My Life So Far (81 page)

“Let’s block out the times when we can get together this summer, okay? You got a calendar?”

“Not really, but it’s okay.” I quickly ran my mind down the left curve of my year—July, August, September . . . nothing. “I really don’t have much planned.”

Before there could be any more discussion, Ted had penciled me in for one or two weekends every month for the next four months, the follow-up coming just three weeks hence at his place in Big Sur. Yep. In addition to all the other properties, Ted apparently owned a place that jutted into the Pacific right above Pfeiffer Beach.

“Ted, this is kind of fast, don’t you think? I mean, don’t we need time to get to know each other before we lock in all these dates?” I didn’t know him. I didn’t understand that he needed to know way in advance who he was going to be with so he wouldn’t be caught alone, God forbid, even for one night. Over his shoulder I could see up to September. Most of the days were already penciled in.

B
y the time we got to the Bozeman airport, I was a noodle, limp from overstimulation. If the super-stupendous performance (I swear, it felt as if a 3-D stereophonic Shakespearean-level, sound-and-light show had rolled over me) I had been privy to over the last thirty-some hours had been designed to knock my socks off, it had succeeded. My socks, my nerves, and my tongue were knocked. Over and out. On top of it all, he dropped me off at the airport two hours early, because he had to go to the private airport next door, where his jet was waiting to take him to Atlanta, where he was going to a fiftieth-anniversary celebration of
Gone with the Wind
(he owned it)—with a girlfriend who’d rented a Scarlett O’Hara gown just for the occasion. He was, of course (could I have doubted it?), going as Rhett Butler. He didn’t want to be late. Okay, so we left it there. It felt bad. So much performing and then this. Off to the next one. I thought, Well, I had a lot of fun with this guy. He’s totally amazing, and I definitely have a crush, but I must have bored him to death. I didn’t say anything interesting.

W
hen I got home, I talked with my therapist and did a lot of deep breathing. Something about Ted felt . . . dangerous, and I didn’t want my heart broken again. I ended by writing him a letter thanking him for the weekend, telling him that he was a national treasure that deserved to be nurtured and preserved and that I’d had a lot of fun—but that I didn’t feel good about the way he’d left me at the airport and I really wasn’t sure all those dates we’d made were appropriate. The chemistry between Ted and me had been powerful, and I was fascinated by his put-everything-on-the-table forthrightness, but I think I was afraid of how vulnerable I’d be if I actually allowed myself to fall in love with him. Instead I fell into lust with a tall, dark, handsome Italian seventeen years younger than me, who made me feel like a girl again.

I called Ted to tell him I had fallen in love with someone and that I wouldn’t be coming to Big Sur.

“Oh no!” I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. “I knew I should never have left you for this long. I was afraid this would happen. Dammit! Oh, come on . . . just for one weekend. You can’t end it like this. We just started. You gotta give me another chance.”

“No, I can’t, Ted. I’m sorry, but I am in love with someone else.”

“Well, I’m coming out there. You’re going to have to tell me to my face. I’ll be there in three days. Make a reservation at that same place where we had dinner that first time.”

Three days later, when the waiter asked Ted for his dinner order, he replied, “I’ll just eat crow and some humble pie for dessert.” I marveled at his humor and resiliency, given that he kept insisting this was an utter tragedy for him. But then he began reciting other tragedies, like the time when he was in his early twenties and had come home from school for a vacation to learn that his girlfriend Nancy, the love of his life, had fallen in love with someone else. He’d sat on a high-up hotel window ledge and contemplated suicide until he remembered his father’s words: “Women are like buses. If you miss one, another’ll always come along.” That did it. He vowed never to let himself be that vulnerable again. (Shades of Vadim . . . and Dad . . . and Tom. Hmm.)

I sat back and tried to decipher what was going on in the head of this unusual man. Was he convincing himself that I was, after all, just another bus? Was he really upset? I didn’t quite get it yet—that with Ted what you see is what you get, no hidden agenda. All I had to do was listen
carefully.
It was all right there, like it or not. Full (though involuntary) disclosure.

I recall telling him that I was looking for intimacy with a man and that I thought I would find it with my Italian boyfriend. “This is what has eluded me so far. Before I die I want to know intimacy, and intimacy may be the one thing I don’t think you’re good at.”

Three months later I went to visit my brother and his wife, Becky, and take a week of classes at the Orvis Fly Fishing School in Bozeman. I had booked the classes in early May, a month before I ever met Ted. In fact, I told Johnny Carson on his show in early spring that every important man in my life had been a fisherman—deep-sea, bass, everything but fly-fishing. I told Johnny that I intended to learn fly-fishing so I’d be ready for the next one.

Somehow Ted found out that the classes were taking place in the old railroad station–turned-hotel a mere twenty minutes from his ranch (The Flying D, the big one that had been in escrow in June) and he showed up one afternoon, nervous and talkative, to suggest I take the final “exam” on his Cherry Creek and stay for dinner.

When I arrived the day of my exam, Ted hovered about, insisting on driving me to the creek himself with the fishing instructor following in his truck. Once more I was impressed at his sense of humor: “I know you’re looking for intimacy, so I’ve started taking intimacy pills.” And later: “Enough of this stuff with younger men. What about older men’s rights?” And in a quiet moment he turned to me and said, “It would be a shame if we were eighty by the time we finally get together.”

Dinner that night was strained. The Scarlett O’Hara girlfriend was there with him, and Ted made no effort to disguise his interest in me. I can’t imagine how three’s-a-crowdish she must have felt. My brother, always there for me when I need support, was with me. As we drove away I could hear Ted calling to me, “I’ll take Italian lessons,” “I’ll get myself stretched to six feet five” (the height of my Italian boyfriend). Total charm. But I am basically a serial monogamist, so that was that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

TED

All I know is I get what I want.

Maybe because I want things more than others do.

—T
ED
T
URNER

—I
MTIAZ
D
HARKER,
from “Honour Killing”

T
HE
I
TALIAN STALLION IS GONE.”
That’s all the postcard said. Unbeknownst to me, my sister-in-law, Becky, a loyal Ted supporter and CNN junkie who was rooting for our coupling, had decided to alert him the moment I was single again. So when Ted’s call came early one morning, I was surprised.

“Hey, I hear you’ve broken up with the Italian. Wanna come up to Big Sur for that weekend we never had?”

“You’re really something, Ted,” I said, again impressed at his persistence.

This time he picked me up at Santa Monica Airport in his jet and we flew to Big Sur together. I was excited to see him and struck by his handsomeness and candor. Once airborne, he asked me if I was a member of the mile-high club.

“What’s the mile-high club?” I asked.

“You know, when you’ve made love in a plane—a mile up in the sky?”

“No, I haven’t done that,” I replied, feeling quite square.

“Wanna do it right now?” he asked with boyish exuberance, and before I could inquire about the logistics, a fully-made-up double bed materialized where just minutes before there had been a row of seats.

“Oh boy! Playtime,” he said gleefully.

Thus began my initiation into the mile-high club.

Driving from Monterey airport in a small Jeep identical to the one he had in Montana, he talked about how he had an okay thing going with a woman in Atlanta and needed to know if I would commit to being his girlfriend, because if not, he didn’t want to blow what he already had.

“But, Ted, I can’t do that till we know each other. How can we know if this will work? Why don’t we just go with the flow . . . see how things work out?” It wasn’t the definitive answer he was looking for, but “go with the flow” became his mantra for two years.

Ted’s Big Sur house is tiny and mostly glass. It sits atop a narrow mountain ridge that juts out into the azure blue Pacific, Pfeiffer Beach on one side and on the other a heart-stopping, southern view down the rugged coast. I was familiar with this view, having often stayed in the Big Sur Hot Springs Lodge in the early 1960s, before it became the famous Esalen Institute, a center of the “human potential” movement. Vanessa had even lived and worked there for a time.

Big Sur is an intense place, all about edges. When edges of things meet, energy is ratcheted up. There is a mysterious altering of molecules in the air, and those who live at the edges are caught up in it. Mary Catherine Bateson writes that it’s at the edges where disciplines meet that thinking becomes most creative: “Where lines are blurred, it is easier to imagine that the world might be different.” Maybe that’s why some people prefer edges. In Big Sur’s offshore waters, the warm Pacific currents converge with the cold arctic waters and this, coupled with Big Sur’s savage topography, creates wild clashings of extremes. Of course Ted would love Big Sur—he’s a man made to live on edges. Brave, brash,
edgy.

Surrounding the house is a terraced garden, wild and tangled, the kind I like, and a wooden hot tub built on a ledge with the view of the coastline.

“Pretty great, huh?” he said as he walked me around the garden. “Ted Turner actually owning all this . . . the most beautiful spot in Big Sur.”

I was discovering that Ted is, in the words of novelist Pearl Cleage, a man who enjoys “creating a perfect moment but can’t let you enjoy it for reminding you how perfect it really is.” I could barely contain the desire to say, “Well, actually, Ted, there’s a place up Limekiln Creek that’s more beautiful,” but I bit my tongue. Standing out on this knee of seacoast, looking down onto Pfeiffer Beach, I told Ted about my long-standing feelings for Big Sur, but while he said, “Oh, that’s great,” I could tell he wasn’t really interested. I remember feeling a shiver when it dawned on me that being with Ted would mean being divorced from my own history.

During dinner I again noticed that my words lay like droplets on an oil slick, never penetrating his surface. This vague indifference to what was not himself left me feeling unseen. The next morning I told him, “I don’t think this will work, Ted. I’m sorry. You want to push me into some sort of commitment. But something doesn’t feel right and I don’t want you to blow that other relationship. I think I’d better go home.”

O
ver the following months I dated other men. I fell asleep on a date with a real estate developer from Laguna Beach. A Beverly Hills doctor took me out several times, but when he told me that he’d gone to South Africa with Frank Sinatra and become convinced that Zulu tribal leader Mangosuthu Buthelasi was the true nonviolent peacemaker there, not Nelson Mandela, I stopped seeing him. Ted called fairly regularly, and there was a constant niggling inside my gut telling me I’d blown my best chance at having the relationship I was searching for, that the problems I’d sensed were really my own, not Ted’s.