When she left for vacation, Kimba Wood was the distinguished federal jurist who sent junk bond king Michael Milken to prison and almost became attorney general of the United States.
She returned as "THE LOVE JUDGE," lurching past photographers with a disguise out of Doctor Zhivago and taking a spill worthy of Chevy Chase.Wood - tough, brainy and beautiful, as the tabloids say - had been revealed as "the other woman" in a bitter divorce that involved purloined diaries and locked bedrooms, intimate East Side lunches and rural trysts, multiple psychiatrists and Jacqueline Onassis.
It began in the spring. Nancy Richardson - thin, blond and social, a sometime magazine writer and full-time clothes horse with a $350,000 yearly apparel allowance - sued her financier husband, Frank, for divorce. She was 51, he 55. Married for 22 years, they had three children.
He, unknown to her, had begun to see Wood, who at 51 was about to split with her husband, Time magazine columnist Michael Kramer. Two years earlier she had been a top choice of President Clinton for attorney general but withdrew after it was revealed she had hired an illegal alien to care for her son - even though the practice was legal at the time.
The Richardsons were battling over possessions valued at $157 million, including a large Fifth Avenue apartment and a larger Long Island estate, with stable and bowling alley. Each claimed to have been locked by the other out of various bedrooms.
In court papers, he said she was seeing six mental health professionals, including three psychoanalysts; she said he suffered from a "rage disorder" and was seeing a psychiatrist four times a week.
But then Nancy found Frank's handwritten diary, which described his meetings with Kimba. Like water seeking its own level, a copy found its way to the New York Daily News.
At one lunch date, Frank wrote, Kimba "leaned toward me, beaming. I love that picture - the black hair around her pearl white skin, the misty green eyes. . . . (Kimba) is a complete woman and person and able to give love wonderfully and freely."
April 3: "She said she was wild when I touched her hands at Lutece. She said . . . I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU."
April 9: "Wild, wild, wild about her. Overwhelmed. No sense of reserve . . . intoxicated by her body."
April 12: "When I first took her head and kissed her lips. . . . She stiffened and gave slowly, but inexorably."
May 14: "The madness of crazed love . . . ."
The madness was just beginning. The News' tabloid rival, the New York Post, played catchup, interviewing Nancy ("THE WOMAN SCORNED"); reporting she might have a boyfriend, columnist-author Michael Thomas; and describing the titillation in Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains, where Kimba and Frank had a fireside lunch that was "as beautiful an eight hours as I have spent in my life," according to his diary.
But there was no evidence anything had been consummated. Frank's lawyer described the diary as merely "the romantic musings of a bygone era."
Speaking of which, the Post quoted sources saying Frank also had a "dalliance" with Jacqueline Onassis. "Any man would love to have that notch on his belt," Nancy remarked.
All this time Kimba and Frank were in Europe, possibly alone, possibly together. She pulled up to her Central Park West apartment house in a cab Sunday night, wearing a large flowered babushka. She tried to brush past the group of journalists but stumbled and fell on the sidewalk before reaching the lobby.
She had no comment.