‘Your husband is having an affair with my wife’: how the perfect life of an heiress exploded
It is March 2020. The bacterial net of Covid has just made its sinister descent upon the world, and you and your husband have packed up your children (and their cellos) and fled from Tribeca, in New York City, to your multimillion-dollar summer home on the island enclave of Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts.
You have, by the way, bought both this home and the luxury Tribeca apartment with an inheritance. You own them outright. Your grandmother was Barbara “Babe” Paley, a famous, beautiful, wealthy socialite who fell out with the writer Truman Capote when he betrayed her confidences, and those of her friends. Your father was a descendant of the Vanderbilts – a storied, moneyed name. You grew up with privilege before you knew the meaning of the word. Your given name is Flobelle, but you go by Belle.
You all shelter together for a week, making fires, roasting chickens, walking in the woods. Your husband of two decades works remotely for his hedge fund in New York, where he earns several million dollars a year, although right then you are unaware of the extent of his vast income.
At the end of that week, while clearing up after dinner, your phone rings in the kitchen. It’s a number you don’t recognise, so you don’t answer it. The caller leaves a voicemail. When you play it, a man’s voice says: “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.”
Not 24 hours later, your husband will have departed the summer home forever and informed you that he wants nothing from the marriage you have built together, including any care or custody of your three children (then 12, 15 and 17), the third child being one he had specifically encouraged you to have.
“That has been the hardest part of this, and the hardest question to answer, and there really is no answer,” Belle Burden says by phone from her Tribeca apartment. The 56-year-old is talking about the steadfast refusal of her now ex-husband to subsequently coparent their children. When he later bought his own apartment, it had two bedrooms. He converted the second into an office for himself.
“I really tried to convince him to have a room for them at his apartment, and he just did not want to do it. And my challenge with the kids was acknowledging that for them: that this is not the norm and this is painful, and I don’t know why he can’t make a home for you, but it is about him, it’s not about you,” she says
Everything about the almost violently sudden and unexpected end of Burden’s marriage was on her ex-husband’s terms. She calls him James in Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, her recent account of her experience, but it’s the work of a few seconds online to find his real name.
Belle Burden: ‘I think he underestimated me, and I think he also underestimated the reaction to the book.’ Photograph: Victor Llorente/The New York Times
“I think that world of finance does emphasise other values,” she says, still struggling with the unanswerable questions of why their marriage ended so completely. (His affair apparently ended soon after, too.)
“It emphasises the bottom line; it emphasises returns. It is not a world that fosters empathy. A couple of different men gave me advice, and they said, in that world, the only thing people care about is losing money. Leaving your wife, leaving your kids, it just doesn’t bother them.”
James has never explained why he left. Nor did he explain why he wished to enforce a prenuptial agreement in his favour that Burden had been strongly advised against signing by her family. Basically, the arrangement was to give him an equal share in the assets they individually brought to the marriage, regardless of whose money had paid for them, therefore including Burden’s properties in Tribeca and on Martha’s Vineyard.
As for the millions James earned at the hedge fund once they were married, those assets were to remain in his name alone should they divorce. She, a lawyer by training, signed this prenup a week before their wedding. They had later discussed changing the agreement over the course of their marriage, but this had never actually happened.
“I knew it probably wouldn’t be good for me, but I really felt that need to trust and be taken care of,” Burden says. “I see that as something that women tend to do. I think we hand over financial decision making and authority, and maybe we might be preprogrammed to do that culturally because it feels romantic.
“To me it felt like my husband’s great act of love for us, to take care of us as a family financially, but I also think I did it to make him feel good and more equal about marrying into a family with money and with inherited wealth.”
I think he believed that men are allowed to leave in the way that he did. That marriages end and you can walk out without an explanation
— Belle Burden
It was not an amicable divorce. James insisted on instigating the prenup. Apart from pro-bono work as a lawyer representing vulnerable migrants, Burden had not worked outside the home since her marriage: James had provided for them all. She now faced the prospect of raising their three children alone and having to sell both her properties to buy a smaller one. Eventually, she and James reached an unpublicised financial agreement before the case reached court.
No matter what background you come from, and how much wealth you have, it does not insulate you from the universal emotions of heartbreak, as what you had always thought of as a successful, happy marriage ended without explanation.
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Burden, who had always wanted to write, started to set down some of her feelings about it all.
“It was my first return to writing other than legal writing in 30 years,” she says. “I really wanted to write down what happened. There were so many narratives floating around about why the marriage had broken up. Whether it was amicable or not. My ex had his version of events, and I wanted to write down the truth of it.”
She submitted her essay about the ending of her marriage to The New York Times’s hugely popular Modern Love column. Nine months later, having heard nothing, she emailed again. An editor responded soon after to say they were considering it for publication, but with the caveat that first her ex-husband would have to sign off on it.
“It still surprises me that he said yes. I also think that he did not see the narrative as very negative. I think he believed, and maybe still believes, that men are allowed to leave in the way that he did. That marriages end and you can walk out without an explanation.”
Belle Burden’s Strangers has been on the New York Times bestseller list since it was published
Burden’s Modern Love essay ran in June 2023. It went viral at once. Anyone reading it has to wonder why James agreed to its publication. Although Burden is scrupulously fair, and writes with great care, her former husband does not emerge well. In addition, readers easily discovered his identity and workplace, details of which some of them posted online.
“I think he underestimated me, and I think he also underestimated the reaction to the book,” Burden says.
Agents vied to represent her, and a book contract was duly signed. Her memoir of their marriage, Strangers, is an utterly compelling read.
Did James read the memoir before publication?
“He did read it, because someone gave him a galley,” Burden says, referring to a proof copy. “We did not give him a galley, but someone gave him a galley. I don’t know who. He read it about six months before it was published, and he never told me what he thought of it. Part of me hoped for some emotion in response to it. He had a couple of objections, which he relayed to the publisher.”
Did she change those things?
“I changed one detail to be accommodating, but otherwise I declined to change.”
Strangers is beautifully written, with clean, spare prose. It’s both a retrospective analysis of a happy married life over two decades and a gripping exploration of what happened to Burden when this ended: there are no cheap shots anywhere.
I am okay being a cautionary tale if it leads to women being more protective of themselves financially
— Belle Burden
It has been on the New York Times bestseller list since it was published, in January. Strangers is also a fascinating insight into the lives of the extremely wealthy and privileged. For instance, for Burden’s wedding, she writes: “I wore a slinky satin dress designed by Calvin Klein at my mother’s request since she was friendly with him.” It’s just one delicious detail among many.
A lot is also revealed about life among the members of the exclusive tennis club Burden belongs to and among her fellow wealthy second-home-owners on Martha’s Vineyard. Some were scandalised when her New York Times essay appeared, and they made it their business to tell her so. She includes these reactions in her memoir, which must have been uncomfortable reading for some club members.
There was even a discussion at committee level at the club about whether Burden would be permitted to remain a member, now she was divorced, or whether the membership would belong only to her ex-husband – who no longer visited the island. This was even though Burden was the person who owned the house on the island, and she was the one who used the club every summer.
“I was really nervous writing about it, because it is a private club, and, as I wrote in the book, people don’t normally talk about these topics, and they certainly don’t write about the club,” Burden says. “The summer season hasn’t started yet – it doesn’t start until June – so we’ll see what it’s like when I’m there.”
Strangers also includes the sorry tale of the prenup and Burden’s passivity around money and assets during the marriage.
“It is a really important part of the book, and I think I am the cautionary tale – and I am okay being a cautionary tale if it leads to women being more protective of themselves financially, both in marriage and before marriage.”
Strangers is now to be made into a film. It will not be the first time that members of Burden’s family have featured on screen. Her grandmother, Babe Paley, featured heavily in Ryan Murphy’s series Feud: Capote vs The Swans.
When we talk, Burden is watching another Ryan Murphy project, Love Story, about the late John F Kennedy jnr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette.
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“I think it is very entertaining, very beautiful and very nostalgic for that time in New York, which is a time when I was a young lawyer in the city,” she says. “I went to [the restaurants] Indochine and Odeon. It was a particular time in New York that was glamorous and fun, and none of us had cell phones, and it was a very different time.
“As for the fascination with John and Carolyn, I think it has always been that way, and a whole new generation is discovering them, including my daughters, who now want to dress like Carolyn. But I think the Kennedys will always be an obsession for people. I met him once at an event. And he seemed like a very kind and lovely person. But I never met her.”
The dramatised adaptation of Burden’s own marriage will be made by Netflix, which won a recent bidding war for the film rights to her memoir. Burden will be played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Will her ex-husband watch it? We will probably never know.
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, by Belle Burden, is published by Ebury Press
