For some mature couples it’s the winnebago trip, for others a parting: late-life crisis strikes love

THE news last September that media kingpin Harold Mitchell and his wife Bevelly had decided to call off their love affair after 50 years of marriage left many aghast.

Bevelly and Harold Mitchell at Harold’s 70th birthday at Crown in Me...

THE news last September that media kingpin Harold Mitchell and his wife Bevelly had decided to call off their love affair after 50 years of marriage left many aghast.

“Good God,” one mature media executive said, giving voice to what many thought: “Why on earth would you bother at that age? What’s the point?”

But Mitchell, 71, having built and, in 2010, sold an advertising business for $370 million, was more matter-of-fact: “These are modern times — it’s what happens,” he said, pointedly telling one writer the separation was his wife’s idea.

He added the couple, parents of two adult children, had “drifted apart”, a statement that many close to the couple understood well enough. Sources would say Mitchell and Bevelly had for decades had what some would call a part-time or long-distance marriage.

While their family home was in Melbourne, Mitchell had maintained an apartment in Sydney and was also flying to London every three weeks to monitor business there.

“Given Harold was a workaholic, he would have slept at the office if he could. Business has long been his great love,” a longtime associate said this week.

Workaholic, reformed alcoholic, one-time foodaholic, Mitchell was only weeks into his hard-earned retirement when the pair announced their marriage was at an end — Bevelly ready to move on even if the ad boss was not.

A month after their split there came yet more surprising news.

Solomon Lew and wife Rosie

Kathryn and Nick Greiner.

Former NSW premier Nick Greiner and wife Kathryn were separating after 43 years of marriage.

Friends of the 66-year-olds were, once again, not surprised.

Greiner had had a tough year of it professionally — first dealing with a Federal Court order to cough up his part of $21 million for “misleading” a mining parts manufacturer and then standing aside as an adviser to Barry O’Farrell’s government.

But surely a mature marriage — sharing love and laughs and the joys of grandparenting and “seniors” cruises — would be a walk in the park after that? The Greiners, who have two adult children, had even survived his admitted extramarital affair in 1996 and the temporary separation that followed.

In 1993, Kathryn, who married her Hungarian-born love on August 1, 1970, addressed an audience at a $1000-a-head roast for her husband.

She told the crowd she could tell them “about the times he would come home at night and say to me how much he loved me, how much he admired me, how much he really needed me. I thought I would repeat those words (here tonight) ...” and then proceeded to stand silently for 20 seconds, biting her lip, to the audience’s great delight.

Greiner himself would later say: “I think when you’ve been married a very long time, it is not all that easy.

“ (For) ... people like us, it works if there’s a fairly large amount of space because otherwise it becomes more difficult.”

Rose Lew with husband Solomon Lew and daughters Jaki (Jacqueline) and Alla at Rockpool Restaurant at Crown Casino.

And so to the news this week, revealed in the lead up to St Valentine’s feast day, that billionaire retailer Solomon Lew and wife Rosie have separated after more than 45 years together. Like the Greiners, the Lews have had a couple of tough years.

In 2012 Lew, whose personal wealth has been put at $1.2 billion, sought to have his children’s ex-spouses removed as beneficiaries from a family trust — the value of which has been put at $621 million.

The 68-year-old rag-trade investor is reportedly now living in a swank bachelor pad in Toorak and is, according to figures from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, more likely to remarry than Rosie.

The AIFS has already confirmed longtime marrieds are divorcing in greater numbers and the rich — whether Catholic, Jewish or non-religious — are not immune.

If $1.2 billion can’t buy you a good marriage counsellor, no amount of money can and for some, the late-life divorce that comes after 40 or 50 years of marriage is the ultimate luxury — something done when a person or couple has the time and money to do it.

Kind of the antithesis of the Winnebago for less well-heeled couples.