Don’t ask me why—but after skimming some gossipy clickbait article somewhere about Australian model Elle Mcpherson, I decided to look up one of her ex-partners and the father of her two children, Arpad Busson.

Maybe it was the name “Arpad”; I don’t know. Maybe it was the fact that among his partners numbered not just Mcpherson but also Farah Fawcett and Uma Thurman. Who was this guy and what were his attractions (besides being very rich, of course)?

But I never finished Busson’s Wiki entry, because I got bogged down in an early paragraph about his growing-up years. When I found that I had read the following three times trying to make some sort of sense of it, I decided it was time to give up this particular research endeavor:

Arpad Busson’s father, Pascal Busson, was a former French army officer and Algerian War veteran, who later turned financier. His mother, Florence “Flockie” Harcourt-Smith, was an English former debutante. His aunt, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, was a companion of Timothy Leary, who coincidentally was married in the early 1960s to the mother of Arpad’s partner, Uma Thurman. His parents met in Paris and named their son after the Hungarian-born banker érpé¡d Plesch (1889”“1974), who was not only Florence Busson’s stepfather (he was the second husband of her mother, Marysia Ulam-Krauss Harcourt-Smith), but also her stepgrandfather (Plesch’s first wife was his second wife’s mother, Leonie Caro Ulam). Plesch was a mentor to Italy’s richest man, Gianni Agnelli, the late head of Fiat.

Get it? Got it? Good. Because I don’t.