Birthday gift for 6 year old girl

The boy is a billionaire. A Hollywood mogul. A Vegas tycoon. A visionary, a shark, a philanthropist, a gambler. Of the world's rich, he ranks 44th. [paragraph] The girl is a millionaire. A tennis prodigy. A white-skirted starlet, leggy and blond enough to be the Anna Kournikova of her day. She, too, once earned a world ranking, 7th on the Virginia Slims tour.

He likes her sport, its tug-of-war of grace and power, etiquette and combat. The game of love, it is called. His own personality is not so different; he can be unfailingly chivalrous and disarming modest--an old-school gentleman--yet sly and pitiless when it comes to expanding his fortune. She craves the attention his money commands, cherishes the licence it grants even more than the materials comfort it affords. On the pro circuit she was a "Superkid," as World tennis magazine dubbed her--mobbed by autograph hounds, showered with stuffed animals, celebrated in posters, murals, TV specials, and endorsements--yet as soon as she hung up her racket, she found herself falling out of play

The boy's name is Kirk. The gift's is Lisa. Kerkorian and Bonder. The majority MGM shareholder and the former L.A. Strings headliner. He is 85. She is 36.

For a good part of the 1990S they enjoyed the sort of affair that tends to inspire either envy or derision: a sugar daddy and his trophy a gold digger and her catch, their liaison a testament to passion and cynicism, lechery and luck. If nothing else, both partners proved they were still very much in the game. Their courtship had no spending limit. Their travels knew no bounds. Because the suitor believed he was sterile, their intimacies required no contraception. It may not have been typical of Los Angeles relationships, but it did conform to a certain Los Angeles archetype, of love at the peak of luxury, a myth spun by the entertainment industry and shredded by the tabloids. L'amore 90210. There were days of mixed doubles at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club; nightly dinners at Spago, the Polo Lounge, the Palm, Mr Chow; a customized Boeing 737 on call at the Van Nuys Airport; a 193-foot luxury yacht moored in the south of France; house accounts at Breakers in Palm Beach, the Pierre in New York, the Four Seasons in Maui; a weekend retreat on the eighth hole of the Las Vegas Country Club; and, always, a gated Benedict Canyon estate to return to, staffed by security guards, chefs, maids, gardeners, and a houseman. "Kirk never expressed any concern about how much money we, he, or I spent--it was just never an issue or a subject of discussion between us," Lisa would later declare, an assertion that, if true, would make them unlike the 99 percent of other couples, for whom the cost of stuff is forever an issue. "If something was wanted, it was acquired. If something was to be done, it was done."

In 1998, seven years after boy met girl, Lisa and Kirk had a baby--a surprise, to be sure, but one they both embraced. The following year they married. The union lasted 28 days.

It is hard to say whether money freed Kirk and Lisa to live as a storybook couple or merely left them ungrounded. But there is no question that money has turned their divorce into a spectator sport, one of the tawdriest and most fiercely contested splits ever to land in a Los Angeles courtroom. Lisa's demand for $320,000 a month in child support--which would be the largest such award in the history of American jurisprudence--already has made headlines and been made the butt of punch lines. The sum includes $14,083 a month for her daughter's birthday and holiday parties, $6,850 for a team of round-the-clock nannies, $5,920 for dining out, $3,388 for lessons (tennis, ballet, horseback, French, piano), $2,500 for clothes, $1,339 for dry cleaning, $1,000 for toys, and $438 for the care of a pet rabbit. Kira Rose Kerkorian is just four, but she apparently also requires $144,547 a month for vacations.

As the case wound its way through superior court this year, each new volume of pleadings grew more startling and salacious. There were reports of infidelities and sperm counts, pilfered garbage and doctored DNA, miscarriages, boozing, car chases, and death threats--with either the Beverly Hills Police Department or the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services summoned to investigate on at least four occasions. Kirk views Lisa as unhinged, a volatile and self-loathing schemer who, in the bitterness of their breakup, has found the identity that eluded her after tennis. "In one conversation, when I asked her if she was crazy, she responded, `Yes! I'm insane! Wait until you see what happens next!'" Kirk told the court. Lisa sees Kirk as Machiavellian, an unsentimental raider who is as ruthless in his personal life as he is in the business world. "Kirk used to brag to me, during more intimate and private moments of our relationship, about ... how he could get almost anyone to say almost anything; all he had to do was offer them money or some of the many advantages he could provide to them," Lisa fired back. "I never thought Kirk would turn this incredible power he has, through his money, on me or on Kira. I was wrong."

Caught in the middle is a little girl, at once overprotected and overexposed. In the thousands of pages that Kirk's and Lisa's lawyers have filed in court, we learn that Kira grew up in a house with "every toy imaginable," that she was taken to a dentist to have her teeth cosmetically bonded even though none were yet permanent, that she is always supervised by two nannies so that "one would tell on the other" in the event of abuse, and that she was forced to withdraw from the prestigious Le Lycee Francais de Los Angeles academy because she was unable to cope without having at least one of those nannies to comfort her. Because of the publicity this case has generated-for which each side blames the other--Lisa has argued that it is unsafe for Kira to leave their $8 million Beverly Hills home. She even commissioned a "threat assessment" to determine how vulnerable her daughter might be to kidnappers or stalking paparazzi. The recommendation--if Hollywood had not already conjured such an image-might have seemed tragic instead of just farcical: Kira would be safer, according to the assessment, if a corner of the house were converted into a "panic room."

"In the event of an emergency, Kira and/or her immediate caretaker can retreat to said `panic room,' close the doors, and create a safe environment," the report concluded. What it failed to consider is that the greatest threat to Kira's well-being comes probably not from the outside world but from her own parents.

THE BOY

The richest resident of Los Angeles may also be the most private. He does not give interviews. He does not use credit cards. He does not have an e-mail account. He does not board commercial flights. He does not shop in retail stores. He does not make speeches. He does not accept awards. Even when he is being magnanimous--his charitable foundation has dispensed more than $100 million over the decade--he has never allowed anything to be named in his honor.

Kirk Kerkorian is called cryptic, reclusive, deceptive, austere. The public might know his face--the leathery dimples and salt-and-pepper eyebrows, brawler's nose and Rat Pack pompadour--but almost never the man. A former business associate, groping for the right characterization, once told a reporter: "He's the nicest nonperson I've ever not known."

What appears detached or even eccentric from the outside, though, is described by those closest to Kirk as the mask of a professional risk taker, a man of modest appetites who lives not so much for the payoff as for the game. It is the bias of society, they say, to presume that a billionaire--five or six or seven times over, depending on market conditions--must be driven by avarice or ego or at least self-indulgence. What motivates Kirk is not money but the deal, business as an end in itself. For the better part of a century he has been buying low and selling high, sometimes demolishing companies, other times building them into empires, almost always flouting conventional wisdom. He is the living embodiment of the American bootstrap ethic, which teaches that wealth can spring from pure imagination and just as easily be snatched away. "Somehow," wrote Dial Torgerson in Kerkorian: An American Success Story, "he apparently missed the hang-up that possessions are permanent."