A DECADE ago, Deborah Couples was the brassy blond wife of a superstar golfer, taking private helicopters to ritzy New York parties and famed for racing onto the greens to congratulate her husband, Fred, after his victories.
Years later, divorced and closing in on her 50th birthday – a secret she guarded viciously – Deborah was living a modest existence for the first time in her life. The strain, say friends, was too much for the former social diva to bear.
Two weeks ago, she leaped to her death from the roof of a seven-story chapel, 50 miles from her home in Newport Beach, Calif.
“I think she missed the drama in life,” said her New York-based former agent, Matthew Pace. “You can sort of tell by the way she killed herself. She had a need for attention.”
Following a contentious, 1993 bust-up from her husband, Deborah quickly frittered away her monstrous divorce settlement, reported at more than $7 million.
Suddenly, she found herself shut off from her cherished social circles
“Basically, I saw her go from Gucci shoes to Fayva,” says Ken Libman, a former business partner. “She was definitely losing momentum.”
Pace, who last talked to Deborah in 1996, said that, even then, he sensed she was “a confused person, reeling a little bit from being out of the spotlight.”
During her 11-year marriage to Couples, her college sweetheart, Deborah earned a sassy reputation on the staid PGA tour for her ostentatious and boisterous ways.
Always a vocal supporter of her husband, she yelled, “Way to go, Babycakes!” before racing wildly onto the course after his 1992 Masters victory.
“She enjoyed being the golfer’s wife,” says her former lawyer, John Christiansen of West Palm Beach, Fla. “She always prided herself on being supportive of him.”
She also was known for being an outrageous flirt who favored tight-fitting and brightly colored clothes. She kept fit with tennis and polo, the expensive hobby that friends say ultimately drained the bulk of her money.
“They were complete opposites,” says Kathleen Bissell, Fred’s biographer. “But I think he was totally amazed by her. She was his first girlfriend and she had an unbelievable amount of energy.”
The already-rocky marriage hit its breaking point in 1992, when Deborah mortified Fred by doing a strip tease on a table in an English bar in front of his PGA peers. She frequently changed her shirt, baring her bra, on the polo field during matches.
WHILE her friends say Deborah was primarily “wacky in a good way,” they also use words like “aggressive,” “emotional” and “boorish” to describe her.
She was also reckless with money, once spending $300,000 a year on her polo hobby.
She asked for such outlandish sums during her divorce that she became an instant celebrity in Palm Beach, where she also picked up several traffic violations for speeding in her luxury cars.
She requested $160,000 a month in temporary support in 1992, and was granted $52,000 a month. That dropped to $27,000 a month after Couples won an appeal.
When the divorce became final, she received a lump sum of $3 million, plus the Palm Beach mansion.
Giddy from the settlement, Deborah headed to New York where, living in the Trump Towers and then at 67th Street and Park, she latched onto the ritzy social scene.
It was in New York that she met her business partner, Libman, who had just started up a construction and interior-design firm, called Libman and Wolf.
When Deborah asked what price would make her a partner, Libman threw out an “outrageous six-figure number.” The next day, he received a check for that exact amount with a note that said: “Change the stationery.”
But Deborah failed to drum up any business and, after 90 days, Libman returned the check, effectively buying her out.
The two parted amicably, and Libman remains president of the company, still called LWC, Libman, Wolf and Couples, located off Fifth Avenue.
“She seemed to start up a whole lot of different things,” one friend said. “But she wouldn’t stay with any one thing.”
While Deborah was trying to find a life away from the golf tour, her divorce money was gradually drying up. And with that, Libman noted, her demise began.
Despite numerous boyfriends, she never recovered from losing Couples. She never remarried, as Fred did in 1998, and continued to call the 1993 Golfer of the Year her “soulmate.”
She last saw him at the funeral for Payne Stewart, the golfer who died in a 1999 plane crash.
Deborah, friends say, had always craved the spotlight and feared losing either her looks or her money. Suddenly, she was losing both.
She told people, even as a child, that she was a direct descendant of financier J.P. Morgan, a fact refuted yesterday by James P. Morgan, who keeps the family tree.
BY the time of her death, the former diva was physically frail and living in a modest neighborhood in Newport Beach. Her life was a long way from the days of hobnobbing with Ivana Trump, Susan Lucci and Wayne Gretzky.
On the afternoon of Saturday, May 26, a woman friend visited Deborah at her home, then frantically called the Newport Beach police when Deborah sped away in a Toyota 4-Runner.
The friend, whose identity is being withheld by the police, was concerned because Deborah had given her the power of attorney and asked her to tidy up her home.
Soon after, Deborah climbed a ladder and jumped 70 feet off the roof of the Kresge Chapel on the campus of the Claremont School of Theology. She was pronounced dead at 6 p.m.
Couples has no plans to comment on Deborah’s death, according to his agent. His current wife, Thais, told The Los Angeles Times the family was “shocked” by the news.