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A First Failure, A Second Chance - Page 3

© Greg Camden

In reality, it had become painfully clear to anyone on the inside that his relationship with Frances was, in effect, over. "My marriage is the one crisis in the last five years where I didn't want to admit defeat," Sting said in 1985. "I wanted to have a perfect marriage that would last forever—I really wanted it so bad I would lie to myself about it. It was the only real crisis of my life. It was a question of taking responsibility for what you've done and coming to terms with that reality, not pretending that things are different than they are."

Sting and Trudie, courtesy the biography Sting: Demolition Man by Christopher Sandford.

It was some time in 1981 that Sting and Trudie became lovers, and it wasn't too long before the British press began to go wild with the story of the pop star's failed marriage and new lover, as Sting talked about to Playboy: "It was a nightmare, a horrific, endless nightmare, and I couldn't see any way out but to get out—I went to Jamaica. I wasn't talking to the press, but they made interviews up. They harassed me at home and they harassed my wife and my mistress and they harassed my children. They had photographers out behind the house one day—fuck knows what for. They were just idiots. [. . .] But when the whole bubble burst—my affair with Trudie—it was an excuse for the press to hang me from the neck. So I became the Devil for a few months—always a philandering, drug-taking Devil, totally evil. I just had to sit through all that bullshit. [. . .] Luckily, my son was just a little too young to he bothered with it. I'll never forgive the press, and I know the people directly responsible for it. Anyway, anyone who reads that stuff and believes it is a moron. None of my friends who read it believe it. It's written by morons."

Shortly, though, Sting had to confront the break-up publicly. "We're separated," he confirmed in 1982 about his relationship with Frances. "It's impossible to sustain a marriage, or any sort of commitment like that, when you're on the road most of the year or locked up in some recording studio." Even though Frances gave birth to Sting's second child in 1982, in 1984 Frances would file for divorce, citing the fact that she and her husband had not lived together for two years.

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