The Pink Floyd co-founder has filed in New York to end his fifth marriage, and the longer you look at all five, the more he resembles rock’s last unreformed believer in the wedding vow.
Roger Waters believes in marriage more than anyone else in rock music, and the record proves it from both ends. On Tuesday 10 November he filed for divorce from Kamilah Chavis in New York Supreme Court. Five years earlier he had shared their wedding photographs under the caption “Finally a keeper.” He is 83 and she is 48, according to Hello!, and this is the fifth of his marriages to head for the courts. Every headline since has made the obvious joke, so we shall leave it where it lies.
DDW reads the record the other way. Waters has stood up and made the promise in five different decades: the sixties, the seventies, the nineties, the 2010s and the 2020s. Each time he said the words, signed the register and announced it. The cynic’s route through later life is well mapped: marry once, perhaps twice, then settle into a long companionship that troubles nobody’s solicitor. Waters has never taken it. He keeps choosing the version with vows.
He has always said yes again
The record opens in 1968 with Judith Trim, whom Gulf News describes as an English potter, and that marriage lasted until 1975. Carolyne Christie, a British aristocrat by the same paper’s account, followed in 1976 and stayed until 1992. She is the mother of his son, Harry, and his daughter, India. Priscilla Phillips, an actress, was his wife from 1993 to 2001. Laurie Durning, an actress and director, married him in 2012, and they split in 2015. After her came Kamilah Chavis, the fifth.
By our count, Waters has spent about thirty-nine of the fifty-eight years since his first wedding married, counting the present marriage up to the day of filing. Twice the gap between one wife and the next was about a year. The only long pause ran from 2001 to 2012, eleven years without a wedding, which by his standards counts as a sabbatical.
Your correspondent once spent a fortnight deciding whether to renew a gym membership.
Waters, faced with the largest contract most people ever sign, has signed it five times. The marriages have come in every length. The one with Christie ran sixteen years and produced both children, and the one with Durning ran three. Neither seems to have put him off the next. You can call that folly or you can call it faith, and the evidence of fifty-eight years leans towards faith.
It is also worth noticing what the record does not contain. There is no famous decade of drift between wives, no string of companions the press had to keep a spreadsheet for. The public story of Waters’s private life is a list of five women he married, each named, each dated, each formally ended or ending. Romantics of the old school worked from the same list. They simply kept it shorter.
Even Rolling Stone lost count this week. Its headline called Chavis his fourth wife, above a story that got the number right.
Finally a keeper, said the caption
They met in 2016 at Coachella, where Waters was performing and where, according to Hello!, Chavis was working in transportation. That makes theirs one of the few romances from the festival known to have outlived the wristband by the better part of a decade.
The wedding was announced in October 2021, and Gulf News dates the post to 14 October. The photographs, as Rolling Stone described them this week, showed a cake-cutting and the couple’s dog, a creature called Sweet Georgia Brown. According to Hello!, they also showed an intimate celebration at Waters’s estate in Bridgehampton, New York. It was the fifth wedding of a man then in his late seventies, and it looked like a first one. The guest list was small, the dog was invited, and the cake was cut in the time-honoured way.
Then there was the caption. “Finally a keeper” is three words, and the first one does all the work. It concedes four earlier attempts, in public, at the very moment of a fifth, and it declares the search over. A man who had quietly given up on marriage would not reach for that word. He would post the cake and say nothing, or say nothing and skip the cake. Waters wrote a line that only works if you believe the thing can come right, and he wrote it at an age when most men have stopped believing that about anything, including the trains.
Only an optimist puts “finally” in a wedding caption.
Neither Waters nor Chavis has commented in public since the filing, and Hello! reports that the reason for the split has not been disclosed. Chavis is a private person who married a famous one. The least she is owed is to be kept out of the guesswork, and the guesswork has no facts to work with anyway.
Contested means unresolved, and nothing more
Rolling Stone reported on 12 November that the case is listed as contested, meaning one or more terms remain unresolved, and that further details of the filing are not public. Contested is a word that sounds like raised voices and describes something nearer a to-do list with an item still on it. A couple who agree on everything bar a single line carry the same label as a couple who agree on nothing. The listing does not take anyone’s temperature.
So the public record of the fifth divorce is short: two names, a court, a Tuesday and one adjective. Anything longer is invention, and the internet will supply plenty. DDW would rather look at the record that is long, which is the record of the marriages themselves, and at what it says about the man who keeps adding to it.
It says, first, that Waters is consistent in a way his reputation does not lead you to expect. He changes his mind about wives. He has never changed his mind about weddings. Five times he has preferred the formal arrangement, with its paperwork at both ends, to the informal one with none. The first wedding came the year before men walked on the moon, and the fifth came in the middle of a pandemic. In the years between, the music business invented and abandoned several ways of being famous, and Waters went on doing the most conventional thing a famous man can do.
It says, second, that his longest commitments are not always the obvious ones. According to Hello!, his feud with David Gilmour dates to 1985, when Waters left Pink Floyd to pursue a solo career. By our count that quarrel has now run forty-one years, more than twice the length of his longest marriage and still going, with no sign of anyone filing to end it. Waters has shown a stamina for disagreement that he has never had to bring to the altar, because at the altar he has always been agreeable.
And it says, third, that he means it at the time. You cannot write “finally” under a cake-cutting at a fifth wedding as a joke. The word only works if you think the search has ended. He thought so in 1968, and in 1976, and in 1993, and in 2012, and in October 2021. The courts have since disagreed with him four times, and may soon make it five, but the man in the photographs was not hedging.
A sceptic would have stopped at the second.
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