When Your Friends Throw You a Fake Funeral

Haden-Guest “laid to rest.” Photo: Stefano Giovannini

On a Sunday in May, the 86-year-old art-world raconteur and man-about-town Anthony Haden-Guest (he’s said to be the inspiration for Peter Fallow in The Bonfire of the Vanities) arrived at his friend Libbie Mugrabi’s Upper East Side mansion for his own funeral. The idea was hatched by Mugrabi — the ex-wife of billionaire David Mugrabi — who made headlines last year for having allegedly threatened her former housekeeper with a knife and mop handle (Mugrabi denies this). In recent years, Mugrabi has become Haden-Guest’s friend and sort-of patron, encouraging him to work on his art and commissioning pieces from him. The two hit it off when she threw a much-criticized 50-person dinner party in Miami in December 2020, during the height of COVID. “For some reason, I think too much wine,” Haden-Guest says, “we both climbed up onto a Damien Hirst unicorn sculpture in a hotel.”

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Haden-Guest had told Mugrabi he wanted to have a dry run of his funeral one day, an “extinction party,” and when Mugrabi offhandedly mentioned that fact this past spring to a reporter from the Daily Mail, Joanna Bell, she pounced on it: “I told Libbie, ‘We’d love to cover that.’” Which set Mugrabi in action. She quickly hired the publicist R. Couri Hay to organize, sent out VIP invites (Haden-Guest’s half-brother Christopher Guest and sister-in-law Jamie Lee Curtis could not attend, nor could Anna Wintour), and locked in a date for that Sunday. That Saturday, however, neither Mugrabi nor Bell could get in touch with the guest of honor. “We were saying, ‘Oh my God, I hope he hasn’t died before his funeral,’” Bell says. Finally, they got ahold of him. “We were pretty sure he was drunk somewhere dozing on a friend’s sofa; he does tend to go hard even in his tender years,” she adds. (Haden-Guest remembers it differently: “Maybe I lost my telephone.”) He showed up, not fully understanding what he had stepped into. “I was the central figure there,” he recalls, “very much in the sense that turkey is a central presence at Thanksgiving.”

They had him lie down on one of Mugrabi’s massage tables, which they had covered with a sheet, and Hay put pennies on his eyes. Bell surrounded him with pink roses, and they rolled him onto the terrace. Mugrabi had ordered $10,000 worth of Cristal and some sandwiches. “Then I was raised from the dead and enjoyed the party,” Haden-Guest says. The guests — a motley group that included the fashion designer Frederick Anderson and various members of the rap collective Dipset — stood around and posed for the Daily Mail photographer. “These weren’t my enemies,” Haden-Guest says. “But also not people I knew very well. But the whole thing was very amusing, very diverting.” Mugrabi, recalling the bizarre afternoon, says, “I’m telling you: It was a moment.” The article ran the next day. Many didn’t seem to register that the funeral wasn’t real. “I’d run into people,” Haden-Guest says, “and some of them seemed rather offended to discover I was still alive.”