Caroline Laws’ death brings to close a love story for the ages
The wife of radio legend John Laws, Caroline, who died last Monday following a four-year battle with cancer, will be farewelled on Tuesday at Darling Point’s St Mark’s church.
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THE wife of radio legend John Laws, Caroline, who died last Monday following a four-year battle with cancer, will be farewelled on Tuesday at Darling Point’s St Mark’s church.
Caroline, Lawsie’s “Princess”, leaves behind four daughters, Gabrielle, Georgina, Nichola and Susie and a husband who, despite his well known weakness for women — including two former wives — remained devoted to his third and last wife until she drew her last breath a week ago.
The Lawses’ love affair, which really began in 1951 when they were teens, was one for the ages.
During a series of meetings between your writer and Laws during the past decade, Caroline, who he finally married in 1976 after both had married and had children with others, was always in attendance, eager to hear what was going on in the media.
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She was keen to take one’s temperature on the declining state of what passes these days as Sydney society over lunch at Otto Ristorante.
And she graciously opened up the couple’s grand two-storey Woolloomooloo Finger Wharf Pier apartments to give a curious reporter an insight into the extravagant and indulgent life the couple created during their 44-year marriage.
Until Caroline’s diagnosis, the seasoned jetsetters travelled every year, generally to Europe — frequently to Italy and Spain which they loved — where they spent days and weeks perusing art galleries and museums and compulsively spoiling each other with gifts and trinkets.
When Caroline and I last caught up in 2016, the year she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she and Laws — “Darling” and “Darling” — seemed almost impossibly still in love as they sang out to one another, each correcting the other as they dissected their final disastrous European holiday together.
Both had been hospitalised on the trip — he, now 84 but then 80, with pneumonia and her, then 78, with blood poisoning.
After weeks of illness, they finally made it to Rome and moved into their rooms at one of Laws’s favourite hotels, Hotel d’Inglaterra, just a hop, skip and a wheelchair ride from the Spanish Steps.
Had they seen it? “Fleetingly,” said Laws after his return home.
This column sends its deepest condolences to Laws and Caroline’s extended family.