It has been 16 years of love that have united Julio José Iglesias and his wife since 2012, Charise Verhaert.
So far, they have announced their separation.
The couple had been together since 2004, married since 2012, and in these three long decades they have openly shown their relationship at events, parties, family celebrations and magazine covers.
His good times, like all those of the Iglesias-Preysler clan, have been meat of the coated paper.
The bad guys, on the other hand, are pure silence.
It has taken more than six months since the couple began the legal process for anything to be known about this divorce.
And not a word has come out of their mouths.
First, some US media and then other Spanish ones echoed the break but they, habitual of the heart media, did not comment on it.
Her wedding was very different.
Iglesias and Verhaert were getting married amid great anticipation in 2012, after eight years together in which they were repeatedly asked about their wedding and in which, when they had a date, November 2012, they did not hesitate to publicize it.
Although they both live in Miami, the celebration took place in Madrid, in the El Rincón palace, belonging to the second ex-husband of Julio José's mother, Carlos Falcó, and the organization was in charge of the groom's sister, Tamara Falcó.
Rivers of ink flowed that the event led to a rare meeting of the Iglesias clan, despite the fact that the groom's younger brother, singer Enrique Iglesias, did not attend.
It was known that he had organized the bachelor party in Las Vegas, USA.
There was no detail that did not transcend that event: that about 60 people attended, that dinner was served by the José Luis restaurant at the wish of Julio Iglesias (who attended alone, without his wife Miranda Rijnsburger or their young children), which Carlos Falcó gave away the wines, that Miguel Boyer was present ... All this seasoned with the corresponding cover of the clan's main magazine the following week with the couple posing with their parents (only his).
If the question was to tell everything, the couple went public until their wedding, four years later.
Dressed in white, they renewed their wedding vows again in November 2016 at Lake Tahoe and came to announce, of course, in
Hello!
: "Next year we want to be parents."
Something that never happened.
Unlike the new batch of celebrities and television personalities who make their living touting their misfortunes, it seems that Preysler's children still function in the old way, as they used to do decades ago, in a tradition that is long gone.
What you sell (or what they try to sell you) are their smiles, not their tears.
Weddings, births, presentations, postings, pottery store openings ... but dirty laundry is washed at home.
Isabel Preysler herself has been her children's best teacher in matters of discretion.
Her wedding with Julio Iglesias, held in Illescas (Toledo) in 1971, was national news.
The birth of his daughter Chábeli seven months later in Estoril, who was opportunely said to be seven months old and had been born early and far from Madrid due to a surprising kidney condition in her mother, was widely publicized.
Just like the arrival of her two sons, Julio José in 1973 and Enrique in 1975. And, despite the shocking in Spain that had just come out of the Franco regime, her divorce with Iglesias in 1978 was much more discreet. Years later, the story turned he repeated with Carlos Falcó.
Such is his experience that, in 2012, and not without irony, Preysler wrote the foreword to a book of recommendations on how to break up a marriage.
Chábeli Iglesias, the first-born of the marriage, also experienced an immense
boom
with her first wedding, which was celebrated when she was only 22 years old and which accumulated 5,000 people at the doors of the office in Barcelona of her then father-in-law, Ricardo Bofill Sr. .
More than 200 guests passed through there in September 1993: from Pitita Ridruejo to Terenci Moix.
Then it became known that the complete menu served by elBulli consisted of caviar in radish sauce, cold meat with truffles and artichoke and pigeon salad, as well as rock fish stew with monkfish and, for dessert, raspberries and passion fruit. in addition to the wedding cake, a
coconut
mousse
and
biscuit
with almonds.
All this seasoned with tangos, a piano recital, a rociero group and even a concert by Julio Iglesias himself.
The divorce came only 16 months later. "Disputes arising in the married life of Mrs. Isabel Iglesias Preysler and Ricardo Bofill have determined their separation in fact, as the step prior to the initiation of the judicial procedure by mutual agreement," said her lawyer. Chábeli herself claimed that they were two very different people. “I am very calm. I am a person who likes peace, tranquility and being at home. And Ricardo is a person who likes nightlife, going out with his friends and another kind of life that I think is not in line with the life of a couple ... Ricardo likes to live life. He is a bohemian of life. A great bohemian ”. That divorce reached the magazines, and televisions, which were already beginning to approach the current model, but also with discretion. She avoided telling, as if she would do almost two decades later in an interview with
Vogue
, what her father told her moments before the ceremony: “Chábeli, I have the plane ten minutes from here; we all leave and we leave them with the wedding ”.