DINA EASTWOOD WITH DAUGHTERS MORGAN AND FRANCESCA.
“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote. “They are different from you and me.”
He was absolutely right. And we need look no further than Dina Eastwood for confirmation.
On a recent episode of her new E! reality show, “Mrs. Eastwood & Company,” the wife of famed actor Clint Eastwood stood idly by as her stepdaughter Francesca and her photographer beau destroyed a $100,000 Hermes Birkin handbag to make an artistic statement.
To flaunt wealth in such a manner is nothing short of obscene.
Especially, when there are so many needful people throughout the fair land – including California’s Monterey County, where more than a quarter of children are living in poverty right outside the gates of the Eastwood family’s $20 million, 15,000-square-foot palace.
Dina Eastwood, who, as a teen growing up in the working-class city of Castro Valley,California, held minimum-wage jobs at McDonalds and cleaning apartments, obviously has forgotten where she came from.
Otherwise, there’s no way she would have stood for the destruction of a handbag that costs more than the average American earns in more than two years.
The star of “Mrs. Eastwood & Company,” which also features Francesca, her stepdaughter, and Morgan, her biological daughter with Clint, sounds especially disingenuous when she professes herself a person of compassion.
“I must volunteer on nonprofit projects to feel fulfilled,” she told Carmel Magazine.
She also told the magazine that, while she and hubby Clint are been blessed with great wealth, they are inconspicuous consumers.
“It is a value to me and it is a value to Clint,” she said. “I love purses and shoes as much as anybody else, but we do most of our shopping at Marshall’s, Ross and Mervyn’s. Clint’s very non-flippant with money. He’s a Depression-era baby.”
Apparently, the very rich couple’s values did not trickle down to daughter Francesca.
Otherwise, she wouldn’t have gone along with photographer-boyfriend Tyler Shields when he decided that they should burn the red crocodile Hermes bag and attack its charred remains with a chainsaw.
Shields explained that destroying the bag was a way to demonstrate that material objects don’t define a person.
But a far better way for the envelope-pushing photog and girlfriend Francesca to make that point was to sell the $100,000 bag – a coveted favorite of such celebrities as Kim Kardashian and Victoria Beckham – and donate the proceeds to a charity serving the needful.
Dina Eastwood insists that she did not approve of the artistic “statement” by her stepdaughter and her stepdaughter’s beau. But she didn’t stop it. And she even gave the two young vulgarians undeserved publicity on her surreality show.
That makes her no less guilty than they.
