The odd couples

These celebrity couples looked unlikely and the results proved they often were, reports Margaret Carragher

WE’VE all seen them — papped at glitzy award ceremonies, or on private yachts or planes, or occasionally as the subject of cautionary “And finally…” snippets on the evening news.

Frequently at opposite ends of the age and/or beauty spectrum, unlikely couples are characterised by their, well, very unlikeliness: think Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, Joan Collins and Percy Gibson, Zsa Zsa Gabor and just about anyone. And of course the recently wed, 85-year-old Spanish Duchess of Alba and her toyboy husband Alfonso Diez.

But for all their individual disparities, a common characteristic of such relationships is the inequality of wealth/power/status/intellect between the couples involved.

Take for example intellectual colossus Arthur Miller and airhead movie star Marilyn Monroe. “She was a Hollywood bombshell who yearned to be taken seriously. He was the Great American Playwright, looking to escape his stale marriage. Briefly, they found happiness together. But then the madness began.” So wrote Christopher Bigsby in his 2008 biography on Arthur Miller, which detailed the demise not just of the couple’s marriage but also of Monroe herself.

Despite the inexorable, mutual attraction the pair were simply, hopelessly mismatched.

Research shows that such unions are usually doomed: opposites might attract in the short term, but for the long haul you’re better off with someone whose views and values you share.

But such triflings were unlikely to trouble 26-year-old Playboy Playmate of the Year Anna Nichole Smith as she hooshed 89-year-old Texan oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall up the aisle in 1994. The pair, who’d met three years previously in a Houston strip club, declared themselves madly in love, with Smith insisting that her new husband’s billion dollar fortune, advanced years and precarious health had in no way influenced her decision to marry him. Perhaps unsurprisingly her new husband’s family begged to differ; and following his death 13 months later Marshall’s son challenged Smith’s claim for half of her late husband’s $1.6 billion estate. The legal row was still raging when Smith died of a prescription drugs overdose in 2007.

Vertically, horizontally and aesthetically challenged, with Crolly doll hair plugs and glow-in-the-dark porcelain teeth, the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi might seem an unlikely choice of mate for a nubile young beauty. But factor in his multi-billionaire status, humongous ego and despotic power and influence, and suddenly the nipped, tucked and lavishly Botoxed septuagenarian has nubile young beauties by the shedload cavorting naked at his ‘bunga bunga’ parties — where the vexed issue of shared views and values is unlikely to arise. Even if, given Berlusconi’s legendary appetite for Viagra, one can rest assured that everything else will.

Ditto Nicholas Sarkozy. So besotted is the diminutive French president with his willowy fashion model wife Carli Bruni it’s claimed he once kept Queen Elizabeth waiting while he and his wife made out in the guest apartments of Buckingham Palace. And for as long as Sarkozy remains Monsieur Le President he can be assured that the relentlessly driven, upwardly mobile First Lady will remain in his bed. But politics is an uncertain business; and mindful of Bruni’s past (her many former lovers include Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and former French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, and she has publicly dissed the concept of monogamy) her pint-sized husband might do well to polish up his CV. Or maybe have a word with Berlusconi.

It could have been a match made in heaven. A beautiful, aristocratic young English rose. A dashing, sporty prince of the realm. But there was also the Other Woman. Doomed from the outset, the union between Charles, Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer lasted just long enough to provide the royal family with the requisite heir and spare. And even then, the Other Woman was a constant presence. Plain as a haystack and utterly devoid of her rival’s popular charm, Camilla Shand first met Prince Charles when both were young, free and single. That Charles could have married her first time round and thus avoided all the subsequent grief and recrimination is surely the most enduring irony of all. As it was he dithered, and army man Andrew Parker Bowles stepped in and married her instead. But Charles and Camilla were meant to be together; and more than 35 years after they first met, this most unlikely pair finally wed in 2005.

Other European royal families boast similarly unlikely couples. Consider Monaco’s Prince Rainier and Oscar-winning actress Grace Kelly. On paper, it was an ideal match: movie queen marries handsome prince. In True Grace: The Life And Times Of An American Princess, Hollywood biographer Wendy Leigh claims the actress had a string of torrid flings both before and after her marriage to Rainier. During her time in Hollywood, Kelly bedded many of her leading men, married and single, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Bing Crosby, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis and William Holden — she even seduced her bridesmaid’s husband. So much for the unattainable ice queen image.

And it seems Grace’s younger daughter is little better. With a penchant for tattoos and rough trade, Monaco’s recalcitrant Princess Stephanie has lived much of her life in the redtops. Barely out of her teens, she had two children with her former bodyguard, Daniel Ducruet — who was subsequently papped cavorting by a pool with Miss Nude Belgium. Exit Monsieur Ducruet. After a string of equally disreputable suitors, in 1998 Stephanie produced Baby No 3 by an unnamed father before taking up with married elephant trainer Franco Knie, and moving into a caravan with him. In September 2003 the wayward princess went on to marry trapeze artiste Adans Lopez Peres, but the union lasted less than a year. She was photographed recently, looking rough, at the wedding of yet another unlikely couple, her brother Prince Albert and former Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock.

Even before the nuptials on 1 July 2011, rumour was rife of a split amid revelations that veteran ladies man Albert was to face paternity tests following claims that he had fathered a third child out of wedlock. Despite such reports the wedding went ahead, even if the bride burst into tears and was reportedly inconsolable during the ceremony.

Two of Princess Caroline’s three marriages have ended in tears: the first in 1978, to Parisian banker and playboy Phillipe Junot was over in two years, while the second, in 1984 to Stefano Casiraghi, heir to an Italian industrial fortune, ended with Casiraghi’s death in a speedboat accident in 1990.

Caroline’s current marriage is reportedly in trouble amid rumours that her husband of 12 years, Prince Ernst of Hanover — a cousin of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, with numerous convictions for brawling and assault, and a penchant for binge drinking and urinating in public — has taken up with a former nightclub dancer from Romania, known only as Simona, who now models lingerie for an Austrian brothel chain. But as in most such unions, unlikeliness is par for the course.