Marriage in the third degree
It is likely that no man ever crouched on one knee, stared lovingly into his girlfriend’s eyes and asked, “Will you do me the honor of being my first wife?” Perhaps, given the current state of marriage and remarriage, that would be an appropriate proposal.
In the United States, almost 50% of first marriages and more than 60% of second marriages end in divorce. Official statistics on subsequent marriages are more difficult to come by, but there is ample anecdotal evidence that a significant number of people are pledging fidelity “until death us do part” for a third and fourth time. As the famously self-indulgent baby boomers edge toward 60, many of them have experienced more than three decades of adulthood -- long enough to marry, divorce, marry, divorce and marry again.
“I always had clients who were on their second or third divorces,” says Valerie Colb, author of “The Smart Divorce” (Golden Books, 1999), who has practiced family law for 25 years in Beverly Hills and La Canada-Flintridge. “But the volume of divorces that aren’t a first one has gradually increased over the years.”
Are third marriages becoming as common as second marriages once were? Is three the new two? And just how far has society come in its acceptance of people who say “I do, I do,” and then “I do” once more?
Fifty years ago, when Adlai Stevenson made two unsuccessful bids for the presidency, the fact that he was divorced was considered a contributing factor in his defeats. Voters wondered if there was “something wrong” with a man whose marriage had failed. By the time Ronald Reagan and his second wife, Nancy, moved into the White House in 1981, the stigma of divorce, at least in political life, had greatly diminished. The second divorce of former General Electric Chairman and Chief Executive Jack Welch became very public last year. His soon-to-be ex-wife, a former corporate lawyer, had also been married before. Corporate culture once frowned on men and women with a divorce or two on their resumes. Now enough ex-spouses to start a basketball team wouldn’t qualify as a scandal in the business world.
Men or women who appear to be “marrying up,” or practicing licensed social climbing, have always been grist for nasty gossip (ask Georgette Mosbacher, the redheaded Texan now divorced from third husband Robert, a Houston oilman who was secretary of Commerce in the early ‘90s). And a third marriage before a 35th birthday still inspires finger wagging and invites ridicule: When Jennifer Lopez, who is 32 and has been divorced twice, announced her engagement to Ben Affleck, Jay Leno quipped: “Jennifer Lopez getting engaged! Now that’s something that doesn’t happen every day.”
Bestselling author Michael Lewis (“Liar’s Poker”), now 42, lives in Berkeley with his third wife, former MTV VJ Tabitha Soren. “Never would it have occurred to me, or anyone who knows me, that I would have been in the position of being twice divorced at the age of 34,” he says. “I’d never been in a situation where the casual, off-the-cuff joke at the dinner party was going to be me. I felt like maybe a black person would feel sitting at dinner parties and hearing racist jokes. ‘Oh, he’s the guy who’s been married three times.’ It was shorthand for some larger set of negative traits that weren’t mine, really. Being married twice, that’s no problem. Everybody’s been married twice. Two marriages are looked at the way one marriage was in the past -- as kind of normal. But three has become the new two, and for a lot of people, that means I’ve crossed a line.”
‘Who’s next?’
Social scientists believe increasing life expectancy has had a negative effect on the life cycle of some marriages. Staying with one mate was easier when adults died at 45 or 50 (and when a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward mistresses existed in many circles). People live longer today, and thanks to medical breakthroughs, better nutrition and cosmetic surgery, they feel vital and look younger at more advanced ages. A woman widowed at 55 used to devote herself to grandchildren. Today, she might get a face-lift, step up her exercise program, look around and ask, “Who’s next?”
Toni Grant is a clinical psychologist, author and radio talk-show host who lives in Dallas. “It isn’t uncommon for people to live into their 90s now,” she says, “so if they marry in their 20s and after 10 or 15 years feel the marriage was a mistake, it doesn’t make sense to stick with it for the next 60 years. I don’t think someone is judged very harshly if they’re 60 and on their third marriage. But if they’re 35 and their third marriage isn’t working, then that’s someone who isn’t getting it. I’m on my second marriage, and in June we’ll celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary. We have a second marriage made in heaven, but it isn’t an accident. I diligently searched for the right partner. I really understood in a way I didn’t the first time what I required in a partner, and my husband, who had been married before, did as well. I know many other people who have had very successful second marriages. People who need to go to three and four and five haven’t learned the true significance of marriage.”
Grant and Lewis are typical of many social observers interviewed who conclude that one divorce isn’t taboo and two is no longer shocking. But it’s still possible to do something smirk-worthy: Thirty-four-year-old Lisa Marie Presley’s third marriage, to Nicolas Cage, ended recently after four months, so fast that there wasn’t time to pull a dreamy photograph of the couple from Vogue’s February “Couples Issue.” “A third marriage makes a lot of people nervous, and definitely a fourth does,” says Nancy Etcoff, who teaches psychology at Harvard Medical School and is in private practice in Boston. “What raises eyebrows is the turnaround time, someone who very quickly cycles in and out of marriages.”
Celebrities have made marrying repeatedly more familiar, although no one expects extreme cases like Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton (twice) Warner Fortensky to become the norm. Yet the list of celebrities who seem to enjoy attending their own weddings is long. Billy Bob Thornton has had five marriages and as many divorces. Producer Robert Evans is with wife No. 6, as is talk-show host Larry King. Writers Michael Crichton and Danielle Steel have married four and five times, respectively. Directors Martin Scorsese and James Cameron are each married to their fifth wife. Joan Collins wed her fifth husband not long ago. Multiple spouses don’t only exist in the arts. When New York businessman Ronald Perelman married actress Ellen Barkin, she became the fourth Mrs. Perelman. L.A.’s new chief of police, William Bratton, is his wife’s third husband. She is his fourth mate.
“We feel horror and fascination for celebrities who marry a lot,” says Olivia Goldsmith, whose bestselling novel “The First Wives Club” was made into a movie starring Goldie Hawn, a veteran of three divorces. “It’s like watching violence on television. After a while, you become accustomed to the horror. There’s no doubt that respectable people in the public eye are doing it, and it is perceived as not an aberration. In London and New York, there seems to be a very acceptable pattern among the media elite and the upper middle class: The first wife was a throwaway. The second wife was a reaction to the first -- she’s the bimbo. The third wife is the charm.”
Another model is suggested by the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: Marry once to produce children, once for money and once for love. She never divorced, however, because her two husbands died. And she didn’t marry the companion with whom she shared the last seven years of her life, financier Maurice Tempelsman.
Half-full or half-empty?
Whether someone who marries and divorces often is admired or criticized depends on a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full perception of events. Some focus on the divorces and wonder, “Why can’t they get it right?” Others concentrate on the marriages and think, “Wow. Not only are they adept at attracting the opposite sex, they can close the deal, too.”
One indication that multiple marriers feel some societal scorn is a tendency to “forget” a spouse. When John P. Dwyer resigned as dean of the law school at UC Berkeley last year, his third ex-wife, who referred to herself as his second wife, told a Times reporter that Dwyer had implored her to keep his first, short marriage a secret. Nobody ever lies up, do they, inflating the number of exes?
“I know a lot of women who won’t admit they’re in a third marriage,” says New Yorker Marsha Johnson Berger, a 61-year-old former model. “I just say I was married before.” Two years ago she married her third husband in a big church wedding, the groom’s first. In the 10 years between her second and third marriages, Berger went into therapy to try to learn why her choice of husbands hadn’t been better. And she dated a lot.
“If I was dating a man who’d been divorced twice, I was very wary, because I think most women get rid of men, not the other way around. None of them seemed to be concerned that I’d been divorced twice. Men are so shallow and naive -- I was nice looking and I had a nice figure. Some of them wouldn’t even ask, although they often wanted to know how old I was. So they’d ask if I had children, and how old they were. That’s the only reason past marriages would even come up. I have two children, now grown, who are from my first marriage. I forgave myself for that marriage, because I met him on the first day of college. He was gorgeous and I was young. What did I know?”
Brief, youthful unions have become so common that a term has been coined to describe them. “A starter marriage is defined as lasting five years or less and ending without children,” says Pamela Paul, who wrote “The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony” (Villard Books, 2002).
Whether a marriage produces children affects how much disapproval its failure engenders. “Trading in wives can be a very expensive habit for men,” novelist Goldsmith says. “I’m not opposed to divorce. I’m opposed to deception and the victimization of children. I think all first marriages should be brief and easily revocable. Almost everybody used to make a stupid college marriage. There’s nothing wrong with unloading it if both people are young and have a chance to make a new life. But if that college wife has put her husband through law school, then the situation isn’t so simple. What is immoral and, in my view, deleterious to society, is that fathers and husbands desert their first families emotionally and financially, and that didn’t use to happen.”
Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Victor Sherman has been married and divorced five times. His shortest marriage lasted a week. He spent eight years wed to his last wife. “I’m obviously a total failure at marriage,” he says. “My judgment is impaired. My problem with women is I get intrigued with the challenge they present. When the challenge is no longer there, I lose interest. I always thought the idea of marriage was kind of absurd, because the idea of having one sexual partner for your whole life isn’t possible. My attitude has changed a little as I’ve gotten older, because I see that changing partners doesn’t get you anywhere. When I was younger and got divorced, I didn’t feel guilty. I’d wonder about how stupid I was, but I didn’t feel guilty about getting divorced from any of the women I didn’t have children with. Now I feel huge guilt about the destruction I’ve caused.”
Sherman, 61, has a 31-year-old son from his first marriage who recently got engaged. His last marriage produced three sons, twins now 9 and a boy now 11. Every other weekend, he flies to Connecticut to be with them, so he doesn’t have much time to date. “The thing that shocks me is I do go out with women who say they want to marry me. I tell them I’ve never been faithful. Why would anyone want to marry me?”
‘A powerful need’
For those who marry repeatedly, hope springs eternal. “People have a powerful need to be with other people, to be loved and attached. On the other hand, they often find it very difficult to stay together,” Harvard’s Etcoff says. “No one would ever get married assuming divorce. These people are supremely optimistic. They value love and romance and they want to get it right. Every time they marry, they want it to last forever.”
Frequent marriers with complementary streaks of romanticism and delusion evidently can learn from their mistakes. The life of actress Stockard Channing, who plays a smart, strong-willed first lady on “The West Wing,” reflects a pattern Etcoff believes has become widespread. Channing has had four marriages; each lasted between four and six years. Since 1988 she has been with cameraman Dan Gillham, although they never married. “The statistics say that second and third marriages are no more successful than first,” Etcoff says, “but I see people who do get it right the third or fourth time, and their experience isn’t reflected in the statistics because they aren’t getting married. They’re getting into intimate, committed relationships, but they’re stopping short of getting married.”
Conservative observers assume that people who marry and divorce repeatedly don’t respect the institution of marriage. But could it be that it means a great deal to them? “A lot of people value it very much and it doesn’t meet their standards,” Etcoff says. “They want marriage to take the place of religion in life, to be the be-all and end-all in life, and if it doesn’t meet that standard, they go looking for it somewhere else.”
Berger admits she kept searching for her ideal marriage. “It never occurred to me, when I got divorced a second time, that I would stay single,” she says. “I do believe marriage is important, and I wanted what I knew was out there. I knew I was capable -- especially after several years with a shrink -- of having a good marriage, and I knew I was going to attract the right man the next time. And I did. We’ll never get divorced.”