Do You Remember: When Sting and Trudie Styler Got Tantric
Don't stand so close to them. They're going to be busy for the next seven to ten hours...
CONTENT WARNING: This piece is not suitable for work.
No joke, the idea for this piece came to me in a dream. Being a workaholic freelancer makes your brain go to weird places.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pop culture urban legends, and I was reminded that most of the more notorious ones are centred on, well, sex. Whether it’s Richard Gere and the gerbil or Marilyn Manson’s rib removal, it seems we love outlandish stories of celebrities being corrupt deviants in ways that would make even the most orgiastic among us blush. The mythos of Hollywood as an endless cycle of kink makes it sound more interesting than it actually is, but it also serves as a convenient cover for a hierarchy of abuse that blamed women for their own harassment and degradation by calling it “the casting couch.”
But I digress. With these urban legends, the source is often a mean whisper campaign or pure fantasy designed to make the subject look bad. In today’s case, a joke turned one celebrity couple into the face of life-changing sex.
In 1982, Trudie Styler fell in love with Gordon Sumner. She was a jobbing actress who had been in a few British TV shows, and he was Sting, the rock icon and frontman of The Police. At the time, the band was a hit-making machine, but all the members hated one another, and Sting wanted to go solo (I’m Team Stewart Copeland. He did the scores for the Spyro the Dragon games and Sting didn’t.) Their romance was intense and a little messy because Sting was married to Frances Tomelty and had two kids with her.
He began his affair with Trudie the year his daughter Kate was born. Oh, and also Trudie was really good friends with Frances and neighbours with the family! The split was, as you can imagine, pretty messy, and in 1983, Trudie became pregnant with the first of their four kids. At one point during the fallout, Sting referred to Styler as his mistress at a press conference, which should have earned him a slap.
They'd eventually marry in 1992, and I highly recommend you check out the photos of that ceremony on Go Fug Yourself. It was a glorious over-the-top combination of horses, pastoral bliss, and custom Versace. Styler’s acting career ground to a halt thanks to being labelled the mistress, and she largely moved behind the camera to work as a producer, which she does to this day. The pair were a major power couple, co-founding the Rainforest Foundation Fund and doing tons of philanthropic work together.
The image the world had of the Sumners was that of a kind of woo-woo couple with more money than sense. They lived a grand and extremely celeb life, with no illusions of faux-humility. Some thought it was arrogance, a sign that they had both forgotten their working-class roots. This is pretty typical for any celebrity who dares to have a cause, and Sting was certainly not shy about his support for the likes of Amnesty International. Although it didn’t exactly help Sting’s image when he performed at a private festival in Uzbekistan for the daughter of the nation's authoritarian leader. It’s tough to square “preaching” about social justice while flying in private jets to hang out with dictators.
But admit it: when you think of Sting and Trudie Styler, there’s one thing that comes to mind. Heh, comes. Sorry.
Tantric sex! Yeah, baby!
