Last spring, Howie Kohlenberg, a 47-year-old beauty products salesman and entrepreneur, appeared on “The Marriage Ref” with his 37-year-old wife, Christine. Since then, Kohlenberg’s struggling business failed, his wife left him to chase Hollywood dreams, and he’s gone bankrupt and now faces eviction. And Kohlenberg’s blowing the whistle on the monster who created this mess: “Marriage Ref” producer Jerry Seinfeld. The NY Post has this groundbreaking scoop:
Kohlenberg says he and Christine were happily married but having money issues with their now-defunct Midtown spa when a friend suggested auditioning for the show. They were picked out of a pool of thousands. “We did it to drum up some business,” he said. “They promised to promote the spa on air. They didn’t.”
Whoa whoa whoa. Is he saying that some people in the television industry… didn’t fulfill a promise? But that’s DISHONEST! This is the first time I’ve ever heard of such moral shortcomings in Hollywood.
“Our arguments were always over the business, but the argument they [producers] wanted was that I took my wedding ring off when I played basketball,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily a true angle because she really didn’t care if I took it off or not.”
This just in: some aspects of reality television may be artificial.
Kohlenberg insists their marital bliss turned into a blistering nightmare during preshow filming. “The people on the show were pumping us up, saying, ‘You’re going to wake up and be stars. You’re going to be famous and make money.’ The producer kept saying her lips looked great, and all of a sudden she was getting a lot of Botox,” he recalled.
“I bought all this snake oil for nothing!”
“Now she’s getting this huge head. She wants to do Playboy. We almost got kicked off the show because she was putting racy photos on Facebook. I’m not saying our marriage was perfect, but it put it in a whole new direction. It was the nail in the coffin. She had all these ideas that ‘I have to live my life and be an actress.’ “
This seems like a good time to point out that that wedding photo is from 14 years ago.
Kohlenberg said that after the “Marriage Ref” segment aired, his wife flew to Los Angeles, where she played a pool girl in the indie comedy film “Chakra Love.” There she met a producer from Canada and went to live with him. Since then, she’s appeared in a New York-based reality pilot, “Shopaholics,” Kohlenberg said.
Oh my. An extra in an indie film AND a reality pilot? Watch out, Oprah.
Kohlenberg says he pleaded in vain for his wife to return home. “Everybody thinks reality shows are glamorous — you’re going to get rich, and it’s going to be the next ‘Jersey Shore,’ ” he said.
Wait, WHAT? Everybody thinks that? I thought that everybody thought that people who went on reality shows were delusional morons. And I think the data backs up my theory more than Howie’s.
