HARTFORD, Conn. — His ill-fitting Turn- bull and Asser suit still bears creases from the package it came in. His mussed hair looks as if he cut it himself. With a chainsaw.
His voice is like a cross between Lurch from “The Addams Family” and Yoda on crack.
COUNTESS’ EX GAVE LOVER $1,500 BEAUTY CREAM, HI-END UNDIES
He’s George David, otherwise known as The Mogul who’s divorcing The Countess.
And to me, George is a stud-muffin undertaker — the hottest, stiffest, blandest bazillionaire ever to grace the halls of this down-on-its-heels city.
On what felt like Day 2,000 of the divorce war now being waged between George, the megarich chairman of United Technologies, and the gal he constantly refers to as “Marie David,” George, 67, described how he hid his wife in the shadows of Paris in late 2007.
He’d run into mutual friends, you see, and didn’t want them to think he was sleeping with his own wife!
By this time, George had taken up with girlfriend, Wendy Touton, on whom he lavished stupidly expensive gifts. Like a $13,000 Dennis Bosso fur. Some $1,500 La Mer face cream. And $10,000 worth of Manolo Blahniks he bought in London. I’m certain you could house a small village in them.
“I was holding Marie David at arm’s length,” George explained of 2007. They’d split up, but Marie wasn’t having it. “She was importuning me to recommence the marriage.” Yeah, he talks like that.
Marie, 37, looked at her hubby miserably from the other side of the tiny courtroom, as George avoided her gaze and repeatedly dissed her.
According to Marie, she was trying to reconcile with a guy whose babies she desperately wanted. George says otherwise.
“I had a relationship [with Wendy] commencing in July,” he said. “Marie comes in out of the blue and she tries to initiate, recommence the marriage.
“I was holding her as hard as I could away,” he said, channeling Yoda. And a good thing it is.
All that recommencing had some effect. Because George, who could not be seen as sleeping with two gals at once, said he “promptly ended the relationship.”
Now, I hear, he’s back with rootin’ Touton.
Marie is fighting for about $100 million of George’s more than $300 million fortune. But George thinks the $43 million in stock, jewels and property he promised her in a postnup is quite enough.
“We offered to put her in the top one-quarter of one percent of all Americans,” he told me. “Less than 50,000 of America live with assets of that magnitude!”
I asked George if it was worth it. “In a six-year marriage she did little or nothing to generate any assets,” he said.
No, George — was one little countess worth the grief? Suddenly, his face dissolved into a bundle of nervous tics. He paused. When he finally spoke, he tried to put a smiley face on this distasteful episode.
“We always learn and grow through life’s experiences,” he said, sounding much like himself.
Hang in there, stud. With all the money going to lawyers, you’re both insane.