Page 5 The Talented Mr. Epstein; Lately, Jeffrey Epstein's high-ying style has been drawing oohs and aahs: the bachelor nancier lives in New York's largest private residence, claims to take only billionaires as clients, and ies celebrities including Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey on his Boeing 727. But pierce his air of mystery and the picture changes. VICKY WARD explores Epstein's investment career, his ties to retail magnate Leslie Wexner, and his complicated past Vanity Fair March 2003 Epstein is charming, but he doesn't let the charm slip into his eyes. They are steely and calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. "Let's play chess," he said to me, after refusing to give an interview for this article. "You be white. You get the first move." It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York's moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole. "He's very enigmatic," says Rosa Monckton, the former C.E.O. of Tiffany & Co. in the U.K. and a close friend since the early 1980s. "You think you know him and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin and there's something else extraordinary underneath. He never reveals his hand... He's a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get." Even acquaintances sense a curious dichotomy: Yes, he lives like a "modern maharaja," as Leah Kleman, one of his art dealers, puts it. Yet he is fastidiously, almost obsessively private-he lists himself in the phone book under a pseudonym. He rarely attends society gatherings or weddings or funerals; he considers eating in restaurants like "eating on the subway"-i.e., something he'd never do. There are many women in his