Most of the dirty laundry surrounding Arnold Schwarzenegger’s betrayal of his wife, Maria Shriver, has been aired — most recently on “60 Minutes” and in his memoir, “Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story” which hit book stores last week.
The former California governor discussed how he cheated on his wife, never divulged the paternity of the son he fathered with his family’s long-time housekeeper and covertly provided financial support to the boy.
“That’s the way I handle things and it always has worked,” Schwarzenegger told CBS News’ Lesley Stahl. “It’s not the best thing for people around me … but some information I just keep to myself.”
While few people may blow up their marriage as spectacularly as the movie star/former politician, secrecy is a common thread in most divorces, experts say. Infidelities are often intertwined with more lies, including hush-hush bank accounts and clandestine hideaways for continuing liaisons.
“Secrecy is playing out in the celebrity world, but it happens every day in the real world,” said Michelle Hughes, a family law attorney in Chicago. “No matter how hard you try, it’s very difficult to keep something a secret. And today — with technology — it’s even harder.”
Schwarzenegger was able to keep his extramarital activities under wraps until 2011, just before he stepped down as governor, even though rumors about his unfaithfulness had circulated for years. Shriver gamely defended her husband, even as his out-of-wedlock child spent time at their home.
“I’m not perfect,” Schwarzenegger conceded on “60 Minutes.”
Such brazen acts are not unique to public figures, said Howard LeVine, a divorce attorney for more than 40 years.
“Everyone thinks they’re smarter than anyone else. They’ll be the one person who doesn’t get caught,” said LeVine, whose offices are in Chicago and Tinley Park. “It’s all about ego.”
Given the narcissistic overlap of the bodybuilding, show business and political worlds in Schwarzenegger’s life, many observers thought it implausible that Shriver — a former journalist — was clueless about her husband’s dalliances. But Fred Hicks, a divorce lawyer with Chicago-based Katten Muchin Rosenman, said that people will go to great lengths to convince themselves that their unions are deception-free.
“It’s not a question of smarts or socioeconomic level, but the relationship,” Hicks said. “Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, people want to believe that if your spouse tells you something, it’s true … and it happens all the time.”
In one of Hicks’ cases, a client steadfastly refused to believe her husband was playing around. Her mate was a workaholic, she said, but after he put a private investigator on the case, it took less than a day for Hicks to discover that not only was the husband cheating — but so was his boss.
Hughes has also unearthed some astonishing skeletons, including one client who was not only unaware of his parentage, but of his race. “He always thought he was white,” she said.
Schwarzenegger’s surreptitious activities weren’t confined to sex. In “Total Recall,” the 65-year-old actor also revealed that he traveled to Mexico in 1997 for open heart surgery without telling his wife and kept his gubernatorial ambitions to himself until just days before the filing deadline.
But when it comes to secrets, adultery tops the list, say lawyers, and in this electronic era, discovery is easier than ever, the lawyers said. Gone are the days when a spouse had to rifle through coat pockets looking for telltale credit card receipts. Email and text messages now provide all the incriminating evidence a mate needs. There’s even inexpensive surveillance software that can be loaded onto a home computer, capturing passwords and snapshots of the screens for a digital “gotcha.”
“Anyone who emails is crazy,” LeVine said. “They are creating their own destruction.”
One suburban woman, who requested her name not be used, discovered that her husband was browsing dating websites — even after they decided to reconcile. “I had to know that we were both committed to working hard on our relationship, for the sake of our children … and I discovered we weren’t.”
It was out of concern for damage inflicted on their four children, ages 15 to 22, that Shriver reportedly asked her husband not to write his book, promoted as a “tell-all memoir.”
Splitting up is difficult on kids in any circumstances, but when the betrayal is so public, it’s even worse, said Karen Grais Meyer, a North Shore therapist and divorce mediator.
“It’s very confusing … you don’t know what to do with all this information,” said the social worker, who will be participating in Divorce University, a one-day conference on the legal, financial and emotional aspects of ending a marriage, sponsored by the Lilac Tree in Evanston next month.
Tweens and early adolescents are in the developmental stage when they view life through a moral lens. They’ll align themselves with the parent they think was wronged, but that also “puts them in a bind” because they love the other parent, Meyer said.
After such a betrayal, “a daughter may wonder ‘Can I trust a man?’ A son may ask, ‘Who is this person? How could they do this to our family?'”
Of course, an observer also must speculate about the effects of the media blitz on Schwarzenegger’s 15-year-old son with the housekeeper, Mildred Baena. He has referred to the liaison as “a huge screw-up” and “the biggest mistake of my life.”
The round of mea culpas are quite a change for a man used to concealing things.
“Secrecy,” he writes, “is just a part of me.”
