The wages of beauty are loneliness
Marianne Macdonald says that the crazy bounty nature bestows on gorgeous women can be a curse: a recipe for low confidence and solitary distrust
I am always struck, interviewing the planet’s most beautiful women, by the disconnection between their difficult love lives and dazzling looks. Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey, Elle Macpherson, Helena Christensen, Emmanuelle Béart, Inés Sastre, Diane Kruger, Sienna Miller — in my decade as an interviewer I have met dozens of these stars and supermodels, and almost invariably they are single or struggling with divorce or some dubious relationship. These women can often seem to have everything — stunning looks, amazing figures, to-die-for wardrobes, killer charm, fame, money — except happiness with men. It is a small, unacknowledged tragedy that I discussed with the supermodel Helena Christensen, who knew all about it. We were in the little private room off the library at the Covent Garden Hotel, and Christensen was single at the time, aged 38. She gave an ironic shrug of her swan shoulders, gift-wrapped in a froufrou black shirt that buttoned at the back of her neck. ‘If you look at the history of human beings,’ she pointed out, in her soft American accent, ‘there are some very beautiful people out there who had tragic love histories.’
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Kevin
January 31st, 2008 8:22pmYou need a control group to test your hypothesis that exceptional beauty makes a woman a loser in the marriage stakes. Secondly, your view of marriage seems implicitly to pre-date Henry VIII. I have no objection to that, but I wonder if non-Catholic women genuinely aspire to lifelong marriage. In other words, is relationship breakdown merely a self-fulfilling philosophy of life? (If you believe marriage is a non-binding commitment, are you likely to make the effort to rationally seek a credible lifelong partner?). Finally, in establishing who is and who is not happily married, one has to bear in mind the observation made by Athenian lawgiver Solon to the fabulously wealthy King Croesus of Lydia, which may be paraphrased as follows: "One can only know if a woman was truly blessed when she is dead", because of course, at any moment up to that point it can all go pear-shaped (as it did for Croesus).
Sheila
January 31st, 2008 10:36pmWhat on earth is this article doing in The Spectator? Did Hello! or People turn it down?
D Short
February 1st, 2008 3:31amThe Spectator continues to go downhill. What a lot of celebrity drivel! How can a formerly serious, witty and well-written magazine publish such puerile trash?
Tim Jenkins
February 2nd, 2008 8:59pmThe previous two comments are endorsed by this one. Oy vey.
Pablo Escobar
February 14th, 2008 11:31amRegardless of whether these beautiful women are temporarily single, or coming out of a "bad" relationship, they are still better off than the ugly people with who will never find a partner. For example, I'm a 20 year old who's never had a gf, and is unlikely to have one due to my lack of good looks and shyness. So the premise of this article is faulty -- you start from the assumption that celebrities are suffering in their relationships, when in fact their lives are a million times better than the average geek. The average geek can only dream of a relationship, whereas these good looking celebrities are just finding it difficult to find the RIGHT KIND of relationship. Big deal.