Originally appeared on E! Online
Suddenly there he is, not necessarily wearing Armani on Sunday, but nevertheless the real Mr. Big.
Ronald Galotti, long known as the inspiration for the suave businessman in Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” book that later become the hit Sarah Jessica Parker series, did not meet his untimely end on the seat of a Peloton like his TV counterpart.
In fact, the former Condé Nast executive — who dated Bushnell in the mid-90s — is more of an Aidan (John Corbett) these days. After all, the 75-year-old — portrayed by Chris Noth in “Sex and the City” as well as “And Just Like That” — has lived in a farmhouse in North Pomfret, Vermont, with his wife Lisa Galotti for the last 20 years, and has no plans of returning to his dapper Manhattan lifestyle anytime soon.
As he told the New York Times in a July 3 profile, “I’m not sitting in the chair anymore.”
But as for his relationship with Bushnell, the inspiration for the iconic Carrie Bradshaw, and how it played out on the screen for Big and Carrie? It was never more, for him, than a casual relationship.
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“She was a great girl,” Galotti told the New York Times of Bushnell, who is now 66. “We had a great time and there was no future attached to it. And there was never intended to be. I was never deceptive. I never said I love her.”
Indeed, the real-life Mr. Big didn’t move to Paris, but if he had, he also wouldn’t have asked the real-life Carrie to follow him.
“There’s nothing worse than when you love me and I don’t love you,” he admitted, noting of Bushnell’s New York Observer column-turned-book inspired by their relationship, “I can’t help that.”
Mr. Big’s own happily ever after took the form of Lisa, whom he met just a year after Bushnell in 1996. The couple share one 26-year-old daughter, Abigail.
And while the media executive-turned-farmer admitted that he sometimes misses the version of his life that inspired Mr. Big, Galotti’s sure his fate would’ve been the same as the character had he stayed in the business. As he told the New York Times of where he’d be now had he become the CEO of Condé Nast in the early aughts, “Probably dead.”
