But now, the trauma of those days is over.
Two-and-a-half years after the former Pink Floyd manager died aged 66 following devastating brain damage, Greta has a new spring in her step.She has, I am told, found a charming companion — one very different from her ebullient late husband who made a £90million fortune publishing the music of Elton John, the Bee Gees and Wham!.
Greta has been stepping out with academic Dr James Cook, 42, a university lecturer at Imperial College, London who is 24 years her junior. They have enjoyed holidays abroad together, I understand, and trips to the theatre.While Hackney-born Bryan was the type of man who loved setting up million pound deals in the pop world and became obsessed with polo — so much so that he built his own ground, the Royal Berkshire — Dr Cook is almost his polar opposite. He works in biological sciences, studying the relationship between wasps and fig trees.
According to pals, Greta and Dr Cook have been seeing each other for some months. His college has an outpost at Silwood Park, Ascot, not far from Greta’s mansion Bartlett House.
Says a friend: ‘They have a nice easy-going relationship. After all the stressful years with someone like Bryan who was a roller-coaster of a man and was unfaithful to her, this relationship with someone who is gentle and unflashy — and not a bit like Bryan — has given her a lot of happiness.’
Dr Cook is a divorcee and neither of them feels the need to rush into another marriage, I gather.
The only blip in Greta’s convivial new life is that her plans to downsize from Bartlett House, her seven-bedroom Georgian mansion set in 18 acres, have not yet met with success.
She optimistically put the house up for sale for £6million in February last year and it is still on the market now, at a reduced £4,500,000. She and Bryan lived in the Grade ll listed house for 29 years, bringing up their children Jamie and Karina. But it is too big for her now and she wanted to buy land nearby and build a new home.
