So Conrad Black gets convicted of ripping off Hollinger International Inc., and what do the media do? They blame his wife, Barbara Amiel Black, and her extravagant tastes.
The “Marie Antoinette syndrome” rears its beautiful head again: A powerful man goes down, and his free-spending woman becomes the scapegoat.
Remember the Marie Antoinette moment when hordes of poor Filipinos stormed the palace to find Imelda Marcos’ thousands of shoes? Why did Imelda’s shoes become the enduring image for the corrupt reign of her president husband, Ferdinand? And why can’t Conrad Black be held solely responsible for his actions? It’s likely that his decision to misappropriate millions of dollars was made for his pleasure too.
But no, we want to find a femme fatale, a dragon lady, as writer Christopher Hitchens called Barbara Amiel Black.
Pierre Saint-Amand of Brown University sees “the Marie Antoinette syndrome” as a “fear of women in power,” which often takes the form of demonizing a woman’s “influence” on her husband.
He compares the media’s treatment of Hillary Clinton as first lady to that of Marie Antoinette — both “victims of a backlash against the advancement of women in the public sphere, against their increased visibility and competition with men for participation in social institutions.”
The pattern goes back at least as far as 18th Century France and the glamorous queen of Louis XVI. Lord Black and his lady are only the latest installment.
“What do Hillary Clinton, Barbara Amiel, Imelda Marcos … have in common?” asks Dena Goodman, a professor of history at the University of Michigan who edited “Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen.” “Nothing. And yet the same kind of tropes, accusations and explanations keep coming up.
“The women are so different [except for] their relationship to powerful men, the legitimacy of whose power is being questioned in each case,” Goodman said.
Critics of Marie Antoinette focused on her body and sexuality. The British media have done the same with Barbara Amiel, playing up her supposed sexual hold over Black.
One British newspaper quoted a friend of Amiel’s as saying of Black: “If I walked past him, I would have had to step over his tongue, literally hanging out. He was smitten by her sex.” The article referred to the Canadian press baron as a man led around by his … well, a word the British press can use but this American family newspaper cannot.
It’s true that Amiel’s own writing has frankly focused on her sexuality. In her column for Maclean’s, before the July 13 guilty verdict, she wrote of her husband, “Give him another four months — and fewer nights of love — and he’ll have two finished manuscripts.”
Does all this mean that Amiel deserves scorn for Hollinger’s troubles? No more than Marie Antoinette did for France’s. After all, the regime the French despised belonged to Louis XVI, not to Marie Antoinette. And though Amiel was a Hollinger International executive and on the board of directors, the Hollinger official shown carting away documents in a damning video played at trial was Conrad, not Barbara.
Yet Marie Antoinette, who had no real power, was called “Madame Deficit” and depicted by revolutionary pamphleteers as a “bad daughter, bad wife, bad mother, bad queen, monster in everything,” not to mention a drain on Louis XVI’s riches.
Similarly, The Daily Telegraph, which like the Chicago Sun-Times was part of Black’s stable when he ran Hollinger, called Amiel the “ultimate hard-nosed gold-digger” who “has been a crucial ingredient in Black’s decline and fall.” Amiel herself, in a Daily Telegraph piece last year, implicitly, and favorably, compared herself and other rich and celebrated women with Marie Antoinette.
Though Amiel paints herself as an innocent victim of the tabloids, the truth is she has brought some of this on herself. The press has endlessly, and gleefully, repeated the line from Amiel’s interview in Vogue magazine in 2002 in which she gave a writer a tour of her vast closets and said, “I have an extravagance that knows no bounds.”
Prosecutors played on the Marie Antoinette syndrome at Black’s trial, trying to pique the potential class envy of the jury. They introduced evidence of the Blacks’ lavish lifestyle, the trips to Bora Bora on the company plane, the surprise birthday party for Amiel at La Grenouille in New York.
The jury acquitted Black of charges of using company funds to support a jet-setting lifestyle. But what is “truth” does not matter when it comes to cultural myths. After all, Marie Antoinette never said, “Let them eat cake.” But the legend is still appealing.
In an article for Slate, Hitchens put Hollinger’s acquisition of a private jet firmly on Amiel’s shoulders simply because she did not want to fly commercial anymore — even on the Concorde. But it was Amiel’s supposed dim view of others outside her class that really riles, Hitchens wrote:
“This, in turn, meant the installation of an extra lavatory on the aforesaid private jet, at a cost of half a million dollars, so that Lady Black wouldn’t have to be inconvenienced by the crew members coming down the fuselage to use the existing one.”
That last bit, Hitchens argued, promotes Amiel into the ranks once described by novelist Joyce Cary: people who utter what he called “tumbrel remarks,” comments made by the rich that might spur class warfare. Hitchens points to Barbara Bush on the upgraded accommodations for Katrina refugees in Houston’s Astrodome.
Though wealthy women who look down their noses at the common man often are demonized, powerful, wealthy men are not expected to be “nice.” Donald Trump’s “You’re fired” on the “Apprentice” was seen as strong and decisive; in a woman that behavior is considered abrasive or “bitchy.”
In a 2004 interview, Black stood up for his wife, and for himself.
“The attempt to portray her as a Marie Antoinette and me as a supine love-struck spouse, like most comment on the subject, is a complete fiction,” the lord proclaimed.
Yet it doesn’t matter whether it is a fiction. We retell the Marie Antoinette story in different guises because it has an appeal for us. These fictions satisfy some compulsion in us that though the man may have the power and money, the beautiful and doomed wife is to blame.
“The problem we need to address as a society is not simply the imbalance of power between men and women, but the deep-seated assumption that men hold power legitimately, whereas women do not,” Goodman said. “Until this attitude is changed, until it is acceptable for women to hold power, all women risk being just another Marie Antoinette.”
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Laura Hodes is a Chicago-area freelance writer; her blog, “Personal is Political,” is at www.personalpolitic.blogspot.com.
