THE PATH OF TRUE LOVE NEVER RUNS SMOOTH, BUT DOES IT HAVE TO BE A DEATH MARCH, I THOUGHT TO MYSELF, AS I ABSEILED THROUGH MY THIRD MARRIAGE.
— BARBARA AMIEL IN HER NEW MEMOIR,
DA friend of Barbara Amiel's once remarked that he would hate to be one of her enemies, that he wouldn't wish it on anyone. The friend was Henry Kissinger. In her new tell-all memoir Friends and Enemies, Amiel holds nothing back. The former journalist and glamorous socialite writes about herself with candour — in the extreme. In this excerpt, she talks about her wedding night with the third of her four husbands — David Graham. Amiel married Conrad Black in 1992, and they are still married.
ammit, I couldn't escape this blithering ache for a husband. Any sane onlooker could see that the combination I favoured and presented, of slightly messy sexual activities, greedy work ethic and snobbish cultural attitudes would not be found in one man — just as any man close to embodying this happy mix was unlikely to find in me the ideal partner for life. If only I had the wisdom of Edna O'Brien, who, after a first youthful marriage of ten years failed, had a desperate love affair and then seems to have stopped the steeplechase. “I didn't live with anyone,” she said in a much later interview, “they never moved in. I suppose that gave me more time to write.”
In this one area, though, I was a perpetual optimist: around the corner would be my Prince Charming. Ever alert to the possibility of being swept off my feet, the next sweep came unexpectedly when I attended a dull party in Toronto — for which I was very late, possibly because I knew from the tony address that it was bound to be dull. Most of the guests were leaving when I arrived with a current companion from Montreal, a suave and clever Jewish lawyer who felt about me much the way I felt about him: if not Ken and Barbie dolls, we were the matchmakers' mature Jewish version, so we ought to try this on and see if it works but it's very unlikely. Besides, he had a much younger French-Canadian girlfriend in his own back garden.
My future third husband, who had just arrived from London, was still at the party. Apart from the slight inconvenience of his being a Roman Catholic, David Graham reeked of eligibility: cosmopolitan manner, late forties, well over six-feet tall, thick silver-ginger hair, very funny, a successful businessman, never married and a walking photo-op in his casual Burberry. Too good to be true. And it was.
The path of true love never runs smooth, but does it have to be a death march, I thought to myself, as I abseiled through my third marriage. The plus was that in 1984 I returned to London with my Canadian, who resided in the U.K. where he enjoyed its numerous theatres, divorcees, splendid restaurants and intoxicating nightlife all enclosed in a fuzzy tax regime for foreign residents. We ploughed through nine months of somewhat tumultuous dating from Calcutta to Paris before we married secretly in Nantucket after a game of tennis I tactfully lost. He then left for his London home while I returned to my job at the Toronto Sun.
The secrecy was necessitated, he explained, by the need to protect his tax status. As a full-time resident of the U.K., it would not be helpful to have a wife with a Toronto residence. My own view, which I pushed furiously to the back of my mind, was that secrecy was a useful tool for a man who had spent forty-seven years as a bachelor to get accustomed to the notion that he wasn't.
Before we each returned to a pseudo existence as singles, though, we flew to New York for a one-night honeymoon in the Carlyle hotel. A starry night was upon us as he pushed open the door to a suite filled with flowers and champagne. I was in heaven. When I came out of the bathroom in my best Janet Reger nightgown, my husband was still dressed and sitting on the bed with his briefcase.
“I've called for a bellboy,” he said. “Why?”
“I just need him to witness your signature.”
He pulled an envelope out of his briefcase, opened it up flat on the side of the tan leather, and I knew. This was the marriage contract I had declined to sign, given its rather austere terms. Essentially, I was to give up my staff job at the Toronto Sun with all its benefits, including pension and insurance. I was to terminate the lease on my cherished apartment — paid for by me and in a building that rarely had vacancies — in order to sever any Canadian tie that might impede his tax status. In return I would receive — nothing. If we divorced after a number of years, I would get a lump sum of $200,000, rising over a period of years to a maximum of $400,000 Canadian. If there were a child, he would provide for it.
Though in principle I did think separation of assets was a good thing, and although I had no idea of his worth — all I had seen was his two-bedroom garden flat in Belgravia and his small set of offices in Toronto — I assumed that if he needed tax protection he must have something to protect. I felt it would have been sporty to offer some pension substitute to kick in after, say, half a dozen years of marriage, even if I didn't take it up. I thoroughly disapproved of the fifty-fifty no-fault marital property regime in Ontario and had no idea whether our marriage would come under U.S., Canadian or U.K. law, and anyway if the marriage was shortlived, I'd simply go back to the status quo ante. His money was his own.
“David,” I said. “I really don't want to sign it and especially not like this on our wedding night.”
“Sign it or I leave for London right away.”
That travel plan struck me as difficult since it was already close to midnight, but I took his meaning. He'd leave the suite, marriage unconsummated. I had come out of the bathroom worrying about my post-tennis hair and concerned that my improvised bare-faced night makeup of loose powder, lip colour and eau de toilette would not meet his criteria for glamour, only to find that the criteria I had to meet was an altogether different sort of bare face. One minute you're standing in your silk and lace all warm, apprehensive and bridey, and yes of course we had been intimate but it's really a special act when you have just been married, and now I was in a triangle with a Hispanic bellboy, a briefcase and myself. I looked at my putative husband and melted.
I signed.