Jocelyne Wildenstein figured there might be trouble. Three days earlier, on August 31, her estranged husband, Alec, had faxed her a letter at their ranch in Kenya, Ol Jogi, where she had been living for several months. “It is impossible for me to let you come in at #11,” Alec wrote, alluding to their 14-room Manhattan town house on East 64th Street. “[I will] be entertaining at home this week.”

Jocelyne went anyway. Just before midnight on September 2, she arrived at the town house with her two bodyguards. What happened next depends on whom you ask.

Jocelyne says that when she and her assistant went upstairs to the couple’s bedroom Alec appeared at the door wearing only a towel. Once he saw her, Jocelyne says, Alec grabbed a loaded nine-mm. semi-automatic and aimed it at her—and continued to do so even after the bodyguards identified themselves. Jocelyne also says she “glimpsed” a naked blonde woman in the bedroom. Alec disagrees, insisting that Jocelyne was downstairs when he first saw the bodyguards, whom he mistook for burglars. Once he discov-ered who they were, Alec says, he quickly put the gun away.

In the end, Alec left the town house—in handcuffs—after one of Jocelyne’s bodyguards called the police. “I will see you are out on the streets!” Alec reportedly shouted as police led him away on charges of menacing. He spent 16 long hours in custody, some of it at Manhattan’s infamous Tombs, where cellmates had plenty to say about the jailbird wearing an Armani suit and a Legion d’Honneur lapel pin. “That day,” Alec says of Jocelyne, “I broke off all feeling for her.” It was also the day when the art world’s wealthiest, most secre-tive family became tabloid fodder. Alec and Jocelyne’s messy, very public divorce is seamy enough, with its charges of adultery, greed, and gunplay. Photographs of Jocelyne’s once delicate face, stretched freakishly tight by plastic surgery, have only heightened the scrutiny and ridicule. (New York’s Daily News dubbed her “The Bride of Wildenstein.”) Worse, the divorce has earned the wrath of family patriarch Daniel Wildenstein.

It was in 1977, while on safari with friends in Kenya, that Jocelyn fell in love with Alec, who was there to inspect his family’s 66,000-acre ranch. “A lion had to be killed at a neighbor’s ranch,” Alec recalls. “The night before, Jocelyne asked, ‘Could I go with you?’ I said, As long as you keep your mouth shut.’”

At dawn, they sat wordlessly, waiting for the big cat. Alec made his kill. On their first day together, they rode motorcycles to a hilltop and shared their first kiss. “It was quite intense,” Jocelyne recalls.

Jocelyne was a 31-year-old knockout—“an exciting woman,” if Alec says. She’d grown up in Lausanne, Switzerland, the daughter of a struggling department-store buyer. She’d moved to Paris before she was 20 and had already spent a decade exploring Africa. And she had a boyfriend: European filmmaker Sergio Gobbi, whom she’d been dating for five years.

Alec was also involved. Since 1965, he’d been living in Paris with Maria Kimberly, a Ford model who’d starred in Jacques Tati’s comedy Traffic. “That relationship stopped the moment I saw Jocelyne,” Alec says. They eloped to Las Vegas on April 30, 1978. Later they invited friends and family to a second ceremony in Lausanne. But Alec’s father, Daniel, was conspicuously missing. “He was against marriage in general,” says Alec.

More specifically, he was against Jocelyne. Daniel went as far as to urge Maria Kimberly to try to win his son back. “My father checks things out,” Alec says. “My father tried to warn me.”