But he also spent $10 million in cancer research grants (a fraction of his phenomenal wealth) and was a long-time patron of the arts (although not even in that capacity did his actions prove uncontroversial – he rescinded his vast collection donation to the LA County Art Museum after it refused to comply with his demands that the names of other donors who gave money for galleries where his paintings would be displayed be stripped from the spaces and that life-sized portraits of Hammer and his wife be permanently displayed with his art collection.).
Casey describes a childhood spent craving the affection of this distant, detached nucleus of family wealth and power. “My grandfather basically controlled the family, it was like a chessboard, and he made all the moves” she said last week on the Juicy Scoop podcast. When the family drove over to his LA mansion for Sunday brunch, they would arrive early and then sit and wait in the car, not daring to ring the doorbell until the exact time they were expected.
At one point, the young Casey worries that if she didn’t address him as a “grandpa”, he would have no idea who she was. “I started watching Succession and I had to shut it off because it was triggering” she told Juicy Scoop. She is long estranged from her brother Michael and regrets having no relationship with his sons.
At one point in the Juicy Scoop podcast, Casey thinks about Armie and his younger brother Viktor. “I wanted to get to know my nephews. They had grown up so fast, and I always wondered what they thought happened to me and why I wasn’t in their lives.” But in the end, she decides not to make contact. She says she hasn’t spoken to him for 13 years, since her mother died.
We know that Armie still has a close relationship with his father – in an interview with GQ in September, the actor disclosed that he had spent the first half of 2020 in lockdown at Michael’s house in the Cayman Islands, with his new wife, and Armie’s own family (including now ex-wife Elizabeth Chambers, whom he was in the process of separating from at the time). Casey, who now works as an interior designer, describes MIchael as “the kind of person that you enjoyed being around’.