Jamie Dimon's Not-So-Secret Meeting with Mitt Romney
Welcome to the Smart Set. Every morning we bring you the gossip coverage, filtered. Today: Obama's banker takes a meeting with Romney, George W. Bush returns to Washington and exercises, and Roman Polanski receives a standing ovation in Zurich.
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon raised money for Barack Obama in 2008 and was reportedly in the mix for the treasury secretary job that went to Timothy Geithner. So what was he doing having a "discreet one-on-one conversation" with Mitt Romney before a Tuesday morning fundraiser at Brasserie 8¹/2 on Tuesday morning. According to a JP Morgan source, Dimon hasn't given money to Democratic candidates this election cycle, and has "met privately with many of the Republican presidential candidates" for 2012. Dimon can't endorse a candidate because he's on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which one JP Morgan insider speculates he'll use to "continue to look bipartisan, then work behind the scenes to get a Republican elected.” [Page Six]
George W. Bush was back in Washington yesterday to deliver a luncheon address at a medical technology summit. Before his address, the former president was spotted "churning away on the elliptical for a full hour...at the VIDA Fitness Center in the downtown Renaissance hotel." He was wearing black shorts and a white t-shirt "from a charity mountain-biking ride in Texas last spring, it seems." [The Reliable Source]
Susan Sarandon dropped in on the Occupy Wall Street protestors earlier this week long enough to tour tour the "makeshift kitchen and library" portions of the portestors' sleeping bag shantytown. "I'm here to understand what's going on and lend my support," said Sarandon, who it should be noted was in the sequel to Wall Street last year. [Bloomberg via Daily Intel]
Gwyneth Paltrow and husband Chris Martin marked her 39th birthday Monday night by going out to "an intimate dinner" with Jay-Z and Beyonce at Tertulia, a Spanish restaurant in the West Village. No word on what the couples discussed, but it seem a decent bet that Paltrow and Jay-Z at least touched on how much they adore the other's celebrity lifestyle blog. [Us Weekly]
Admitted child rapist Roman Polanski received a 10-minute standing ovation at the Zurich film festival yesterday when he took the stage to accept the lifetime achievement award organizers tried to give him two years ago, when he was detained by Swiss authorities and nearly extradited to the United States. "Better late than never," the director joked. "I'm not kidding, far from it." [The Hollywood Reporter]
Former assistant secretary of state James Rubin is out as coexecutive editor of Bloomberg View 10 months after taking the top job at the organization's opinion-writing arm. Rubin had no prior experience in journalism, and supposedly struggled to fit into a newsroom culture and at times clashed with his colleagues." [Media Decoder]
