LONDON (Reuter) - They inherit celebrity names, appear to have it all andlive apparently gilded lives, but what may at first seem like paradise canend in pain or even tragedy.
Angst has become so widespread among the descendants of superstars andthe mega-rich that many commentators are now talking of the existence of a``paradise syndrome.''
Amschel Rothschild, 41-year-old chairman of Rothschild Asset Managementand great-great-great-grandson of Nathan Meyer Rothschild -- who establishedin 1804 the merchant bank in the City of London that still bears his name --hanged himself in a Paris hotel room Monday, French police said Thursday.
Ten days ago, actress-model Margaux Hemingway, granddaughter of famednovelist Ernest Hemingway, also 41, was found dead in her apartment in theUnited States, 35 years after her grandfather died of a self-inflictedgunshot wound.
Investigators await the results of laboratory tests to determine whetherMargaux had taken a fatal drug or drink overdose, although an initial autopsycited natural causes.
She took to drink as she failed to build upon the early success of heryouth. Blonde and six feet tall, she was one of the world's top models by theage of 20.
But Margaux, older sister of 34-year-old actress Mariel Hemingway, laterbattled both alcoholism and eating disorders and friends said she becamedepressed about her stalled acting career. She was treated at the Betty FordCenter in California in the late 1980s and her two marriages ended indivorce.
Descendants of celebrities face particular stresses in living up to thelegacy of their forbears. They may live for ever in the shadow of theirfamous name, cast into the media spotlight but unable to match their success.
Actor Paul Newman lost his eldest son in 1978 following an overdose ofpills and alcohol. Years later, Newman commented that: ``There are about180,000 liabilities in having me as a father. The biggest one is that thereis always an element of competition between children and their parents.''
Multi-millionairess Christina Onassis went through four broken marriagesin 16 years, suffered from intermittent obesity and died of fluid in thelungs at the age of 37.
Hollywood giant Marlon Brando gave his son Christian Brando his ownprivate desert island playground -- an atoll near Tahiti. But Christian'slifestyle changed abruptly when he received a 10-year prison sentence formurdering the allegedly abusive boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne.
Cheyenne later compounded the Brando misery by hanging herself.
Amschel Rothschild, a likely successor to the banking dynasty's firm,continued the flamboyant style of life of his ancestors, with a penchant forracing classic cars.
Relatives cast a characteristic veil of secrecy over the circumstances ofhis death, but the merchant bank N M Rothschild & Sons confirmed Thursday thedeath was suicide.
His widow Anita Rothschild said his death was ``totally unexpected,'' andthe family was ``shocked and devastated.''
The second of two children born to Henry and Frances Seymour Fonda, Peter soon learned thathaving glamorous parents and luxurious homes in Los Angeles and suburban Connecticut didn'tmean having a storybook childhood. While moviegoers the world over knew his father as thearchetypal decent man, Peter Fonda knew him as a forbidding figure who sent him to boardingschool when he was 6 years old and responded to his mother's 1950 suicide by ignoring it. Foryears, Fonda feared he might never crack his father's starchy exterior.
During the war, the elder Fonda returned to visit his family. The night he came back, we gathered inthe living room and listened to many stories. After a while, I wandered off to his dressing room tolook at the little things that were his "personals." After looking at his watch and dog tags, I reachedinto a large bowl that was full of pennies and little candies, took a candy and went back to the livingroom. I climbed onto the couch next to him, and he noticed I was sucking on the candy. He askedme where I got it, but the look on his face and the tone in his voice were terrifying. I told him I hadjust found it. He bellowed that I was a liar. I jumped off the couch and ran for my life with Dad in hotpursuit. I made it into my bathroom, locking the door, but then Dad kicked the door in. He pickedme up by my small, terrified neck and carried me into my bedroom, giving me the spanking of mylife.
Peter didn't understand the significance of his mother's frequent visits to the hospital, and when hefound the house crowded with friends and relatives one afternoon, had no reason to suspect anythingwas amiss.
When I walked toward them they told me to go through the closed doors and into the living room. Iopened the doors and saw Jane, Grandma and Dad sitting on the couches. Jane was on Dad's lap. Iwent to Grandma, and she told me Mother had died of a heart attack, in a hospital. After that, noone ever talked about Mom. No one seemed to miss her. It was almost as if she had never lived.Jane and I never went to a funeral or service for her; I didn't know where she was buried.
I think my family had a peculiar bent to privacy, and the strictness with which Aunt Harriet and Dadand Aunt Jayne had been brought up prevented them from getting close to their own children, or totheir own inner selves. Dad was never one to open up. Dad was too shy, too intensely private, totruly expose the part of his history that mattered to him.
His father had been keeping a secret; Peter, then 20, learned it when he apprenticed in a summerstock theater in Fishkill, N.Y., in the summer of 1960. The owner of the local diner, a man withwhom I'd chatted all summer, sat down next to me at the bar. He pulled out his wallet and removeda yellowed newspaper clipping. My eyes were perfect in those days, and I saw the same photographof my mother that had been in The New York Times for my birth announcement, but the copy wasvery different: Frances Seymour Fonda, wife of the actor Henry Fonda, committed suicide yesterdayat the Craig House, a posh asylum in Beacon, New York.
I was stunned. I sat there for two or three minutes, speechless. I sped off to the theater, my tiresmaking a wailing and moaning sound that was close to the noise banging around in my head.Everyone else knew. Knew everything! But not me.
Eventually, I learned that our mother had killed herself by cutting her throat from ear to ear with arazor, one she'd apparently secreted behind a photo of her children during her last visit home.