THE GAY DIVORCES

By MARGARET CARLSON

It wouldn't be surprising if men stayed away from The First Wives Club in stadium-size droves. The three screen-grabbing actresses don't just do well by beating their feckless husbands at the money game; they do good by opening a women's crisis center with the proceeds. They do not shrink from campiness, either, as they vamp through a girl-group rendition of You Don't Own Me in the final scene.

It would be easy to make fun of First Wives but a mistake to miss it. Once you accept the fact that Frank Capra is dead and that Hollywood is remaking The Day of the Jackal in case the original was insufficiently bloody, First Wives is one of the best movies of a very long year. It's funny: "There are only three ages for women in Hollywood--Babe, District Attorney and Driving Miss Daisy," declares Goldie Hawn, who with her collagen-inflated lips is trying to stay in the first phase. It's touching: Diane Keaton is convincing as a woman devastated when her husband reveals he made love to her not because he wanted to reconcile but because he wanted a divorce. And it's satisfying: these women don't just get even; they get back their lives.

It's too soon to know whether the movie will have women talking to the screen, as Waiting to Exhale and Thelma & Louise did. But at the very least, it works as an antidote to the zeitgeist of the '80s, when middle-aged tycoons and their acolytes could suddenly drop an inconvenient first wife without social opprobrium. Time was, a price had to be paid for dumping wife No. 1 just as her usefulness was fading, the kids were leaving home, and she was learning what the sun can do to your face and gravity to your thighs. Then, if you decamped with the 20-year-old assistant, the woman left behind got to keep the house, the friends, the country club and the moral high ground. She could also count on the solidarity of first wives--without a club--who would shun the new woman for moving in to skim off the gravy years.

But around the time that greed got dropped from the list of the Seven Deadly Sins, the informal first-wives club gave way to a marketplace ethic. In magazines, books and movies, a new trophy wife was viewed as one more perk for the corporate shark, career-enhancing proof that his manly takeover skills weren't limited to the boardroom. After all, wife No. 1 was old-think, a mom-and-pop store in an age of mergers and acquisitions. Wife No. 2 by lavishly spreading the shark's money around to hospital and museum boards, was soon lionized in the pages of the Living Section and Vogue.

On the eve of the movie's premiere in New York City, the New York Times sought out some famously ditched first wives, who basked in the sudden attention. What would be truly revolutionary is if first-wife chic traveled from Manhattan to Washington, where the original spouse is usually among the disappeared. The only time a prior marriage is even acknowledged here is when a public official needs someone to blame for an illegal housekeeper or an impropriety. Just last week vice-presidential candidate Pat Choate dragged up his first wife in a lame attempt to show he wasn't an adulterer except in her acrimonious mind. Disgraced G.O.P. consultant Roger Stone, when the story broke about his seeking group sex, also reflexively invoked a vindictive former spouse to deflect accusations--until he was buried under a second week's worth of tabloid documentation, including a canceled check and photographs. If Washington's first wives started dishing instead of going quietly back to Kansas, what a club that would be.