They're showing up at movie theaters en masse--some, like the 15 members of a women's group in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in stretch limos and evening gowns. They're calling in to drive-time radio stations, like Raleigh, North Carolina's WRAL-FM, which solicited listeners' divorce horror stories and revenge fantasies--and found its switchboards lighted up like Times Square. And they're throwing parties, like the one last week for Patti Kenner's 52nd birthday, in which 60 of her female friends gathered for cocktails, then adjourned to a Manhattan theater to hoot and laugh their way through all 105 minutes of The First Wives Club. Even though Kenner and most of her guests are still happily married to their first husbands, they found plenty to identify with in the hit movie about three women of a certain age, dumped for younger models, who get mad and then get even. "Doesn't everyone, even in the best of marriages, want a little revenge once in a while?" asked Ann Oster, 45, who works in real estate in New Jersey. Living well, of course, is the best revenge of all: after the screening, Kenner gave each of her friends a special First Wives memento--a string of pearls in a little velvet pouch.
Women scorned, women afraid of being scorned--and some curious men along for the ride--are helping The First Wives Club break records. Its $18.9 million opening weekend was the highest ever for a so-called women's film and captured more than one-third of the movie-going market from competition such as Bruce Willis' Last Man Standing. The characters played by Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler are like the Furies crossed with the Three Stooges--college friends spurned by their husbands in middle age who plan a madcap payback. But for all the one-liners and pratfalls, the movie is more than satiric fluff. Like Thelma & Louise, which five years ago set audiences to cheering when Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon blasted a trucker's rig to smithereens--or last year's Waiting to Exhale, which had women yelling "Go, girl!" at the screen--The First Wives Club is dipping into a bottomless well of shared female rage. It is rage at the imbalance of power that allows men to use up the best years of a woman's life, then trade her in for an ingenue--and rage at every single element that goes into that scenario: the obsession with youth and looks, the persistent inequality in income, the devaluing of a woman's contribution to the family and to a man's success.
"We're talking about betrayal," says First Wives author Olivia Goldsmith, who was herself downsized by divorce. "These guys are stealing not only the present but also the past. And after they steal part of your life, then they steal your property." After Goldsmith wrote the best-selling novel in 1992, her publisher sponsored a First Wife contest. "We received 1,500 letters, and they were tragic," she says. "I had never been so depressed." (The winning entry was like so many others: a husband runs off with his secretary after 23 years of marriage, leaving the wife to cope with a child's cancer--it had the distinction of being written entirely in verse.)