If, like me, you feel as though you'll be paddling blissfully in clear, deep Wilsey Pond till the end of your days, you'll fold this anecdote right into all the fantastically excessive others:

When Dede Wilsey saw the surface of the stone that had been chosen for the floor of the new de Young Museum, she was worried.

"What's it going to be like in my Manolos?" she recalls asking herself.

The petite blond heiress tested mock-ups of the rough-hewn Italian stone in her designer heels and approached the architects.

"'It's a mistake,'" she recalls saying during a recent hard-hat tour of the new museum. "And they said, 'Dede, you're not serious. It's already been ordered.' And I said, 'I'm not buying a $200 million museum where the floor hurts your feet. I'll pay the difference.'"

In the end, the stone was changed.

Welcome to the wild world of Dede Wilsey, where public good is forged through the power of a Chanel suit, an iron will and a Midas touch. In Dedeland, the vertical surface at the entrance of the museum that celebrates the thousands of $1,000-plus donors is called the "dog wall," because many of her canine companions have given generously to the museum and their names will be listed there alongside those of donors belonging to Homo sapiens. In Dedeland, the grates on the floors needed to pass muster with her Manolos to fend off possible lawsuits from similarly shod patrons. And in Dedeland, the massive Gerhard Richter for the central hall gets approval because, she says, she can "decorate around it."
...
For those on her radar screen, her fund-raising acumen elicits praise and even a little fear. At a recent tour of the museum, Jim Ludwig, a friend of Wilsey's and a de Young donor, half-jokingly told a group of assembled journalists, "San Francisco has never seen another fund-raiser like Dede. A lot of people are now afraid to sit next to her at dinner."
...
There's also a matter of having a calling. Some people are meant to ice-skate or write sonnets; Wilsey seems to have been born to raise money. "Unlike a lot of people, I love asking for money," she says. "Not small amounts—I can't stand to do annual drives—but big amounts. You get to your goal much faster. I just love round numbers." [If this were the book, Wilsey might say something like: "Dede. Dad. Trevor. Todd."]
...
When Wilsey gave the money for Wilsey Court, the vaulted-ceilinged central gathering place at the de Young, she wanted to also donate the art that would adorn the enormous wall. "If I gave the art, I could make sure it wouldn't be too ugly," she explains. In the end, she chose to commission a piece by Gerhard Richter, an artist whose more traditional work appeals to her but whose more challenging pieces remain, well, challenging. "We really hit it off," recalls Wilsey of her trip to Cologne to visit the celebrated artist. "It's mostly black and white, but there was some color, and I love color. My favorite colors are pink and green. I said, 'I see lavender, and I see green.'" The painting, which is based on blown-up images of atoms, reminded her of the large pearls she was wearing. "And he said, 'It's a self-portrait.' And I said, 'OK. I'll buy the thing.'"