Cassandra Grey Opens Up About Her Business, Losing Her Husband, and Finding Samantha Ronson
A writer reached out to me recently, wanting to write a TV show about my life,” Cassandra Huysentruyt Grey says over blueberry pancakes at the Sunset Tower Bar, the famed canteen on L.A.’s Sunset Strip, which often serves as her office these days. “But I don’t know which part she’s interested in.”
Where to start? There’s her atypical childhood: Grey was born in San Francisco 41 years ago to hippie parents and by 12 had lived in a teepee on an Oregon reservation and in a Quaker community in the Smoky Mountains. But it’s the past two years of Grey’s life that have seen enough heartache and high drama to fuel several seasons of a hit series.
A gamine beauty with a pixie haircut and penetrating brown eyes, Grey has been an object of rumor and fascination since she landed with a splash in Hollywood a decade ago, as girlfriend and then wife of Brad Grey, the former Paramount chairman and CEO who succumbed to cancer at 59 two years ago.
Cassandra has found love again, with a twist: Her current significant other is Samantha Ronson, the 41-year-old DJ/musician best known as the sister of recent Oscar winner Mark Ronson. Grey’s life is no TV show, though-not yet, anyway-and real life doesn’t come with a pause button. So, bundled up on a nippy L.A. morning in a vintage Deer Valley ski hoodie and beige cashmere coat, she is more determined than ever to emerge from the fog of grief and return to the ambitious fast lane she relished being in before her husband’s death.
In any case, her schedule affords her little time for despair. When she isn’t chasing after three-year-old Jules Andrew, her son with Brad, Grey is furiously trying to close a new round of funding for Violet Grey, the beauty company she founded in 2013. She likens her online portal to “the Rotten Tomatoes of beauty,” a slick digital destination combining star-driven editorial with a cosmetics store that stocks products that meet the “Violet Code” stamp of approval.
“It’s one-stop luxury product shopping for pros and civilians alike,” says makeup stylist Erin Ayanian Monroe, who shops the site before crafting red carpet looks for the likes of Elle Fanning and Pink.
Another fan is January Jones, who met Grey at a “girls dinner” attended by Shelli Azoff (wife of former Live Nation chairman Irving Azoff), Karyn Silver (wife of movie producer Joel Silver), and Eva Mendes (movie star and mom to Ryan Gosling’s two daughters). Jones and Grey instantly clicked.
“Cassandra is very dry, and how I imagine an old madame would have been-in the most glamorous sense,” the Mad Men star writes in an e-mail. “Just fabulous, smart, sexy, and cleverly business-savvy, which is key in this town if you want to survive and succeed.”
The surviving part Grey seems to have down; succeeding is another story. Beauty is a tough market, and maintaining Violet Grey’s buzz is an evolving challenge, though the company claims to have doubled its revenue year over year in 2018, to more than $10 million.
Realizing that she is now competing with the Goops of the world, in 2017 Grey hired as CEO April Uchitel, who helped build Diane von Furstenberg’s DVF into a $300 million brand. One recent development is the introduction of supplements to the platform, say in April, gushing in an Instagram post about the concentration aid Nootro-Focus: "I am not a “wellness” supplement person, but I am now."
A fighter, Grey approaches business as one big battlefield. “You’re just in a war zone,” Grey says of the cutthroat world of retail. “It’s all about survival, and the stakes feel extremely high. The idea of failing is just like death.”
That last word comes up repeatedly in a three-hour conversation. It’s a topic with which Grey has had far too much experience. Growing up, she lost both her best friend and her younger brother. Those were difficult experiences, but Brad’s death was much, much harder. “I thought, There’s no way I’m going to be able to get through this,” she recalls. “I was inconsolable. I went into shock. Your whole body just shuts down.”
She and Brad met in 2006 at Chateau Marmont, at a dinner party thrown by a mutual friend, Jim Berkus, the co-founder of the talent agency UTA. She was a New Yorker then, living in a tiny West Village walkup and doing brand marketing for companies like Dom Perignon. Brad was separated but not yet divorced from his first wife; Cassandra had a “pretty serious” boyfriend. Nevertheless, sparks flew.
“I think it was love at first sight for Brad,” she says. Not that there wasn’t an abundance of red flags. “He was 20 years older than me, he had three children, plus he was a powerful guy in Hollywood.” (Plus, you know, she had that boyfriend.) Brad eventually wore Cassandra down and convinced her to join him at a swanky event in New York. For their third date he flew her to Paris. “I guess he thought people fall in love there,” she muses.
A few weeks later, Cassandra tattooed her new boyfriend’s initials on her left hand, and soon she moved to L.A. full-time. They went public with their love in 2008, marrying three years later in a ceremony attended by Jack Nicholson and Brad Pitt.
Running a Hollywood studio means year-round social commitments-red carpet premieres, A-list parties, yachts in the Mediterranean-and Cassandra dove head first into La Dolce Vita. She charmed and impressed at every turn, inhaling everything she observed. One day, she thought, she would be able to funnel all that glamour and star power into her own company, which at that point was just a business proposal.
There were missteps. A 2012 Italian Vogue profile with an accompanying video, “The Princess of Bel-Air,” made Grey look more spoiled than savvy, and it elicited snickers all over town. (The video has since disappeared from the internet.) It was a humbling experience, but one she moved past. Those first five years were by and large pure bliss.
“It was like teenage love-a carefree, no-problems kind of relationship,” she says.
Then came Brad’s devastating diagnosis: fourth-stage metastatic lung cancer. “It turned into a different kind of love after that,” Grey says. “The love you feel for somebody who is dying is very specific. Cancer is dark. And he really wanted to be private, so he didn’t talk about it much. I didn’t talk about it with anybody.”
Her coping strategy was to remain almost irrationally positive. And for a while it seemed to be working; Brad, also an optimist who loathed self-pity, lived another five years. But in the last months of his life, he found himself locked in a struggle with his corporate bosses at Viacom over $180 million in losses and a string of box office bombs.
On February 17, 2017, after 12 years in charge, he was ousted; his health deteriorated, and he died just three months later. “I really didn’t think he would die until 12 hours before it happened,” Grey recalls.
Brad’s final moments were spent surrounded by family members at the couple’s newly built Holmby Hills estate-a 14,000-square-foot dream home designed by Napa Valley architect Howard Backen. (Brad oversaw the architecture; Cassandra decorated the interiors.)
She spent a year living there with Jules, but ultimately she started to feel dwarfed by the cavernous space, which reminded her at every turn of her late husband. So she put it up for sale-it sold for $70 million, one of the priciest transactions ever in the elite neighborhood-and moved to “a little Neutra house” in Nichols Canyon, a winding enclave in the Hollywood Hills. She shares the two-bedroom home with little Jules and Ronson, who moved in last April.
The two women first met six years ago, and Grey was smitten. “I even told Brad about it. He was like, ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t hang out with her.’” Fast-forward to November 2017, six months after Brad’s death. Feeling depressed, Grey turned for advice to her famous analyst-Phil Stultz, best-selling author of The Tools and Brad’s former therapist-who suggested she “leave the house, get up and go places, talk to people.”
Everyday is Valentine’s Day with Samantha
A post shared by cassandra huysentruyt grey (@cassandragrey) on Feb 14, 2019 at 9:46pm PST
So Grey attended a friend’s Make-a-Wish Foundation gala at which Ronson was DJing, and she did not stray from the DJ booth all night. “The conversation was very familiar, very fast, and I felt very comfortable,” she says.
Grey rejects labels like straight, gay, or bisexual. Whatever she is, she says her feelings for Ronson are ones she has never before felt for a woman. The two are the same age, which helped. Both are sober, so they bonded over that. In the first three weeks of reconnecting, they met for dinner so many times they lost count. “Samantha took me and Jules to Disneyland because she loves Disneyland,” Grey says. “And then one day I was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to be together.’ And then we were together.”
Snapshots of their love affair are beamed out regularly to Grey’s 130,000 Instagram followers. “I used to joke with Brad that if he ever left me-not like death, but if he left me for somebody else-I would just go in a completely different direction,” Grey says.
For her, last and always is Jules Andrew Grey. “He’s so much like Brad that it’s like Brad’s just here,” she says.
She pauses, then reflects on her late husband. “I’ve felt him and communicated with him and really feel like he is not gone,” she says. Then she closes her eyes and acknowledges the warmth of a sliver of sunlight running diagonally across her face.
This story appears in the May 2019 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Now
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