Six hours into a difficult labour with our first child, my husband of 14 months said he was popping across the road for a couple of pints while I ‘got on with it’.
I begged him to stay, but he was unmoved. ‘It’ll take at least another two hours,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back before it gets exciting.’ And with that, he was gone.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. My husband, Brent Sadler, now 67, a war reporter for CNN, was used to swooping in at the last moment for the headline event.
His second marriage in 1985, to Debby, now 54 and a former air hostess, was different. Pictured: Tess and Debby
More importantly, he’d seen it all before. It was my first child, but he already had two daughters — and two ex-wives.
Like the U.S. First Lady Melania Trump — who sparked headlines earlier this month in a spat with her husband Donald’s ex, Ivana — I knew when I married a ‘recycled’ husband that I wasn’t going to get many firsts.
But I wasn’t aware quite how greatly the shadow of the previous Mrs Sadlers — the second, in particular — would loom over my life, rendering me nervous, defensive and paranoid.
Indeed, I felt for Melania, who has previously insisted she has a ‘thick skin’. Yet it was all too apparent that she was terribly stung when Ivana Trump announced she was ‘basically first Trump wife, OK? I’m First Lady.’
While technically, of course, Ivana was the first Mrs Trump and Melania is the mere third, this was too wounding to go unremarked. Melania hit back, saying via a White House spokesman: ‘There is clearly no substance to this statement from an ex. This is unfortunately only attention-seeking and self-serving noise.
‘[Melania]… is honoured by her role as First Lady of the United States.’
When I became Mrs Sadler in 1993, aged 23, the title of ‘Mrs Sadler’ was already well-worn. But I didn’t expect how much it would bother me that Brent, then 42, had already experienced so much with other women.
He’d set up home as a newlywed twice. He’d travelled all over the world with his previous wives. Romantic weekend in Paris? Done that. Pyramids in Egypt? Done that, too. I couldn’t help but feel our life was somehow tarnished by the feeling he had played it all out before.
But Brent assured me those marriages had been disasters.
My husband, Brent Sadler,(pictured in 1982) now 67, a war reporter for CNN, was used to swooping in at the last moment for the headline event
His first, to Janis, now 67, a petite brunette, had been a youthful mistake, and their marriage in 1972 lasted only a few years. She lived in their old home in Bristol with their daughter, Nicola, then 17. On the few occasions we met, we got on.
His second marriage in 1985, to Debby, now 54 and a former air hostess, was different. It had been fiery from the start, provoked in part by Brent travelling all the time reporting for ITN. Debby had no choice but to build a life that didn’t include him.
I took careful note when he said he needed lots of attention, and determined to prove that Mrs Sadlers One and Two had been mere warm-up acts for the real thing.
Brent and I had met in the summer of 1991, when he gatecrashed my birthday party at a bar in London. He and Debby had unofficially separated a few months beforehand, after six years of marriage, and she was abroad with their daughter, Brooke, then three.
He said she didn’t care about him, insisting they led separate lives on different continents.
My heart ached for the lonely man who literally wept on my shoulder. I was sure I would be the one to make him happy.
He asked me to marry him just four days after we met. I quit my job as a TV producer on News at Ten three months later, and moved with him to Cyprus, where he was CNN’s Middle East bureau chief.
Not long after we reached that milestone in early 1997, Brent began an affair with his Serbian translator, Jelena, then aged 25. Pictured: Tess and Jelena
But there was one imperfection in an otherwise seemingly flawless picture: Debby, wife number two. She had done me no harm — I’d never even met her — and yet I hated her simply for existing.
I couldn’t bear the idea he’d ever loved her. And so we flaunted our relationship on the cover of glossy magazines and even gave syrupy joint interviews under headlines like: ‘Why Brent’s new wife will be his last.’
When Debby branded Brent a ‘love-rat’ in the newspapers, I cruelly dismissed her as ‘an irrelevance, just one more bill on our list’. Naturally enough, she retaliated in kind, saying I had a bad reputation and a laugh ‘like a hyena’, which stung.
Then, in 1994, six months after our marriage, I became pregnant with our first baby, Henry, now 23. I was elated, but my thrill was even greater because I was having a boy. Neither of his previous wives had given Brent a son.
Still, though, my obsession with Debby deepened. I drove a newer version of her Mercedes. I made friends with her estranged best friend, which infuriated Debby and meant an extra frisson of pleasure for me.
Brent and I went to the same places they’d once gone to on holiday — only I insisted we stay at more chic hotels. At my request, he even bought me half-a-dozen of the same gold bangles that she had.
I was afraid if Brent could stop loving her, he might stop loving me, too. When I asked him for reassurance, he was dismissive, saying it was Debby’s fault and that he’d never leave a ‘good’ wife.
When he threw out all his photos and videos of Debby, determined to erase her from his life, I secretly saved them, poring over them and studying how happy he looked with her compared with me.
I couldn’t see what she’d done wrong — which made me worry that I’d make the same mistakes and never know it.
I even worked out exactly how many years they’d been married before we met — five years and eight months — and marked it off on my calendar when we’d been together longer, as if I’d finally laid her ghost to rest.
Pride comes before a fall. Not long after we reached that milestone in early 1997, Brent began an affair with his Serbian translator, Jelena, then aged 25.
I was pregnant with our second son, Matt, now 20, at the time. I found out about the affair when a journalist called me to ask whether I’d like to comment on the story.
Brent denied it, and I believed him, but started watching his behaviour more closely. I scrutinised phone bills and discovered he’d made calls to a certain number every day for the past year. Of course, I called it and found out the hard way.
I didn’t tell Brent I knew, and waited for the affair to burn itself out. It didn’t and after 12 agonising months, I asked him to leave.
I felt for Melania, who has previously insisted she has a ‘thick skin’. Yet it was all too apparent that she was terribly stung when Ivana Trump announced she was ‘basically first Trump wife, OK? I’m First Lady’
It was the harshest of lessons. I realised when a man has an affair, it’s not his wife’s fault, no matter how ‘lonely’ he is.
However, I was determined to ‘do’ divorce better than Debby had. Whereas she had raged at Brent over the phone, and publicly excoriated him, I went out of my way to be accommodating — even though I despised his mistress.
I made friends with Jelena, in part to throw Brent off balance. It worked: he was utterly confused. She shouted furiously at him and I looked like a saint.
We initially agreed a financial arrangement without even resorting to lawyers. I let him see our sons whenever he wanted.
But, all the while, Jelena was the one having to deal with a previous Mrs Sadler, and she guarded her territory as ruthlessly as I had.
Her jealousy wasn’t unfounded. In 2001, two years after our split, Brent secretly flew me to the U.S. to renegotiate his contract with CNN without telling Jelena — something I agreed to in part to annoy her.
When Jelena found out, she insisted all communication between us had to go through her, and our relationship descended into precisely the kind of bitter feud Brent had with Debby.
Oh, the karma of it all. Now I understood how Debby had felt. Even though I hadn’t caused their split, I deeply regretted my ungracious behaviour afterwards.
After all, she had played a part in Brent becoming the man I fell in love with.
I know now it’s hard to watch a man you once devoted your life to with another woman. Because like it or not, you have shaped him. All that effort — and now Jelena is the one reaping the rewards, enjoying the family life I created.
I’m ashamed to admit that, even now, I hate seeing photographs of Jelena smiling with my two sons. She is welcome to my ex, but she will never come close to being a mother to my children.
Amid all this emotion, I came to realise something: I owed Debby an apology, but didn’t ever imagine she’d want to hear from me.
Then three years ago, I found the box containing all those old photos of Debby and her daughter that Brent had wanted to get rid of.
I was about to throw them out, when something stopped me. Nervously, I contacted Debby on Facebook and to my astonishment she sent me a warm reply. For several months, we messaged each other, before arranging to meet up.
With wry humour, Debby suggested Langan’s in Mayfair, where they’d celebrated their wedding reception and where she’d later hosted her divorce party. We met for lunch — and rolled out of Langan’s five hours and four bottles of champagne later.
We talked about Brent, of course, but we had much more in common than a mere ex-husband. Men tend to have a type — Debby, Jelena and I are all tall, blonde, confident and outgoing — so perhaps it’s unsurprising that Debby and I felt like we’d known each other for years.
She had resented me when Brent and I got together — of course she had — but her main concern was always for her daughter. The fact I’d saved those photographs meant the world to her.
Since then, we’ve met up several times and are in regular contact. Debby is hugely entertaining and runs an extremely successful PR company she built up herself. All those years I wasted being terrified and jealous of her when we could have been friends.
The irony is that my short marriage to Brent matters now only because it gave me my boys.
For the past 16 years, I’ve been happily married to my second husband, Erik Oliver, 46, with whom I have a daughter, Lily, 15.
And I’ve learned an important lesson. Forget waging war on the wives who went before you. Showing your ex how happy you are is by far the best revenge of all.
- Tess Stimson is the author of The Adultery Club, published by Pan Macmillan.