Jerry Hall said of her 22-year relationship with Mick Jagger: "We got on great. Except he slept with lots of other people, which was horrible.” Photo / Jo Wood
Jerry Hall said of her 22-year relationship with Mick Jagger: "We got on great. Except he slept with lots of other people, which was horrible.” Photo / Jo Wood
Opinion by Judith Woods
OPINION:
Eleven words was all it took. In just 11 words, curmudgeonly old snapping turtle Rupert Murdoch ended his six-year marriage to former supermodel and current superstar Jerry Hall. You don’t have to be Thomas Hobbes to recognise the nonagenarian’s email was every bit as nasty, brutish andshort as its author.
Incidentally, Murdoch has since axed his latest fiancée, destined to be ex-wife number five, just a fortnight after gifting her a mahoosive engagement rock that I hope she damn well keeps as a multimillion-dollar reminder of a billionaire bullet dodged. The split with Hall occurred in June of last year.
The Texan was completely blindsided and now the details have emerged in Vanity Fair, those words are being pored over like the Rosetta Stone; “Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage. We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do. My New York lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.”
Hard to know where to begin unpacking that valedictory billet doux, but I would (not very) respectfully suggest the weirdest aspect of the break up was how Hall’s former partner Mick Jagger came swinging to the rescue with the sort of protective grand gesture he never made when they were a couple for more than two decades.
Apparently Snake Hips sent his security consultant to disconnect the creepy live surveillance cameras in the Oxfordshire home that Hall received from Murdoch in the divorce settlement. Even after the split, the footage was purportedly still being sent to Murdoch’s Fox headquarters. It may look at first glance as though Jagger, 79, was magnanimously stepping up to be the perfect ex. On closer inspection, I suspect it was simply a point-scoring exercise against Murdoch, 92.
Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall at the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party in LA. Photo / Jon Kopaloff, WireImage
I know hell is supposed to have no fury like a woman scorned and all that, but the towering rage of one male ex against another male ex is truly a sight to behold. Womenfolk fade into the background once the egos have landed. And so we have a rich old bloke intent on out-alpha-ing an even richer, even older bloke, like two retired boxers clumsily slugging it out while the spectators watch through their fingers hoping neither of them takes a tumble or bursts their prostate.
It’s a peculiar scenario familiar to some women. “I split up with my partner because he was chronically lazy and refused to do anything around the flat which was literally starting to fall apart,” a girlfriend told me. “He didn’t seem that bothered and we still saw each other socially. When I started dating again he wished me well but then I met someone who he discovered had a qualification in carpentry and my ex took it personally – he even turned up one day and insisted on bleeding the radiators and telling me about heat pumps. It was utterly absurd.”
Another friend, a mother of one, who has remained on “reasonable” terms with her ex-husband, was taken aback to find him getting proprietorial when a new man moved in with her. “We had agreed shared custody 50/50 but my ex started muscling in and making derogatory remarks to our son about my new partner, which was a bit pathetic as he had actually remarried and his wife was having a new baby,” she said.
“I know for a fact he didn’t want to get back with me, it was ridiculous male pride. I think if I’d left him alone in the house he’d have cocked his leg to mark it as his territory. Eventually I had a quiet word with his wife and that stopped him in his tracks.”
Julia Roberts and George Clooney in Ticket to Paradise. Photo / Supplied
I have no doubt Jerry, 66, was appreciative of Mick’s intervention. She comes across as a woman of dignity and almost tragic forbearance: “All of our friends are the same friends, we like the same people,” she said of her relationship with Jagger in 2005. “So we got on great. Except he slept with lots of other people, which was horrible.”
He also contested they had ever been married, remember? When she finally got fed up with his philandering – after it emerged Brazilian model Luciana Morad was pregnant following a fling with Jagger – she filed for divorce, whereupon his lawyers argued their Hindu wedding ceremony in Bali wasn’t legally valid.
A nice touch after having four children together. In another bizarre twist after their more recent relationship ended, Murdoch made Hall promise not to approach the producers of Succession, the sky-high-net-worth family drama believed to be based on the media mogul’s dynasty. He feared she might feed them plot lines – based on the ending of the marriage. Paranoia? I’m not sure how else to term it.
But then again there is something irresistible about exes at loggerheads; rifts and reunions are the bread and butter of romantic fiction and classic cinema alike. Think Katharine Hepburn sparring with her ex Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story or last year’s Ticket to Paradise featuring George Clooney and Julia Roberts as a constantly bickering divorced couple brought together by circumstance.
Much of the comedy in Mrs Doubtfire is predicated on Robin Williams’s ongoing rivalry and resentment towards his ex-wife’s new partner Pierce Brosnan; long after hopes of reconciliation have faded, he’s still intent on point scoring. It’s clearly a guy thing. But that doesn’t make it any less irritating to witness.
As my divorced friend noted: “If he’d spent half the effort impressing me as he wastes trying to impress my new partner, we’d probably still be together.”
