My First Five Husbands (30 page)

Bill and Marie, taken above my back forty acres in Encino.

With Buster Big Balls in my Encino living room, 1992. Some cat, huh?

School let out for the summer, Mark went to Oklahoma, and I started house hunting for something comfy and cozy with a good music studio for Mark. The perfect place popped up on Doheny Drive in Hollywood, just above Sunset Strip. My dad came out, remodeled Mark’s studio and bedroom, and built a beautiful wooden fireplace façade—his own design—in the living room. He also started replacing all the plastic water pipes under the house with copper pipes, but we had some planks stacked outside the garage, and some inspector came by, asking, “Can I see your permit?”

Oops.

Bill had no permit, and to make matters worse, that section of town didn’t allow copper pipes, only plastic, and we also had to change the garage door back to its original form, even though it had been altered by a previous owner. Mad as all hell at the dumb California laws, Bill finished the work and returned to Oklahoma, where things made sense.

At the garden nursery to buy plants for our swell new house, I saw a workman about to heave a half-grown kitten into the alley and called out, “Stop! I’ll take that cat!” A black-and-white longhair with a black Charlie Chaplin mustache, Celestine was pure sweetness. Sadly, dear Grover had recently died during surgery for an old injury.
Dammit
. But he had three good years with us, finally knowing that he was loved, the big round-eyed sweetie.

B
efore Lette met Jack, she had had a brief fling with a charming Greek realtor. Early forties, six foot two, big head of thick, dark hair, brown eyes, well-built. A mite weak in the chin, but he camouflaged it with a nicely manicured beard. Some people thought he looked like Dean Martin, but I thought he was more of a poor man’s Perry Como. Being in residential real estate, he dressed like a high roller, and I must say, he did look mighty good in suits. The Greek remained on the Castle dinner party guest list, and as you may have guessed, one thing led to another, as one thing is inclined to do. Especially when that one thing is little ol’ me.

So buckle up, folks. We’re about to go for a rather jolting ride.

The first time The Greek squired me to dinner, late in the summer of 1975, he took charge in a glad-handing sort of way. He knew the place, and they knew him. I was impressed with how he handled himself. It’s nice when someone is genuinely proud and happy to have you on his arm. The conversation was not especially scintillating. He wasn’t witty, but he was high-spirited, so we laughed a lot. We started going to Lette’s soirees together, though he always got sleepy and wanted to leave before I was ready. He also went home from work every afternoon for a nap. For a grown-up, he sure needed a lot of sleep.

One afternoon, he came over to my house and totally missed his nap.

The Greek was masterful in bed—not tender or especially original, but he got the job done, performing with gusto. One afternoon, we had sex five times in a row.
Five!
We were both amazed at ourselves. The man obviously loved sex, which gave us something in common, though he had one move that always reminded me of those mechanical oil drills that seesaw relentlessly on the Oklahoma fields. Nonetheless, I’ll give the man a B for bumptious enthusiasm.

We had a good time folk-dancing in downtown L.A. He knew all the Greek dances, and I picked them up quickly. (Folk-dancing can be a blast, although the Greek dances always featured the men, the women confined to waving around decorously while the guys jump and stomp.) He also took me to visit his hometown in West Virginia, an economically deprived place where his relatives lived simply with their big families. He and I got along fine and there was a spark there, but I didn’t find him smart or interesting enough to ignite much fire, dammit. But he was the only bull in the pasture at the moment, and I figured, hey—you don’t have to go completely gaga over every guy you date, do you? (No, Rue, but you sure as hell don’t have to marry them, either!)

As we got to know each other, I began to get intimations that he was much more politically conservative than I, voting not for the common good or the big picture but for the best immediate advantage to his business, which surprised me, because he came from a poor immigrant family who ran a little grocery. He’d gone to college on a basketball scholarship, then joined the Marines, and from there moved to Hollywood with the goal of becoming an actor, but he had no natural talent. Ambition, yes—but the bells, he did not ring.

“My father passed away when I was in high school,” he said with tears in his eyes. “My mother didn’t speak English, and I remember watching her carry heavy boxes of beer, working in that store until she died.”

Relating this story always made him cry. I should have realized then that he was scared of being poor and was determined to have money, because I had the same fear and the same goal. I had started Mark’s college fund when he was four and always saved whatever money I could, not wanting ever to be old and poor and dependent. Being young and poor is okay, being old with money is okay, but being old
and
poor? Not okay. The difference between me and the Greek, as it turned out, was that I planned to earn my money, not marry it.

I
n the spring of 1976, while Mark was finishing his senior year and I was spending my
Maude
hiatus in Ohio doing a play, a taxi pulled up in front of the house and a guy called out to Mark, “Is this 1201 Doheny Drive?”

“Yes,” Mark shouted back.

The guy crowed,
“FAR OUT!”
and ran to get his bags.

It was my Levi’s-dropping pal, Brad “Isn’t it a lovely day?” Davis. He’d just finished shooting
Sybil,
in which he played the boyfriend of at least a few of Sally Field’s several personalities. Mark put him in the front bedroom, and they stayed fast friends for the next sixteen years.

An amateur theatre group in Hollywood was doing a meticulous six-month rehearsal of Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard,
which came off very well for a non-union play, and The Greek performed relatively well in it. He played the self-made neighbor of the cherry orchard’s financially depleted owners. His character makes repeated offers to buy the property, both to save these dreamers from ruin and to cut down the old orchard for commercial development. The family is finally forced to sell, and the play ends, you may recall, with the sound of heavy axes felling the grief-stricken family’s beloved orchard. I could have taken it as an omen. (I know, I said I don’t believe in omens, but this one was the exception.)

“We need to get married,” The Greek abruptly announced in September. “If we don’t get married now, we’re going to drift apart.”

I stood there with the phone to my ear, feeling cornered. The old panic loomed.
Drift apart?
What’s
that
supposed to mean? He was going to dump me? I would be alone? But wait, wait! I thought I was over that “I must have a man or I’ll die!” neurosis.

“I’m just…I don’t think…I’m not ready for marriage,” I finally said.

“I need a commitment from you, Rue,” he said. “Now.”

Oh, dear. C’mon, Rue, baby…say the words…
Let me think it over
. You can do it!

“I need to think it over!” I blurted out, and hung up the phone.

Hurray! Therapy
über alles
! For the moment.

I couldn’t think. Frozen with panic, I paced the room.
What to do? What to do? Tom doesn’t love me. I am alone. Now this man will drift away, and I’ll be even more alone.
I felt myself getting stampeded over the cliff again. Why didn’t I call a therapist? Why didn’t I call Lette, who would have given me a good swift kick? Nothing entered my mind except ending the unbearable panic, so I called The Greek back.

“Okay. Yes. I’ll marry you,” I said. And the panic evaporated on the spot.

I wasn’t happy, but I was enormously relieved. Anything was better than that quagmire of abandonment and desperation.
Heck, it won’t be so bad,
I told myself.
He has a lot of nice qualities, I can make it work,
blah blah blah. Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.

The Greek found a pretty house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Studio City: three bedrooms downstairs, a master suite upstairs, large pool, spacious fenced yard for all our animals, including his Irish setter. There was a large roofed back patio where Mark’s groups could get together to jam. Not as suitable as the soundproof studio my dad had built him, of course, and Mark was not pleased to leave Doheny Drive, but once again, had I consulted him? Not that I recall.

Throughout all those years, Mark had no notion of my panic problem. He probably figured I
wanted
to marry The Greek. Mark was funny and intelligent, into music and art, while The Greek was into football games and real estate, so they had zilch in common. For that matter, The Greek and I had about as much in common as a blowfish and a baby’s butt.

I sold my house to make my half of the down payment on the new place while The Greek used his real estate savvy to avoid spending any of his own cash. I arranged for the personal portion of my income from
Maude
to go into our joint account, putting the larger portion into my pension plan in the loan-out corporation I’d formed in 1975, when I was finally starting to pull down some real money. The Greek had acted as witness to the signing of those papers, in fact, just weeks before he called with the ultimatum about getting married!