my mind for years, but now I needed to make this book happen. So I knocked the novel into shape and sent it to 50 agents. They all hated it but one.
Called “Brooklyn Story,” a thinly veiled memoir of my romance with the mobster, the book sold to Simon & Schuster within a week. To my amazement, I was offered a six-figure deal. And, when the book hit the best-seller lists in 2010, they asked me to write a trilogy, culminating in my last novel, “Hello, Hollywood,” published last month.
Looking back, I can’t help thinking of my grandmother’s birthday gift of the Smith Corona. Her prediction came true: I wrote myself out of my own story. They haven’t all been easy, but the stages of my life have inspired my writing, and now support our lifestyle.
Anthony still dabbles in the financial markets and, between the two of us, we now make as much as he’d been making before the crash — after eight years of struggle, and with all our investments wiped out. And though our marriage may have been through a rocky patch, we’re taking things one day at a time.
I’ve kept a few tokens of our wealthier days — like my two Birkin bags — but otherwise I am happy to shop at places like Zara.
Our main priority is that Samantha has grown up, not as the girl who orders room service, but into a beautiful person who knows the value of family and love.
Yes, the greatest thing that ever happened to me was losing $100 million; I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know exactly who I am.
I’m a storyteller and a survivor.