Cindy Adams Pirro-uettes Over Pals’ Marriage WoesHey everybody! Have a nice weekend? Get some rest? Watch a football game? Good for you. Unfortunately, not all of us had such a great time. Jeanine and Al Pirro let slip that they are getting a divorce. You remember Al and Jeanine — he was the guy who sabotaged his wife’s political ambitions by earning a tax-evasion conviction and fathering a love child, and she was the one who was caught on tape asking Bernie Kerik to bug her husband’s yacht to catch him philandering? Hm. Maybe it wasn’t so much that the pair had a bad weekend — more like they’ve had a bad decade or so. Former Westchester D.A. Jeanine failed in her runs for U.S. senator, lieutenant governor, and state attorney general, and real-estate broker Al spent over a year in the clink, starting in 2000. It looks like their divorce has already been hashed out so at least this part might run smoothly, though All-Purpose Divorce Spokesman Raoul Felder claims “it’s mutually assured destruction” (Felder, of course, represents neither party). It’s times like these, when tabloid superstars hit rock bottom, that we turn to the one name we can trust: Cindy Adams. What does Lady C, who was pals with both parties, have to say about the Pirros’ great love?
company town
CNBC Backs Anchor Maria BartiromoMEDIA
• The story of the jet-fueled relationship between ex-Citigroup exec Todd Thompson and CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo has turned from a snowball into an avalanche. [WSJ]
• Newspapers eliminated about 1,500 positions in 2006, an improvement over 2005, when 2,500 scribes took a walk. [E&P]
• Putting scratch-and-sniff ads in the Wall Street Journal actually makes us less inclined to read a newspaper. [AdAge]
the follow-up
One More Thing About the Pirros: Al Wants Counseling
When Jeanine Pirro’s campaign for attorney general is over — or, to be cruel but precise, once she loses — she’ll be going straight into marriage counseling, at least if her husband has anything to do with it.
New York’s Steve Fishman profiled the Pirros’ increasingly confounding marriage for this week’s magazine, and he found Al Pirro, Jeanine’s wayward husband — by all accounts a screamer, a bruiser, a brusque alpha male — surprisingly wounded and therapized, talking about his anxieties. Al knows he needs to be flattered, to be reminded that he makes more money than Jeanine, to feel generous (Fishman zeroes in on his compulsive need to pick up the check, even for parties of 30). He denies the infidelities that drove Jeanine up the wall (and into the dubious confidences of Bernie Kerik) while readily admitting something even more hurtful to a relationship: that he needs outside female companionship, be it platonic or not, because he doesn’t feel encouraged, admired, or appreciated at home. And he knows the couple needs to work on these issues.
“He was essentially stewing,” Fishman says. “He feels that he’s been shut out, silenced, and attacked, both by the campaign and by his wife personally.” Is there enough therapy in the world to get the pair past all that? Maybe, Fishman says. The real turning point for the relationship, he says, was Al’s tax-evasion conviction. “But it was never a fake marriage. There’s a basis of deep mutual admiration — hell, love.”
Can This Marriage Be Saved? [NYM]