It was shaping up to be the greatest battle since Macca versus Mucca. When
Madonna and Guy Ritchie announced they were divorcing a month ago the diary
columns and showbiz blogs were electrified: the pitched battle between Paul
McCartney and Heather Mills had kept everyone agog, but this would be the
ultimate in celebrity linen washed in public.
In the event, Madonna and Guy were too smart. Their marriage was quietly ended
on Friday in court 10 of the Principal Registry of the Family Division in
London, where “Ciccone ML v Ritchie GS” was listed alongside 16 other
divorces “for pronouncement of decree”.
Gwyneth Paltrow, Donatella Versace and Stella McCartney had been at the
wedding but there was nobody present, not even the principals, to see the
marriage dissolved. Madonna was performing in Philadelphia, while Ritchie
was in Liverpool with his two sons, Rocco, 8, and three-year-old David, the
African boy the couple adopted.
The previous evening, as the court officials were listing the forthcoming
business, another high-profile divorce was announced. Slavica Ecclestone,
wife of Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One ringmaster, put out a statement
through a public-relations firm saying that she was leaving her husband
after 24 years.
When Ecclestone was asked about it, he seemed baffled. “Really? Oh . . . we
will see. I didn’t even know she had a PR company,” he said. So, first
strike, Slavica.
She’s hired a lawyer too, Bernie – a scary one. Liz Vernon successfully
represented the wife of the Arsenal footballer Ray Parlour in a landmark
case in 2004, securing a deal that gave her client a third of her
exhusband’s future earnings for four years. Now she’ll be running the red
pencil over the Ecclestone offshore trusts, which hold £2.4 billion,
according to this year’s edition of The Sunday Times Rich List.
What do they have in common, these two divorces, other than the eyewatering
amounts of money at stake? In their own way, they both tell a tale of modern
Britain and the way we do break-ups in 2008.
“NOT a penny for Guy” made a nifty headline and was the principal leak from
the Ciccone-Ritchie agreement – Ritchie, 40, apparently trading a slice of
the £300m fortune he shared with his 50-year-old wife for access to his
children.
He confirmed as much in Liverpool as he ushered the boys into a waiting car.
“It was never about money – never about her bloody art collection. I just
wanted to settle it and move on,” he said. “I didn’t raise any objections at
any stage until she insisted the children live permanently in New York.”
Even 10 years ago a man who set such store by being a father might have been
regarded as something of an oddity, but it is increasingly a factor in
divorce settlements.
“What would surprise us now is the idea that a man would want anything else,”
said Nick Barnard of Families Need Fathers. “We work with dads every day
that struggle to see their kids and they are frequently people who have put
everything they have into that struggle. It seems natural that Ritchie
should put money aside.”
Neil Lyndon, the writer and journalist whose book No More Sex War underlined
the problems men faced in a feminist world, said he admired Ritchie: “It’s a
striking contrast with Heather Mills.”
The McCartney divorce set a new low in celebrity disputes. During the court
hearings, Mills complained that McCartney was often drunk, smoked cannabis
and had stabbed her with a broken wine glass. McCartney’s friends denounced
her as unstable. She demanded £125m but was eventually awarded £24m.
Scores of people who posted comments on the internet agreed that Ritchie had
done the right thing in avoiding such public humiliation: “I am sure if the
boot had been on the other foot Ms Ritchie would have taken Guy to the
cleaners! Good for him,” said Filmex of London.
Jai, also of London, wrote: “Atta boy! Let her go and be done with it. I’m a
fan of Mads and her music, but I have to say I’ve been rootin’ for Guy all
the way – kept quiet, kept his dignity and stay focused on what he wanted:
the kids.”
Ritchie is a wealthy man in his own right. He’s estimated to be worth £30m,
earned through directing films such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,
so we shouldn’t overdo the nobility of his sacrifice. He is also not the
first famous partner to walk away with nothing: Billie Piper did not take a
penny when she separated from the DJ Chris Evans; Elizabeth Hurley made it
clear that she did not want film producer Steve Bing’s money when she found
she was pregnant with his child.
Madonna reportedly says it is “fantasy” to think that Ritchie is getting
nothing, and it appears that she is picking up the tab for the children’s
travel expenses and security. Whatever he’s getting, it’s clearly not nearly
the £150m he might be entitled to – and it may be that his decision not to
fight for a large financial settlement was made in order to send a message,
both to Madonna and the wider world.
“There’s something quite empowering about saying, ‘I don’t need your money’,”
says Dr Gayle Brewer, lecturer in psychology at the University of Central
Lancashire. “It’s good for your confidence and it can also be a way of
addressing people who might have been critical of you at the start of the
relationship.
“If you became involved with someone who was much richer or more successful,
there might have been a suspicion that you were after their money. So
refusing to take any is a way of saying that was never true. You were there
because you wanted to be with that person and nothing else.”
So was it a sensible decision or one driven by emotion? “In this day and age
of equality, why shouldn’t a man go for what he’s entitled to – why play the
stiff-upper-lipped English gentleman who walks away?” said Marilyn Stowe, a
family law specialist.
“I wonder whether he’ll come to regret that.”
NEITHER the Ritchie nor the Ecclestone divorce should come as a surprise. One
in 10 marriages in Britain does not make it past five years and almost half
– 45% – will eventually break down if recent trends persist.
The most recent figures suggest the divorce rate is dropping slightly for
younger people but that may be because fewer are marrying. The rate
continues to rise for women over 45. It used to be that past the 20-year
point, almost no marriages broke up. Couples simply resigned themselves to
their marital fate. Now, two-thirds of divorces are instigated by women,
many of them like Slavica, 50, whose children, Tamara, 24, and Petra, 19,
are grown up.
Slavica was said to be fed up with her husband’s workaholic lifestyle.
Ecclestone, 78, had a heart bypass nine years ago and rarely takes holidays.
He was once asked when he would retire. “Never, never, never,” he said. “The
first day I won’t be going into work is the day they will be lowering me
into my grave.”
It’s impossible to know exactly what prompted Slavica to file for
divorce, but being married to someone so devoted to work must get lonely and
boring once you’re no longer needed for the school run.
Slavica may well be seeking a settlement that will break all records. The
biggest payout by a British court so far is the £48m awarded to Beverley
Charman last year after her split from her husband, John (the case was
handled, incidentally, by Helen Ward, who also represented Ritchie).
The scale of the Ecclestone wealth makes Madonna practically a pauper. Much of
it is believed to be held by Slavica, a Croatian-born former model, in a
trust that also owns just less than 10% of F1. Bernie, who left school at 16
and started selling fountain pens in London’s Petticoat Lane market, is now
chief executive officer of Formula One Administration and owns part of
Queens Park Rangers football club.
“A woman who has had a long marriage and looked after children is generally in
a weak position. Slavica married young to a rich man and she will have to
look to her husband for financial support,” said Geraldine Morris, editor of
Butterworths Family and Child Law Bulletin.
Ecclestone has reached an exceptional level of wealth and should be able to
refer to that “stellar performance” as a reason for the split of assets to
be other than 50/50, should he wish to fight, Morris says, but whether their
assets, even those offshore, are in his or his wife’s name will make no
difference to the court: “They will look at the reality of the situation. If
the assets were earned by Mr Ecclestone he will be given credit for that,
regardless of legal ownership.”
Will we ever know how the assets are split? Probably not. For the other
characteristic of the modern super-rich is that they like to divorce in
private.
“The McCartney-Mills case has had a huge impact,” said Hazel Wright, a divorce
and family law partner at Cumberland Ellis. “To have made a lot of money on
your own means you are quite a combative person, with opinions on a range of
subjects, including the divorce settlement. But the McCartney-Mills case
showed how destructive divorce cases can be. Realism has set in. They don’t
want the same to happen to them.”
As result, so-called HNWs– high-net-worth clients – are far more likely to
come to an amicable agreement than drag their private business and bank
balances through the courts.
So, Macca and Mucca, thank you. You did each other no favours but you may just
have made life easier for the Ecclestones and also for Madonna and her Guy.
