It's been almost eleven months since the Metropolitan Museum named Thomas Campbell, a British tapestries expert, its new director. Since then, he's given only a few interviews, none of them particularly revealing of either his personality (shy but graceful) or his plans for the museum (spend less, update the web...

"If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?"

That's never been said to me, but I've read it more than once in the faces of the rich-and-famous types who populate my journalistic "beat." What follows often proves a different dictum, expressed through a variant of the question first...

On Thursday morning, Charlene Marshall was sobbing, her eyes bloodshot and bright red when she walked into Supreme Court in Manhattan where her husband Anthony is on trial, charged with manipulating his Alzheimer's Disease-stricken mother, the philanthropist and socialite Brooke Astor, into changing her will in his favor, plundering her...