Question Celebrity

I'm transfixed by the tragic yet somehow comic tableau of billionaire casino mogul and hotelier Steve Wynn accidentally punching a small hole in one of his Picasso paintings several weeks ago while showing it off to a roomful of important guests, including Barbara Walters and Nora Ephron. "Le Rêve" is (er, was) valued at $139 million. While boasting to his guests how he had just sold it to a hedge-fund investor, Wynn, who has lost some of his sight to an eye disease, gestured with his arm and somehow put his elbow into the work and punched a hole in the center of the canvas. About 10 days later, accounts of the incident showed up in the New York Post and the New Yorker magazine; in one version, Wynn immediately asked his guests not to blab about it until he'd had time to mull over exactly what sort of damage he'd done.

"I can't believe I just did that," Wynn is alleged to have said, according to Ephron, who told it to the New Yorker only after it had been on Page Six, and she figured that the secret was out and meant to be shared -- savored, even. "This has nothing to do with money," Wynn reportedly said as soon as the damage was done. "The money means nothing to me."

Now, who among us has not dropped, broken or lost that on which we had spent a lot of money? It's horrible enough to mar one of your personal treasures in private, but to do so in front of company is worse, for you lose not only the perfection of an object but the ability to immediately amend the facts of how it happened.

There are witnesses.

Wynn did his damage in front of two people (Walters and Ephron) who've built their careers around newsy chitchat and high-altitude whispering. Hence his immediate request: Don't speak of it until I've had time to figure it all out. Value and social stratosphere already place this tale of woe far above the time you or I spilled wine on a new rug. The immediate worry about publicity, media and gossip only amplifies the neuroses that come with being that rich, that famous and that fretful about the market price of your own humiliation. But let's spin it happy: This sort of art history footnote could even enhance the value of a repaired "Le Rêve." Its next owner will acquire a tale of foible, of hubris, of monumental oopsy -- all those missteps we long to see the very rich take.

E-mail: celebrity@washpost.com