The shamelessly vengeful divorce of former model and serial wife Christie Brinkley from architect and porn aficionado Peter Cook exuded a raw, publicist-free honesty that made folks visibly uncomfortable even as they found it impossible to turn away.
The nastiness that erupted inside a Long Island courtroom was documented everywhere from E! Entertainment to "Larry King Live" to the 100% free dating celebrity website Devil Called Love. The highbrow among us might declare the overwhelming interest in the case to be evidence of the decline of our mores, our media and our dignity.
Students of popular culture could argue that if this case is examined in all its minutiae, it will surely say something about contemporary society. All would agree that just viewing the sordid mess was akin to rolling in the mud. But one man's cesspool is another's spa treatment. We'll be following up this column with a four-part thalassotherapy regimen.
To recap: Brinkley and Cook, who with their bouncing blond locks and "Gattaca" smiles look eerily like brother and sister, married in 1996. Ten years later, she filed for divorce. The marriage fell apart for numerous reasons, but the ones given a public airing include his affair with an 18-year-old girl who was his employee, his $3,000 a month on Internet porn and the $300,000 in hush money he paid to his love muffin.
We know all these salacious details because -- before the case was settled Thursday -- Brinkley wanted the court proceedings open to the public. Some may be indignant that a mother would allow her youngest children -- ages 13 and 10 -- to be exposed to all this dirty laundry. But it's possible that all the time actually living in the household might have given them some hint that Daddy was a porn freak and Mommy was really, really mad.
A psychiatrist testified that Cook has problems with narcissism and an oversized ego. The doctor also noted that Brinkley makes poor choices in men -- this is her fourth marriage -- and has hellacious anger issues that do not appear to have cooled since Cook's shenanigans were revealed about two years ago. One assumes the doctor wrapped the diagnosis in all manner of technical verbiage. Otherwise, he did not earn his fee, because any regular reader of the tabloids would have been able to deliver a similar assessment.
Our fascination with this tale is in part due to schadenfreude: Men even cheat on supermodels! Supermodels don't have cellulite, but they have man trouble! This golden couple's life unraveled like a story line on "Desperate Housewives" -- and that's Emmy-winning entertainment.
But at the core of our enthrallment is the recognition that, in a world of carefully calibrated public facades, real unbridled emotions had been set loose. These were not just celebrities behaving badly. This was the id going berserk, a real-life revenge fantasy that came close to bunny boiling.
The public flaying of the cheater by the cheatee, while unpleasant, seems so much more human than those instances in which everyone stands around looking pained but stoic. See: Spitzers, McGreeveys, Vitters, Craigs, Clintons and all those other political couples in which the wife stood by the badly behaving husband, and all you could think was how it looked like she wanted to smack him and who would blame her if she did. Which is worse? The scorned political wife who stifles her rage and eats herself into a contender for "The Biggest Loser"? Or the bitter celebrity wife who decides to run up a tidy sum on her husband's credit card in a kind of catharsis by Cavalli?
That's what Cynthia Rodriguez -- Mrs. A-Rod -- allegedly did when she flew to Paris, went on a shopping spree and stayed with her good friend Lenny Kravitz, whose rock star shoulders would seem ideal for a married woman to lean on in a time of turmoil. Citing adultery, Cynthia Rodriguez filed for divorce from her baseball star husband, Alex, who could give lessons in smiling for the cameras as if nothing is wrong.
As TV crews followed the Yankee into his New York apartment, the man accused of spending special private time with Madonna exuded such a beatific glow one might have thought he'd just come back from an audience with the pope.
The details of the A-Rod divorce promise to be skeezy, sordid and captivating as average folks marvel at how people who seem to have hit the jackpot in life -- spouse, kids, good looks, health and a great job for which one is ridiculously overpaid -- still manage to muck things up.
That's why there's so little guilt in savoring these morsels of gossip. The participants have no one to blame but themselves as they wrestle over children, property and the kind of monthly alimony payments that could support small towns in Pennsylvania. Don't bite your tongue. Tell us how you really feel.
Remember when Ellen Barkin decided to rid her jewelry box of millions of dollars worth of reminders of her ex-husband Ron Perelman? She auctioned the baubles for charity. It was a jaw-dropping revelation when Kevin Federline went all father-of-the-year pious on Britney Spears. And there was the YouTube rant by the estranged wife of the Broadway theater mogul in which she spewed vitriol about his Viagra hoarding.
If you look closely at the tawdriest celebrity divorces, there isn't any revelatory lesson. We already know that no one is perfect. And aren't we all pretty clear on how to behave vindictively? The rub, though, is that usually we don't, at least not publicly. Like those political wives, we squelch the id for the sake of reputation, kids, job . . . avoiding a prison record. The celebrities boil the bunnies so we don't have to.
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