Olivia 'First Wives Club' Goldsmith dies after face lift

By JEREMY LAURANCE


She was the spurned spouse who got everything – money success and fame. But her money could not buy her time. Olivia Goldsmith, best selling author of the popular comic novel First Wives Club, has died aged 54 after complications following a facelift.

The self deprecating author whose book was made into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Goldie Hawn in 1996, was reported to have had a reaction to the anaesthetic while undergoing surgery to remove loose skin from under her chin.

She was admitted to the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospitals in New York on Wednesday. According to her literary agent, Nicholas Ellison, she had a heart attack as she went under anaesthesia and lapsed into a coma. She was transferred to Lennox Hill hospital but died later.

General anaesthetics are a rare, but recognised, risk of surgery and in many cases carry a higher risk than the operation itself.

A former management consultant, Ms Goldsmith took up writing after divorcing her husband, a business executive whom she once described as "tremendously charismatic but totally irresponsible."

The First Wives Club was her first book, published in 1992, which playfully imagined the revenge of three women who had been dumped by their husbands for younger second wives.

Ms Hawn played a flashy Hollywood diva who had plastic surgery to retain her youthful looks but wound up with a decidedly comic outcome.

A stream of comic novels followed, including Switcheroo, Young Wives and Uptown Girl. She admitted that most of her work had an autobiographical element to it, often involving the age old female dilemma of choosing between a solid reliable man and a wicked, unreliable rogue.

Her own husband fell into the rogue category. "I married a bad boy," she once said. "He was charming and good looking – people mistook him for Robert Redford. He was the boy everybody wanted."

In restaurants women would come up to him on a pretext and hand him their business cards in front of her. "I just couldn't stand it for one more minute. I left. Child that he was, he went into a temper tantrum and it took me seven years to get divorced."

In the end she gave him almost everything she owned – her flat, the house in the country and the jaguar that had been a business car. Years later, she told an interviewer that she wrote from anger. "I like things to work out fairly. That's why I write fiction because in real life everything isn't fair. The cards are stacked against women."

In 2001, she told an interviewer that she was paying as much as possible into a pension fund so she could enjoy a relaxed old age. She said the most important things she had learned about money were that they bought freedom and time "which are the two most wonderful things in life."

- INDEPENDENT