Payback time for Vilar

The card was cream-coloured, the lettering embossed and ceremonial. Its elegance made the content seem all the more unreal. The message stated: "The event scheduled for 12 October has been postponed. Alberto Vilar.

"The "event" was to have been New York's wedding of the season: a love-match between the billionaire arts benefactor and a freshly divorced Harvard musicologist, Karen Painter, 24 years his junior. Vilar, 61, had put the ring on Painter's finger this summer at Bayreuth and announced their betrothal at Salzburg.

Both black-tie festivals had received multi-million pound gifts from the Cuban-born technology investor who, in return, got the best seats in the house and a page to himself in the programme. "I'm in for the long-term," he told me confidently two months ago.

But all was not well with Alberto Vilar. Throughout the summer, reports trickled in that he was falling behind with payments. Los Angeles Opera was the first to crack, cancelling the Kirov's imported War and Peace, when Vilar's cash failed to arrive. Then the bumptious new chairman of Washington Opera took Vilar's name off its Young Artists' programme for the same reason. Both companies, it so happens, are under the artistic directorship of Vilar's close friend Placido Domingo.

In New York, the conductor Lorin Maazel stumped up his own money when Vilar's cash did not come through for the Vilar-Maazel conducting competition. In St Petersburg, Valery Gergiev's Kirov company is said to have gone two years without a Vilar cheque and to be verging on despair. Washington DC's Kennedy Center, headed by former Covent Garden boss Michael Kaiser, has quietly written Vilar's $50 million pledges out of its current budget.

Nerves are fraying at Covent Garden, where Vilar has, until now, been punctilious in making instalments of his £10 million donation. A cheque, due this month, is supposed to pay for the installation of surtitle screens on the backs of 622 seats. The screens are up but have not been activated.

"The situation," says a Royal Opera House spokesman tersely, "is that he is up-to-date, but we are getting close to the next payment date." Any delay could trigger legal action from the Californian owners of the surtitle patent, a company called Figaro Systems in which, confusingly, Vilar is a major shareholder.

Vilar's cultural life has atrophied in recent weeks. For the first time in a decade, he was absent from the season opening of the Metropolitan Opera, where he has endowed a gallery and much else. "It's got to the point where he can't show his face in the places he most wants to go," snipes one arts chief. "What I cannot stomach," says another, "is the man's unbelievable vanity, demanding to put his name on everything." The New York Times has wallowed in schadenfreude, reporting one failed payment after another.

Vilar broke his silence to tell a journalist that he was not being sufficiently honoured for his contributions, but friends say he is not returning their calls. They fret over his state of health after a year in which he underwent life-threatening surgery and the assets managed by his company, Amerindo Inc, fell below $1 billion. His whirlwind romance seemed out of character for this stalker of new-tech startups, one of the earliest investors in Microsoft, Amazon and E-bay. The suspension of his wedding has fuelled wild rumours about his emotional and fiscal equilibria. Vilar is currently the hottest topic of crush-bar speculation.

Amid the general deprecation, few care to recall that he is the biggest performing-arts donor in history - and that remains true even if (as now appears) he has paid only half the $230 million he pledged.