If you struggle to maintain a healthy relationship spare a thought for poor celebrities, who have the odds stacked against them when it comes to love.
First of all, there are four people in a celebrity relationship: him, her, his public image and hers. We all want someone who makes us feel better about ourselves, but celebs want someone who makes them feel good on a personal level and who enhances their public image at the same time. Agents and publicists often get involved in matchmaking celebrity clients, choosing partners who will generate the most favourable column inches. They don’t want their client to be with a man who makes her look needy or unloveable; if things go wrong, she has to be the one to leave because it’s not sexy to be left. It’s an arranged marriage based on the worst possible criteria.
Celebrities are narcissistic. Their egos are fed so much by the press and fans and their big bank balances that they genuinely believe they are better than the rest of us. But there’s a tiny part of them deep down that feels unworthy and this terrifies them, making them need more reassurance than most. It’s lonely at the top, and many celebrities have trouble finding people they can trust, when family members and old friends succumb to the lure of the tabloid chequebook. That means they have to put all their eggs in one basket and expect their celebrity partner to be all things to them: lover, parent, best friend… a pressure that would damage most relationships. Yet that very loneliness means that as soon as (or preferably before) one relationship breaks up, they are on a hunt for the next person to fall in love with. And that’s why they keep getting married again and again.
The more space a particular celeb takes up in the tabloid media, the more likely it is that their marriage will fail, according to John Tierney and Garth Sundem, who studied the subject for The New York Times. They even came up with a formula to predict the chances of a celebrity’s marriage succeeding http://nyti.ms/ZUbvfc.
Rule number one: if a woman is a sex symbol given to wearing skimpy clothing in public, the marriage is doomed. Sorry, Katie Price and Kieran Hayler…
Rule number two: there are bound to be problems if one partner is much more famous than the other, or much wealthier than the other, because it means there is an inherent imbalance of power. Sorry, Kate Winslet and Ned Rocknroll…
Celebrities don’t have time in their busy schedules for long courtships when they try out different things and get to know each other. They hook up, the press gets wind of it and starts asking “Will they wed?” and the pressure is on. But a whirlwind courtship is one of the clearest indicators that a marriage will fail. If there are less than six months before the big day, it’s likely they’ll be in the divorce courts within six years. They’re marrying because they have sexual chemistry instead of taking time to learn mutual respect, trust and affection.
It used to be said that selling coverage of the wedding to Hello! Magazine was a sure sign the marriage wouldn’t last, and this may well still be true. Other key signs include:
• Getting tattoos of each other’s names. When he broke up with Winona Ryder, Johnny Depp had the tattoo ‘Winona Forever’ turned into ‘Wino Forever’ but they can’t all be so neatly transformed.
• Having a lavish fairy-tale wedding lets them be prince and princess for the day but indicates they are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
• Playing romantic roles in which they kiss other actors on screen is inevitably going to lead to infidelity sooner or later. It’s an occupational hazard.
• If there have been several marriages before the current one, its chances are substantially lessened. Look at the previous relationships and you’ll see where the fatal flaws lie. (Will Tom Cruise ever stop trying to convert his wives to Scientology? Probably not…)
I’ve been writing about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in my latest novel The Affair (due out on 23rd May). The odds were heavily stacked against their relationship working: she was much more famous and much wealthier than him; she was constantly photographed in low-cut gowns; she had already been married four times; she consumed her body weight in prescription drugs and both were at the start of a lifelong love affair with booze. The fact that their first marriage lasted ten years says something about their huge attraction to each other that clearly transcended the physical.
All her life she’d been praised for her beauty but Richard Burton was the first person to tell her she was intelligent, with opinions worth listening to. He even told her she was a good actress, which is pushing it some. On his side, he fell for her thoroughly modern outlook and her caustic, bawdy wit. She didn’t nag him not to drink; she let him be the dominant one and they had a lot of fun – while it lasted. Ten years first time round, then a quick remarriage of nine months duration.
He moved on to find happiness, peace and sobriety with wife number four, Sally Burton. Elizabeth Taylor remarried countless times but always looked back with nostalgia at the great love of her life, with the man who played Anthony to her Cleopatra.
Gill Paul 