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Tough Love
USINFO | 2013-08-23 16:18
What happens when mogul and a movie star get married? Contracts get signed, and the drama begins . . .
Ronald Perelman was born on New Year’s Day, 1943, and celebrates the occasion in extreme style. His annual New Year’s Eve–birthday party in St. Barts is one of the world’s most exclusive social events. The billionaire takeover artist hosts the gathering on Ultima III, his multi-million-dollar, 188-foot yacht, which he keeps docked in Gustavia harbor. In past years, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Jerry Bruckheimer have attended the event, and for Perelman’s 60th, Barry Manilow sang “Happy Birthday.” This year, Russell and Kimora Lee Simmons, Owen Wilson, and Usher were among the 200 guests.
The highlight of the evening is, naturally, the countdown to New Year’s. Shortly before midnight, the guests gather on the observation deck of the boat. A cake is typically waiting, with the candles lit. When the big moment arrives—“three . . . two . . . one . . .”—the people in the crowd shout “Happy New Year!” Then, in chorus, they sing “Happy Birthday” to Perelman. A canopy of fireworks explodes against the nighttime Caribbean sky.
The scene feels magical, in an over-the-top mogul-fest sort of way. Or at least it has in years past. This year was different. Something was plainly wrong. Ellen Barkin, the feisty, flop-mouthed actress and Perelman’s wife of five years, was not at Perelman’s side at midnight. Later, she would tell friends she was trying to stay as far away from him as possible. The night before, she had told them, she and Perelman had had a particularly brutal fight, their worst ever.
Perelman and Barkin had always been an unlikely and combustible pair. Cynics said that he married her because he wanted a Hollywood trophy wife with a marquee name and that she married him because she wanted his money (Perelman’s net worth at the time was estimated at about $3.3 billion; it’s now valued at $6.1 billion). The couple’s romantic histories, doubters noted, didn’t foretell a lasting union: Perelman was divorced three times; his last breakup was an ugly and highly public split from the doe-eyed Democratic fund-raiser Patricia Duff. Barkin was divorced from actor Gabriel Byrne and, when their relationship had fallen apart, she took to dating the much younger actor David Arquette (he was 23; she was 40). Still, friends say that Perelman and Barkin, at least for a time, were truly in love. As different as they were outwardly—he the pit-bull corporate raider and Upper East Sider, she the downtown boho actress—they had a fierce attraction, friends say. Their relationship drew energy from their differences. “We never bore each other,” Barkin once said.
Barkin also liked Perelman’s charm, generosity, and impulsiveness, a friend of Barkin’s says. He sent her a gold Cartier watch on her birthday after knowing her only two weeks, the friend says; his marriage proposal followed just two weeks after that. Perelman, in turn, seemed to like Barkin’s salty, frank demeanor. They also had great physical chemistry. “They couldn’t keep their hands off each other,” one of her friends says. “A very physical relationship,” one of his friends says. They fought, but they had always worked things out. “High highs and low lows,” says a friend of Barkin’s. In the end, their dramas had always ended happily.
But not this New Year’s Eve. Tonight, Perelman and Barkin weren’t speaking, a friend of Barkin’s says. They hadn’t been intimate for months, and Barkin speculated Perelman might be cheating on her, the friend says, although Barkin had no evidence. As the clock approached midnight, hundreds of revelers in linen shirts and party dresses had gathered on the docks, as they do each year, to watch the fireworks and toast in the New Year. On the Ultima III, the guests soon stood waiting in place for the big birthday moment. Perelman’s cake was ready, the candles flickering. But Barkin was elsewhere, on the top deck with a friend, not at Perelman’s side.
“The tension,” one observer says, “was thick.” Back in New York the next week, people close to Barkin say, Barkin was still raw from the fight they’d had on the boat. Even so, she never thought that weeks later, she’d be served with divorce papers and booted from her home.
Divorces are intensely personal and often contentious affairs. Spouses fight. Anger grows. Accusations are traded back and forth. It can be impossible to know with certainty what goes on inside a marriage, or what causes one to end (divorce agreements are confidential, and people loyal to ex-husbands and ex-wives invariably color events in the ways that reflect best on their family members and friends). But when two such well-known figures as Ron Perelman and Ellen Barkin divorce, the relationship inevitably becomes a matter of public discussion. The news that Perelman and Barkin were splitting up was first reported in January in the New York Post. According to gossip columnist Liz Smith and reporter Phil Messing, Perelman’s motivation for divorce was financial. If Perelman didn’t seek a divorce soon, the Post reported, a clause in their prenuptial agreement stated that Barkin would be entitled to a significant increase in alimony.
Ronald Perelman was born on New Year’s Day, 1943, and celebrates the occasion in extreme style. His annual New Year’s Eve–birthday party in St. Barts is one of the world’s most exclusive social events. The billionaire takeover artist hosts the gathering on Ultima III, his multi-million-dollar, 188-foot yacht, which he keeps docked in Gustavia harbor. In past years, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Jerry Bruckheimer have attended the event, and for Perelman’s 60th, Barry Manilow sang “Happy Birthday.” This year, Russell and Kimora Lee Simmons, Owen Wilson, and Usher were among the 200 guests.
The highlight of the evening is, naturally, the countdown to New Year’s. Shortly before midnight, the guests gather on the observation deck of the boat. A cake is typically waiting, with the candles lit. When the big moment arrives—“three . . . two . . . one . . .”—the people in the crowd shout “Happy New Year!” Then, in chorus, they sing “Happy Birthday” to Perelman. A canopy of fireworks explodes against the nighttime Caribbean sky.
The scene feels magical, in an over-the-top mogul-fest sort of way. Or at least it has in years past. This year was different. Something was plainly wrong. Ellen Barkin, the feisty, flop-mouthed actress and Perelman’s wife of five years, was not at Perelman’s side at midnight. Later, she would tell friends she was trying to stay as far away from him as possible. The night before, she had told them, she and Perelman had had a particularly brutal fight, their worst ever.
Perelman and Barkin had always been an unlikely and combustible pair. Cynics said that he married her because he wanted a Hollywood trophy wife with a marquee name and that she married him because she wanted his money (Perelman’s net worth at the time was estimated at about $3.3 billion; it’s now valued at $6.1 billion). The couple’s romantic histories, doubters noted, didn’t foretell a lasting union: Perelman was divorced three times; his last breakup was an ugly and highly public split from the doe-eyed Democratic fund-raiser Patricia Duff. Barkin was divorced from actor Gabriel Byrne and, when their relationship had fallen apart, she took to dating the much younger actor David Arquette (he was 23; she was 40). Still, friends say that Perelman and Barkin, at least for a time, were truly in love. As different as they were outwardly—he the pit-bull corporate raider and Upper East Sider, she the downtown boho actress—they had a fierce attraction, friends say. Their relationship drew energy from their differences. “We never bore each other,” Barkin once said.
Barkin also liked Perelman’s charm, generosity, and impulsiveness, a friend of Barkin’s says. He sent her a gold Cartier watch on her birthday after knowing her only two weeks, the friend says; his marriage proposal followed just two weeks after that. Perelman, in turn, seemed to like Barkin’s salty, frank demeanor. They also had great physical chemistry. “They couldn’t keep their hands off each other,” one of her friends says. “A very physical relationship,” one of his friends says. They fought, but they had always worked things out. “High highs and low lows,” says a friend of Barkin’s. In the end, their dramas had always ended happily.
But not this New Year’s Eve. Tonight, Perelman and Barkin weren’t speaking, a friend of Barkin’s says. They hadn’t been intimate for months, and Barkin speculated Perelman might be cheating on her, the friend says, although Barkin had no evidence. As the clock approached midnight, hundreds of revelers in linen shirts and party dresses had gathered on the docks, as they do each year, to watch the fireworks and toast in the New Year. On the Ultima III, the guests soon stood waiting in place for the big birthday moment. Perelman’s cake was ready, the candles flickering. But Barkin was elsewhere, on the top deck with a friend, not at Perelman’s side.
“The tension,” one observer says, “was thick.” Back in New York the next week, people close to Barkin say, Barkin was still raw from the fight they’d had on the boat. Even so, she never thought that weeks later, she’d be served with divorce papers and booted from her home.
Divorces are intensely personal and often contentious affairs. Spouses fight. Anger grows. Accusations are traded back and forth. It can be impossible to know with certainty what goes on inside a marriage, or what causes one to end (divorce agreements are confidential, and people loyal to ex-husbands and ex-wives invariably color events in the ways that reflect best on their family members and friends). But when two such well-known figures as Ron Perelman and Ellen Barkin divorce, the relationship inevitably becomes a matter of public discussion. The news that Perelman and Barkin were splitting up was first reported in January in the New York Post. According to gossip columnist Liz Smith and reporter Phil Messing, Perelman’s motivation for divorce was financial. If Perelman didn’t seek a divorce soon, the Post reported, a clause in their prenuptial agreement stated that Barkin would be entitled to a significant increase in alimony.
Perelman and Barkin declined multiple requests to comment for this story, citing the confidentiality of their divorce agreement. Interviews with friends and associates, however, begin to give definition to their tempestuous relationship. What emerges is the portrait of a marriage in which both parties started out in love, but finally split up when their fundamental differences and mutual hardheadedness—the very things that attracted them to one another in the first place—created too much friction to sustain.
Ellen Barkin never had much interest in meeting a Ronald Perelman. Not at first. Suits with cigars? Not her type. She grew up in the outer boroughs—first in the Bronx, then Queens—with her older brother, George. Her father was a salesman for Fuller Brush and also worked as an usher at Yankee Stadium. Her mother, Evelyn, was an administrative assistant at Jamaica Hospital. From an early age, Ellen was rebellious. As a teenager, she wanted to go to Woodstock, but her parents refused. In protest, she stayed up one night dropping acid. She hung out in the Village and, at 15, auditioned at the prestigious High School of Performing Arts on a lark. She was accepted, but when she got there, her teachers didn’t have high hopes for her. “She’s just not pretty enough,” she remembered a teacher telling her parents in one interview. “She has a little talent but no spark.” She went on to Hunter College, paying her way by waitressing in punky clubs and no-frill restaurants. An acting career seemed far-fetched. Barkin once recalled in an interview that she was so emotionally unstable in her early twenties she didn’t bother lining up auditions. “I couldn’t even turn the lights on,” she once said. “I was so depressed. I used to just sit in my dark apartment.”
Perelman’s roots were all country club and business. He grew up in a conservative home in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, a Jewish suburb north of Philadelphia (Perelman is a modern Orthodox Jew who is known to speak with his rabbi once a day and is said to travel with him). His father, Raymond, a factory owner and deal-maker, would dress up young Ronald in a blazer and tie and have him sit in on his board meetings. The pressure turned Ronald into an angry and conflicted child, overly mature, distant, and “a loner,” according to Christopher Byron’s book Testosterone Inc.: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild.
Perelman went to Wharton, as an undergraduate (like his father) and then for his M.B.A. As a student, he made a reputation for himself as a financial prodigy by pulling off a million-dollar deal for his father. At 21, on a summer cruise to Israel, Perelman met a shy 17-year-old named Faith Golding. Her grandfather was the wealthy real-estate mogul who built the Essex House on Central Park South. After marrying and finishing grad school, Perelman went to work for his father and started a family. He and Golding would have four children. Perelman was busy—and restless. After failing to convince his father to retire and let him run the business, Ronald and his family moved to New York to begin a new life.
To start his empire, Perelman borrowed $1.7 million from his wife to buy a stake in a jewelry chain, Cohen-Hatfield Industries. Then, with the help of junk-bond guru Michael Milken (another Wharton alum), Perelman went on a borrow-and-buy tear. Surrounding himself with a team of aggressive and loyal attorneys, he took control of companies including MacAndrews & Forbes (originally dealing in licorice extracts, it’s now Perelman’s holding company), Technicolor (a film-processing company), Pantry Pride (a supermarket chain), and Consolidated Cigar (which custom-produced a long, skinny H. Uppman for Perelman, hand-rolled from its factory in the Dominican Republic).
As his business prospered, Perelman was rarely home. Then one day in the winter of 1982, Faith Golding received a mysterious bill for a gold bracelet from Bulgari, according to Richard Hack’s unauthorized biography When Money Is King. Suspecting an affair, Golding hired a team of private eyes to follow her husband. They reported back that Perelman was having an affair with Susan Kasen, an Upper East Side florist; during the subsequent divorce proceedings, Golding also claimed that her husband had charged at least $100,000 on gifts and lavish trysts to the company she had loaned him the money to buy. In a hard-fought settlement, Golding would ultimately win $8 million in alimony, reportedly the least amount received by any of Perelman’s four wives.
In 1982, Barkin made her first feature-film appearance in Barry Levinson’s Diner. She got rave reviews, then continued to impress critics in a variety of film and theater roles with her quirky looks and tough, sensual demeanor. In a Times review of the Off Broadway play Eden’s Court in 1985, Frank Rich summarized her performance this way: “If it were really possible to give the kiss of life to a corpse, the actress Ellen Barkin would be the one to do it.” After major roles in The Big Easy, with Dennis Quaid, in 1987, and Sea of Love, with Al Pacino, in 1989, Ellen Barkin the not-pretty-enough teenager and depressed New York waitress had become Ellen Barkin the unusual Hollywood sex goddess.
Ellen Barkin never had much interest in meeting a Ronald Perelman. Not at first. Suits with cigars? Not her type. She grew up in the outer boroughs—first in the Bronx, then Queens—with her older brother, George. Her father was a salesman for Fuller Brush and also worked as an usher at Yankee Stadium. Her mother, Evelyn, was an administrative assistant at Jamaica Hospital. From an early age, Ellen was rebellious. As a teenager, she wanted to go to Woodstock, but her parents refused. In protest, she stayed up one night dropping acid. She hung out in the Village and, at 15, auditioned at the prestigious High School of Performing Arts on a lark. She was accepted, but when she got there, her teachers didn’t have high hopes for her. “She’s just not pretty enough,” she remembered a teacher telling her parents in one interview. “She has a little talent but no spark.” She went on to Hunter College, paying her way by waitressing in punky clubs and no-frill restaurants. An acting career seemed far-fetched. Barkin once recalled in an interview that she was so emotionally unstable in her early twenties she didn’t bother lining up auditions. “I couldn’t even turn the lights on,” she once said. “I was so depressed. I used to just sit in my dark apartment.”
Perelman’s roots were all country club and business. He grew up in a conservative home in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, a Jewish suburb north of Philadelphia (Perelman is a modern Orthodox Jew who is known to speak with his rabbi once a day and is said to travel with him). His father, Raymond, a factory owner and deal-maker, would dress up young Ronald in a blazer and tie and have him sit in on his board meetings. The pressure turned Ronald into an angry and conflicted child, overly mature, distant, and “a loner,” according to Christopher Byron’s book Testosterone Inc.: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild.
Perelman went to Wharton, as an undergraduate (like his father) and then for his M.B.A. As a student, he made a reputation for himself as a financial prodigy by pulling off a million-dollar deal for his father. At 21, on a summer cruise to Israel, Perelman met a shy 17-year-old named Faith Golding. Her grandfather was the wealthy real-estate mogul who built the Essex House on Central Park South. After marrying and finishing grad school, Perelman went to work for his father and started a family. He and Golding would have four children. Perelman was busy—and restless. After failing to convince his father to retire and let him run the business, Ronald and his family moved to New York to begin a new life.
To start his empire, Perelman borrowed $1.7 million from his wife to buy a stake in a jewelry chain, Cohen-Hatfield Industries. Then, with the help of junk-bond guru Michael Milken (another Wharton alum), Perelman went on a borrow-and-buy tear. Surrounding himself with a team of aggressive and loyal attorneys, he took control of companies including MacAndrews & Forbes (originally dealing in licorice extracts, it’s now Perelman’s holding company), Technicolor (a film-processing company), Pantry Pride (a supermarket chain), and Consolidated Cigar (which custom-produced a long, skinny H. Uppman for Perelman, hand-rolled from its factory in the Dominican Republic).
As his business prospered, Perelman was rarely home. Then one day in the winter of 1982, Faith Golding received a mysterious bill for a gold bracelet from Bulgari, according to Richard Hack’s unauthorized biography When Money Is King. Suspecting an affair, Golding hired a team of private eyes to follow her husband. They reported back that Perelman was having an affair with Susan Kasen, an Upper East Side florist; during the subsequent divorce proceedings, Golding also claimed that her husband had charged at least $100,000 on gifts and lavish trysts to the company she had loaned him the money to buy. In a hard-fought settlement, Golding would ultimately win $8 million in alimony, reportedly the least amount received by any of Perelman’s four wives.
In 1982, Barkin made her first feature-film appearance in Barry Levinson’s Diner. She got rave reviews, then continued to impress critics in a variety of film and theater roles with her quirky looks and tough, sensual demeanor. In a Times review of the Off Broadway play Eden’s Court in 1985, Frank Rich summarized her performance this way: “If it were really possible to give the kiss of life to a corpse, the actress Ellen Barkin would be the one to do it.” After major roles in The Big Easy, with Dennis Quaid, in 1987, and Sea of Love, with Al Pacino, in 1989, Ellen Barkin the not-pretty-enough teenager and depressed New York waitress had become Ellen Barkin the unusual Hollywood sex goddess.
