The length to which some celebrity couples go to make a spectacle of their private lives never ceases to amaze me. But it’s only on very rare occasions that I find the tabloid fodder they provide worthy of comment. And the divorce between Peter Brandt (63) and Stephanie Seymour (42) as well as persistent rumors of infidelity in the boy-toy marriage of Ashton Kutcher (32) and Demi Moore (47) fit the bill.
Peter & Stephanie
Frankly, few people knew anything about Peter, whom every paper describes as a polo-playing millionaire, until he married Stephanie. After all, she was the model who every heterosexual male my age remembers as the feature attraction in many issues of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition during the mid-1990s. But I digress.
The point is that the marriage between this former playboy and this former supermodel – who also posed in Playboy – seemed doomed from the start. Not least because of the combustible mix of his open and notorious history of buying and controlling his women and her equally open and notorious history of aping the bad behavior of high-profile lovers like Axl Rose, Charlie Sheen, and Warren Beatty. So that it lasted 15 years was very commendable indeed.
Then earlier this year came the divorce petition, which was followed by the kind of mudslinging that made the War of the Roses seem genteel.
For his part, Peter accused Stephanie of being a drug and booze-addled spendthrift who not only cuckolded him but neglected their three children to boot. She, in turn, accused him of treating her like a trophy wife (duh) whom he wanted to keep locked up in a gilded cage and of cheating on her far more than she cheated on him.
And these allegations were only the opening salvos in proceedings over the past few months that provided prurient details that were almost as titillating as revelations about Tiger Woods’s extramarital peccadilloes.
It has become all too commonplace for couples going through divorce to subject themselves to this kind of public spectacle, wasting millions of dollars in legal fees in the process. (Exhibit B: the ongoing divorce proceeding of Frank and Jamie McCourt, owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers) But I can think of nothing more foolish than for them to air all of their dirty laundry in this fashion and then “reconcile”.
Yet this, according to reports, is what Peter and Stephanie did yesterday. Never mind that even their children probably know that this reconciliation will only give them a chance to collect more mud to sling at each other when divorce proceedings begin again, which seems inevitable. Fools.
Ashton & Demi
No doubt many of you have heard far more about the rumors of infidelity now besetting Ashton and Demi’s five-year marriage. Not least because they have published more fodder about it through their Twitter accounts than the tabloids.
And there’s the rub. Because you’d think a guy who’s cheating on his wife would not be fronting on Twitter everyday about every aspect of his perfect married life, including sharing far too much information about “their own naked workout parties” to keep in shape.
What makes their spectacle so sad, if not pathetic, is the fact that it’s the older and presumably more mature Demi who has been twittering like a teenager gushing on about her first crush.
But the lady doth profess too much, methinks. And nothing is more embarrassing in this respect than the pictures she’s been posting of her surgically enhanced body – as if to show all of the twenty-somethings out there that they really have to be on their game to steal her man.
Well, if reports in People and Star are true, there are at least two girls who had enough game to at least lure Ashton away for a little extramarital play. And Ashton only added credence to these reports, which included witness accounts of him “kissing and groping an unidentified blonde outside a restroom at the Los Angeles Italian eatery Madeo”, by publishing this non-denial denial, via Twitter of course:
I think Star magazine calling me a ‘cheater’ qualifies as defamation of character. I hope my lawyer agrees… STAR magazine – you don’t get to stand behind “freedom of the press” when you are writing fiction.”
(Twitter, September 1, 2010)
Meanwhile, Demi seems so wrapped up in the virtual reality of their marriage that she cannot even imagine Ashton creeping for some young and more natural booty on the side. Accordingly, she immediately appended Ashton’s tweet with her own enabling tweet as follows:
No question! Excellent point my love.
Twits!
Of course, we all know that threatening to sue is one thing, suing is quite another. And since there’s been no word about Star being sued, we have to assume that Ashton’s lawyer advised him that truth is an absolute defense to any claim of defamation. Not to mention that more girls are likely to come out of the woodwork….
In any case, the real pity here is that instead of emulating Tiger’s wife Elin Nordegren or Jesse’s wife Sandra Bullock by kicking her cheating husband to the curb, Demi seems intent on keeping her twittering marriage intact. But I doubt Ashton will still be around when she’s 50 years old. Fool.
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