State secret: Chelsea Clinton’s wedding plans
Monday, July 19th, 2010One weekend afternoon in April, Dan Bleen, the manager of Le Petit Bistro, an upscale French restaurant in New York, received a mysterious telephone call from the owner of Astor Courts, the centrepiece of a nearby 50-acre estate.
The caller wanted to make a reservation, she told him, “for some very special guests”.
The guests, it turned out, included Chelsea Clinton, the publicity-shy daughter of former president and the current secretary of state.
It seemed unremarkable at the time. But now, the dinner has become yet another morsel of evidence over the social event of the season: the impending marriage of Chelsea, 30, to Marc Mezvinsky, 32, an investment banker at 3G Capital Management and a son of two former Democratic members of Congress, one of whom served prison time for fraud.
The wedding, set for July 31, is so cloaked in secrecy that in Washington, where the mother of the bride holds down a day job running international diplomacy for President Obama, details are harder to ferret out than the president’s Afghanistan strategy. Even guests do not know the locale; invitations came with instructions to be within driving distance of Manhattan, plus a promise that specifics would be sent a week before the big day.
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