Lucky Heather Kerzner

When she wants a holiday, she heads off in the private jet to her homes in the Bahamas, the South of France and Cape Town, or touches down at any of Sol's numerous luxury resorts that takes her fancy: the Atlantis in Dubai or the Bahamas, the One&Only resorts in Mauritius, Mexico, the Maldives, South Africa, or even the Mazagan Beach Resort (if she can face it without the monkeys). So could she cope if she lost everything? I'd like to think I could,' she says slowly. I know I'd be able to get a job. The only thing I would really hate would be to lose my house. When I was small, we must have moved about 17 times. Having a sense of security is what I love, and not worrying about having enough money to buy food and pay the rent. After that, it doesn't matter whether you're shopping at Topshop or Chanel, none of it makes you happier. Obviously it's fun to be able to buy a beautiful gown, but if I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't be less happy. I know you can live without material luxuries.'

Which would be hard to swallow from the wife of a multibillionaire if it didn't come from experience. For Heather's background is far from gilt-edged. She was raised with her two elder brothers in Albany, New York. Her parents had split up: her father worked for a small sound systems company in Mississippi and her mother in management for a local television station. Money was extremely short. I remember my mother really stressing about paying the rent, and how she was going to put food on the table,' she says.

Did she mind not getting the latest trainers? When you have a mother who is working really hard for you, there's a real sense of not wanting to ask her for things. You don't want to put more pressure on someone who you know is already under a lot of pressure.

She was a great mom, and there was never a Christmas when we didn't get what we wanted, but we were subconsciously aware of what she could afford and that was what we asked for.' Her mother remarried and had another daughter, but cash was still in short supply. From the age of 12, Heather earned her own money. I did everything from delivering papers to modelling and waitressing and working at the Gap,' she says.

Her childhood has informed the way she has brought up her children, Charlie, 13, and Savannah, 12, from a previous marriage. They are very grounded kids,' she says, and they would never say to their friends, "We just went to a launch and met Lindsay Lohan," you know what I mean? Savannah likes dressing nicely but she doesn't know anything about brands, and my son doesn't like to wear anything flashy, or do anything flashy. When they get older, they're definitely going to have jobs. I give them a lot – they both have iPods – but if I ask them what they want for Christmas, they don't have a big list. They always say, "Mom, you always buy us nice things." ' Can they really be such paragons of un-materialism? (My mind flicks uncomfortably to my stepson, whose list of Christmas requests is the size of a phone directory and who refuses to contemplate any underwear but Calvin Klein.)

Heather won a place to Columbia University to study English, then worked in marketing for Time Warner. She married a Morgan Stanley banker called Charles Murphy in 1993 and moved with him to London, where she started studying for a doctorate in theology but gave up after a term to retreat into luxury home-making in Kensington.

As members of the international jet set, her path and Kerzner's often crossed. We were always in the same place by chance. In the summer we would go to the Bahamas, and at Christmas we would go to South Africa and get invited to Sol's New Year's Eve party. And we had the same social circle in London. I was often seated next to him at dinners, but I never looked at him in a romantic way at all.'

That changed when Heather and her husband split up. She moved back to New York with her children, then aged three and one. Sol was building Atlantis in the Bahamas,so he used to fly up and take me out to dinner, really as friends. It kind of evolved from there.' At the time, he was engaged to Christina Estrada, one of Heather's friends, which ruffled some feathers.

Sol Kerzner is the son of Russian Jews who fled their home in the late 1920s and ended up in South Africa, where they ran a kosher hotel. Sol studied accountancy at the University of Witwatersrand, then joined Durban's largest accountancy firm, where, by 26, he was a junior partner. His first venture into the hotel business was when he bought The Palace Hotel in Durban. Then he snapped up a piece of land north of the city and turned it into the Beverly Hills Hotel, South Africa's first five-star resort. In 1969, in partnership with South African Breweries, Kerzner established the chain of Southern Sun Hotels, which, by 1983, was operating 31 luxury hotels with more than 5,000 rooms. Most notoriously, in 1979, he opened Sun City in Bophuthatswana, a fantasy jungle palace (the beach had its own wave-making machine) and casino. Despite global condemnation of the apartheid regime, which saw him labelled The Sultan of Sin', he lured stars such as Frank Sinatra there to entertain.

But in the late 1980s, after unsubstantiated allegations of bribery, he sold Sun City and his other hotels and moved to London. He then founded the Atlantis brand of destination resorts in the Bahamas and Dubai, as well as the stealth-luxe One&Only resorts, which are dotted across the globe from Mexico to Mauritius.

Along the way, he collected three wives and five children: Butch, Andrea and Beverley by his first marriage to Maureen Adler; Brandon and Chantal by his second to Shirley Besthier, who committed suicide shortly after Chantal's birth. His third marriage to ex-Miss World Anneline Kriel ended in divorce. Heather is younger than two of his daughters.

Heather says she and Sol were both quite taken aback to realise they were falling in love. Sol had been divorced for 18 years and never thought he would get married again.' Didn't the prospect of being wife number four put her off? I think more about that now, but at the time I was madly in love. I just wanted to be with this man.' So, Heather, I wonder, Mrs Merton-style, what was it that attracted you to a sixty-something multibillionaire? A lot of it was just a chemistry thing. We clicked. His humility is really extraordinary, and it makes him extremely engaging. He makes everyone feel very comfortable because he accepts people for who they are. If he's talking to Prince Philip or one of his construction workers, he is the same guy, and he treats the person in the same way.'

At any rate, it probably wasn't the lifestyle, funnily enough. For their first proper date, Sol asked Heather out to lunch. I got all dressed up and had my hair done, and he took me out to Central Park and we had a hot dog on a bench,' she recalls laughing. I was looking as glamorous as possible and he didn't even notice. And if he had, he wouldn't have felt embarrassed taking me to a hot dog stand dressed like that. I once said to him: "When I make an effort, you really have to compliment me," and he said, "I decided a long time ago that I think you're beautiful. You should know that by now." And it's true. He's never looked at me when my hair's all messy and I have no make-up on and said, "What are you doing?" '

They married less than a year after they started dating, sneaking off to a suite at the Atlantis with two witnesses. We kind of eloped,' she says. It wasn't glamorous at all. We'd both been married before, and we both felt that the marriage was the important thing, not the wedding. We'd been living together, so we felt married anyway.'

The couple are clearly very dependent on each other. Heather gets a starry, new-bride look in her eye when she talks about her diminutive powerhouse of a spouse, and Kerzner is clearly just as smitten. He takes her to business meetings, and she is heavily involved in women's charities, including Women's Aid, which works to end domestic violence against women and children, and The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, as well as being an ambassador for the Kerzner brand. I'm very involved in the business,' she says, it's a family affair. It's Sol's passion and it's impossible to be around him and not contribute. After ten years of being married to him, I've learned to have his eyes and to notice things the way he does.'

As for the 34-year age difference, she thinks it's a positive bonus. I'll always be young to him,' she says. The joke is that he's never gone out with a woman in her forties before, and I turned 40 in March.' The event was celebrated with a huge bash for 250 of her closest friends at The Dorchester, including the Duchess of York and her daughters, Elizabeth Hurley and Arun Nayar, Geri Halliwell, Elisabeth Murdoch and David Furnish, with music provided by Donna Summer and Natalie Cole.

Heather was presented with the best gift I've ever received. Words can't describe it. Would you like to see it?' She trots upstairs and, while she's looking for it, I speculate wildly about what it might be. An emerald the size of a
hen's egg, perhaps? A teensy Rembrandt? But Heather returns with a handmade scrapbook. Pasted in it are love letters from Kerzner (who has almost illegible handwriting), drawings and poems from her children and little notes from her party guests. It's a whole book of my favourite things,' she says ecstatically, clutching it to her chest.

And at that moment, even the prospect of shuffling in holey tights across the white marble hall under the disapproving gaze of a butler can't dim the liking I feel for Heather Kerzner.