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“Tyne O’Connell is the Queen Bee incarnate!” The Daily Telegraph
“Draped in pink and sipping saki in her fashionable London Warehouse,the impossibly glamourous O’Connell!” Elle UK
Tyne O’Connell inhabits the worlds she writes about: exotic, unconventional, off-piste in every way.
Working with artists and artisans like a latter day Medici, Tyne designs her own range of artwork, clothes, jewelry and crocodile accessories under her label Apis Regina; a range which is exclusive to her and which no one else can purchase.
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Contact us: info@tyneoconnell.com |
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"You could certainly start a stimulating debate on modern relationships based on Tyne O'Connell." The Sunday Independent Ireland
"Draped in deep pink and sipping saki in her fashionable London warehouse, the impossibly glamorous Tyne…." ELLE (Australia)
"She's a very attractive, driven, intense person." Tyne's Ex-husband. The Independent
"Dinner parties at Tyne's house sound particularly bizarre. On such occasions, a stuffed chimpanzee is moved to the dinner table. I for one can't wait for an invitation " Lucas Hollweg, The Sunday Times Style Magazine
"There are usually a few raised eyebrows when people first encounter Tyne O'Connell." The Mirror
My Two Husbands published 1998 in VOGUE UK & Ms. USA
By Tyne O’Connell
Oscar Wilde said “in married life three is company, and two is none” yet more than one hundred years later when I mention that I live with my partners – as in plural – even the most sophisticated jaws drop. I live with two men, the fathers of my children. No I am not a spin doctor with a Utopian Philosophy to sell, nor are we a liaison dangereuse for the nineties. Basically, I am just like thousands of women who have remarried – the exception being that I decided not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Or in this case, the first husband out with the marriage.
Forget nannies and au pairs with attitude, forget juggling career and kids – the key to family bliss in the fin de millennium is not a vacation in Mauritius, but finding another spouse to share the load. Preferably young and gorgeous, and with an artistic flair for compromise.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking, but ah, where do you all, er, sleep?” people ask, uncomfortably looking around as if we were stuck for space in our huge converted factory. Watching them on the edge of their seats, their expressions suffused with anticipated titillation, we all feel slightly guilty as we admit that we are not actually a ménage a trois.
In fact, what is scandalous about our triumvirate is not sex but the symbiotic rhythm of our lives together – the way there is always someone on hand to buy milk, to read a story to one of the kids, or to do up my zipper. As three parents with busy and frequently separate social agendas, it is not a grand passion that drives us, but a quotidian pragmatism. We are liberated by our commitment.
When my first husband and I separated ten years ago we had two young sons. It wasn’t an acrimonious divorce. Still, it was traumatic, and we spent the next two years juggling access and custody arrangements, made all the harder because my career as a gemmologist frequently took me abroad. Finally we decided that for practical reasons it would be easier if I moved back into the house.
A lot of people thought it was incredibly big and brace of us to attempt a rapprochement. We pointed out that only a few years before we’d been exchanging body fluids like there was no tomorrow – a little bit of bill sharing wasn’t going to kill us. So we thought. As it happened, the ensuing arguments were far worse than anything we had encountered in our marriage. The disputes centred around our sex lives. SP, my ex, who claims not to believe in jealousy, didn’t see why I had a problem with him bringing women home. On the other hand, my boyfriends got on so well with SP, they’d drop round for a drink with him!
Some of the women he dated were less than enamoured with me. If we were divorced, why didn’t I just take the kids and leave? They all took different approaches. There was the vegetarian who threw out my venison steaks. The woman who hated kids and asked me to keep them out of her way, but most of them wanted my advice on how to make their relationship with SP work. As if I would know! They’d take me to lavish lunches to beg me to put in a good word for them. Then there was the woman on a business trip who kept ringing me to make sure SP was being faithful to her. He wasn’t.
When the relationships ended, as they inevitably did, I often felt like I was the cause. Basically, I was – not because of anything I said or did, but just because I was there. In the end we agreed that unless we fell inexorably in love with someone, we wouldn’t introduce our lovers to the home.
We had hardly made our pact when I met Eric. I was living in Cairo when this artist with looks to die for ran onto an elevator I was entering and proposed. Just like that. That same audacity is probably what carried him through when I gave him a run down of my living arrangements. Thankfully, neither my ex-husband nor my sons could resist his charms nor he theirs. When he landed on the doorstep a few months later and turned our lives upside down.
By this time the thought of being apart from our children was anathema to both SP and me. When I told my mother that Eric and I were getting married and that we were thinking of all living together, she said, “Poor Eric! At least give him a six month honeymoon first.” She was right – privacy is not part of the structure of a three parent family.
There were bound to be problems, and the determination to stay together for the sake of the children buckled more than once under the sheer weight of compromise. The first year was the hardest – not helped by my pregnancy. At various stages we all threatened to leave; eventually I was the one who walked out.
My two husbands found where I’d gone and turned up in the middle of the night. SP sent Eric up a ladder to talk to me with a silver tray and smoked salmon sandwiches while he stood outside, supporting the ladder and urging Eric on, prompting him, and promising us both it could work.
I realised I was matrix for our togetherness, but I was also central to most of the problems. I had a shared history with one man and a fledging relationship with the other; this would have been a juggling act without wanting to live together. I had to learn to let go and put my faith in our future together rather than in my ability to control it. We had to discover a new way of living because, apart from a few eccentric exceptions like Madame De Stael, the French intellectual, there were no precedents for what we were attempting. We had to invent a new lifestyle.
In the early stages we had no backup from society, family, or friends. Everyone was open minded about what we were trying to do, but they all expected us to fail. Perversely, this drove us on. As time went on, our loyalty grew; we clashed less and laughed more.
What finally forged our triumvirate was the birth of Cordelia. From the moment I felt the first twinge Eric went into one of those first time father comas, and started panicking about all the wrong things; champagne toasts, cigar distribution etiquette etc. Husband number one, the veteran, organised the hot towels, the breathing, and the ice chips. Our lesbian separatist midwife found herself beguiled by the two husband set up. On the balcony afterwards, smoking her cigar, she conceded that fathers could be of benefit after all – the trick was to get them in pairs.
Having an extra father on board certainly revolutionised the concept of motherhood for me. Two men falling over one another to co-parent took the sting out of my stitches. I lay back and breastfed while they debated diaper changing methods and boasted to one another about sleepless nights.
I started proselytizing to my married girlfriends: get another husband before you have children. One isn’t enough, I said. With one you bicker and niggle, with two you rejoice. My girlfriends were dubious. Surely two men were twice the trouble? But what actually happens when you get two men together is that their innate competitiveness comes to the fore. And then there is that bonding thing men do. People ask whether the men get jealous of one another. Come off it, I’m the one who get’s jealous of them! They give one another the sort of moral support no Prozac, beta blocker, or annalist can offer. It’s called having your cake and eating it, actually. All the jealousy came from the girls SP dated who saw me as the reason he wasn’t committing to them. He saw our family as his shield against further commitment and used our family as his cover all excuse for not delivering his girlfriends what they wanted……
By Cassandra Jardine The Telegraph, November 1996
Tyne swans in last. Clad in a little black suit her hair piled high, she drips Vivienne Westwood jewellery, red lipstick and charm. She is the queen bee incarnate. A vast bed, draped in red velvet, dominates the top floor of Tyne O'Connell's home. "Okay yaaah, this is where we congregate," Tyne announces in deadpan drawl, watching for a reaction. She is used to getting one.
For eight years now, she has lived with two husbands: Eric Hewitson, her current one, and Simon Peter (SP for short) the former. "No one who comes across our set-up considers it absolutely normal," she says, perching demurely on the edge of the bed, crossing her fish-net clad legs and throwing back her head in laughter.
Tyne is used to encountering raised eyebrows, embarrassment and other people's imaginations working overtime on the sexual permutations and tensions involved in such a household. And the house does little to put fevered speculation to rest.
As you ascend the stairs to the bedroom, a sumptuous bath greets the eye. It is surrounded by open space - presumably so that both men can tickle her toes simultaneously while she soaps herself. Then past a screen is the bed; large enough for three of more, and splattered in gold cushions. I settle nervously on the chaise longue opposite, imagining that if a latter day Elinor Gyn wanted to sin, she would choose such a setting.
By Lucas Holweg Style Magazine (The Times on Sunday), 1997
O'Connell herself is every bit as glam as her fictional heroines - blond hair, red lipstick, John Richmond outfit and Vivienne Westwood earings"
O'Connell writes in the second-floor bedroom - which she describes as "the gathering point" of the house. Here, the open spaces and wooden floors are contrasted with a collection of furniture that is quirkily ecclesiastical in feel. "It's a kind of gothic modernism," says O'Connell…..
At one end of the room is a huge 19th century French bed (9ft wide by 7ft long) with an ornate wooden headboard. Draped with a deep crimson bedspread it looked as if it were designed for a large and self indulgent bishop…similarly there is a larger than life gilt candlestick, which originally graced a French alter ("I think it must be my Catholic background that attracted me to it.") says O'Connell…The ground floor picks up on the churchy theme of the bedroom with a pair of throne-like eighteenth century chairs upholstered in vivid red fabric. There are inventive modern touches, too, such as a mobile side table, designed by O'Connell, using a hospital washstand found at Brick Lane market, or the "skylight" in the floor, made of glass shelves salvaged from a hospital dispensary, which funnels light into the basement studio. Dinners sound particularly bizarre. On such occasions, a stuffed chimpanzee is moved from the shelf where he lives to the dinner table. "We sit him opposite one of our guests and watch their reaction," says O'Connell. I for one, can't wait for an invitation.
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