Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

ON LANGUAGE

ON LANGUAGE; Trophy Wife

ON LANGUAGE; Trophy Wife
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
May 1, 1994, Section 6, Page 26Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

"The ultimate ambition of a gold digger is to end up as a trophy wife," Lynn Barber writes in The Times of London. Using that phrase in its most pejorative sense, she quotes Sally Burton, who married the actor Richard Burton a year before he died, as one who was not a trophy herself but seemed to know plenty who were: "The golden rule if you are a trophy wife is that you do not stray while the old man is still alive."

A somewhat less insulting sense of the phrase appeared in a January interview with the actress Bo Derek in The Chicago Tribune. Bart Mills, describing her role in a cable-television movie, wrote, "She plays a former megamodel turned trophy wife who gets enmeshed in a plot to kill her rich husband." A megamodel is a force in the fashion industry, outearning run-of-the-midway supermodels, and is more often gold-dug than gold-digging.

The revised second edition of the Random House Unabridged Dictionary provides this cautious definition: "the young, often second, wife of a rich middle-aged man." But that slips past the controversy: is the trophy wife a mere armpiece, or even a bimbo? Or is she a new and attractive partner in power, successful in her own right? Must she be very thin, or at least physically attractive? Is it a sexist slur?

A trophy is an award or honor given for some victory. The meaning of the Greek root is "turning," specifically a turning away from battle, as when an opponent is routed and his battle flags become trophies, symbolic of victory. To have a trophy is fine, but to be a trophy is usually considered demeaning.

The term trophy wife, now firmly ensconced in the language, was coined by Julie Connelly, a senior editor of Fortune magazine. In a cover story in the issue of Aug. 28, 1989, she wrote: "Powerful men are beginning to demand trophy wives. . . . The more money men make, the argument goes, the more self-assured they become, and the easier it is for them to think: I deserve a queen."

In the initial coinage, the term was in no way synonymous with bimbo. "Enter the second wife: a decade or two younger than her husband, sometimes several inches taller, beautiful and very often accomplished," wrote the unmarried Ms. Connelly. "The second wife certifies her husband's status and, if possible given the material she has to work with, dispels the notion that men peak sexually at age 18. This trophy does not hang on the wall like a moose head -- she works. Hard. For starters, she often has her own business."

The woman chosen for Fortune's cover to exemplify this career woman whose husband is part of her career was Carolyne Roehm, a dress designer whose business had revenues of $10 million, then married to the leveraged-buyout king, Henry Kravis. They have sinced divorced; Ms. Roehm has retired from the dress business and will be spending the summer in Britain studying Shakespearean tragedy at Oxford University. I was seated next to Ms. Roehm at a recent dinner party and seized the opportunity for lexical research.

"Women considered trophy wives are accomplished and ambitious," she reported, "in both their careers and their lives. They have some looks, but are neither glamorous nor stupid enough to be called a 'bimbo'; they attract husbands who generally see second wives to be a kind of reward, but who want more than a pretty face."

Thus, the term has two clearly differentiated senses. On what was trophy wife bottomed, as they say at the Supreme Court? To Fortune's Ms. Connelly: "When I was writing the article, I thought of the real-estate term trophy building for a premier place like the Plaza Hotel in New York, and I formed trophy wife based on that term."

What about the natural follow-up? "I thought about trophy husbands," Ms. Connelly says. "In fact, the April issue of Working Woman does discuss that, but I decided against it. You might describe Ted Turner as a trophy husband, but he's hardly known mainly as someone you wear on your arm."

That suggests that the coiner of trophy wife, who originally gave the term a connotation of accomplishment and business acumen, now sees the primary sense as emphasizing a lean pulchritude. "There's a bimbo quality to trophy," she admits, "and that doesn't translate into the male image. A trophy husband would be a C.E.O. or a really powerful guy, not some stud muffin." (Stud, originally "a protuberance" or "a stand," was applied to male animals used for breeding; muffin, in modern slang a cloying endearment for a woman, was combined with stud by vengeful females to mean "sexy but airheaded hunk of man.")

Sure enough, the cover of Working Woman extends the metaphor in its original, non-insulting sense. "Trophy Husbands" is the headline, with a subhead of "Success and Sex: When a high-powered woman meets her match, he's got to be more than attractive, intelligent and charming. He must be rich, powerful and secure." The men chosen to illustrate these admirable characteristics are Ted Turner (husband of actress Jane Fonda), Richard Gere (megamodel Cindy Crawford), Mike Nichols (journalist Diane Sawyer) and Bob Dole (Red Cross Chairwoman Liddy Dole).

Although misattributing coinage of trophy wife to Tom Wolfe, who described determinedly emaciated spouses as "X-rays" in his novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities," the magazine vividly defines trophy husband with this quotation: "Marry this guy and she becomes one-half of that phenomenon known as the Power Couple."

When attending fashion shows and craft exhibits with my wife, who is a jewelry designer, goldsmith and glass artist, I often put on a badge reading "Artist's Husband." Asked if she thought the attributive noun trophy applied, Helene Safire patted my hand and said, "Of course, dear," in a tone that indicates the term never describes veteran husbands.

Working Woman extends the metaphor even further, to trophy dates: these unmarried escorts of high-powered or talented women are not boy toys, a derogation popularized by Madonna. These desirables include Peter Jennings, David Letterman, Mort Zuckerman, Charlie Rose, Bob Kerrey and the White House aide George Stephanopoulos ("workaholic but great dresser").

As a modern modifier, then, trophy most often means "bimbonic" when applied to women, though a second sense remains of "accomplished." Applied to men, however, trophy is almost always complimentary. Not fair? "Life is unfair," said President Kennedy, a trophy husband.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 6, Page 26 of the National edition with the headline: ON LANGUAGE; Trophy Wife. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT