Sun, Jul 20, 2008 page9

• Manhattan marriages hit hard by the credit crunch

  • By Barbara Ellen / THE GUARDIAN
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  No cash, no trophy wife: It’s a simple enough psychosexual equation

  Ah, there’s nothing like a tragic love story. And indeed what follows is nothing like a tragic love story. For, if you listen carefully, you may just be able to catch the sound of high-end scuttling among the steep-sided canyons of New York. That would be the Manhattan rats leaving the sinking ships or sinking husbands — pretty much the same thing.

  It appears that the credit crunch has sent top-flight New York divorce business rocketing up 40 percent, as the trophy wives of Wall Street’s beleaguered super-wealthy (executives, hedge funders, property developers) race to lawyers to cite “irreconcilable differences,” which in this case roughly translates as: “He’s poor now.”

  It’s got so bad that some Wall Street husbands are trying to hang on to their wives by taking out huge loans to maintain their mansions, yachts and Saks accounts. However, lawyers are saying that wives aren’t interested in standing by their men, opting instead to end their marriages as quickly and clinically as a bad credit card snipped in half in front of you in a restaurant. The whole debacle amounts to a somewhat ruthless: “If the gravy train is over, then so are we, darling.”

  The only appropriate response is how appalling. What kind of cow leaves a marriage just because the helicopter has left the lawn? Indeed, any decent person should despise these women, right?

  LOYAL TO A FAULT

  Well, no, actually, wrong. It seems to me that these women are loyal to a fault, that is, loyal to the deal that was originally struck.

  When you think about it, there is a world of difference between being a trophy wife — waving hubby off on his private jet while you face another day of lonely, unfulfilled spending in Barneys — to being a real wife — having some sacked bitter bozo under your feet all day, reliving past glories, hogging the remote control and asking too many questions about your lipo-fund.

  More to the point, before we all start working ourselves into a righteous lather over the behavior of the trophy wives, these masters of the universe knew what they were getting into. After all, weren’t they the ones who brokered the “deal” in the first place — their cash and status for a trophy wife (someone to make their peers drool)?

  So, no cash, no trophy wife. It’s a simple enough psychosexual equation. Cold yes, but only as cold as the one that makes it clear to the trophy wife that she will be unceremoniously dumped, Trump-style, for a new hottie if she commits the crimes of becoming fat, old or Ivana (the patron saint of failed trophy wives). In short, in the land of the deal, the fleeing rat-wives have a point — what does love have to do with it?

  Indeed, while the new breed of credit-crunch bailer-wives might be ruthless, maybe they learned from their masters. Only last week, I was hard at work doing research (OK, sprawled on the sofa reading the newspaper) and came across the tale of Arpad Busson, the hedge-fund philanthropist and multi-zillionaire, who had a nine-year, two-children relationship with model Elle Macpherson, allegedly couldn’t marry her, because he was a strict Catholic, and she was a divorcee and then went on to propose to twice-divorced Uma Thurman.

  REVENGE

  Just as I was thinking: “Nice guy — way to go, Uma,” I came across another tale of Super-rich Lurrve Gone Sour.

  Christie Brinkley’s Hamptons’ paradise was shattered when her husband was discovered paying off a neighbor’s teenage daughter to keep quiet about their affair.

  Just in case Christie hadn’t been humiliated enough, the divorce judge commented that she might care to “examine her taste in men.”

  At which point, you think, enough already! Whatever happened to the great high-end romances, the ones that were examples to us all — Bogie and Bacall, Scott and Zelda, Bill and Monica? Which, for their sins, were about love, sex and madness. Anything but money.

  So what are we seeing here — the revenge of the trophy spouse? Certainly it’s a timely reminder to the rich of Manhattan that the first law of the trophy wife is that she, natch, atrophies at the first sign of trouble. For the rest of us, it’s culturally interesting.

  In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, another great period of international stress, it was noted, rather droningly, that every day brought a new life lesson. With this in mind, maybe we should take heed of the morality tales emerging from the credit-crunch crisis.

  Certainly, it seems to say something that the relationships of the rich seem to be the first ones to go.

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