I remember one day in 1995 picking up the newspaper and getting accosted by mug shots of British actor Hugh Grant and of a somewhat masculine-looking African-American woman identified as “sex worker Divine Brown.” The two were reportedly arrested while Grant’s car was parked on a dark road off Sunset Boulevard.
Police were attracted by the blinking of the brake lights because Grant, apparently unable to control his ecstasy, repeatedly slammed on the brakes.
Having lived in Los Angeles for over 25 years, I couldn’t imagine something as commonplace as this attracting the attention of the hard-bitten LAPD, if not for the unlikely pairing of the two participants, one well-known and the other soon-to-be. It seemed incredible to me that they were charged with “lewd conduct,” which, today, would elicit no more than a yawn.
My skepticism about the authenticity of this story and pictures stemmed not so much from my distrust of Hollywood news, but from my naïve and automatic conferring of the mantle of propriety and good taste to all things and persons British (I’m over it), no doubt influenced by many hours watching BBC’s “Masterpiece Theatre” on American Public Television.
Grant’s first big role was as Lord Byron no less, followed by the Merchant/Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s “Maurice.”
Could this be the same man looking disheveled and forlorn in a mug shot alongside Ms Brown? By golly, it is!
Inexplicable
I might have been amused at this too-funny-to-be-true Hollywood vignette had I not recalled that a year earlier, Grant and his long-time fiancée, the gorgeous Elizabeth Hurley, had stopped traffic during a Hollywood premier when she showed up wearing that skimpy black leather Versace dress held together by gold safety pins. She looked, to put it mildly, heart-stoppingly sexy.
That Grant could make the descent from Ms. Hurley to Brown in a short year (even if only in a brief encounter) was not only troubling, but truly inexplicable.
Just as inexplicable to me was the three-ring circus that was the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana, made “somewhat crowded” (Diana’s words) by the unrelenting intrusion of the middle-aged, decidedly non-virgin, matronly Camilla with the dated Farah Fawcett hairdo.
It seemed that Diana’s virginity, youth, beauty, charm and skill as a mother were insufficient to satisfy the dithering moon-child Prince. The most incensed people turned out to be the British themselves, who heaped ridicule and insult on Camilla, mostly over what a British cabbie described to me as her “horse-like appearance.”
None of it quashed Charles’ ardor. A British friend explained Charles’ perverse behavior this way: “Well, what can one expect when one has nothing better to do with one’s life other than wait for one’s mother to die?” One can scratch one’s head, I suppose.
But by the time of Charles and Camilla’s wedding in 2002, when I was then slightly past middle age, my attitude had made a major shift from disapproval to relief—that every middle aged woman’s fantasy might actually come true—as I watched the older and still matronly Camilla skip triumphantly down the aisle with her prince.
Frequent refrain
Not all such mysteries of male behavior come from abroad. When I returned to the Philippines in 2005, some friends felt duty-bound to fill me in on similar peccadilloes of our local gentry. One was of a rather prominent man in his 60s who left his also prominent and, by all accounts, still attractive wife for another woman of surprisingly similar age.
The latter was described as charming but chubby, fun but frumpy, and hardly one’s idea of The Other Woman.
My friends were, and still are, completely flummoxed by it, as expressed by the frequent refrain, “Can you believe that he left his wife for HER?”
A former classmate tearfully shared with me one day that her husband, whom she married when she was 17 and he 19, had left her and their children for an older woman.
I later ran into him with this older woman and, for the life of me, could not understand the attraction, although it was obvious and palpable. Clearly there is more going on here than can be explained by simple biology.
It must really rankle a long-time wife when, after having submerged herself daily in a vat of Olay, limited her diet to bird-seed and hay washed down with a mild laxative, and the remaining residue of fat extracted by an insidious fat-sucking device, she finds her husband besotted by a woman of similar age—but who thinks Olay is how Spanish dancers greet one another, who has had a long relationship with bacon and whose voluptuousness is eagerly fondled by the errant husband.
Frustratingly, there doesn’t seem to be an explanation or remedy.
Real, verifiable
So perhaps it’s time to rethink The Other Woman.
To be sure, there are probably more examples of the Hollywood version of The Other Woman: young, thin, nubile, etc., than what’s described here. But what’s described here is also very real, verifiable and not that uncommon.
Could it be that not all men are shallow or hormonally driven? That there is more to a man’s desire in a woman than youth and beauty?
That a man’s need for relevance trumps other needs that recede with age and can be satisfied only by a woman who’s lived a little and has learned her way around a man’s psyche?
As the old song says, “Who can explain it, who can tell you why”? The American poet, Stanley Kunitz, says it better: “What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire. The longing for the dance stirs in the buried life….”
The verse is poetic, but only partially explains the pathology of male desire. William and Harry would appreciate a full explanation. Please!