Eleanor Alter, the formidable New York lawyer who helped Mia Farrow decimate Woody Allen’s 1992 custody suit, has witnessed the ugly nadir of many a celebrity union.
The 78-year-old has been on the job since about 1970, representing the likes of Madonna, Robert De Niro and John Lennon “when he was separated from Yoko Ono a million and a half years ago.” Her powers of persuasion are such that Uma Thurman — against whom she’d once repped Ethan Hawke — snatched Alter up for her own custody case against her ex-fiancé, Arpad Busson.
Alter, who charges $800 an hour at the Manhattan firm she launched last year, attended Harvard Law with the late Janet Reno and recalls vividly the days when men would deem a woman “too ugly” to be a firm partner and red nail polish was considered déclassé. She’s also surprisingly hip, having lent consulting expertise to shows like HBO’s “Divorce” and the drama “ER,” on which her son was an executive producer. “My Cousin Vinny” is her favorite movie.
Point is, Alter’s a family-law savant. And so, on the heels of Brangelina’s seismic uncoupling (and in January, anecdotally termed “Divorce Month” due to the high volume of filings), we thought she’d be the ideal person to weigh in: Why do stars bother getting hitched, anyway, when their marriages are so prone to failure?
“Hope?” Alter offered during a recent interview in her Midtown corner office. “I mean, some of them really get married for all the reasons that other people get married. They believe they’re going to have children ... they want a family.”
But the gregarious, scarf-clad counselor — herself twice divorced — had far more to say about how and why both stars’ and normals’ marriages tend to implode.
“There’s so much boredom ... (For) people who travel all the time — I mean, even like an investment banker who’s away for seven months doing deals, or a lawyer who’s out of town doing big cases — the temptations are huge, and the loneliness,” Alter said. “And then drugs and alcohol fuel a lot of it, because your normal inhibitions (are lowered) — and you think, ‘Well, everybody’s doing it.’”
Another path to Splitsville, she explained, is our advanced lifespan.
“Look at a colonial graveyard: You’ll see one guy and five wives who died in childbirth,” she said. “And now we live a very long time, and things kind of wear out sometimes, but also people’s expectations are much higher.”
You’d think Alter, confronted with the idea of a third marriage, would run screaming in the opposite direction. She didn’t: She and her husband Allan Lans, a private-practice doctor who served as team psychiatrist for the New York Mets, married 22 years ago, a year after they started dating.
“I think if you can find somebody and believe you’re going to be together forever, even if you’re wrong, that is better than going from person to person to person,” Alter said. “So just because you’ve been divorced or have failed at it ... you hope — or I believe — that you can get it right at some point, even if you’ve failed before.”
“The other two times when it didn’t work out, I thought it was forever,” she added. “So this time I thought it was forever — and it is.”
Source: New York Daily News / Author: Meera Jagannathan / Date: 1/12/2017