Erica Packer and new love fly home to plan wedding

AFTER a giddy eight-month courtship, Erica Packer has accepted the marriage proposal of Cuban artist Enrique Martinez Celaya and is enroute home from Paris to share the news with her family.

AFTER a giddy eight-month courtship, Erica Packer has accepted the marriage proposal of Cuban artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, the latest artistic suitor to sweep the vivacious former model off her feet since her marriage to billionaire James Packer ended in 2013.

Packer and Martinez Celaya escaped to Paris, the city of love, this month for a romantic two-week liaison during which 54-year-old Martinez Celaya took the mother-of-three into his arms, slipped a chunky gold ring on to her finger, and asked if she might consider spending the rest of her life with the father-of-four who holds the position of Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California.

Erica Packer, sporting a shiny ring, with Enrique Martinez Celaya embrace on the streets of Paris. Picture: BACKGRID

Packer’s three children to billionaire James Packer — back home in the US being cared for by their nanny — would learn about the proposal later, after their 41-year-old mother had begun to process it and imagine what life with a man variously described as artist, poet, philosopher, writer, student of quantum physics and laser device inventor would entail.

She is still contemplating that this weekend as she flies home from Europe to Los Angeles where Martinez Celaya owns and runs an enormous 16,000-foot-square studio.

The couple reportedly met earlier this year while both were navigating the school drop off and pick-up in the affluent LA suburb of Bel-Air although sources say they may have crossed paths earlier in Aspen where she co-owns a house with her ex-husband and the artist frequently retreats to work.

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A chance meeting at the school gates in LA would follow a pattern for Packer, who with her children Indigo, 10, Jackson, eight, and Emmanuelle, six, lives in a $14 million mansion in a luxury gated estate bought with the proceeds of her $100 million divorce settlement from the casino magnate.

Martinez Celaya established a home base in nearby Brentwood and spent the years from 1999 growing his international following and raising a family with wife Alexandra Williams, daughter of Watergate-era Washington Post editor and Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and screenwriter Christian Williams.

Orlando Bloom provided a shoulder to cry on after Packer’s divorce. Picture: Matthias Nareyek/Getty Images

Williams Sr has previously written of his former son-in-law’s robust attitude and how “the universe around Enrique seems to be constantly expanding … drawn into it, you feel larger”.

Martinez Celaya and his wife welcomed four children in rapid succession, Gabriela, Sebastian and Adrian (now teenagers) and later youngest daughter Natalie, before he filed for divorce in 2015.

Last week while Packer and Martinez Celaya nuzzled and kissed on the chilly streets of Paris in a romantic two-day PDA captured by a lucky (or well-informed) paparazzo, her family buzzed with the exciting news that five years on from her bruising divorce from James Packer, she is making plans to marry again.

It is not the first time the Gunnedah-raised model has been swept off her feet at the school gates in Bel-Air.

In 2015 Grammy Award-winning British singer Seal, another high-profile divorcee who calls LA home and whose children to model Heidi Klum are schooled in the Bel-Air district, made a play for the Aussie beauty’s affections.

By August that year, as rumblings of her ex’s new relationship with Mariah Carey gained momentum, Packer and Seal flew to Europe where Seal demonstrated his easy way with Erica’s brood during a holiday and cruise off the coast of Italy.

While that relationship would run out of steam after 18 months, sources maintain it gave Packer, a solo parent, a benchmark for a future relationship with a partner who would prove a devoted father.

LA-based British singer Seal had a relationship with Packer that last 18 months. Picture: Valerie Macon/AFP

It was a quality she also admired in actor Orlando Bloom, an attentive friend who offered her a shoulder to cry on following the breakdown of her marriage in 2013.

Like Packer, Bloom was in recovery mode following the end of his own marriage, to Australian model Miranda Kerr, mother of his son Flynn, and the woman rumoured to have been romanced by James Packer following his split with Erica.

Martinez Celaya is by all accounts a devoted father who has nurtured a love of art and science in his children. He is also something of an over-achiever and a marriage to him would represent a step-up into US society for Packer.

Acclaimed in the US for his “blood and tar” sculptures and paintings, Martinez Celaya’s often bleak work is collected by high-level trustees and has been displayed around the world — from Russia to Stockholm — and is currently part of a permanent collection at the New York Met.

His background, born in Havana to a schoolteacher mother and a jack of all trades father and spending his formative years in Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba, later moving to Spain and Puerto Rico in adolescence — before making America his home later in adulthood — bears little resemblance to Packer’s own stable comfortable rural Australian childhood.

Martinez Celaya has spoken of his mother and father alternately queuing for six days in Cuba to secure a Christmas toy for him — an experience entirely alien to Packer and her children.

Not that anyone was looking for potential obstacles to the union last week as word of the new engagement spread rapidly from the northern hemisphere to the south where it was celebrated by Packer’s nearest and dearest.