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Trash-hungry public mad at Christie for being mad

BY MARIAH FREDERICKS | Mariah Fredericks is author of 'In the Cards: Life,' a novel for young adults to be published next month.

July 13, 2008

My, my . . . so many wronged wives in the headlines!

We had barely sunk into the delightful muck of the Christie Brinkley trial when Cynthia Rodriguez stole the front page by announcing that husband A-Rod had been studying Kabballah, and who knows what else, with Madonna. On Monday, Cynthia marched to court, head held high, eyes dry, hair perfect, ready for her debut as the latest celebrity wife of a cheating fool. One wonders if Christie Brinkley sighed and hummed a few poignant bars of "The Way We Were."

When the news broke that Brinkley's husband, Peter Cook, had gone shopping for toys for his children and bought a child for himself instead (the sales clerk), public opinion was strongly in her favor. It was Class Act Christie vs. Cook the Cretinous Cad.

How could he cheat on her? She's (still) gorgeous! How could he humiliate her? She cares about the environment! How could he not adore her? All her Hamptons friends and neighbors do!

And yet as the divorce hearing drew near, it somehow went wrong for Christie. Overnight, she went from virtuous maid to vengeful harpy.

Why? She demanded that the divorce be public.

And silly me, I thought it already was. If a soul on this planet was unaware that Peter Cook had been bedding an 18-year-old, you could hardly blame the newspapers, the Internet or the evening news. They did their level best to bring this story to the public.

Yet, oddly, they were now hurling rocks at Brinkley for wanting to do the same thing: How dare you invite us to your divorce trial? How dare you help us sell papers and attract viewers for having inane stories about your private life?

Raoul Felder - the celebrity divorce lawyer who apparently abhors divorce as public spectacle (who knew?) - called the trial a "freak show" in the press. Columnists wrote patronizing articles about how no one benefits from such public displays of rancor. Message boards bristled with outrage: Christie was a tramp on her fourth marriage "airing dirty laundry." How could she do it to the kids?

When I asked my female friends about how they felt about Christie's decision, the response was a universal "Yuck."

As one friend who has survived both boorish boyfriends and divorcing parents said, "Who wants to go to school and hear, 'So, your dad likes the young girls, huh?'" OK, granted. But who's really to blame for that particular steppingstone toward a lifetime of therapy? Mom, for making that fact public? Or Dad, for making it a fact in the first place?

Now that the trial is over, let's survey the damage. What did the kiddies learn?

That Daddy cheated on Mommy with an 18-year-old. This - and I'm just guessing - they knew before the trial.

That Daddy spent $300,000 to make said girl go away. Which they would have figured out when all they got for Christmas was a Starbucks gift card.

That Daddy likes porn. Which they already knew because young Jack stumbled upon his favorite sites.

About Mommy, they learned from Cook's lawyer, Norman Sheresky, as if they didn't already know, that Christie Brinkley is angry: "She is an angry, angry, angry, furious woman."

Got that everyone? Three angrys, one furious. That's some angry lady.

This took me back to one of my favorite celebrity breakups of all time: Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. It didn't get more deranged than that. Not just the events, but the conversations people had. I can remember shouting at male friends, "But he slept with his stepdaughter!" and they said, "Well, but Mia doesn't have to get so angry about it."

A lot of us want details - oh, come on, we do - but we don't want the wife hurling them at us along with the crockery. Yet, if we feel the wife has been wronged, why do we object to her saying so publicly?

I think many resent it when one party in a divorce presents herself as blameless and her partner as evil incarnate.

Anger plays almost as badly as self-pity. Cook did himself no favors by sniping, "Shrek gave a better performance," after his wife's tearful testimony. Anger with any kind of financial motive is a really bad PR move.

When your husband uses your hospital stay following the premature birth of your daughter as an opportunity to make whoopee with someone else, as did former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, it would seem that a wife is entitled to something. Yet, Dina Matos is routinely described as "playing the victim" so she can live a lavish lifestyle.

Silda Wall Spitzer gets high marks for her reticence over Eliot's hooker happiness. But Hillary Clinton stood by her erring husband without weeping or taking him to court, and that just proved what a calculating, coldhearted witch Mrs. Clinton really is.

So, are we unliberated and uncomfortable with women who get angry? Or have we come so far that we no longer feel marriage defines women, and big paydays in divorce court are tacky?

As I ran the hit parade of celeb divorces by a friend, she criticized the wife every single time - no matter what the husband had done. ( O.J. Simpson was the sole exception.) When I pointed this out, she said, "Well, women should be better." Just personally? I think that's a lousy deal for women.

The Brinkley-Cook laughfest ended quickly once the court-appointed psychiatrist announced that Cook is, in clinical terms, a jerk. But never fear. A- and C-Rod stand ready to take their place in the mud pit.

Already Team A-Rod is squealing over her $100,000 revenge spree in Paris. The word gold digger is being bandied about - a word you never heard about Peter Cook, though Christie paid his bills for a decade.