Yeah, this. Jerry was a very successful model in the mid-seventies. Bryan Ferry booked her for an album cover and she started going out with him then, she was only 18 or something, he was 30. Then he went away on tour, after they got engaged, and Mick Jagger - still married to Bianca - seduced her away.
By this time her modelling career was being kept alive by her association with famous men. She would have still got work, but not at the same level. Most models’ careers only last about five years. So she must have seen the benefits of being involved with rich, successful partners.
(She isn’t from a rich family. Her father was an army veteran who worked as a truck driver.)
She still did bits of stuff associated with modelling in the 1980s, but not much. Some Bovril print ads etc. That won’t have brought in loads of money. She wrote a few books and appeared on chat shows, by dint of being Jagger’s partner, but the money will have been earned by Jagger. She was having children with him by the mid-80s.
He only capitulated to the Balinese ceremony in 1990 because she caught him having an affair with Carla Bruni and he wanted to keep her sweet.
What this means is, by the time she split from Jagger in 1999 she wouldn’t have been earning any real money, of her own, for around twenty years. She was financially vulnerable (relatively speaking of course). The settlement (not a divorce, because they weren’t legally married) was confidential but was estimated at about £11 million. Which will have included the right to live in one of his houses until some point in the future, but what was she to do after that? £11m less the value of the interest in the house less provision for four children won’t see you through the rest of your life in comfort when you live her life.
She did some reality stuff, clearly for the money. She won’t have wanted to end up like Marie Helvin, with whom she was regularly photographed in the 1980s: both women had been successful models in the 1970s and had become involved with rich and famous men (David Bailey, in Marie’s case). From that point, their access to the social life they liked was dependent on those men. Marie Helvin, who was divorced from Bailey in the 1980s, gave an interview to a magazine a couple of years ago and sounds unhappy, living modestly and living in the past.
I can see exactly why Jerry married Murdoch. She gets to be the glamorous hostess living a jet set life, oodles of cash, back in the league she was in when she was with Jagger but with the added advantage of marriage to protect her. He obviously likes having a woman on his arm, and organising his private life. She’d have done very well in the job, which is what it was. I am, of course, team Jerry.