Andrea Peyser

Andrea Peyser

US News

Cheryl Hines and RFK Jr. need all the luck they can get

Kennedy watchers, hopeless romantics and the rest of us cynics want to know — if Cheryl Hines can take it, why can’t we?

Hines, 48, the actress best known for her role in TV’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is about to win the jackpot. (Some of my friends call it the “booby prize” — or worse, the “Bobby prize.’’) She’s set to become the third wife of Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy Jr., the 60-year-old son of slain US Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and his widow, Ethel, and nephew of slain President John F. Kennedy.

The middle-aged pair is to exchange vows, The Post’s Page Six reported, in a ceremony at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., during an annual summer clan reunion. Let this serve as a warning to the prospective bride:

Marry this man at your own peril.

As The Post’s Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein reported, RFK Jr., a lawyer and environmental activist, kept files of women’s names in his cellphone. One list included the names and phone numbers of 43 women, each notated with the letter “G,” which his late wife, Mary Richardson, believed was code for “goomah,” Italian slang for mistress.

One woman’s name contained in the digital little black book is Cheryl Hines.

Another is Chelsea Chapman Kirwan. She’s the 42-year-old Greenwich, Conn., socialite who’s embroiled in a divorce battle with her plastic-surgeon husband, Laurence Kirwan. He believes his wife, who met RFK Jr. in a Westchester County gym, had an affair with the Kennedy scion beginning several months before the Kirwans separated in the summer of 2012 and, allegedly, at the same time RFK Jr. romanced Hines, according to a friend of Laurence Kirwan.

The pal said RFK Jr. could be called as a witness in the nasty divorce case.

Awkward!

Mary Richardson, who suffered from depression and struggled with alcoholism, committed suicide at age 52, hanging herself in the barn of the Westchester County home she once shared with RFK Jr. in May 2012. She married him in 1994 and bore him four children. RFK Jr. filed for divorce in 2010.

Some husbands collect baseball jerseys. Others amass beer bottles. Two months before her death, Richardson shared her estranged husband’s compilation of women’s names, arranged alphabetically by first name, with a friend. Some women on the list had the same first names and were distinguished by their professions or home cities. At least five women were from Toronto, and one was from Paris. Others came from Palm Beach, Fla., Alaska, Aspen, Colo., Miami, Montreal, Cleveland and Pensacola, Fla.

What was his connection with these gals? I reached RFK Jr. on his cellphone, and he refused to comment for this column. He must still be mad at me.

RFK Jr. called me three days before the start of his sister Kerry’s February drugged-driving trial in Westchester. “Kerry’s been instrumental in freeing political prisoners and dissidents from around the globe from imprisonment and torture” as president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, he told me. I had no clue what that had to do with her driving ability.

I wondered in print if RFK Jr. was “loyal — or delusional’’ for defending an entitled dame who could have hurt or killed innocents, even herself, when she drove her SUV on a highway while zonked on the prescription sleeping pill Ambien and proceeded to smash the vehicle into a tractor-trailer truck. Kerry Kennedy, 54, the former wife of New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was acquitted of a misdemeanor charge of driving while ability impaired by drugs, by a jury whose members I called “starstruck.”

I guess my invitation to the RFK Jr./Hines nuptials got lost in the mail.

Is the public willing to excuse allegations of bad behavior committed by rich, privileged liberals? Or have the once-puritanical American attitudes toward infidelity simply grown more French? Tales of the sexual indiscretions enjoyed by President Kennedy and his brother have only improved their long-term images as virile leaders. President Bill Clinton’s popularity soared after news emerged of his adulterous dalliances with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky — a whopping 73 percent of the public approved of his job performance in a December 1998 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. RFK Jr. holds no elective office.

Yet I can’t help but believe that people who allegedly stray not only cheapen the institution of marriage, they wreck it by lowering acceptable standards of human conduct.

In an entry to RFK Jr.’s 2001 diary reviewed by Vincent and Klein, he wrote about grappling with “my greatest defect . . . my lust demons.” He had to “avoid the company of women. You have not the strength to resist their charms.”

In addition to his four kids with Richardson, RFK Jr. has two children with his first wife, from whom he was divorced, and Hines has a 10-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.

Let’s wish this couple mazel tov.

They’ll need all the good luck they can get.

Tatum’s son takes disease-y way out

Cops busted Kevin McEnroe, the son of former tennis star John McEnroe and actress Tatum O’Neal, in Manhattan’s East Village last week, authorities said, as he tried to score cocaine and prescription pills like a common junkie. He was charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance.

Then, folks in the drug-treatment industry came to a rapid conclusion in messages posted on the Web: The young man apparently is the “victim’’ of the genetic disease of drug addiction, which he likely inherited from his mom, O’Neal, who’s been hooked on heroin. Six years ago, she was arrested while trying to buy cocaine and crack on the Lower East Side, then avoided jail time by pleading guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct, paid a $96 fine and agreed to attend a mere two half-day sessions in a drug-treatment program.

One thing seems clear: Treating accused drug buyers like helpless sufferers of a “disease’’ only infantilizes them. It doesn’t help them.

Coffee clash

Starbucks is set to open its first caffeine-slinging outpost in obnoxiously hipster-heavy Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and The West, a coffee house located a block from the spot, has no problem with that. For real!

“We have bathrooms, too . . . No, seriously,’’ owner Esther Bell is quoted as saying on The West’s website. The cafe sells coffee, plus beer and cocktails that you can’t get at Starbucks. Is there room for two sets of bathrooms in Williamsburg?

You can’t stop progress.

So, this is CNN

A CNN correspondent called Israelis who she said were harassing her “scum.’’ Diana Magnay sent out this angry tweet after reporting on the Israeli-Hamas conflict: “Israelis on hill above Sderot cheer as bombs land on #gaza; threaten to ‘destroy our car if I say a word wrong.’ Scum.’’ It was later removed. A CNN spokeswoman said Magnay was reassigned to Moscow.

She should be fired for her blatant display of bias.

Hey, at least she eats

“I lick the cheese off Doritos and put them back in the bag,” Chrissy Teigen, a 28-year-old cover model for Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, told The New York Times about her bizarre relationship with junk food.

Gross.

While I wouldn’t want to share a salty snack with Teigen, this might spell progress in the fight against eating disorders. At least she doesn’t upchuck the chips.