The last episode of David Letterman that I can recall dates back to my
final days at JHU, when my ex-roommate (no, not Anna, but the one
before Anna), caught Gabriel Bryne’s appearance on the show. Dave
acted bizarrely and harassed Bryne with questions,
such as, “How do you feel now that your ex-wife [Ellen Barkin] is now
married to a billionaire?” Dave said and repeated this
question in such a way as to make Bryne feel small.
This memory has resurfaced because I have never seen an Ellen Barkin
film, nor do I have an opinion of her as a person. But she’s out
promoting her new film with Todd Solondz, and it seems that every
article is obsessed with showing how she’s normal, even though she’s
married to man who not only has a lot of money, but is very flashy
about it. Here’s the New Yorker’s take on Ms. Barkin, and New York Magazine’s take.
Neither writer can restrain herself from name-dropping Ms. Barkin’s
shoes (Christian Louboutin) or cataloguing her jewelry:
diamond on her right hand and a wedding band of diamonds set with a
rose-cut nineteenth-century jar diamond on her ring finger—along with a briolette diamond pendant on a platinum-and-diamond chain.
Both articles are probably the result of some PR woman’s engineering,
but they can’t prevent me from thinking that if I was Ms. Barkin, I’d rather have a simple “modest” life with Gabriel Bryne.
I can only recall seeing her in Drop Dead Gorgeous, where she was very good. Now I’m all curious about this Letterman-Byrne thing, because that really is pretty weird.