First I read an extract from this memoir in a Sunday newspaper and thought, my heart bleeds for you and your house on Martha’s Vineyard. But then I saw the book Strangers in a shop, and opening it at random glimpsed the name of the New York-founded legal firm Davis Polk. I know somebody who works in one of the European offices of Davis Polk, and this made Belle Burden and her world at least touchable from the outer reaches of mine. So I bought the paperback, and I am glad I did. She may be American blue-blood, she may have hereditary wealth beyond my wildest imaginings, but Belle Burden is still a person who tried her best to make a go of her marriage, never realising that she had married a stranger.
She calls him James so I’m going to call him James too. Thirty seconds on google revealed his real name, but it means nothing to me. (Her name meant nothing to me either, I have to admit.) She married him in 1999, having met him when they both worked for Davis Polk. That firm wasn’t keen on couples working for them, so guess who gave up the job – right, first time. When she left, she worked for her brother’s charity for a while and then decided to give up work. Three children arrived like steps of stairs, boy-girl-girl, and he professed himself delighted with each arrival. Those children were 17, 15 and 12 when James announced that not only did he not want to be married to her any more, he didn’t want any kind of shared custody of the children either.
This was at the start of lockdown which they were spending in Martha’s Vineyard (an island off Massachusetts beloved of rich people) instead of in their New York apartment. He’d had an affair – Belle just found out about the affair and was still reeling from that hurt when he announced his departure. Why she would have wanted him around after his cheating on her is an unanswered question, but he never gave her the choice anyway. And he didn’t leave her for this other woman; he was going anyway. It was like flipping a switch. In the evening he was begging for forgiveness. In the morning he was on his way, unrepentant and unexplaining.
Belle herself is the child of divorce as well as of wealth, and no matter how much trouble she goes to, to try to convince us that her parents (who were briefly a golden couple of the late 1960s) were worthwhile people, the reader quickly sees what inadequate parents they were. Great riches muffle reality so much that a child in Belle’s situation can grow up believing that material goods and annual rituals and occasional checking-in are a substitute for the boring everyday security that is every child’s birthright. She writes things like ‘My father and I were close in many ways’ and ‘She [her mother] put us to bed often’, and it breaks your heart. Growing up, Belle had at least one nasty nanny (an Irishwoman, unfortunately) and a lot of indifferent ones. In fairness to her father, all you need to know about his mother, the actor Flobelle Fairbanks, is that she put him on diet pills in his teens. Her mother’s ‘mother’ (something of an overstatement) was Babe Paley, society beauty, who saw her children once a month and never touched them. Belle’s father demanded the world revolve around him till the day he died, leaving his financial affairs in an awful mess. (The money for Belle and her brother was tied up in trust funds, so it was safe.) Belle’s mother built a very ethical career in urban planning, but she had a succession of male partners each of whom were replaced just as Belle and her brother were getting used to them. Belle’s father’s second wife, Susan, was a rock of stability while they were growing up. But they didn’t live full-time with her.
Belle did her best to build a secure, loving family with her mainly absent husband who soon left Davis Polk for the heady world of business and was away a lot. And, as in her own family of origin, great emphasis was placed on celebrations and rituals. On Christmas morning, for example, Belle and James and the kids would all fly up to Martha’s Vineyard and wear Santa costumes (even the dog) and the gifts would have arrived by mail, and James would make breakfast for them all with great hilarity. (We must be talking about a private jet here – who would choose to shuffle through security queues on Christmas morning?) Other times of the year they would have themed parties which also involved guests flying in and massive expenditure on the themes. In ‘the Vineyard’ Belle and the kids became (despite her early misgivings) members of a country club, with friends and activities and all sorts of social activities laid on. Not a minute was unaccounted for. It all sounds a bit manic and over-the-top, even by American standards.
James must have enjoyed this life, too, because he never in his life did anything he didn’t want to do. He was a selfish man from Day One and the signs were all there. When he knew her first, he took no interest in her until he found out how well-connected and rich she was, and then he showered her with the kind of attention we’ve all come to believe is our due from romantic films and books. She fell for it. (As would we all, in fairness). The pre-nuptial agreement should have been the first red flag. Like most young people in love, she didn’t want one, but her parents and lawyer made it a condition of her accessing her money, and then James insisted on a change to the usual agreement – instead of the assets acquired since the marriage being shared in the event of a divorce, each would get to keep what s/he earned over the course of the marriage. But what I think was an even redder flag than the pre-nuptial agreement, was the fact that she wanted dancing at the wedding, and he didn’t, so they didn’t have dancing. What kind of man denies his bride a simple wish like that on her wedding day? And what kind of relationship did they have, that she didn’t feel she could insist?
So his divorce agreement terms were that she was entitled to absolutely nothing of what he had earned while married to her. And when she and her lawyer tried to contest this, he threatened to take half the ‘Vineyard’ house and half the apartment which were of course, in both their names even though it was her money that had paid for both. Now, as a nit-picking New Yorker article insisted sometime earlier this year, he pays $20,000 a month child support and any extras the kids will need (college fees, summer camps) and anyway she has loads of money, so what’s her problem? I’ll tell you what her problem is! He wouldn’t, sorry he couldn’t, have earned all the money over the years if his wife hadn’t been doing all his life-maintenance for him – cooking, cleaning, looking after his clothes for him, oh, and by the way, bearing and rearing the children he insisted he wanted. She even bought both of the residences in which they lived.No wonder he squirrelled away millions. But imagine wanting to keep it all for himself! The staggering selfishness of it beggars belief.
His cosmic meanness manifested itself in other ways too. When he bought an apartment for himself, it had only one bedroom, with no room for the kids to stay over. (He could easily have afforded a bigger apartment). He didn’t want to have them weekends, didn’t want to see them except on a dropping-in-the-odd-time basis. He’d never spent time alone with them in their entire lives, so why should he start now? It is partly to his credit I suppose that unlike many men in that situation, he didn’t have a new wife and child lined up to fill the gap. But is it to his credit that he never noticed a gap?
Throughout her heartbreak Belle kept doing free legal aid work for immigrants,and at one stage was very touched when the mother of one of her clients, a woman who had far greater problems in her life than Belle, was very sympathetic to her marriage break-up. But often, the harder your life is, the more sympathy you have for others. At the country club some (not all, by any means) of her former ‘friends’ avoid her and some of their mutual male friends think the divorce terms are a great joke. She’s quite hurt by this. In her great innocence (which calls to mind Henry James and Edith Wharton heroines), it never occurs to her that some people might be secretly delighted to see someone of her pedigree and ‘perfect life’ brought low.
This book is a good but a painful read, which raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions not only about marriage, but about wealth. The only safe partner for Belle now would be a man who has even more money than she has. This might be one of the ways great riches consolidate themselves, insulating the rich ever further from the lives of ordinary people. But most people’s take-away from this book will be the rather banal conclusion that great wealth causes more problems than it solves.
Belle Burden, Strangers: a memoir of marriage (London: Ebury 2026).
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