Sir Stirling’s widow Susie dies ‘from a broken heart’
SHE first met him when she was five years old — and he was 28. Yet theirs was to become one of the great love stories when, two decades later, acquaintance matured into a fast-lane romance, and led to petite blonde Susie Paine becoming the third and final wife of Britain’s greatest-ever racing driver, the seemingly indestructible Sir Stirling Moss.
Now, barely three years after his death aged 90, Susie, too, has passed life’s chequered flag. Her death, at 69, followed a protracted period of ill health — but owed more, says her older sister, Tina, to grief.
‘My beloved sister died of a broken heart,’ Tina, wife of ebullient retail tycoon Sir Philip Green, tells me amid floods of tears. ‘She never recovered after Stirling left us. Their marriage was the greatest love story I have ever known.’
Few who knew the couple would disagree. Despite the disparity in their ages and Sir Stirling’s undimmed appetite for ‘crumpet’ — his appreciative term for beautiful women — the marriage was an intensely happy one, and was blessed with the birth of his only son, Elliot, months after their wedding in 1980.
Their union lasted for nearly four decades, in vivid contrast to his first two marital excursions. The first, to Canadian brewing heiress Kate Molson, ended after three years, while the second, to American Elaine Barbarino, with whom he had a daughter, Allison, endured just a year longer.
‘The age gap didn’t matter,’ Susie told the Daily Mail after Sir Stirling’s death. ‘I never thought about it because, to me, he was never old.’
Her self-confidence equipped her to cope with the attention he always received. ‘Women threw themselves at him,’ acknowledged Susie.
The couple lived in Mayfair at the house which Sir Stirling designed and equipped with a treasury of gadgets. Susie remained there after his death — sleeping close to the urn containing his ashes. ‘She has gone far too soon,’ Lady Green says. ‘We will miss her terribly.’