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Dennis Hensley
Santa Monica
family law attorney Lynn Soodik was almost in tears herself.
As her client, Mrs. X, an established Hollywood actress, opened
up to the court about her troubled marriage to Mr. X, also
an actor, her emotions got the better of her and a Lifetime
movie worthy blubber-fest ensued. “She was on the stand
crying and you could really feel for her,” Soodik recalls.
“You had all this empathy for her and all of the sudden,
I looked at her and she winked at me. I thought, ‘Oh
my God, she’s even fooling me’!”
Welcome to
divorce, Hollywood style. In a city built on illusions, where
many people make their living pretending to be people they’re
not, one of the biggest illusions of all is that love’s
going to last forever. And while Tinseltown doesn’t
exactly have a monopoly on good-love-gone-bad (just ask New
Yorkers Rudy Gulianni and Donald Trump), there are a number
of key factors that, when combined, can make the train ride
from L.A. to Splitsville it’s own peculiar and often
harrowing journey.
For starters, the money’s usually bigger, a lot bigger.
Amy Irving reportedly received $100 million when she divorced
Steven Spielberg. Cindy Costner left Kevin with $80 million.
Then there’s the granddaddy of all celeb divorce settlements;
the Neil and Marcia Diamond split in 1994 in which she walked
away with a reported $150 million. Talk about your Love on
the Rocks.
“Los Angeles probably has more substantial asset divorces
than anywhere in the country,” observes Dennis Wasser,
the high-powered attorney who represented Tom Cruise in his
divorce from Nicole Kidman as well as such A-list clients
as Steven Speilberg, Clint Eastwood and Jane Fonda. “There
are a lot of very wealthy people here, a lot of whom made
a lot of money at a young age.”
And when you’re
young and in love, getting a pre-nuptial agreement can be
seen as downright unromantic, though that, says Wasser, is
changing. “In countries like France and South Africa,
pre-nups are part of everyday life,” he says. “People
in the U.S. are getting more sophisticated and we’re
seeing more pre-nups in California than ever before.”
Sometimes the provisions of these agreements can be as unique
as the personalities involved. In Don Johnson’s pre-nup
with Melanie Griffith, he reportedly agreed to stay faithful
if she agreed to stay slim. Catherine Zeta-Jones, according
to a London paper, gets a cool $5 million if Michael Douglas
is ever caught cheating.
The drastic
way in which fortunes can rise and fall overnight also sets
L.A. divorces apart. When Jennifer Lopez divorced her first
husband, waiter Ojani Noa, in 1998, after two years, he reportedly
received $50,000. Four years later, when she ended her second
marriage to choreographer Cris Judd after only ten months,
she was a superstar and Judd, according to Us Weekly, left
with $10 million in his dance bag. “If someone’s
making 10 or 20 million a picture, and getting back-end participation,
and they get divorced, the spouse is entitled to half of that,”
explains Soodik who represented Meg Ryan in her divorce from
Dennis Quaid. And because California is a community property
state, the court automatically divides everything 50-50, unless
there’s a pre-nup. “So in Hollywood,” Soodik
concludes, “you can be married for a miniscule amount
of time and then be compensated more money than most people
earn in their whole life.”
It’s
not just the super rich who have money problems. Mr. Y was
a regular on his first hit series when his divorce went through.
A few years later, his show got cancelled and though he’s
hardly worked since, his support payments are based on his
previous thousands-of-dollars-per-episode salary. “In
that case, you can always go in later to modify your payment,”
says Soodik, “but in L.A., you don’t want to say,
“I don’t think that I’m going to make that
kind of money again,’ because that’s not the Hollywood
attitude.”
Then there’s
the case of Mr. Z, a hardscrabble bartender and aspiring screenwriter.
His wife wanted a house-with-the-picket-fence kind of life,
decided she wasn’t going to get it from him, so together
they filed for a summary divorce. (In California, a couple
is eligible for a summary divorce they are married less than
five years and have no assets together.) A few weeks before
the divorce was final, Mrs. Z’s father reads in the
newspaper that Mr. Z has just sold his first script for million
dollars. He calls his daughter, they immediately go to court
to prevent the divorce and then she, on her way out the door,
gets enough money to open her own white picket fence outlet
store.
And then there
are the only-in-Hollywood “lifestyle” considerations.
Just recently, Jim Carrey’s ex-wife, Melissa, requested
more money in support to fund, among other things, a personal
trainer and Pilates room for their teenage daughter. MGM mogul
Kirk Kerkorian pays his ex, Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, over $50,000
in child support monthly for such must-haves as French Lessons
and equestrian activities, even though DNA tests proved that
her daughter isn’t his. “When you start horse
trading ranches and boats and artwork in the millions, it’s
another world,” says Harvey Levin, the executive producer
of the syndicated series Celebrity Justice and a former legal
columnist for the L.A. Times. “It’s like ‘I’ll
give you the Picasso, if you give me the Renoir.’ I
have to say, though, in ordinary divorces, things can get
just as crazy. Maybe they’re they’re fighting
over a pet turtle and not a Renoir, but the turtle is really
a symbol of the anger between the two people. Well, so’s
the Renoir.”
“I was
involved in a case where the couple spent something like $200,000
litigating the issue of ‘What is the value of the use
of a private jet’,” recalls Soodik. “The
wife said ‘I need to be able to use the private jet,’
and the judge thought he was being very smart and diplomatic
and he said, ‘Okay, anytime you want to travel, your
husband will have to buy out all of first class so that you
feel that you’re in a private jet.’ She looked
at him and said, ‘But your honor, it’s not the
same. Commercial airlines don’t leave when I want to
leave’.”
Take-no-prisoners
private detectives, like Anthony Pellicano and Gavin de Becker,
can also play a role in Hollywood divorces—but less
often than one might think because California is a No Fault
state. “So it’s not about who slept with who because
that’s irrelevant under no fault,” says Levin.
“It’s about how much money do you really have?”
So a P.I. is more likely to spend his time chasing paper trails
that scanning through stolen sex tapes? “Yes, though
that stuff happens, too,” says Levin. “Somebody
came to us recently with something really awful in a family
law matter but we always pass because it’s just dirty.
I keep waiting for it to turn up somewhere else but it hasn’t
yet.”
The social
fall-out from a divorce can also be more hard-hitting in Hollywood
than other places. “Even if both people are stars, it
still becomes about, ‘Who do I want at my dinner party,
him or her’?” says Levin. “What’s
really sad is when people call a restaurant or something and
say, ‘I’m the former Mrs. So and So,’ and
use the other person’s first and last name. It’s
like where’s your identity?”
Not that everyone
that goes through a divorce in Hollywood comes out looking
worse than they did going in. Every once in a while, someone
flourishes. “Divorce certainly didn’t hurt Nicole
Kidman much, did it?” poses Levin. “She did a
fabulous job managing her image during that difficult time
and I think it resonated with the public.”
Ah yes, the
public. Of all the quirks and wrinkles that make divorce in
L.A. different from Anywhere Else, U.S.A., the most significant,
by far, is the fishbowl factor. In Hollywood, a divorce not
just between you and your lying, cheating, insensitive spouse.
It’s between you, your lying, cheating, insensitive
spouse and Entertainment Tonight. “When a big time movie
star gets divorced, people are interested,” says Wasser,
“so the divorces are often more difficult because of
the added stress and strain of the publicity.”
The relentless
public scrutiny explains why most high-profile couples, like
Cruise and Kidman for example, settle privately rather than
air their differences in a public courtroom. “That case
started to get a little bit ugly,” observes Levin, “and
then I think everybody realized, ‘Wow, look at the road
we’re going down,’ and they made it amicable and
private and they served everybody well by doing that.”
Usually in
such settlements, a retired judge is hired to conduct trial-like
proceedings in someone’s conference room or hotel suite.
Sometimes he even wears a robe. “It can be quite comical,”
says Soodik, “when somebody is in front of a judge and
they’re saying, ‘I need $300,000 a month and my
cook and my dog walker and I need all these things. And this
judge is thinking, ‘I earn maybe $100,000 a year and
I have a wife a two kids and you want $300,000 a month?’”
One plus to handling divorces in Hollywood is that because
most big players have business managers, their records are
far better organized than your average joe. “I was working
on a divorce for someone in the music industry,” recalls
Soodik, “and every time we’d say, ‘We need
this,’ he’d look over to his business manager
and say, ‘Take care of that. Got that? Take care of
that.’ It was like a cartoon.”
The media
glare can also affect what evidence is presented in these
cases. “There are times that people don’t use
information that would be helpful to them because they know
it’s going to be in the public eye,” explains
Soodik. “Say you’re the non-Hollywood person and
you want to bring something up that’s going to hurt
your spouse’s career. Well, you have to think twice
about it because that can affect your support.”
But it’s
not just about keeping their business out of the papers. Image-conscious
celebrities and their spurned spouses have gotten incredibly
crafty about using the media to serve their interests in a
divorce case. “I’ve seen filings in family law
where you read it and think, ‘This wasn’t for
the judge, this was for the press,” says Levin. “In
one situation, two stars were fighting over visitation and
the ‘opulent lifestyle’ of one side was mentioned
in a way where I thought, ‘This is not to argue visitation,
this is to show excess’.”
What’s
more, stars and their lawyers and publicists are getting into
the act, commenting on the record more than ever before. “It
used to be, couples would put up the wall of silence because
there wasn’t an outlet for this kind of information,”
says Levin. “But now, with so many cable networks and
entertainment magazines, they know that this stuff gets out
there anyway so they’re jumping into the fray early
on and spinning it in a way that best serves their client’s
image. If the client doesn’t look good at the end of
the divorce, regardless of how good the financial settlement
is, they’ve failed. It’s not just about what happens
in court. It’s what happens in the court of public opinion.”
Given the
legal and PR tightrope they must constantly traverse, it is
no wonder the top Hollywood divorce lawyers make anywhere
from $500 to $800 an hour. It’s also not surprising
that they’ve taken on almost mythological status, with
nicknames like the Gunslinger, the Stealth Lawyer and The
Darth Vader of Hollywood. “Being the best divorce lawyer
in New York is like being the best devil in hell,” divorcing
publishing maven Judith Regan once quipped and though some
may believe the same of Hollywood split-brokers, Levin maintains
that, at very the top, the opposite is true. “There
are some family law lawyers who will kind of keep the fight
going because the longer these cases go, the more money they
make,” he observes, “but when you talk about the
lawyers who represent celebrities, it’s the opposite.
I can think of one custody case where a top family law attorney
could have ridden it for twelve years and made hundreds of
thousands of dollars but instead he referred it out to another
state and the case settled within months. If you bleed a client
dry, that person can trash you in Hollywood and it takes about
four of those people to ruin your practice. In the end, stars
are people and most people don’t want to play out a
bitter, acrimonious divorce. They don’t want to live
through it let alone make it public. The best lawyers in Hollywood
understand that.”
And what’s
more, they make house calls. “If somebody is seen coming
to my office, it can end up in the National Enquirer,”
reveals Soodik, “so I more often go to them, which I
have to say is fun because you get to see their house.”
And after the grand tour, you sit down and listen as the spill
their deepest, darkest secrets. “If you’re a voyeur,”
Soodik says, “this would be the most appropriate job
to satisfy that.”
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