Given that she made such a bold move, I expected Barkin to be militant about it. When I walked with Barkin on the streets of New York, every middle-aged woman we passed beamed at her, nodded at her, smiled at her, motioned a thumbs up: Norma Rae for the Temple Emanu-El set.
But our plucky heroine sweetened the deal by selling the jewelry Perelman gave her (more than 100 pieces, including her wedding ring) at auction at Christie’s, for $20.3 million. It has been widely reported that Barkin had to make do with $20 million, though some reports place the figure higher. The account in The Independent in Ireland (which seems to take a proprietary interest in Barkin because of Byrne) read: “Insiders said the tough-skinned corporate raider callously acted with such speed to avoid the looming financial penalties inherent in the renegotiation of the couple’s prenup, which was literally days from its expiry date.” In Hollywood parlance, this is known as “getting Cruised,” since similar motives were attributed, sotto voce, to Tom Cruise in his speedy divorce from Nicole Kidman.Īfter Perelman served Barkin with papers, he had security guards supervise her as she removed her possessions from their town house in a scenario more akin to being fired from a corporation than to ending a marriage. (They remain friends.) Then, at 45, not exactly prime time for women in Hollywood, Barkin became Perelman’s fourth wife, after he met her at the Vanity Fair Oscar party and said, “So are you married or single or what?” Some people are just suckers for poetry.Īfter six years of what was (endlessly) depicted in the press as a turbulent marriage, Perelman, whose worth was estimated by Forbes this year at $12 billion, initiated divorce proceedings in January 2006, blindsiding Barkin.
Barkin graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, even though her teachers advised her parents to take her out of school because she wasn’t “pretty enough” and had “very little talent and no spark.” It took her years to recover from that assessment, but once she did, she was cast in Barry Levinson’s “Diner” and found enough spark to burn up the screen with Dennis Quaid in “The Big Easy” and Al Pacino in “Sea of Love.” She married the Irish heartthrob Gabriel Byrne in 1988 and had two children with him before they divorced in 1999. Born in the Bronx to a father who worked as a Fuller Brush man and part-time usher at Yankee Stadium and a mother who was a medical secretary, she and her brother were raised in Queens. Barkin, who turned 57 on April 16, is the quintessential New York broad, radiating sex and scrappiness. Perelman, it lives side by side with the detestable “trophy wife.” I had touched a fragrant nerve. I hadn’t realized that “Upper East Side” was a code-red term - that even five years after her contentious divorce from the Revlon chairman, Ronald O. Looking stricken, she blew out the scented candles near her bed, even as she said, “I’m a big candle person.” Well, O.K. “Like the Upper East Side,” I said, sniffing. Once we were in her bedroom, it wasn’t the hundreds of DVDs that got my attention.
I’ll show you more than the living room with the white goatskin rugs and original white leather Eames chairs, the ‘public’ room of my West Village town house.” We had already talked for more than an hour, and this was a gesture of good will on her part, a way of saying, “Even though you are a reporter and have the ability to ruin my week or month or year with an untoward phrase, I’m going to pre-empt you, rise to the occasion and open my home. She was chatty in the way you’d expect Ellen Barkin to be - sort of tough yet sort of warm, sort of open, sort of closed. Ellen Barkin led me up the stairs so I could see her bedroom.
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