50th birthday party gift idea

Hans the butler opens the door and leads the way. The six women sit on plump sofas in the 16th-floor apartment of Lorna Berle, wife of the late Uncle Miltie. It is lunchtime in Beverly Hills, and the women are drinking chardonnay in slender glasses that Hans has filled for them. For the past two years they have gathered like this every month. Each has had her own lobs, hobbies, causes she feels strongly about. But their husbands are the reason they're here. Each woman in this room has married a man who had already been married three times. Altogether, the husbands have gotten hitched 24 times, saying "I do" with such frequency that they could be singing with the Drifters. It's hilarious, really Which is how the idea of the Fourth Wives Club first arose: an all-girl celebration of having the uncommon in common.

When the members are present and accounted for, the meeting is called to order, which is to say, Lorna Berle asks, "Shall we?" and the women get up and head toward her dining room table. Carrie is the wife of Bernie Brillstein, one of Hollywood's most successful manager-producers. Barbara is married to Warren Cowan, the pioneering publicist whose clients include Paul Newman and Merv Griffin. Annabelle is the widow of former studio chief David Begelman. Corinna is married to movie and TV producer Freddie Fields. Manna just celebrated her 20th anniversary with Dale Grimm, a founding partner in the oldest personal injury law firm in L.A. Marianne, a seventh member, is absent; she's in Cabo San Lucas with her husband, the high-end retailer Fred Segal.

As the women smooth gold linen napkins across their laps, Lorna Berle describes the evening the club was born. "We went out to Spago one night," she says, recalling a meal that she, Alanna, and their husbands shared in 2000. "After a couple of drinks it struck us as funny that we were each the fourth wife of the guy that was sitting there. Then Manna said, `You know Carrie Brillstein? She's Bernie's fourth wife.' Then, I think a week later, I went to an anniversary party that Army and Selma Archerd had, and you"--she nods at Carrie--"wound up sitting at our table."

"Corinna and I were friends," Carrie chimes in. She smiles at Corinna Fields. "And Corinna said, `I'm Freddie's fourth.' And then we came here"--Carrie waves vaguely toward Lorna's sleek grand piano and Biedermeir furniture--"for Lorna and Milton's anniversary." Barbara Cowan and Annabelle Begelman were also at the party, and when Carrie Brillstein told them about the club, "they said, `Well, we're fourth wives.' And that's how it's been."

Lorna hoots with laughter. "In this town, this is not an exclusive group," she says. "I think to find a group of first wives you'd be a little more hard-pressed."

Alanna Tarkington--the only Fourth Wife who does not use her husbands' name--proposes a toast. "Here's to who we are!"

Lorna raises her glass. "It's taken us years," she says, "to get here."

Lorna Adams first saw Milton Berle across a crowded restaurant on December 13, 1990. She was a fashion designer, "basically a single Valley mom who'd worked and raised two kids." Goaded by a girlfriend, she tried to send a drink to his table, but the waiter said Berle had sworn off the stuff. She sent coffee instead. Curious, Berle came over. Thirty-three years her senior, he was the first celebrity she'd ever met. They talked until 2 a.m.

Eleven days later, Milton invited Lorna to a Christmas party at Frank and Barbara Sinantra's home. "I walk in, I was the only person I didn't know," she says. Standing at the bar, she discovered a stacks of cocktail napkins that read " Barbara and Ol' Blue Eyes." "I said, `Oh, I've got to have some of these.'" She took only three. "I wanted to be invited back.

"When I met Milton initially, I think he was embarrassed about our age difference. So he would always introduced me to people like, `Have you met Lorna? She's got three grandchildren.' It used to really piss me off," she says. Lorna's five feet ten, blond, and tends to wear bold clothes, like plaid slacks, say, or silver-studded blue jeans. Milton liked to joke that he was drawn to Lorna because they wore the same dress size. But he'd married two previous women, one of them twice. He felt he was just too old to do it again.

"But then he started to get very comfortable with our situation," Lorna says. "I was semi-moved in--I had photos of myself, my daughters, and my grandchildren around his house." When she was about to turn 50, Milton asked what he should give her. "I said, `Well, maybe we should get married.' He said, `But your birthday's next week. We can't do it that quick.' I said, `Yeah, we can.' I didn't give him a lot of room to think about it." They were married at home and then drove to Chasen's, where 200 people were gathered to celebrate Lorna's 50th. "We walked in and everybody sang `Happy Birthday' Then Milton took the microphone and said, `I want you to meet Mrs. Milton Berle.' To me, it was the most romantic thing."

You don't have to tell the Fourth Wives Club that getting married is the ultimate act of optimism. Before these women pledged to honor and cherish, each one looked deeply into the eyes of a three-time loser and decided the fourth time would be the charm. That's chutzpah.

If you think the Fourth Wives are foolish, however, you're the fool. Yes, as the fourth Mrs. Warren Cowan puts it, "You have to still be romantic to do this after three other times." But they are also pragmatic. To them, marriage is not like roulette, where no matter how skilled you are, the odds are always stacked against you. To them, marriage is more like poker, in that an experienced player has a fighting chance. You can up your odds of winning, they say, by marrying a much older and wealthier man.

`A lot of people look at an older man and a younger girl and say `gold digger,'" says Corinna Fields, a former Miss Universe, who is 21 years younger than her 79-year-old husband. "But they don't understand that you fell in love with the whole package. An older man has a great brain. An older man takes good care of you. An older man makes you laugh."

Most of this club's members navigate a world that has not proved friendly to monogamy: Hollywood. Here, at the nexus of popular culture and capitalism, intimacy is often no match for the bottom line. Everyone knows that the entertainment industry is built on personal relationships, and yet no one is surprised when a marriage ends. It's just another transaction. A divorcing executive will talk of putting his wife "in turnaround." A well-known producer who has married nine times, twice to the same woman, will counter the question "How many wives have you had?" with "You want gross or net?"

Hans appears from the kitchen with a basket of warm rolls. In a starched white shirt and dark necktie, he has the bearing of a four-star waiter. Lorna Berle admits that since Milton's death on March 27, poor Hans has done double duty as butler and sounding board. He's about to get another earful.

"When you have an older husband, you're always young and gorgeous," says Barbara Cowan, whose husband is 78. She doesn't discuss her age.

"You're adored," agrees Alanna Tarkington, whose husband is 70. "Just adored."

"Older men don't even see cellulite," says Carrie Brillstein, 55, who is 16 years her husband's junior. "They can't see it," she adds, squinting to make her point. It could be our imagination--it's hard to tell from behind--but as Hans ducks into the kitchen, he looks as if he's choking on something.

These women have been married before. Carrie Brillstein has taken wedding vows four times, just like her husband. "We say four and four is eight"--she illustrates with her fingers, making an 8 by touching each index finger to each thumb and putting the teardrops together. 'And eight is infinity. So that's it for us."

They go around the table, counting husbands. Alanna: "Three." Corinna: "Two." Lorna: "Three, though I tried to write the second one out of my bio." Barbara: "Four." Annabelle Begelman smiles. "Only three for me," she says. "But one day my late husband was sitting around a table with seven guys, and there were 31 marriages."

Even in this group, that statistic demands a moment of silence. Then the hostess speaks. "I think I really got Milton in the mellow years," says Lorna, who met Berle when he was 82. He was 93 when he died. "If that's not the mellow years, there are no mellow years."