Sadly, there’s no such thing as a private affair anymore.
Maureen Dowd
We live in a transparent era atwitter with indecent exposure.
Next up in bookstores: “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me,” by Sheryl Weinstein, a 60-year-old former executive with the Jewish women’s group Hadassah, who writes that she was romantically involved with the fraudulent financier in the early ‘90s, though both were married.
The last thing you probably need in your head at this point are images of the Wall Street sociopath nuzzling and nickering. Weinstein, according to a preview in The New York Daily News, gets her revenge for losing her life savings by revealing that Madoff’s unimpressive assets were not merely financial. She also recalls that her friends called her Bernie “Winky Dink” because he blinked anxiously when he was around her.
Jenny Sanford is still sharing about her husband’s affair as well. Her interview in Vogue is accompanied by a leggy photo of the 47-year-old in a beach cover-up that looks like a fetching ad for a new, less embarrassing husband.
She has moved out of the governor’s mansion but says she’s still open to getting back together, noting that pastoral and marriage counseling taught her that “these affairs are almost like an addiction to alcohol or pornography.”
“I think,” she tells the interviewer, “my husband has got some issues that he needs to work on, about happiness and what happiness means.”
She couldn’t resist Googling her husband’s Maria and generously deemed her “pretty.” “I am sure she is a fine person,” she says. “It can’t be fun for her, though I do sometimes question her judgment. If she knew the newspaper had those e-mails back in December, why did she want him to come in June?”
Jenny, who says she wasn’t “madly in love” with Mark Sanford when she married him, is praying for her husband’s soul mate. Her friends agreed that she’d be fine with or without him; one commented that, for a long time, Mark “has been dead on the inside.”
There’s even a TV show inspired by the wives of misbehaving politicians — women who long to never hear the words “long suffering” again. In the new CBS drama “The Good Wife,” Julianna Margulies channels Jenny, Silda, Hillary and Elizabeth, summoning stoicism even when her teenage daughter tells her, “Some girl said Dad slept with a hooker my age.”
When the Sanford scandal broke, some chatterers contended that it was a sign that we should have more women in public office because they get less caught up in sexual intrigue.
A pol paying for sex with a call girl is an old story. But even Heidi Fleiss dropped plans for a bordello for female clients outside Pahrump, Nev., telling The Las Vegas Review-Journal that she’s now focused on alternative energy because “that’s where the money is.”
The only place at the moment where you can see women forking over money to have sex with a gigolo is on HBO’s salaciously named “Hung.” The kooky comedy is about a divorced Detroit high school basketball coach, Ray Drecker (played by the hunky Thomas Jane), who needs money after his house burns down and his twin teenagers are forced to go live with their mother.
He decides to sell his best asset, dubbing himself “a happiness consultant,” and teams up with an unlikely pimp, Tanya Skagle (played by Jane Adams), an aspiring poet who listens to PBS and has “Proust” tattooed on her forearm.
His first lesson on the job is that women frequently derive sensual happiness in a more complex way than men. One of his first clients is a sexy blond ad executive who has had bad luck with guys. He is befuddled to find he must fulfill her fantasies rather than her libido — running along the lake laughing and picnicking with her; going to couples therapy and pretending to be a rich ex-boyfriend; and feigning falling madly in love with her because it’s their fate.
After paying him cash to pick her up by the side of the road, she accuses him of making “an inappropriate pass.” His Proustian pimp has to explain that the young woman with the “bruised heart” is seeking a romantic connection more than a physical one.
“O.K.,” he says with exasperation. “I’ll pretend I’m totally in love with this freak.”
After many rewrites and redos, Drecker tries to summon the necessary acting chops to give his client what she’s paying for. In the parking lot of the roadside diner where they keep eating, a la “Groundhog Day,” while he struggles to figure out what this woman wants, he grasps for a better performance.
“I just wish in some crazy long-shot version of this universe,” he tells her, “that you would stay here with me and not vanish from my life.”
When he spits out the word “destiny,” he finally manages to please her — momentarily.
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