Bitter last chapter for Fay Weldon’s 26-year marriage
RUPERT Murdoch’s decision to divorce — aged 91 — stunned Jerry Hall, who is said to have received the news by email.
But he’s not the only nonagenarian doing the figurative splits. I can reveal acclaimed novelist Fay Weldon — born, like Murdoch, in 1931 — has secured a decree nisi, two years after leaving her third husband, Nick Fox, whom she accused of ‘coercive control and financial mismanagement’.
‘Fay’s divorce has been granted in the past couple of weeks,’ a family friend of The Life And Loves Of A She-Devil author tells me. ‘Fay’s now in a nursing home and can’t talk.’
Fox, a former bookseller 15 years Weldon’s junior, who became her manager after their marriage in 1994, remains bewildered and saddened. ‘People can get very strange when they get old — they can turn on the person closest to them,’ he tells me.
‘She’s no longer the person I knew for 40 years.’
In response to claims he ‘ did well’ out of the divorce, he says: ‘ They insisted on going to arbitration and we had to spend a fortune on lawyers.
‘I was forced to sell the house I inherited from my mother, because I added Fay’s name to it. The judge gave me just about enough to buy another house.’ He adds: ‘A lot of people I thought were my friends were, in fact, just her fans.’
After leaving Fox, Weldon moved in with her eldest son, also called Nick, a musician, whose father was Colyn Davies, a love of Fay’s before her first marriage.
In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2020 she made the shocking disclosure that she had attempted suicide — a day after writing an article about her ‘happy’ 26-year marriage.
‘In effect, Nick [her husband] wrote the article in my name,’ Weldon recalled of Fox. ‘ It’s shocking, but I didn’t have the strength to argue with him. The next day, I took an overdose. I was in such pain, emotional and physical. It seemed like a rational thing to do at the time.’
Her previous marriages ended in divorce — the first, to Ronald Bateman, a teacher 20 years her senior — after two years. Her second, to antiques dealer Ron Weldon, by whom she had three more sons, lasted for 30, only for Ron to leave her for his ‘astrological therapist’. Eight hours before their divorce was finalised, he died of a heart attack.