Guys Just Wanna Have Fun

Add Crystal Harris and Hugh Hefner to the list of high-profile breakups that includes Tipper and Al Gore, Mark and Jenny Sanford, John and Elizabeth Edwards and, most recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver. Will Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner make it through their own recent scandals? And whatever happened to Silda Wall and Eliot Spitzer? It’s Scenes From a Marriage (or would-be marriage in the case of Hef) American style. Let’s analyze the ashes of some of these marriages on a case-by-case basis. There’s a 60-year age difference between Hef and Crystal, and the breakup comes on the eve of the release of her single “Club Queen.” Hef had previously been married to Mildred Williams (the mother of Christie Hefner) and then, much later, to Kimberly Conrad. But his former girlfriend Holly Madison was the Cassandra when it came to his most recent nuptials. “I think it’s possible Crystal could break Hef’s heart,” PopEater quoted Madison as saying. Moving through the list: Schwarzenegger fathered a child with his maid and Sanford fell in love with an Argentine woman and abandoned the state he was elected to govern. Could Al Gore’s troubles have had anything to do with the kind of behavior he exhibited towards his masseuse, Molly Hagerty? Could John Edwards have been one of those men whose infidelity hides a darker truth, the inability to cope with illness, even though he insists that he strayed while Elizabeth’s cancer was in remission? Ironically, sex is the apparent pitfall for everyone but the geriatric Playboy himself. Not that reports about Hefner and Crystal’s breakup have explicitly ruled out the couple’s sex life as a cause, but one can’t help thinking that the yawning generation gap was the ultimate factor, particularly in a youth culture that Hefner himself helped to spawn. On the other hand, age didn’t deter Dominique Strauss-Kahn when he made his unreciprocated advances on the then 21-year-old Tristane Banon. And then of course there is Humbert Humbert and Lolita.

Media Challenged

Now that Mildred Patricia Baena has been identified as the mother of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love-child, one question remains: will there be enough reporters available to cover Schwarzenegger’s breakup with Maria Shriver? Unconfirmed reports that Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s victim lives in a housing facility for people with AIDS and that she spit his semen onto the floor of the hotel only increase the pressure on chronically understaffed newspapers and online outlets like The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Drudge Report (“IMF Accuser in Apt. for HIV Vics,” New York Post, 5/18/11) The fact that ad revenues in print and online media probably peak with each newly leaked celebrity transgression doesn’t really solve what is essentially a staffing problem. For instance, both Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen should be paid royalties by publications like The New York Post that profit from their misdeeds. However, it is unlikely that any print publication is going to hire more reporters on the basis of an upswing in the kinds of meltdowns we’ve seen of late—primarily because such events, while profitable, tend to be fickle as sources of income. Maria Shriver, who herself was a television anchor before she gave up journalism because of her position as the governor's wife, should be the first to realize how marital breakups like the one she is experiencing tax the resources of information-gathering organizations. The fact that she has indicated she won’t talk further on the subject of her ruined marriage is admirable though unfortunate since, in effect, she’s the ultimate stringer. What better person to report on a husband’s marital infidelity than his jilted wife?