How Brynne Edelsten was almost a runaway bride
It was November 2009 when Brynne Gordon wed Geoffrey Edelsten in a ceremony that guests say was more like the Logies than a wedding. Ten years later, the bride takes us inside the big day.
Stellar
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Australia had never seen a wedding quite like it. On November 29, 2009, guests – 500 of them – descended on the Crown Casino in Melbourne for the union of one of the nation’s richest men, medical entrepreneur and one-time Sydney Swans owner Geoffrey Edelsten, to Brynne, a 26-year-old fitness instructor from Oklahoma, 40 years his junior.
Ask anyone who has planned a wedding and they’ll tell you it costs an eye-watering amount, but the Edelstens’ bill was stratospherically staggering: it came in at $3.3 million.
Perhaps the bride stepping out of a helicopter, which had to be pulled apart and reassembled inside Crown, explains a good chunk of it. Plus the guests were – quite literally – a rent-a-crowd, with several celebrities paid to be in attendance.
Even the invitations were lavish: a DVD narrated by Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander and The Nanny star Fran Drescher – who also attended – and shot on location in Los Angeles by Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall, in which the happy couple re-enacted their “fairytale romance”.
Brynne had always loved reading celebrity gossip magazines and watching reality TV, but, she tells Stellar, she had never set out to live in the spotlight.
“I wanted to be a heart and lung surgeon,” she says. “I was very, very smart [as a child] and not social at all. I was so awkward.”
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The couple met nine months before the wedding. He introduced her to a flashy lifestyle of designer fashion, diamonds and a new yellow Bentley with BRYNNE numberplates.
Soon, she was on magazine covers, red carpets and prime-time TV – first as a contestant on Dancing With The Stars and then in her own reality show, Brynne: My Bedazzled Life.
To outsiders it seemed a highly unorthodox match. Many assumed Brynne must have married for fame or money, but she insists they were wrong.
![“I was very, very smart [as a child] and not social at all. I was so awkward.” (Picture: Tāne Coffin for Stellar)](https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/ba88a57d8ef94a0d9139814d303c1b10?width=650)
“Money is nice,” she admits with her trademark giggle. “Nobody is going to turn money down. But it was never about that. Believe it or not, Geoff can be very, very nice.”
This coming Friday marks what would have been a decade of marriage, and Brynne seems wistful as she recalls the lavish day; her tears and the feeling of overwhelming anxiety, aggravated by a slight hangover, as she made her way towards her husband-to-be.
Brynne says on the day her mother, who was by her side, saw how overwhelmed she was on arrival.
“I cried the whole way. Mum said, ‘Brynne, if you don’t want to, we can run away right now.’ But, of course, I didn’t want to run away. I wanted to marry him.”
Kerri-Anne Kennerley was one of the many bemused guests wondering why she had been invited.
“I remember sitting in this room filled with black curtains,” Kennerley tells Stellar. “Suddenly the lights dimmed, and we heard the sounds of a chopper landing. There were two Ferraris in the corners of the room. And then Brynne arrived.”
Apart from interviewing Geoffrey Edelsten in the 1980s when he was still with first wife Leanne, Kennerley says she barely knew him.
“I unashamedly went for the entertainment,” she admits. “Honestly, it was like a very expensive Logies. I was more excited to be sitting on a table with Fran Drescher than anything else.”
Kennerley recalls how her late husband John had earlier walked into the bathroom to find Brynne sitting on the bench in the men’s room crying, being consoled by a couple of friends from the US, two of the few people she knew at the vast gathering.
What surprised Kennerley most about the wedding, she says, was the lack of interaction between the bride and groom. “I never actually saw them speak to each other. And Brynne got hammered. It looked like she was sipping water, but it must’ve been neat vodka.”
Another guest, The Masked Singer judge Dave Hughes, remembers witnessing a heated encounter between the newlyweds on the big day.
“Her and Geoffrey’s only conversation during the wedding night seemed to be her yelling at him,” he quips.
Brynne maintains their union was never consummated. “It was a very lonely marriage because he worked very hard,” she says. “Geoff would be in bed by 7pm every night. He would come home and I would spend a few hours with him after work, and then I would go and catch up with friends.”
The couple, who split in 2014, are still battling over money, but Brynne says she bears no ill will towards her ex-husband.
“Carrying a grudge is not going to affect the other person; it’s going to affect you and how you feel every day. I don’t want to live with that level of anger and resentment. There are definitely times when I feel really frustrated about it, when times are hard [financially].”
“But, at the same time, there’s nothing I can do about it right at this moment. The lawyers are doing the best they can, and that’s all I can do.”
As for her wedding dress, 10 years on she is flirting with the idea of selling it, since she has no plans to get married again. But that’s not to say she has given up on finding love once more.
“I’d like to be The Bachelorette,” she says, giggling again. “I could do that... Line them up!”
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Originally published as How Brynne Edelsten was almost a runaway bride