L’ Wren Scott: not so fast
When the news broke that L’Wren Scott, the dress designer who has been Mick Jagger’s girlfriend for 12 years, killed herself, I thought immediately: “It’s about money.”
Her kind of business, making celebratory clothes for well-to-do women, sold off the peg, is going to the wall right across the board. The market just isn’t there.
That niche has historically been filled by small couturiers and skilled dressmaker-cum-designers for two reasons. The woman who wants that sort of dress and is prepared to pay for it wants it individually made for her. When you are not owned by a conglomerate, or selling standard pieces, you can’t afford to manufacture and hold stock.
Within hours of her suicide, the newspapers had already been at the records at Companies House in London and found that her company is around five million pounds in debt. From there, they went on to discover that the real reason she cancelled her London Fashion Week show last January was because she didn’t even have the money to buy the materials to make the samples, let alone pay the people to make them.
Every news report that I have read says that she was too proud and independent to ask her boyfriend, who is worth hundreds of millions of pounds, for help.
I think that’s balderdash. No woman kills herself because she’s too proud and independent to ask her rolling-rich boyfriend for money. It is a contradiction in terms. What independence do you have when you’re dead?
The more likely and sensible explanation is that she knew asking him for help would be pointless, or that she did ask him and he told her, “Deal with it yourself. It’s your company, they’re your bills and your problem.” Or words to that effect.
The newspapers seem reluctant, perhaps because it is so soon after her death, to dovetail the fact that Ms Scott hanged herself because of financial problems, and obviously because she felt so alone with them, and their own copious reports over the years, going back to the 1960s, about Mick Jagger’s notorious stinginess.
He boasted about not even giving his own children financial help “because they have had enough advantages and should make it on their own”. One of them lives in a council flat.
His ex-wife Jerry Hall, with whom he lived for 23 years and had four children, said in an interview that her husband was “pretty tight with the day to day stuff” and that she had to pay all the household bills.
When he moved out after fathering a child with somebody else, instead of signing over his half of the marital home to Ms Hall – or putting it in their children’s name, as she suggested, which was her way of ensuring that they got to keep their family house – he fought her over it and then conceded to let her stay there until she turned 65.
He didn’t need her half of the house – it was five million pounds, an amount he could well spare to allow his wife of 23 years and mother of his four children keep the family home.
And there you have it. A man who won’t sign over his five-million-pound equity in the family home to the long-term wife he had deserted is not going to give his girlfriend of 12 years five million pounds in cash to pay her business debts.
A man who gives no money to his children is not going to give any money to his girlfriend (some men do, but not this hard-boiled, penny-pinching sort), even if that money will save her.
L’Wren Scott killed herself because she was alone with her financial problems, and she knew it. Stinginess is the opposite of love.
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That is a truly sad scenario, Daphne.
[Daphne – Of course it is. It’s like one of those cautionary tales warning girls not to leave the village for the bright lights.]
Was the rolling-rich pun intended?
[Daphne – I don’t use puns. Can’t stand them.]
I think that loneliness and feeling alone is the only reason one would consider suicide as the only way out.
Stingy people have just one love and it is lifelong.
They are cursed.
I blame the women who stay with these sort of men. I blame them even more for ‘hanging in there’ for more than two years.
Anything beyond two years with a man as stingy as Mick Jagger is pure desperation and I am not surprised she sought refuge in suicide.
May she rest in eternal peace.
Is taking one’s newly wedded second wife for a honeymoon in Gozo considered stingy?
[Daphne – Definitely, if we’re both thinking about Pullicino Orlando. But we now know in retrospect, though I had said as much at the time, that stinginess was only part of it. The real reason was unhappiness with the marriage and a reluctance to be alone together, hence the presence on their honeymoon of the ubiquitous Consuelo and Robert.]
Stinginess is a mental illness, probably inculcated into people’s minds at a very young age by parents and circumstances. None of the Rolling Stones members were well off as children.
Not being well off as a child doesn’t imply that one will be stingy as an adult but it does increase the probability.
[Daphne – Some of the stingiest people I know were born into Malta’s most financially privileged families, Matthew S. And I mean, really stingy. It is an affliction of the spirit, nothing to do with circumstances at all, which is why you can be rich and miserly and poor and generous.]
Some rich people learn how to enjoy their money and use it well. Some spend it unwisely and find themselves in debt. Others get obsessed with saving it. It doesn’t matter how much money they make, they never feel they have enough to start spending or giving it away. When you’re brought up in squalor, it’s hard to get to grips with having money.
Mick Jagger has more money than he will ever need and Rolling Stones concerts regularly sell out. They are one of the top grossing bands in the world. Even though L’Wren Scott’s business sounds like it was doomed and should have probably been wound down, financial help by Jagger could have gone a long way.
It’s sad for me to learn about this side of Mick Jagger. I never knew about it, although I still always preferred Keith Richards, who always seemed more down to earth. In Keith Richards’s autobiography, Jagger comes in for some heavy criticism about his attitude to other people and how little he seemed to care about the people he worked with.
The IKEA founder and owner is famous and proud to be extremely stingy.
Stingy bastard. The disgusting way he treated Jerry Hall, his ex wife (who he claimed he was not legally married to anyway) should have given her a hint of what she was getting herself into.
Right, so one spends 12 years with Mick Jagger, hoping that the man changes his ways and bails you out? How much more time do you need to understand that this won’t happen?
You don’t accumulate GBP 5 million in debt overnight – L’Wren Scott should have cut her losses years ago (clearly she is not fit to run a business) and filed for bankruptcy protection.
Instead she chose to kill herself.
One part of me cannot help thinking that apart from sheer desperation, contrition and shame, there was a part of her wishing to get back at Mick Jagger in a morbidly vindictive way.
May I suggest perhaps realising after many attempts to persist with a dream that it is really all an illusion, there was a crashing reality?
We all die alone, but imagine if there was a terrible revelation that someone adored could not help or reciprocate love or loyalty?
Then there is the harshness of no legacy. Being adopted means limited ties to foundations, and no children hints at no paths beyond.
What would there really be to live for in a flat materialistic world where turnover and expiry drive fascination? This is a grand example of what many people experience, just not as overt or public.
It’s hideous and I feel such compassion for this woman.
And yet, the world swoons at his feet.
These are the modern values that society promotes today. Such people always existed in all societies, but what is different today is the promotion of such people as celebrities to be emulated, and the PR tsunami aimed at the young to entrap them early.
A ‘hard-boiled, penny-pinching’ p***k, definitely. The rest is conjecture on your part, Daphne. It may very well be the case that what you said is an accurate description of events but, thus far, pure conjecture. Now that one of the tango dancers is unable to tell her side of the story, its quite hard to reach any solid conclusions.