DATE: Saturday, November 1, 1997            TAG: 9711010019

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Kerry Dougherty 

                                            LENGTH:   64 lines

THE HEILIG MANEUVER - THE SCANDAL THAT WILL NOT DIEACCORDING TO THE LAWSUIT, HEILIG PROMISED THIS OTHER WOMAN HE WOULD TAKE CAREOF HER FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE ... DIDN'T THIS OTHER WOMAN'S MOTHER WARN HER NOT TO BELIEVE MARRIED MEN ?

Just in time for Halloween, a headline appeared this week that continues to haunt me. It concerned the late George Heilig, a longtime member of the House of Delegates, who is having a sordid after-death experience.

For those who missed the story, ``Heilig's former lover sues for a share of his estate,'' let me recap.

This week a woman who claimed she was Heilig's lover for two years argued in a Norfolk Circuit Court suit that Heilig never intended to leave all of the sizable fortune he amassed during more than three decades of marriage to his wife. He really wanted his paramour to have half of it. About 1 million bucks.

According to court papers filed Tuesday, Heilig promised this other woman he would take care of her for the rest of her life.

I'll bet he made a similar promise 32 years earlier: to his wife, at the altar, in front of witnesses.

Didn't this other woman's mother warn her not to believe married men?

At the risk of sounding like Dr. Laura and Dan Quayle rolled into one, I have to ask: What has happened to that good old-fashioned virtue called shame?

There was a time, no more than 20 years ago, when people who engaged in extramarital affairs at least knew that what they were doing was wrong. Back then, all of society - Christians, Jews and secular humanists - frowned on such behavior.

It would have been fruitless to take a case like this to court because judges and juries were hard on adulterers, philanderers and fornicators. The law was squarely on the side of marriage and the family.

It was also assumed that the wronged party in such a dispute - the loyal wife - was entitled to most of the marital dough that piled up during the years she cooked, changed diapers and stoked the home fires.

If a two-timing guy dropped dead, back in the days of shame, leaving his girlfriend high and dry, the ``other women'' generally had the decency to just fade away. I like to think she then spent some time in sober reflection, lecturing herself on the folly of believing the empty promises of men and vowing to date only bachelors in the future.

Not any more.

Today the other woman defiantly takes the wife to court. Shame evaporates pretty quickly in the face of a dollar sign with a lot of zeroes after it.

Perhaps the plaintiff in this case believes that because she filed suit, the widow will be so embarrassed by the whole sordid mess that she will offer some loot just to make it go away.

It was Lee Marvin's girlfriend who started all this with her ground-breaking ``palimony'' suit against the millionaire actor. Since then, women who have affairs with wealthy men seem to hear a deafening cha-ching as soon as things go sour, or he keels over.

George Heilig's widow filed for divorce in 1996, charging that the Norfolk lawyer deserted her. The divorce, as we know from the papers, was never finalized. Mrs. Heilig's lawyer told the newspaper this week that his client had always hoped her husband would come to his senses and come home. Since you cannot be just a little bit married, the Heiligs were still lawfully wedded when he died in September.

According to Wednesday's Virginian-Pilot, the widow is out of town. Perhaps she's grieving. If so, my heart goes out to her. If not, I hope she's on a million-dollar shopping spree.

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