Top 10 Celebrity Odd Couples
What's more delightful than a celebrity? Two celebrities in a love affair that makes your jaw drop. Or a celeb who marries a nonentity.
Beauties fall for beasts. Talents go for no-talents. Teenagers leap into old guys' laps. (Is that Viagra in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me, eventually?) To celebrate love's sweet mystery, here's our Top Ten Celebrity Odd Couples list, and what makes them tick (or ticked off with each other).
10. Mandy Moore and Ryan Adams
If you ask me, Ryan Adams is trading Porsches for Kias. The guy has dated Parker Posey, Winona Ryder, and Beth Orton, and now he's married to Mandy Moore? That's a walk down the aisle to forget. Mr. Alt Rock weds a girl who got famous by singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at baseball stadiums and toured with the Backstreet Boys? A girl who only bought the Fleet Foxes album because she thought the cover was pretty? Maybe Ryan's hearing loss is even more profound than we thought. On the other hand, she was superb poking fun at herself on Entourage and being a villainous Christian girl in the brilliant Saved!. So maybe their odd match is saved by her talent elsewhere than music.
9. Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel
Christie Brinkley was married to Billy Joel for nine years -- a lifetime, by celebrity standards. They raised a beautiful singing daughter, Alexa. In a way, each is better for the other than their subsequent spouses. More reliable -- whenever either goes through an ugly divorce, it's the ex-spouse who steps in, stands loyally by, and saves the emotional day (and talks to the press to tamp down the bad publicity). But still, you can't deny it: She's the best-preserved beauty of our time, and his eyes still droop like two fried eggs nailed to the wall.
What spells romance to a 5-foot-11 supermodel? When a guy saws you in half, then asks you for a date before putting you back together again. Claudia Schiffer was engaged to David Copperfield for six years, gladly submitting to his magic hands with a saw and guillotine, but eventually the thrill of getting severed petered out and they severed their bond. Ah, love! It's just an illusion.
7. Holly Madison and Criss Angel
I don't know who was crazier to be crazy about the other: Criss Angel or Holly Madison. A guy may call you precious, but if he can make a Lamborghini disappear, he can make you disappear. And having sex with somebody who just had sex with Hugh Hefner is statistically equivalent to sharing your love life with the state of California. Still, lolling with Holly in satin sheets beats getting run over by a steamroller on a bed of glass. The fatal flaw in their union: their careers. He had to stay in Vegas, she had to stay in Hollywood.
6. Britney Spears and Kevin Federline
Celebrity/nonentity couple Britney Spears and Kevin Federline simply can't handle their truth. Bottom line: He may be a crapper of a rapper whose career peaked in the backup-dancer chorus line, a cad who parties in Vegas when his wife is pregnant, but at least once the babies are born he doesn't endanger their lives in convertibles and almost drop them in the street. When Kevin Federline looks good compared to you, your life needs looking at.
5. Paris Hilton and Doug Reinhardt
Paris Hilton is reportedly already getting bored with her alleged maybe-fiance Doug Reinhardt from The Hills. When you're too dumb and boring for Paris Hilton, that's over the line. Paris Hilton and anyone is a celeb coupling too dumb to live.
4. Evan Rachel Wood and Marilyn Manson
Marilyn Manson's gal pals are getting younger even faster than he's getting older. There's about five times as much age difference between him and Evan Rachel Wood, 19, than Dita Von Teese, the wife he split with on Halloween. Why the switch? Dita wanted him to grow up and get responsible (and stop seeing 19-year-olds on the side). Evan Rachel has a bad-girl vibe, and since she stars as Alice in Wonderland in his horror movie Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, she wasn't likely to yell at him about staying up all night baying at the moon.
3. Soon-Yi Previn and Woody Allen
Of all the odd couples on our list, Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn may be the oddest, in that their bizarre marriage actually apparently works, despite its origin in tabloid scandal. They've got paparazzi-dodging down to a science. One night when I exited John's Pizza in New York, I held the door open for a girl coming out of a dark-windowed limo; it was Soon-Yi. I politely held the door for Woody, but he waited many minutes until I left to scuttle from limo to restaurant. I'm happy they're happy, and so what if a guy wants a wife 35 years younger who never sasses him back? What remains weird is his need to transgress taboos. And it puts all those old-guys-boinking-ingenues (and serially dating sisters) in his movies in a strange, unsettling light.
2. Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson
Lisa Marie Presley is mad at Michael Jackson for selling her father's tune "Burning Love" for use in a cheese commercial. But that's not the only way she feels burned about their 19-month marriage. "Holy Mother of God, it was insane," she told Oprah. She was flattered that he turned to her when (she says) he had drug problems (shades of Dad). Mama Priscilla Presley thinks Michael just wanted to father Elvis' baby.
1. Tila Tequila and Billy Corgan
She's famous for being the first nobody Playboy model to get a million friends on MySpace, then inviting fans of all sexes onto her reality TV show to vie for the right to violate her in bed. He's famous for abusing his bandmates and his fans -- he invited one up on the stage and mocked him by claiming the concertgoer had written a song called "Take Your ---- Out of My --- and Stick it in My Mouth." Is Billy Corgan sticking with Tila Tequila, his date to the Bravo A-List Awards? Or is he the only American who hasn't slept with her?
