US News
December 15, 1997

Lifestyles of the rich and divorcing: Sifting through the hype of the Wendt case
By David Whitman

It never got as ugly as Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner's feud in The War of the Roses, but the story line of Gary and Lorna Wendt's marriage is loosely familiar to most women of the post-World War II generation. A boy and girl of modest means meet through church and the high school band in a small Midwestern town. After college, they marry and he goes off to work. She stays home to raise the two children and host dinner parties for his business associates.

Then, one day, when the kids are grown, he abruptly asks for a divorce, offering her a settlement that she believes is less than fair. What is unique about the Wendts' tale is that the divorce settlement Lorna Wendt rejected was worth $11 million. Gary Wendt has amassed a vast fortune--more than $40 million--as the chairman of GE Capital Services, and during divorce proceedings Lorna asserted that she, the stand-by-your-man corporate spouse, was entitled to fully half of it, including his stock options and deferred compensation.

Last week, a Connecticut judge granted Lorna Wendt most of her wishes, awarding her half of her husband's current assets--some $20 million--plus alimony checks of $21,000 a month. Gary Wendt claimed some measure of victory by retaining sole control over much of his lucrative deferred corporate compensation, but the ruling was nonetheless portrayed as a financial triumph for homemakers. Lorna Wendt herself likened her struggle to that of millions of other divorced housewives, arguing that unequal property divisions plague "people from all socioeconomic backgrounds."

Yet apart from the sums involved, the Wendt divorce was not exactly groundbreaking. By law, family court judges in 14 states start from the presumption that marital property should be split 50-50. In most other states, judges often assume an even split, unless one partner can show good cause for an unequal division.

Far from always being a feminist boon, 50-50 property splits have sometimes hurt stay-at-home working-class moms. As the law professor Martha Fineman pointed out in her book, The Illusion of Equality, women who have acquired little job experience often need more than half a couple's estate to maintain a child or a modest post-divorce standard of living.

It's only among the megarich that a 50-50 split, or something close to it, is not now the norm. The "enough is enough" standard has enabled tycoons to keep more than half of their multimillion-dollar estates, so long as they gave their spouses "enough" to maintain their affluent pre-divorce lifestyles. (Even that would have been no trivial sum for Lorna Wendt, who spends $120,000 a year on clothes alone.) The Wendts' divorce could weaken the informal enough-is-enough rule in some states and make corporate CEOs pause before divorcing longtime mates. For most housewives, however, Lorna Wendt's partial victory is less important for its legal ramifications than for its symbolic affirmation of the value of stay-at-home motherhood.