If you are going to marry a celebrity, think twice, or maybe three or four times. If you are married to a celebrity, don’t bother ordering any three-minute eggs. There are inherent built-in problems in celebrity marriages, but some very few, like Paul Newman’s, go the distance.
The underlying problem is that when you marry a celebrity, you are also marrying several other people – a press agent, public relations expert, attorney, a personal assistant, a life coach, etc. All these people are sycophants, whose basic purpose is to make the celebrity believe he or she is a wonderful person whose judgment is unerringly correct. Therefore, many times the lawyer takes a back seat to the celebrity’s hangers-on who, when he or she makes all kinds of outlandish demands or public statements or decisions, and says, “Yeah baby…you are right-on, baby.” “Terrific, brilliant, wonderful,” etc. It is very hard to compete with this audience.
These kinds of things are not on the radar of the average person, and are not part of the life of any normal married couple. This usually means they have a better shot at happiness than celebrities.
Celebrities, on the other hand, on top of all the kinds of craziness that they experience in their inner circle, do care about what the public thinks of their marriage or divorce. Often this third party, i.e., the public that they play to, is more important to them than keeping a marriage alive.
The second problem is, there is the public – who also become a third party to a marriage or divorce. When I was representing Mike Tyson’s wife, Robin Givens, undeservedly, because she is really a fine person, people would lean out of the windows of cars, shouting terrible things about her or, alternatively, great things about Mike. A similar thing happened even more so when I represented Mayor Giuliani while he was still Mayor. In their divorce, everybody had an opinion. Lawyers would stop me and give me their opinion, or legal strategy. Other people would say he was the greatest Mayor New York City ever had. People gave me advice that they asked me to pass on to the Mayor. When I would tell the Mayor a particular person who said he was a close personal friend of the Mayor, said such and such, Mr. Giuliani would think carefully and often had no recollection whatsoever of this person at all. The friendship of this alleged close personal friend of the Mayor existed solely in his own head.
