From time immemorial, mistresses have been linked with powerful men. Here’s a look at the phenomenon
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a married man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a mistress....
Or so Jane Austen would have written had she been ensconced at South-Mumbai’s snootiest club bar one late Sunday afternoon, when after a few Bloody Marys, the conversation turned spicier than the prawn vindaloo.
The subject at hand was a woman as beauteous as she was revered. A swan-necked matriarch celebrated for her fine manners, her regal carriage and her perch as the queen of the Malabar Hill memsahib brigade.
It had been one of Mumbai’s best-kept secrets that her husband’s business success, their lavish lifestyles, their children’s expensive Swiss education and their celebrated parties where white-gloved waiters served champagne to Mumbai’s jet set had been bankrolled by her lifelong paramour, himself a much-married wealthy businessman.
In “don’t ask don’t tell” Mumbai, not only had this arrangement been accepted, but almost approved of, perhaps because in certain societies, almost anything can be swept under the carpet, if it’s deep pile and Persian.
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The dictionary defines mistress as a lover, girlfriend, kept woman, courtesan, concubine; but in popular culture it’s come to mean a woman other than his wife with whom a married man has an ongoing sexual relationship.
They come in all shapes and sizes, from JFK’s curvy alleged paramour, Marilyn Monroe, to the intellectual Pamela Harrison who ended up as US ambassador to France, to Onassis’s fiery opera diva Callas to the feisty Ann Boleyn, famously beheaded.
“Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams,” said Georg C Lichtenberg and nowhere has it been truer than in India’s political circles where the mistresses of politicians have mostly blended into the scenery.
In Delhi, for instance, the fact that two recent prime ministers have had paramours has been as easily digested as the carrot cake at the India International Centre tearoom. One a widower, was engaged in a dignified relationship with a respected scribe, and the other, in a long-term cozy friendship with the wife of a late friend, even raised a child with his lady love. These affairs passed under the radar because of the sobriety with which they were conducted much like that of the octogenarian opposition leader known for his holier than thou stance, who nevertheless has a special female acquaintance.
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Unfortunately not all politicians possess that finesse. Sleaze and skullduggery have been the legacy of a certain flamboyant late minister whose affairs were as legendary as they were sordid, and his own murder attributed to woman-trouble.
From time immemorial, mistresses have been linked with powerful men. In fact, originally the word courtesan denoted a female courtier, a person found in the court of a king or feudal head. It was only later, during the Renaissance, that the word was used to refer to a well-educated and independent woman of free morals, especially one associated with wealthy, powerful, or upper-class men.
This avatar of the mistress is reflected in Indian films like Umrao Jan, Pakeezah and Devdas.
What are the financial implications of a mistress? Even though it’s widely believed that it’s largely men with disposable income who can afford to have them, the entry points run the gamut of the middle-class spectrum.
A middle-level banking executive who had taken up with his married maid would create great consternation within his family circle for the fact that every month when he did the household shopping he would duplicate each and every item he bought for his own household with exactly the same one for his maid’s. Right down to the toothpaste and daal.
Other mistresses are more high maintenance: a flashy hotelier installed his mistress in Mumbai’s most expensive apartment block and was rumoured to give her a monthly stipend of Rs 10 lakh as pocket money.
In the 1960s in Mumbai, a certain rat pack of industrialists kept discreet apartments tucked away in its best streets to visit their love interests. Another Mumbai industrialist had such an institutionalised domestic arrangement with his mistress that often his peers would be invited to dine with the two of them in her apartment where she would serve him dotingly like a wife before she ate herself.
In Delhi a bachelor industrialist legendary for his largesse with the ladies made the front page of newspapers when in a momentary lapse of judgment he almost got hitched to one of them and the pictures showed him exchanging garlands with the said lady. A few hours later the denials came in fast and furious, and the story was retracted.
Whereas indulgences like apartments, foreign vacations, designer threads along with patronage in the form of bankrolling art galleries, film careers, or other career-building activities are expected of any self-respecting wealthy man who desires a mistress, in the end a mistress is nothing but her own mistress as in the case of Marion Davies, mistress to William Randolph Hearst who inherited over 50 per cent of his wealth on his death bed but married the love of her life less than three months later.
Amongst royalty, mistresses were almost de rigueur (at least two of Mumbai’s grandest dames owe their rock-sized emeralds to the largesse of their royal admirers). Which is why Prince Charles is reported to have famously asked “Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress,” when the question of Camilla Parker Bowles consumed his subjects.
Of course, Camilla-like, many mistresses before and after graduated to becoming a wife.
It is not an uncommon phenomena and seen in purely HR terms, constitutes a promotion.
But it’s not quite the happily ever after that it appears to be: as the much-married English billionaire James Goldsmith quipped: “When a man marries his mistress it creates a job opportunity.”
