ELLEN & PORTIA MARRIAGE AT BREAKING POINT!
Portia has had enough of the talk show host’s diva tantrums
Woman’s Day reported last month that Twitter erupted after a thread about Ellen Degeneres’ offcamera persona went viral. So spare a thought for her wife, Aussie actress Portia de Rossi, who sources say deals with the talk show host’s diva behaviour every day. “Ellen’s always been, shall we say... determined. But, the past few years she’s crossed the line and pushed her staff way too hard,” says a source. “They’re terrified of her.” Friends close to the couple – who married in August 2008 – tell Woman’s Day there have been problems between the pair for years.
“Ellen has always had the upper hand over Portia and that’s the way she likes it,” explains a source. “She bosses her around like nobody’s business and Portia puts up with it, because she feels like Ellen gave her this luxurious existence in mansions and all the pet horses she could ever have dreamed of.”
It’s partly true. Portia, 47, who was born and raised in Geelong, struggled with chronic anorexia and bulimia before she started dating Ellen, 62, and doctors predicted she would die.
“Ellen nursed her back to life, and apparently has decided she’s forever in Ellen’s debt for that,” says a source of the Ally Mcbeal star. “For a while, Portia enjoyed feeling so loved. But in recent years, she’s been strong enough to become her own person.”
Adds the source, “They’ve had some rip-roaring fights when Portia has ‘stepped out of line’, in Ellen’s view. Portia usually goes running off to her brother in tears, but she always returns to Ellen.
“You can’t blame Portia if she doesn’t want to leave her. Ellen’s one of the most well-connected, wealthy and powerful people in Hollywood and could easily run Portia out of town if they were to break up.”
FEELING UNDERSTOOD
But since the Twitter thread emerged two weeks ago – with some claiming Ellen has “thrown” meals in their faces, and insists staff leave the office if her “sensitive nose” can smell them – our source says, “Portia feels vindicated. By other people putting their stories out there, she feels heard about the difficulties she faces in her marriage.”
For now, Portia is playing it cool since she’s stuck in isolation with Ellen in their Beverly Hills mansion, but she sometimes escapes to their Tudor-style beach house in Montecito.
If a split was on the cards, it would be one of the biggest divorces in celebrity history, with Portia worth $100 million and Ellen worth $740 million. However, under California law all assets have to be divided fairly. “Thankfully their houses are large, so Portia’s been able to avoid Ellen a lot of the time and think about things,” says the source.
“By the end of this isolation, Ellen could very well open the door to a divorce filing.”
The accidental deaths of President John F Kennedy’s grandniece Maeve Kennedy Mckean and her son Gideon in a canoe accident last week has left many believing that America’s own “royal family” is truly cursed.
Maeve, 41, and her eight-yearold son Gideon went missing, presumed drowned, in Chesapeake Bay, near Annapolis, Maryland, on April 2, when they set out in a canoe to recover a ball kicked into the water by one of her other children.
The canoe has been recovered, and the family have been once again shattered with tragedy.
“With profound sadness, I share the news that the search for my beloved daughter Maeve and grandson Gideon has turned from rescue to recovery,” Maeve’s mother Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said in a statement.
“My heart is crushed, yet we shall try to summon the grace of God and what strength we have to honour the hope, energy and passion that Maeve and Gideon set forth into the world.”
The death of mother-of-three Maeve, who like many of the Kennedys spent her life trying to help society’s most vulnerable in public service roles, comes just eight months after the death of her cousin Saoirse Kennedy Hill, who was also a granddaughter of Robert Kennedy.
TRAGEDIES
Former congressman and mental health and addiction advocate Patrick Kennedy, who is the son of the late Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, angrily denied there was such a thing as the “Kennedy Curse” when his cousin Saoirse, 22, was found dead last year.
When she died of an accidental overdose at the famed Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in August, Patrick said he was “offended” by talk of a curse and that his family “is, in many ways, painfully typical”.
But with more than a dozen untimely deaths, including the assassination of his uncle President John F Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, it cannot be
denied that this famous family has suffered more than its fair share of tragedy.
The first tragic death happened in WWII when John’s older brother Joseph, 29, died while on a dangerous mission in a plane crash in 1944. Just four years later, his sister Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy Cavendish, 28, died in a plane crash in France.
The family appeared to enter a golden age in the 1960s when John became US president. With younger brother Robert by his side as Attorney General, many compared the young, progressive administration to the mythical and idealistic Camelot.
But a nation mourned on November 22, 1963, when John was assassinated in Dallas, leaving behind his widow Jackie and their two children, Caroline and John Jr. Five years later, Robert was gunned down at the start of his own presidential campaign.
In 1984, Robert’s son David, 28, was found dead from a drug overdose in a hotel room in Florida, while his brother Michael, 39, died in a skiing accident in Colorado in 1997, when he crashed into a tree.
In 1999, President Kennedy’s handsome son John, his wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren died when the small plane he was piloting crashed into the sea near Martha’s Vineyard in 1999.
The family has suffered more than its fair share of tragedy