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In fact, some first wives feared that Hollywood would trivialize their plight. "I didn't think I'd like this movie," says Marilyn Nichols Kane, ex-wife of America's most famous deadbeat dad, precious-metals consultant Jeffrey Nichols, who has been jailed twice for his failure to pay the $642,550 he owes her. "I thought it might be offensive--making fun of the suffering we've all been through. But I wanted to stand up and cheer. Remember that part where Goldie Hawn strips her husband's house? I did that!" Marilyn Kane, meet fellow fan Lynn Landon, second wife of actor Michael Landon, who left her for a younger woman and divorced her in 1982 after 19 years of marriage. "I used to say, 'Death would have been too good,'" she recalls. "Of course, now that he's dead...Who could have known? But my other fantasy was that his hair would fall out. His hair was such a big thing for him."
Fourteen years ago, Landon formed a support group in Hollywood called LADIES--Life After Divorce Is Eventually Sane--which has helped the exes of Gene Hackman, Leonard Nimoy and Jerry Lewis, among others, survive a breakup. "The public thinks that money makes it different for us," says Landon, "but I've seen firsthand first wives of Oscar winners who moved from mansions to little apartments"--or even, for a while, to their cars.
For middle-class first wives, that car often seems just one paycheck away. One woman, a program coordinator at a Los Angeles aerospace firm, claims her ex-husband refused to pay alimony or child support two years after their divorce. She couldn't afford the airfare or the time off work to go back and sue him for it. He "bought the boys gifts, which made him look like a hero, while I was working two jobs to pay for braces," she recalls. "I was living paycheck to paycheck, and he had a sports car, a camper, a boat." Though she has put her life back together and even graduated from college alongside her son, she feels a rush of satisfaction over her husband's medical problems. "He's in constant back pain after several operations. I always thought he'd get his. I feel vindicated."
Many first wives, it seems, indulge in revenge fantasies. But though rage at a bitter breakup may be natural, it can be dangerous too. Manhattan psychotherapist Carole Fudin reports that one of her patients shredded her husband's wardrobe. Another crashed her car into his. A third woman came within inches of running her husband down, hitting the brakes just in time. Fortunately, none of them went as far as La Jolla, California, socialite Betty Broderick, who in 1989 gunned down her ex-husband and his new young wife, an assistant from his law office, in their bedroom. "One way or another," says Fudin of her clients, "these women need to talk it out, write it out, scream it out." They must also take pains to keep the children from getting caught in the battling--something Diane Keaton neglects to do in the movie. The kids "will have their own rage to deal with," notes Fudin.
Some viewers are protesting that The First Wives Club does little more than perpetuate destructive myths about human behavior. "It's raw sexism," insists David Usher, who helps edit a men's magazine, The Liberator. "We stereotype men and women, and they act out these stereotypes, and it goes straight into the divorce courts."