Gawker had a
good bit on this, but it's possibly the most awesomely awful wedding announcement I've ever read:
May 27, 2007
Vows
Stephen Gaghan and Minnie Mortimer
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON
IT was the light.
“She was perched on the edge of a picnic blanket, sitting by herself, in perfect light,” the filmmaker Stephen Gaghan said, recalling his first sight of Minnie Mortimer at the pre-Oscars picnic that Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller gave last year in Los Angeles.
“I watched her for two hours,” said Mr. Gaghan, 42, who wrote and directed the film “Syriana.” He knows his light.
Mr. Gaghan approached her and spoke, and found himself talking about North Africa, as if the carpet they sat on was a flying one.
“What do you think about the C.I.A. trying to assassinate the king of Morocco,’ I asked Steve,” recalled Ms. Mortimer, 26, who had recently returned from Morocco. “And he said, ‘Well, I’ve never heard of that.’ ”
Nor did Ms. Mortimer know that “Syriana,” up for two Oscars the next day, was Mr. Gaghan’s work. On his side, he thought he knew his Morocco, where much of “Syriana” was shot. So Mr. Gaghan punched at his BlackBerry, e-mailing Robert Baer, the former C.I.A. agent who was the inspiration for the George Clooney character in the film.
“He asked for my e-mail,” Ms. Mortimer recalled, “and said, ‘I’ll tell you if it’s true.’ ”
Mr. Gaghan, who said he eventually got “a denial, denial, denial” from Mr. Baer, suddenly believed that “Minnie was right.”
When she left Los Angeles for New York, Ms. Mortimer had no idea Mr. Gaghan was left coast royalty, having won an Oscar for his screenplay for “Traffic.” Or that his solicitous BlackBerry messages the next day were coming from his seat at the Oscar presentations, which he attended with his mother, Elizabeth Haag of Louisville, Ky. (His screenplay, though nominated, did not win.)
Mr. Gaghan had no idea Ms. Mortimer was right coast society — a great-granddaughter of Henry Morgan Tilford, a founder of the Standard Oil Company and a member of a sprawling, prominent New York family.
Over the next two months, they corresponded from respective coasts. They had dinner in the East Village. Mr. Gaghan taught Ms. Mortimer to surf in Malibu, where he lived.
In June, they met in Paris, where Mr. Gaghan was filming commercials; Ms. Mortimer was in Europe for the couture presentations. And then, like the music going quiet in a movie and a look exchanged, they decided to stay together.
“We had barely kissed, it was very chaste,” Mr. Gaghan said. “Within three days in Paris, we knew we wanted to spend our lives together.”
Ms. Mortimer, who was to go to Milan, said, “It became clear that it didn’t make sense to leave.”
Mr. Gaghan, who has a son and a daughter with Michael McCraine, an actress he never married, recalled: “I was terrified. At this point in my life, I have two children and work — when you add the pressures of writer-director, that’s 105 percent of every week. I didn’t think this experience was available to me.”
The couple traveled to Biarritz to surf. “We would surf three times a day, have a big lunch, eat moules frites, and go back,” Ms. Mortimer said. And then, there was the light.
“It was incredibly cloudy,” Mr. Gaghan said of one evening the couple went surfing. “Then the clouds dumped two-inch raindrops, and the silver raindrops are backlit. And Minnie drops into a wave and disappears — the biggest wave of the day. She pops up surfing this wave, just flying, with incredible courage. Then she’s standing in the sand, holding her board, and behind her, from one end of France to the other, this rainbow appears. ”
Ms. Mortimer said: “He just asked me to marry him, and I said yes. I went back home with him to Malibu, and we’ve been together ever since. I’ve never been one of those girls who dreamed of their wedding day. Everything changed when I met Steve.”
On May 19, her father, John Jay Mortimer, in a morning coat, stood by the door at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, as guests entered like a bicoastal credit roll: Amanda Burden, Wes Anderson, Louise Grunwald, Charlie Rose, Jeffrey Wright and Ashley and Ogden Phipps II. Mindful of the crowd, the church’s rector, the Rev. Andrew C. Mead, who officiated, made an announcement before the service asking that cellphones be switched off. Gardner, the bridegroom’s 7-year-old son, and Betsy, his 5-year-old daughter, led the procession down the aisle. At the lunch reception, the bride’s mother, Senga Mortimer, an editor at House Beautiful, harried the table decorations like a pro. A dog got loose on the dance floor.
“Personally, he’s funny, and charming, and sweet, and it blows me away, the things he writes,” the bride said of her new husband.
“It’s been a joy you can’t imagine,” Mr. Gaghan said of her. “Minnie’s a calm, strong presence — for me and my children. And I ain’t making it up, man.”
