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IN DEFENCE OF GOLD DIGGERS – October 17th 2005
Tess Stimson, 37, is a novelist. She is divorced from CNN correspondent Brent Sadler and lives with her fiancé and three children aged 11, 8 and 3.
arrying for money is a great British tradition; it’s how the aristocracy has held body-and-stately-pile together for centuries. More recently, many a rich American heiress has handed over a heap of Daddy’s greenbacks in exchange for a posh title and a draughty castle.
And pretty-but-poor girls have always used their looks better their prospects, too. It’s why so many posh young ladies these days have bone-structure to die for: their rich ancestors have had the pick of the gene pool for generations.
Even the great romantic Jane Austen knew the value of cold, hard cash: her heroines are not noted for marrying impoverished nobodies. That most famous of opening lines – ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ – was ironic; but it was also true.
Back then, girls were expected to ‘marry well’ to benefit their families as well as themselves. Marriage was not a romantic liaison but an important political, financial and social alliance in which each party brought something to the table. Both sides knew what the terms of the deal were, and accepted them. If love came into the picture, so much the better; but it was incidental, not central, to the concept of marriage.
These days, though, we have such a sentimental, Hollywood vision of matrimony that our delicate sensibilities can’t tolerate the idea of anyone marrying for any reason other than love.
It is ironic that in a material age that equates money with personal happiness and conspicuous consumption with success, something as seemingly straightforward as marrying for money is so despised.
We don’t care how celebrities in our newspapers and magazines acquired their millions. They can get rich by being poisonously rude to people – step forward, Anne Robinson – or, like professional Big Brother ignoramus Jade Goody, simply by being stupid.
In these egalitarian times, we don’t even much mind if the cash is just inherited – hands up, Paris Hilton. But marrying for money? The very thought is enough to bring out the judgemental heebie-jeebies.
n the mid-nineties, Anna Nicole Smith, then a 26-year-old topless dancer and Playboy magazine Playmate Of The Year, caused a sensation in America by marrying J. Howard Marshall II, an ailing and wheelchair-bound oil magnate of 89.
Their marriage sparked a heated moral debate. Some people applauded Anna’s blatant opportunism, but the majority cast her as a shameless gold-digger and ridiculed Marshall for having more money than sense. But Marshall, who had been married twice previously, said she had brought happiness to his twilight years and called her ‘The Light of My Life’. For her part, Anna told everyone she really did care for the man who’d showered her with gifts worth $6million.
However, they had less than 15 months of wedded bliss before Marshall died, presumably a happy – if poorer – man. For the last decade, his widow has been locked in a bitter battle with his children over his estate. The case, it was announced last week, will shortly go before the US Supreme Court.
For all her protestations of devotion, it’s hard to believe that Anna would have married Marshall had he not been filthy rich. Likewise, would he have looked at her, however enchanting her personality, had she been 89?
Having said that, both parties were apparently very happy with the arrangement, so why the outpouring of bile? And, more to the point, why is he written off as foolish, whilst she is cast as the villain of the piece?
It’s a familiar double-standard. Caroline Aherne’s sly dig at Debbie McGee – ‘So what attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’ – touched the nation’s funny-bone because she’d articulated what so many were privately thinking.
It seems marrying for money is vulgar and contemptible; but buying youth and beauty to adorn your wrinkled arm is acceptable. Mind you, for the woman it’s unlike to be all wine and roses being married to an over-indulged man.
Yet it’s a bargain only too many women would be happy to strike. To many women, men are still seen as the providers, the gateway to a better lifestyle and standard of living. They assume that the moment a wedding ring slips on their finger, they’re set for life.
You only have to look at the huge payouts footballers’ wives expect for just a few years of marriage. Karen Parlour, ex-wife of footballer Ray Parlour, recently secured a vast chunk of her husband’s future earnings after only four years of matrimony
Women hate gold-diggers because, quite simply, they’re jealous of them. Anna Nicole Smith landed the big fish and won the juiciest prize in the marriage market; other women look at her bleached hair and silicone-enhanced cleavage and think, ‘Why her?’ And, though they may not admit it, the corollary, ‘Why not me?’
But the contempt is rooted in more than this. It this most secular and materialistic of times, we need to believe in something: romantic love. We refuse to accept the unvarnished truth – that marriage is always a trade off, no matter how much of a sentimental gloss we like to put on things.
Gold-diggers break this complicit silence. They expose marriage for what it is: a contract. Even the terms of the wedding ceremony itself are promises of what each partner will commit to in return for a similar commitment from their spouse.
hen I married my ex-husband, he was broke: two previous divorces had seen to that. But we loved each other, and it didn’t seem to matter. Ironically, our marriage fell apart just as he started to earn huge sums of money, and for a while, life was too comfortable for me to leave. In the end, though, the money and status simply weren’t enough to compensate for the love I’d lost.
Now engaged to a penniless philosophy don, I can’t say I don’t sometimes miss the speedboat and live-in maid, but I wouldn’t exchange what I have now for all the Tiffany pendants in the world. I’ve tried marriage both ways, with and without love, and I know which I prefer.
But that’s a personal choice. I don’t condemn women who choose hard cash as a more reliable investment in the future than love. They are only taking society’s obsession with money to the next logical level.
The old saying, ‘When poverty comes in the door, love flies out the window’, contains more than a grain of truth. However, women who make that choice should remember one other cliché: ‘Money doesn’t buy happiness. ‘
And without that, all the money in the world means absolutely nothing.
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