George Burns reported that his married sister showed up back at
home one day with her suitcase. She told their mother that she was
moving in for a while to teach her husband a lesson. "If you really
want to teach him a lesson," Mom answered, "have me move into your
house for a while." Mom's wisdom was right on target. The lesson
taught by the sweetheart moving out has a distinct advantage over
the lesson taught by the viper moving in: it can be absorbed in
quiet surroundings. As the Talmud says: "Curling up with a snake is
not a comfortable way to live."
In the case that is currently engaging Italian society, we see a
third scenario in play. This is where the viper has moved out but
is still offering free lessons. More of an adder, actually, as she
sues for millions in palimony.
The woman is Narissa Bradford, 41, an American model who came to
Milan some years ago as a poor girl from Starkville, Mississippi,
with $500 and a shopping bag full of her belongings. Between
modeling gigs she snagged the attention of Franco Colosio, 54, who
had inherited a half-billion dollar supermarket chain and built it
up to three times that value.
She was only a friend, says Colosio, but Bradford says she can
"prove" otherwise from a decade's worth of receipts. She says that
she paid all his bills for him and managed his accounts, as
indicated by his giving her carte blanche with his credit cards and
a $65,000 a month allowance. Hey, she may have smoothed her lines
with Botox, but we can still read between them: she is asking for
spending money now to compensate for her onerous task of spending
his money for ten years. Unless, of course, she was applying the
secret Starksville Accounting Method that his experience in
expanding a billion-dollar company could not duplicate.
Once they drifted apart he agreed to pay her $70,000 a month "to
avoid legal action." After a year, he stopped, thus forcing her
hand. Astonishingly, she offers this as an argument on her behalf:
a year of successful extortion entitles her to continue. Apparently
she found her knight in shining armor -- in a suit of black
mail.
Here we have Fatal Attraction asking for the Easter Bunny to be
put into her pot. Colosio tried to be like Neil Diamond
and "find us a dream that don't ask no questions" and instead found
himself a nightmare that has all the answers.
The suit is working its way through the Italian courts in an
echo of the Lee Marvin palimony case that spurred a series of
copycat actions in our own legal system back in the 1980s. The
first reaction of many conservative types is to revel in the
morality play of the mistress who turns into Miss Stress. They may
also think that making dalliance as expensive as alliance will
eliminate a key disincentive for marriage, thus strengthening that
societal institution.
I believe that these are misleading approaches, at least from
the perspective of public policy. If we are prepared to write
constitutions affirming that marriage is between a man and a woman,
then the premises of the contract must be sacrosanct. If any two
people who keep company are de facto married, then gay marriage and
other eccentric configurations are more difficult to counter.
If Mr. Colosio wanted to commit to Ms. Bradford, presumably she
would have been receptive. The very fact that he propositioned her
rather than proposing to her proclaims loudly his decision to
define their relationship as temporary. In accepting his largesse
in lieu of a wedding ring, she was implicitly forfeiting any claim
on his future. She could not get him to sign on the dotted line,
dashing her hopes; this was a coded, but simple, message that she
stubbornly refused to read.
The courts should not allow this to metastasize. Her case is as
frivolous as was their friendship. The precedent created could wind
up digging a tunnel under the bedrock of wedlock. The type of
conservatism called for here is a formal and legalistic
conservatism that does not allow playing house to become a legal
substitute for keeping house. The financial contracts should remain
firmly tied to the social contract. If you do it right, you get the
benefits and the obligations. If you won't, then you don't.
She came to Milan with her dream of modeling and she succeeded
after a fashion. Her shopping bag was kept full for a very long
time. But 'til death do us part from our money? I don't think so.
It's time for her to learn to lessen.
topics:
Constitution, Conservatism
