Kelleher International is a high-end matchmaking service which, for around $30,000, will set up rich, attractive middle-aged women with rich, attractive middle-aged men. Or so its CEO claims, says Nancy Jo Sales in Air Mail. Increasingly, female members are complaining that the blokes aren’t uber-elite at all – they’re complete bums. One hopeful, Kelley Gast, splashed out $10,000 for a date with a man she was assured was gorgeous. “No offence,” she says, but the guy was “5ft 3in and living in somebody’s guest house”. Another client, Darlene Daggett, is suing the company to reclaim $150,000, after being served up a disgraced New York Supreme Court judge and a man who fainted from a heart condition on their first date.
The problem is – you guessed it – that rich fifty and sixty-something men don’t want a successful mature woman; they want a “hot 30-to-35-year-old”. So matchmakers end up trawling free dating websites like Match.com and commandeering any reasonably attractive guys to pretend to be super-wealthy businessmen. The company’s roster of “highly screened” gentlemen, according to Daggett’s lawyers, includes guys who are “married, mentally unstable, physically ill, pathological liars, serial lotharios, stalkers, convicted felons, and men unwilling or unable to travel and/or the subject of professional sanctions”. You might as well save your money and stick to the apps.