I decided to wade deeper into the waters of marriage. A voice at the other end of the line at Taki Theodoracopulos’ Manhattan residence informed me that the fabulously wealthy 70-year-old Greek columnist—renowned for his mastery of sailing, tennis, karate and womanizing—was taking calls on the second floor of his townhouse; a number was provided.
“I’m a European,” he said, “and I operate under European rules. I’m allowed to fool around; my wife is not. It’s as simple as that. And that’s why it’s worked for 37 years.
“We don’t fall for this American bullshit,” he continued. “Wives, we put them on the plinth, we protect them, we support them.” He said he and his wife, Princess Alexandra von Schönburg, have an arrangement. “Obviously, if you have money, you can do that. If you can’t—and most people have to work—then the little women, as they used to call them, have rights, too, and they have to be 50-50. But in my case, let’s say I was lucky, and I’ve had it my way.
“Obviously, my wife—who’s an Austrian and a German princess—I don’t do it openly, but she obviously has heard things and she obviously was upset,” he said. “But you don’t break up a family, because men are promiscuous by nature, and that’s it.
“I don’t think you can live having equal rights within a family,” he went on. “There has to be a boss. You can’t have two superpowers—one is bound to collapse. Communism did. This equality thing doesn’t work in a family.”
New York, he said, is prime example of the dangers of equality.
“From the New Yorkers I know, I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t been divorced,” he said. “All my friends—people who I’ve liked, gentlemen—most of them have been divorced. And the ones who haven’t been divorced, are Europeans who live here. Very strange, that.”
How are things going with the Princess, by the way?
“Very happy, extremely happy,” he said, speaking for himself and his wife, who was a continent away. “As I get older, even happier, I chase less pussy.”
I swiveled to a great American: Gay Talese, who is married to editor Nan Talese.
“Next year will be 50 years in the same house with the same woman,” said Mr. Talese, 76. “So the trophy bride is in her early 70s.”
“What helps a marriage is space,” he said. “One of the great things that Nan and I have had from the year we got married is more than one bathroom.”
Also, each morning she goes off to her office and he goes to his—a converted wine cellar beneath their townhouse on East 61st Street. When they sit down for dinner each night at 7, it’s like a date.
“It’s like a 50-year-long date,” he said.
I called former Andy Warhol acolyte Bob Colacello, who’s 61 and great pals with Nancy Reagan.
“In the abstract, I think divorce is wrong, and it’s better to stay married and make an arrangement, like they do in Europe,” he said. “But then, in the concrete, I have friends who have been divorced, have fallen in love again or divorced because they fell in love with someone else, and they’re much happier for it, and eventually the spurned spouse seems to land on his or her feet and they are happier for it, too. It’s so hard to generalize about marriage. I do think the younger generation seems to get divorced real quick.”
Why is that?
“I think I’m probably going to get in trouble with the feminists, but I think women expect too much these days, out of life—or are trying to do too much, maybe. But in Manhattan, in New York society, or so-called New York society, it’s so competitive on every level—in terms of money, in terms of publicity, in terms of houses and planes and yachts. This whole phenomena of trading up.
“In the ’80s, it seemed like it was the husbands trading in the wives for newer models,” he continued. “That’s when the phrase ‘trophy wife’ emerged. In the early years of this new century, it seems like it’s the women trading in the husbands, because the husbands don’t quite match up to their expectations, whether it’s financially, or romantically, or in glamour or in publicity.”
And then there’s gay marriage?
“I think gay marriage is going to be great for the gay divorce lawyers,” said Mr. Colacello.
