Article - Tom Green - Polygamy and Its Discontents

Tom Green: Polygamy and Its Discontents
By Lance Morrow Monday, May. 21, 2001

a man — short, bald, of undetectable charm — who was a virtual bigamist. He had a wife and family in the suburbs and something of the same arrangement, though without benefit of clergy, in town. He lived a complex double life — a secret agent in his own existence, half of him a stranger to the other half.

- Two dinners each night, one with each wife
- Lie-management is intricate work, as every philanderer knows
- two-timing is an effort to thwart the fatal fact that you only go around once. It doesn't work, but it keeps you busy.
former president of France, who had a wife but also many mistresses. He possessed, evidently, an orderly mind. Five days of the week, as I heard the story, he took a different mistress out to dinner, always dining on the same night with the same woman at the same restaurant. Thursday meant Babette and Le Cochon D'Or, or somesuch. Tuesday meant Francoise and Le Bistro de L'Ennuie. This was cosmopolitan but drearily bureaucratic polygamy, and I cannot help wondering if the women did not get terribly bored, not just with the Great Man, but with the schedule. Might they not have called one another up and tried to swap nights and restaurants, just to get a change of menu?
Tom Green, a self-proclaimed Mormon living in the Utah desert, has five wives and 30 children (the Mormon Church excommunicated Green in 1980 for his belief in polygamy). He has just been convicted of bigamy in Provo, and could get 25 years — five years for each wife — for doing what all self-respecting male waterbuck, eland, and gnu do as a matter of course
- former president of France, who had a wife but also many mistresses. He possessed, evidently, an orderly mind. Five days of the week, as I heard the story, he took a different mistress out to dinner, always dining on the same night with the same woman at the same restaurant. Thursday meant Babette and Le Cochon D'Or, or somesuch. Tuesday meant Francoise and Le Bistro de L'Ennuie. This was cosmopolitan but drearily bureaucratic polygamy, and I cannot help wondering if the women did not get terribly bored, not just with the Great Man, but with the schedule. Might they not have called one another up and tried to swap nights and restaurants, just to get a change of menu?