“Perhaps inevitably, signs have pointed to a comeback for another eighties billionaire supervillain: Leona Helmsley. The hotel empress, whose iron-fisted management style earned her the nickname the Queen of Mean, grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of a hatmaker, and married the real-estate developer Harry B. Helmsley in 1972. In ad campaigns, she cast herself as the nitpicking monarch of the Helmsley Palace Hotel (‘It’s the only Palace in the world where the Queen stands guard’), while the tabloids fed on tales of her berating and firing employees for minor infractions. In 1988, after using company funds to renovate their Connecticut mansion, she and Harry were charged with income-tax evasion, and she served eighteen months in prison.

‘Queen of Mean: The Rise and Fall of Leona Helmsley’… aims to place its subject in the pantheon of great musical antiheroines, from Mama Rose to Eva Perón.”

– Michael Schulman, The New Yorker