She met her husband, Paul Guerin, at her brother’s bar mitzvah, and married him despite objections from her father that he wasn’t Jewish, according to a 2008 interview with a Cedars- Sinai in-house publication.
“I knew I could be self-sufficient,” the magazine quoted her as saying. “I could support myself. I could put Paul through school. We did all that. We had three children and struggled. I think that’s why we appreciate everything we have today, because we worked so hard for it. It was the best lesson ever in our lives and I thank my parents for that.”
Original Partners
The billionaire had to defend her father’s estate against a lawsuit filed in 2008 in California Superior Court by Cheryl Kane, who was Shapell’s girlfriend after the 1994 death of his wife. Kane said she not only lived and slept with Shapell in his Beverly Hills house, she acted as his personal assistant and watched over him as his health declined.
Instead of receiving the title to a house he bought for her and providing Kane with living expenses for the rest of her life, as he allegedly promised, she only received a one-time check for $11,000, according to her complaint. She separately filed a $10 million claim against Shapell’s estate.
Guerin denied most of Kane’s allegations and settled the case for an undisclosed amount in 2009.
Her father’s original partners, his brother David and Webb, both in their mid-90s, still come to the office every day, according to West.
“The homebuilding business is not for the faint of heart,” said West. “You have to have an unbelievable passion to want to deal with the volatility of that business and they just felt that there were others who’d probably do more for the company and more for the employees than they felt comfortable doing.”