BEL MOONEY: Show me a loyal husband and I'll show you a man who has never had the chance to stray
Are men just weak by nature, and what makes a woman accept the role of a mistress? The Mail's advice columnist casts her verdict on a new book that charts the fascinating history of The Other Woman.
The book jacket shows a voluptuous woman, sprawling naked and fast asleep in a crumpled bed. If she hasn’t just had sex, you know she soon will. And she’ll be good at it.
This is the image of every wife’s nightmare: the irresistibly sexual femme fatale who will, given the chance, ensnare her husband and become the mistress who lures him away. For a while at least.
Wearing my advice columnist’s hat, as well as my wifely bonnet, I admit to a suspicion that most men are susceptible to temptation. Show me a loyal husband and I’ll show you one who’s never had a real opportunity to stray.
The other woman: Marilyn Monroe had an affair with John F Kennedy
But if the sexpot pictured on the front of this fascinating book offered herself for free? Well, you wives, don’t count on him turning her down.
The author, Canadian academic Elizabeth Abbott, argues that marriage and mistressdom have been two sides of the same coin since the beginning of time. The men can’t help it, you see.
Is this to do with an innate weakness in the male sex - or a comment on the institution of marriage? The great French writer Alexandre Dumas was in no doubt: ‘The chains of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two people to carry them - and sometimes even three.’
Ah, but the French have always had a tolerance for such things. They call the after-office-hours rendezvous of a man with his mistress the ‘cinq a sept’ - after which he goes home, happy and relaxed, to his wife and family.
In Joanna Trollope's novel Marrying The Mistress, the heroine is blunt: 'We sleep together, you pay for some things for me, I keep myself exclusively for you. That’s what they do, mistresses'
For years, the French establishment (including the Press) knew that President Mitterrand kept a long-time mistress with whom he had a daughter - but there was no scandal.
For that matter, I was once informed by an Italian count that Princess Diana was absurd not to see that all kings and princes require a mistress, and the wise royal wife is satisfied with her status and wealth. His own wife nodded her agreement.
What makes a woman accept her role as a ‘kept woman’ or ‘bit on the side’? Love or necessity?
The concubines of the ancient world and the East had little choice, and their stories are very different from the sophisticated and famous mistresses of European history, from Madame de Pompadour to Marilyn Monroe.
Elizabeth Abbott unfolds story after story - absorbing chronicles of mistresses throughout the ages, real life and (some) fictional.
We meet delightful Nell Gwynne, notorious Lola Montez, Lord Byron’s three mistresses, Hitler’s Eva Braun, and far too many more to list.
Story after story: Abbott unfolds the history of Hitler's mistress Eva Braun
There are mistresses as the muses of artists, the intellectual equals of philosophers, the molls of gangsters and ‘trophy dolls’.
On one level, reading this book is like indulging in night after night of delicious gossip, and just as riveting. But that would be to undervalue a well-researched and intelligent look at human weakness - in women as well as men.
Abbott reveals she grew up knowing about mistresses because her great-grandfather, a wealthy Detroit brewer and local politician, maintained a ‘love nest’ occupied by a series of ‘fancy women.’
She met her first real-life mistress while at university and was captivated by the subject from then on.
When she began her researches Prince Charles was ‘in disgrace’, but when she finished, he was married . . . to his love, Camilla Parker Bowles.
While on the subject of recent, real-life stories, I must confess that, innocently opening a book for review, I was somewhat shocked to find the story of the end of my own first marriage on page four.
It was a reminder that there are no easy generalisations about this subject.
But there are prejudices and problems. The deeply damaged Vicki Morgan, mistress of department store magnate Alfred Bloomingdale, told group therapy: ‘I am a mistress - and what is a mistress? A high-class call girl? A second wife? A friend?’
Famous mistresses of European history: Nell Gwynne (left), who was mistress of King Charles II, and Madame de Pompadour (right), mistress of Louis XV
Writer Lillian Ross, lover of powerful New Yorker editor William Shawn, scornfully defined a mistress as ‘a heavily-mascaraed woman in a corny movie, wearing a negligee and sitting around sulking and painting her fingernails’ - although she herself enjoyed quiet domesticity with Bill in their apartment, when he wasn’t at home with his wife and family just a few blocks away.
To turn to fiction, in Joanna Trollope’s novel Marrying The Mistress, the heroine is blunt about her role: ‘We sleep together, you pay for some things for me, I keep myself exclusively for you. That’s what they do, mistresses.’
One thing is sure, guilt and jealousy are part of the ménage. The mistress will dread another Christmas without her lover, and may even be the last to know if he is suddenly killed.
She may resent his wife, but still feel guilty to think of the betrayed family elsewhere.
In turn, the other woman will usually be hated by the wife - if she finds out.
As for the men, all too often (as Abbott shows) they discover that having your cake and eating it can make you sick in the end.
