The Curse of the InStyle Wedding

By ALEX KUCZYNSKI

A year ago this month, Kelly Rutherford, an actress who starred on "Melrose Place," married Carlos Tarajano, a Venezuelan banker, at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills.
     Mr. Tarajano had proposed to Ms. Rutherford with a three-carat emerald-cut diamond ring flanked by tapered baguettes. On her wedding day, the bride wore a Carolina Herrera gown, and 140 wedding guests danced to salsa music in the Sunset Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel until the small hours of the morning.
     InStyle magazine featured the wedding in its February 2002 issue. But by the time it arrived on newsstands, complete with gauzy photographs of the couple grinning as they cut the cake, Ms. Rutherford had filed for divorce.
     This was not the only time a celebrity marriage failed to survive InStyle's publication schedule. The February issue of both InStyle and its spinoff, InStyle Weddings, featured details about the wedding of the comedian and actor Tom Green and the actress Drew Barrymore. But Ms. Barrymore and Mr. Green had called it quits in December, five months after the ceremony — and a number of weeks after both magazines had gone to press.
     And there is Courtney Thorne-Smith, whose marriage to Andrew Conrad appeared in the spring 2001 issue of InStyle Weddings. The magazine, with a radiant Ms. Thorne-Smith on the cover, arrived on newsstands just weeks after the bride had filed for divorce.
     At a time when half of all marriages end that way, Hollywood unions that fizzle fast are no surprise. But when InStyle, the monthly chronicle of picture-perfect celebrity lives, published a string of happily-ever-after stories about marriages that ended before some readers had a chance to crack the pages, the result was a string of embarrassments.
     The phenomenon also raises a tantalizing question: is there some kind of jinx?
     Charla Lawhorn, the managing editor of InStyle, said that when a couple splits up just as their wedding pictures are being shipped to newsstands by the hundreds of thousands, the editors are helpless.
     "First of all, it's their personal lives, and we feel badly," she said. "And, of course, we hate it when it happens and the story is in the magazine."
     And in these days of multimedia brand extension, the opportunities for shame are amplified. InStyle, for example, shared the story of the Rutherford-Tarajano nuptials with NBC's "InStyle Celebrity Weddings" program. One can only imagine what the couple were thinking on Jan. 22, as viewers watched Mr. Tarajano spooning cake into his bride's mouth. Ms. Rutherford had filed for divorce 11 days earlier.
     Representatives of Ms. Rutherford, Ms. Barrymore and Mr. Green all declined to comment.
     Weddings have long been the subject of obsessive fascination for prospective brides, so much so that the subject has spawned an entire genre of magazines: Modern Bride, Bride's, Elegant Bride, Martha Stewart Weddings. Town & Country devotes one issue a year to the subject.
     But InStyle, founded in 1994, is different from the rest because it features only the intimate ceremonies of the famous and the semifamous.
     It has usually been a win-win-win situation for everyone. According to Ms. Lawhorn, unlike European tabloid magazines like Hello! and Hola, InStyle pays no fees for access to its weddings. Hello!, which is owned by the Spanish media mogul Eduardo Sanchez Junco, paid $750,000 for the right to publish photographs of Claudia Schiffer's wedding last week. (According to news reports in Europe, Ms. Schiffer did not like the pictures and demanded that the feature be yanked from the magazine at the last minute.) Readers get a voyeuristic look at a famous person's dream wedding, and celebrities get some free publicity.
     But the celebrity wedding coverage that makes InStyle and InStyle Weddings different from the pack may contribute to the undoing of their willing subjects. Having your wedding featured in the no-warts-at-all magazines can raise expectations of perfection to an unrealistically high level, suggested Manley Freid, a divorce lawyer in Los Angeles.
     "It may be, along with all the pressures of being married in the entertainment world, that this just puts too much additional pressure on the marriage," said Mr. Freid, who is representing Rene Elizondo in his divorce settlement with Janet Jackson.
     He compared it to the problem of athletes who have posed for the cover of Sports Illustrated. According to the magazine, a number of athletes appearing on its cover have shortly thereafter suffered injury or professional embarrassment. (The curse has gained such notoriety that Kurt Warner, the St. Louis Rams quarterback, cited it in refusing to pose for the January cover; the editors filled the space with a picture of a black cat and the headline "The Cover That No One Would Pose For.")
     Pamela Paul, the author of "The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony" (Villard, 2002), said that the seeming speed of celebrity decoupling is a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon: wedding mania, an obsession with the ceremony, the cake, the dress, everything but the relationship.
     "People have this illusion that if you have a Cinderella wedding you're going to have a Cinderella life," Ms. Paul said. "It sometimes strikes me almost as if they doth protest too much with these massive wedding extravaganzas."
     She added that because these are celebrities, not real people, more focus is paid to their demise. "Is the country going to care if the folks down the street get divorced?" she asked, referring to the civilians featured in other bridal magazines.
     Such was the case with Ms. Thorne-Smith, whose divorce became fodder for a flurry of tabloid reports. On Jan. 4, 2001, Ms. Thorne-Smith, who was starring on "Ally McBeal" at the time, announced that she and her husband, Andrew Conrad, a scientist, were separating.
     "Andy and I have mutually decided to separate," Ms. Thorne-Smith said in a statement. "We remain good friends and will share custody of our dogs."
     Unfortunately, Ms. Thorne-Smith's essay in InStyle Weddings, in which she wrote about planning her last-minute Hawaiian ceremony — was just hitting newsstands.
     Careful readers might have picked up hints about the relationship's tenuous nature. Ms. Thorn-Smith wrote: "One of my best girlfriends (who got engaged, set a date and married during the course of my own protracted engagement) confided that she and her new husband had bet $100 on whether or not we would `go through with it' (she claims to have put her money on `yes' — I'm still not quite convinced)."
     Ms. Lawhorn said that the InStyle editors make attempts to not focus on marriages that look wobbly from the get-go. "If we know there is a problem someplace, we stay away from it," she said. "But sometimes we get surprised."
     Other marriages have outlasted InStyle's lead time — the period it takes to edit and print the magazine — but sometimes only by a little. Helen Hunt and Hank Azaria filed for divorce in January 2001, five months after InStyle published the details about their ceremony. Jennifer Lopez filed for divorce from Ojani Noa in December 1997, six months after their wedding was featured.
     David Blankenhorn, a sociologist and the president of the Institute for American Values in New York, said that the InStyle syndrome reflects a larger issue that affects contemporary marriage.
     Decades ago, marriage was a radical change in a woman's life, he said; it meant she was moving from her parents' home, taking on a universe of new responsibilities and passing the major demarcation between childhood and adulthood.
     "Now, with cohabitation, with marriage at a later age, the transition from being married to being unmarried is no longer this radical all-encompassing change of your entire world," he said. "So perhaps we compensate for the shrinking nature of the change in daily life by magnifying the ceremony and party into a huge event. The party becomes the thing. And for celebrities, perhaps it is also a chance for some press."
     The next issue of InStyle Weddings, the second this year, is due to arrive on newsstands June 11. Shannon Elizabeth, a star of "American Pie II," is the cover model. And InStyle appears to be hedging its bets. Ms. Elizabeth is only engaged (to an actor, Joseph Reitman). That means there's little chance before the magazine lands that she will file for divorce.