In search of 'Cinderella' shoes

Kim Hee-ae Kim Hee-sun Ko Hyun-jung Noh Hyun-jung

Celebs’ marriages with the rich not always lead to happy ending

By Park Si-soo

Where the rich are, there the beauties are.

Don’t take it negatively. Well, as long as capitalism rules the globe, money is a proven mighty tool to pursue the state of well-being and comfort, an inherent universal human desire. In that sense, it seems quite natural for beauties to live up to this dictum by resorting to their competitive advantage in looks.

Marriage for the most part has proven to be one of the most convenient means to achieving this desire of becoming the “Cinderella” of the 21st century.

Many female celebrities in Korea have in that spirit chosen the option of marrying rich tycoons to achieve this goal.

A case in point is Ko Hyun-jung. The 42-year-old actress surprised the public in 1995 with the so-called “wedding of the century” with Chung Yong-jin, incumbent vice chairman of retail giant Shinsegae Group and grandson of Samsung Group founder Lee Byung-chull. Chung’s personal wealth is estimated to be 830 billion won ($740 million).

The couple split in 2003 with child custody given to Chung. She returned to the small screen in 2005 to “make a living.” Yet rumors have it that she earned a massive fortune from the ensuing divorce suit.

Former TV news anchorwoman Noh Hyun-jung is another such. The 34-year-old married Chung Dae-sun, CEO of Hyundai BS&C and grandson of Hyundai Group founder Chung Ju-yung. The junior Chung’s wealth is unknown.

Noh, who resigned from her position shortly after August the 2006 marriage, has since largely maintained a very low profile. She however received unwanted attention last week following allegations that she resorted to illegal means to get her children enrolled in a foreign school in Seoul. She is scheduled to be questioned over the allegations by prosecutors.

Actress Park Sang-ah was also embroiled in the admission fraud scandal. The 41-year-old is accused of transferring her two children to a foreign school based on a forged proof of enrollment of an English immersion kindergarten in connivance with an American employee of the school.

Park is the wife of the second son of former President Chun Doo-hwan. Her husband’s wealth is also unknown but rumors have it that he owns several buildings and other properties at home and abroad valued at multimillions of dollars.

Other celebrities married to business bigwigs include actress Kim Hee-sun, Kim Hee-ae, Hwang Shin-hye, Choi Jung-yoon, former TV news anchorwoman Hwang Hyun-jeong and Han Seung-joo.

The two Kims recently made a comeback on the TV screen, while the other two still hold onto a self-imposed embargo.

By all accounts, actress Moon Hee made the first case of rich-beauty ties in her 1972 marriage to Chang Kang-jae, then vice president of Hankook Ilbo daily, the sister paper of The Korea Times.

Guaranteed happiness?

You may think that the life of a celebrity-turned-wife of a billionaire is free from worry and stress. But many couple mangers and wedding consultants say it’s never the case.

“There are many beauties who complain over their stressful life after marriage,” said James Lee, CEO of Sunoo, a leading matchmaking company. “Rich families are usually conservative and they have very strict family-wide code of conduct that all family members are required to abide by. They used to become stressful while being familiar with it.” He said some even become targets of ridicule by their husband’s kinsmen because of their previous career.

There is scientific evidence that money doesn’t always guarantee a happy marriage.

A study by scholars at Brigham Young University (BYU) and Provo, Utah and William Paterson University concluded that materialistic spouses pay less attention to their marital relationships and give their marriage lower priority than other concerns.

“Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” Jason Carroll, a BYU professor and lead author of the study, was quoted as saying in a Wall Street Journal report. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.”

Nevertheless, there are still many beauties holding onto the dream of achieving the Cinderella status through marriage.

Experts say, most of them are influenced by TV dramas or online articles telling unproven stories about how an ordinary woman gets married to a rich man.

In fact, there are matchmakers who get a pretty ordinary woman introduced to a rich bachelor in exchange for handsome brokerage fees.