On the day the first reports of Gordon Ramsay’s extramarital activities broke,
the man himself was at Babington House, recovering from a friend’s birthday
party the night before. Staff quietly removed every copy of the offending
paper, so that Ramsay and his pals were protected from the awkward modern
inconvenience of a kiss-and-tell exposé.
As Gordon and his wife, Tana, were chauffeur-driven back to their family home
in Wandsworth, who can guess what kind of conversations were going on in the
back of the Mercedes. Because to the outside world, the Ramsays have done
the united front — posing, with the rictus grins so beloved of disgraced
MPs, for the welcoming party of paparazzi. His wife is standing by him.
Ramsay may deny the allegations, but within hours the usual “friends” had
come forward to say his wife has become “resigned” to his roving eye.
While Tana may decide there is more to their relationship than her husband’s
fidelity, the entire Ramsay clan may also accept that their unity is not
only good for the family, but for business too. Family Ramsay is a brand, a
huge one, with its globally syndicated television shows, books and
restaurants. Gordon may be the product but so, too, is Tana, with her
“family cooking made simple” columns and books, as are the kids, who are
often roped in for magazine spreads. Tana’s father, Chris Hutcheson, is
Gordon’s business partner. As one fellow chef says: “Gordon can cook, yeah,
but how did he get from where he was when he met Tana, to this empire you
see now? That’s Chris.”
Many families go through Ramsayesque domestic nightmares and survive. They may
not have a business empire at stake, but there is still the family brand to
protect, and women are prepared to put up with terrible behaviour to
safeguard it. Tana joins Princess Diana, Victoria Beckham, Hillary Clinton
and Mary Archer — women who have all stood at the garden gate in front of
the press.
“Ramsay is such a force of nature. I guess his wife thinks it comes with the
territory. He is publicly very faithful to Tana,” says Style’s agony aunt,
Sally Brampton. “Relationships are agreements, and just because you break
the rules of society, it does not mean you are breaking the terms of that
unique agreement.”
One successful businessman I know, a serial cheater, says drily: “Playing away
is not good for the balance and harmony at home, so I keep it quiet,
although men do talk about it among themselves.”
Brampton thinks that sex is rarely the issue at the centre of such behaviour.
“It is about low self-esteem, and the man’s self-worth being validated,” she
says.
The businessman continues: “Most relationships start with passionate love or
lust. Neither of these last, but the relationships often do. Many people
need bursts of passion or lust. If their spouse accepts this, they may
continue to be happy; if not, they might be driven apart and the cycle is
repeated. If the mistress is tolerated or kept secret, what I would call the
‘sub-relationship’ can be long-lasting and to the benefit of all concerned.”
Another man describes how his occasional straying “can have a therapeutic
effect on the relationship. It often makes you realise you are better off
where you are — the grass is not greener — and reinforces your commitment to
the relationship”.
Many wives are pragmatic about this state of affairs. As the wife of two
unfaithful men, Annabel Goldsmith said in 1987: “I can never understand the
wives who really mind, the wives who set such store by fidelity. How
extraordinary and how mad they are. Because, surely, if the man goes out and
he comes back, it’s not actually doing any harm.” Goldsmith was the late
Jimmy Goldsmith’s mistress before she was his wife. It was he, of course,
who uttered the memorable truism: “If you marry your mistress, you create a
vacancy.”
Alpha males, like rock stars, MPs, princes and tycoons, with their incredible
egos and rampant, childlike need for attention, wealth and opportunity, are
particularly prone to such behaviour. The wives of these men develop blind
spots and coping mechanisms to sustain the the family. The divorce lawyer
Vanessa Lloyd Platt says: “Three- quarters of the powerful men in this
country are having affairs in some form or another. Some of those affairs
last 10 years without the wife, apparently, knowing. Women come to us to
find out what their husbands are up to, and if it transpires he is having an
affair, it’s not a given they will divorce him. Often they’ll say the reason
they’re not leaving is, ‘He’s such a character, I will never meet someone
like that again.’ It can be fine for years, and then the men actually fall
in love, usually with a younger version of the wife. That’s when trouble
starts, and when I meet them, they are very angry.”
The extramarital affair is more common than divorce, though independent
working women are more likely to leave unfaithful husbands as they have less
fear of coping with life alone. “Infidelity is not always a sackable
offence,” says Rowan Pelling, former editor of the The Erotic Review. “In
all the uproar and scandal, people forget marriage is an alliance. Men are
like egotistical little boys — ambitious and driven ones even more so. They
need constant attention, and when you have kids, some women will think, ‘Oh
god, let someone else take up that slack.’ ”
Mick Jagger’s wives and significant others have all tolerated his infidelity
up to a point, but even fierce rock-star wives have limits. Bianca divorced
him over Jerry, who herself left him after his countless affairs became more
than she could stand. Jerry says her reason for staying for 21 years was
that she was “co-dependent” on Mick. He was addicted to affairs — and she
was addicted to loving him.
I know one woman who left her husband after his persistent straying, combined
with her postnatal depression, became more than she could cope with. Now, 40
years on, she insists that he was the love of her life and wishes she had
gritted her teeth and stuck it out.
“What is often forgotten is love,” says Pelling. “A husband can be like a
difficult teenage child, but it doesn’t mean you stop loving him. Infidelity
is just another weakness, like extreme selfishness or not picking up his
dirty socks.”
At the hard end, though, let’s not pretend it’s pretty. Thirtysomething Jenny
has managed to hold her family together for eight years while her husband
carried on with a beautician. He claims the affair is over now, but Jenny
says: “I will never forgive or forget.” Her husband works in the film
industry, “where there is a culture of what goes on the shoot, stays on the
shoot. His father was a famous lothario, and while my husband always swore
he would not be like his dad, he turned out to be the same”.
She says finding out was hideous — “Like being punched in the stomach again
and again” — but she stayed: yes, for their children (including a stepchild
from his first marriage), but also for love. “I hated him for years, but I
stayed because I love him. I've fallen in love with a few people in my life,
but I gave my loyalty to him. I swear it’s something biological, cellular.
You fall in love with the whole package.”
She took some comfort from the fact that the other woman was not the wild,
hot, sexy woman of her nightmares, but “nondescript, piggy-eyed. It was just
about feeding his ego. She clearly idolised him in a way no wife ever
could”.
I spoke to one person in the Ramsay camp who said Gordon was like a child in a
sweetshop, with adoring women making silly eyes at him. “You’d need to be a
very strong man to resist that kind of attention and opportunity. I’m not
sure I could.”
For a certain type of wife, however, a mistress can be a blessing. “I didn’t
want to have sex,” says one Hampshire mother of two. “So I told him, ‘The
ideal situation is for you to go and get a mistress. I don’t care who she
is, just as long as she is kept out of our lives.’ There was nothing sexual
left in our marriage; it was something I had to force myself to do every few
months. I thought we would struggle on if he was getting regular sex and
attention from another woman, and then we could just get on with being
friends and having a family. I think, as a society, we’re morally squeamish
about the practicalities of farming out sex to another woman, but I have a
couple of girlfriends who say, ‘I don’t care if he’s getting it elsewhere. I
just don’t want to know about it.’ ”
If you talk to the hairdressers and beauty-parlour confidantes of some of the
richest wives in London, you’ll hear the same story again and again. “It’s
different for those women,” says one. “They don’t marry for love — the
families push them together or the woman marries the man for his money. A
lot of wives turn a blind eye, but they lay out ground rules: the other
woman can’t be a scrubber, in case she goes to the press or gets pregnant,
and she can’t be too beautiful or he’ll leave the wife for her.”
One £200-an-hour beauty professional pointed out that if all other wives in a
social group are putting up with it, you will too. Infidelity becomes
socially acceptable.
The last straw for one woman who had tolerated her husband’s infidelities for
several years was when “I found out the wine he bought her was twice the
price of the wine he bought for me. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that
little thing was emblematic of how little respect he had. I could put up
with his monkeying around, as long as he compensated in some way.”
Jenny was given heaps of apology gifts by her husband, but she gave every one
back. “I didn’t want his lingerie, watches or jewellery. It’s blood money,”
she tells me. She seems calm, but you can feel the hurt, taste the pain.
Still, she is solid on her decision to stay. “Stability and family life is
important to me. And you can make a relationship work, despite everything. I
look at where we are as a family now and it was worth sticking around.”
