While Melinda Ann French and I are both Dallas natives, we moved in very different circles. Second daughter of an aerospace engineer, she was valedictorian at the all-female Ursuline Academy. Me, I was a face in the crowd at a big public high school. She matriculated at Duke University, earning a bachelor’s and an MBA, and pledging Kappa Alpha Theta. I am not sure whether she ever met Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but it is possible. Jackie—who knew of what she spoke—advised the young women who gathered around her about marriage prospects: “Girls, don’t just go for money. Go for REAL money.”
Maybe Ms. French had that in mind in 1987 when she started working at Microsoft and met the company’s co-founder, William Henry Gates III. He was not just rich but filthy, stinking rich; the combined net worth of Jackie’s three main men (JFK, Aristotle Onassis and Maurice Templesman) would constitute just a drop in the bucket for Gates.
In 1975, he and Paul Allen, a couple of Seattle guys with big ideas, had started what grew into the world’s most powerful technology company. Whereas the lady in this story got two degrees, Gates and Allen were dropouts—from Harvard and Washington State, respectively. After a quarter-century of exhilarating triumphs and battles with his friend and partner, Allen cashed out. He took his $30 billion and embarked on a series of business and philanthropic ventures before dying of cancer in 2018.
Gates, no doubt the pushier of the two and a cut-throat capitalist, would go on to have a bank account far greater than Allen’s. It is currently somewhere north of $100 billion. When he met his wife-to-be in ’87, he had a reputation as a self-centered person and an extremely demanding boss who often made crude come-ons to women he encountered. Melinda handled Bill deftly during their seven-year courtship. She, too, brought a lot to the table. She was pretty, smart and cultured—as if dozens, hundreds, indeed thousands of other female staffers at Microsoft were not.
At any rate, they married in Hawaii in 1994. It is interesting to note that they did not sign a pre-nuptial agreement. They did, however, have an understanding wherein Bill would be allowed to spend one long weekend per year with his ex-girlfriend, Ann Winblad. The purpose, he liked to say, was to play miniature golf, ride dune buggies, hang-glide and walk on the beach together. Surely they did not engage in connubial relations, as he was a married man. Right?
Since the Gates divorce proceedings have been covered so extensively in the last five weeks, many facts have come to light. Bill kept philandering, an open secret at Microsoft. Melinda, now the mother of three supremely privileged children (Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe) knew, too. She considered Bill’s friendship with sex-offender and eventual suicidee Jeffrey Epstein repugnant, not to mention a fairly long-running affair and other one-offs.
At this point, I have to observe that it would be highly unusual if Bill had not cheated on Melinda. He was the epitome of rich and successful, and women have always been, still are and always will be drawn to that. Let us be realistic. But he went about it in a ham-handed way. While I do not mean to be glib, Bill should have sought advice from a Frenchman or an Italian. In those cultures, discretion is understood and practiced by all parties.
Melinda was clearly the less powerful of the two. He was sometimes dismissive toward her in public; in private, probably more so. The unstated truth was that she had done little beyond marrying well. (Although the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of nearly $50 billion, is named after both of them, this is just a veneer. It’s his money, not hers.) But she would have been within her rights to find some engaging bed partners of her own. You know what they say about the goose and the gander.
She hired a private investigator about a year ago and apparently was not pleased with the information he brought back, leading to the issuance of divorce papers. Of course, the Microsoft spinners have been hard at work, demanding privacy and respect for this fast-dissolving marriage of 27 years. As one friend blandly put it, “Melinda has decided that it was best to leave her marriage as she moved into the next phase of her life.”
I am interested only up to a point because Bill and Melinda, who since 1997 have occupied a 66,000-square-foot home, a veritable Xanadu on the shores of Lake Washington, will do just fine after all is said and done. The division of their assets, their plans for the future and so forth do not concern me. Bill will keep the lion’s share, but Melinda won’t exactly have to watch her nickels and dimes.
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