Not Young, Still Restless (8 page)

A woman’s voice responded when I answered.

“Jeanne Cooper? This is Michelle,” she said.

“Who?” I didn’t have a clue who she was, but she cleared it right up for me.

“Michelle,” she repeated. “I’ve been seeing your husband for the past six or seven months, and . . .”

I had no idea where she planned on taking this conversation, but I wasn’t about to hold up my end of it with a roomful of coworkers staring at me. I cut her off and gave her my dressing room phone number. “Call me there in five minutes.” It wasn’t an invitation; it was an order.

I hung up, grabbed the closest inanimate object, which happened to be a coffeepot, and hurled it across the rehearsal hall, where it shattered against the far wall. A lot of sympathetic onlookers quickly moved to clean it up, but I waved them away and did it myself, then headed off to my dressing room, gratefully accepting Julianna McCarthy’s offer to come with me and listen in.

The phone was already ringing by the time we got there. Even I was surprised at how calm and flat my voice was when I answered. “Yes, Michelle, you were saying . . .  ?”

“Well, this is a little awkward, but as I mentioned, Harry and I have been seeing each other for the past six months or so . . .”

“And I hope you enjoyed your red Valentine roses,” I said. “Although the note about his loving you more every year must have confused you. But since you’ve tracked me down at work, I assume you didn’t just call to chat, so what is it you want?”

“Like I said, it’s awkward, and I’m sorry to bother you with this while you’re dealing with your illness.”

“My illness?!”

She actually took a stab at sounding compassionate. “Harry told me all about it, and believe me, he’s made it very clear that he’ll never leave you until you’ve made a full recovery.” Julianna and I pulled our ears away from the receiver to give each other a “Do you believe this?” look. Incredibly, she was getting even angrier than I was. “But the thing is,” Michelle rushed on, “he’s a month behind on the rent, and we bought all this furniture, but I just found out they won’t deliver it until they get a check.”

What do you know, I’d been wrong all these years. Harry hadn’t been robbing Peter to pay Paul. He’d been robbing Jeanne to pay Michelle and God only knows who else. As for this conversation, I’d finally had quite enough.

“Michelle,” I said, “I have good news for you, and I have bad news. The good news is whatever illness I was suffering from, a miracle happened and I don’t have it anymore, so Harry’s all yours, with my blessing. In fact, marry him if you want, even though he doesn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. Really, I mean this, be my guest. But just so you know, here’s the bad news—the bank is closed.”

I’m proud to say I made it through work that day without a glitch. And then I drove home, packed up everything Harry owned in that house, and had it delivered to Harry’s office—or, to be more precise, the office I was renting for him in my agent’s suite of offices.

Harry called a few hours later in a panic. “I just got back to my office and all my things are here. I guess you don’t want me to come home tonight.”

“Not unless you promise to bring me two dozen pink roses,” I shot back in a sickeningly sweet voice that quickly switched to a low growl. “I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Michelle called me, and I just want you to know that as thoroughly disgusted as I am with you, I’m even more disgusted with myself. Good-bye, Harry.”

None of our children was living at home by then. Corbin and Collin had started college, and Caren was thriving at the Idyllwild Arts Academy, a private school near Palm Springs. My plan was to sit down with each of them face-to-face and explain, without going into too many details, that their father and I had separated. Harry, just when I thought I couldn’t despise him more, trumped me by calling them instead, even reaching and devastating Caren at school the next morning with the news that “your mother kicked me out.” I immediately called the headmaster, told him to please keep her in the building until I got there, and made the two-hour drive in just under ninety minutes.

I wish I could say I felt relieved and glad to be rid of a man with such an obvious lack of integrity. But the truth is, the pain and anger were excruciating, compounded by the fact that as the next days and weeks passed, I discovered that Harry’s serial infidelities were the worst-kept secret in town. It seemed as if everyone knew but me, including my agent, who’d been sharing office space with Harry at my expense. Needless to say, I fired him immediately. A well-known soap columnist admitted in private that he’d spotted Harry several times at a restaurant called Jack’s at the Beach, not with Michelle but with Michelle’s best friend, and Harry had been seen by many of our mutual friends with several different girlfriends at screenings all over town while I was home studying the next day’s script. No wonder he’d been so adamant about not wanting to lose me and the children. We were the perfect defense against his having to make any long-term commitments to the many mistresses on whom he was also cheating. Using me was bad enough. Using my children? Really? The word “unforgivable” doesn’t begin to cover it. I’ve been told there are references on the Internet to the fact that Harry and I remained close friends after our separation and divorce. There you have it—absolute proof that you can’t believe everything you read online.

It was an awful, painful, deeply insecure time in my life when there were very few places I could turn where I didn’t sense betrayal, secrets at my expense, and astonishing stupidity on my part. One of the places I could turn to was the
Y&R
studio, where I was valued and where Harry Bernsen meant nothing, and not a day went by when I wasn’t grateful for the safety net my coworkers, and Katherine Chancellor, for that matter, provided me when I needed it most.

T
hings weren’t going all that smoothly for Katherine either, by the way. When her husband, Phillip, learned that his mistress, Jill, was carrying his child, he was ecstatic and asked Katherine for a divorce. Katherine, drunk as a skunk, signed the divorce papers and Phillip flew to the Dominican Republic to put a quick end to his marriage so that he could marry Jill.

Katherine met his plane when he returned to Genoa City and offered to drive him home, during which she tried to convince him to give their marriage another try. When he refused, Katherine pushed the gas pedal to the floor while going around a curve, and the car flew off a cliff. Both Katherine and Phillip were critically injured. Shortly before he died, Phillip had the hospital chaplain marry him and Jill, a marriage Katherine had annulled by successfully alleging that because she’d been drunk when she signed the divorce papers, the divorce wasn’t legal and neither was Phillip and Jill’s marriage.

One day Katherine’s beloved son, Brock (by her first husband, Gary Reynolds), arrived at her door and begged her to let him take her to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The “Friday cliffhanger” that week was a very shaky, hesitant, frightened Katherine stepping through the door of a meeting with Brock by her side. We had no idea if she was going to stay or run away . . . but Monday’s show opened with Katherine taking a deep breath and stepping forward to announce, “My name is Katherine, and I’m an alcoholic.”

I was genuinely honored and humbled by the response to Katherine Chancellor’s rehab. For years afterward, I received thousands of letters from fans telling me that it was Katherine’s battle for sobriety that inspired them to overcome their own alcohol addiction, and at countless personal appearances people not only thanked me for the inspiration Katherine provided but also gave me their AA chips as a token of their gratitude. One woman in particular touched me deeply—she’d kept a note that I’d written to congratulate her on her first month of sobriety that was so old there was a three-cent stamp on the envelope. Katherine’s obvious impact on the
Y&R
audience, and the responsibility that impact carried with it, made such an impression on me that whenever I heard about an upcoming storyline in which Katherine was going to fall off the wagon, I wrote literally hundreds of letters to warn those very special fans what was coming and to remind them that it was only a fictionalized version of what could happen. “Don’t do it yourself,” I told them. “Let Katherine do it for you, and you’ll see, she’ll beat it again.”

I hope each and every one of you knows what your stories continue to mean to me. I’ve never forgotten you, and I never will.

M
eanwhile, back in Beverly Hills, I filed for a legal separation as soon as I kicked Harry out of the house, but it took almost a year to get the actual divorce under way. During that year I worked hard, trying to regroup and getting invaluable emotional support from such
real
friends as Doris Day, who’d gone through her own marital nightmare with her late husband, Martin Melcher; Barbara Stanwyck, who lived up the street; and my darling Barbara Hale, whose friendship I continue to cherish to this day.

Inevitably, all that emotional pain began to manifest itself physically, including an onset of severe stomach spasms. I was at lunch with a dear friend one day about six months into the legal separation when a particularly nasty spasm hit—suddenly I couldn’t breathe, and my stomach distended so horribly that I looked as if I were about eighteen months pregnant. My friend ordered two shots of brandy and told me not to sip them but to belt them down as fast as I could. And what do you know, a few moments later my muscles relaxed, I could breathe freely, and my stomach returned to its normal size. I’d never had any relationship with alcohol at that point in my life, for the simple reason that I just plain didn’t like the taste of it. But if it could calm these stomach spasms, and even my nerves, and make all this not hurt quite so much? Sure, hell, why not start keeping some brandy, or whatever, around the house just in case? It worked too, at first to get rid of the stomach spasms and, before long, to prevent them in the first place. Not only that, but it was also socially acceptable, legal, and readily accessible, and it helped me sleep. Even the taste wasn’t so bad once I got used to it. What had I been thinking, rejecting alcohol for all these years when it had so much to offer?

The divorce proceeding itself was as predictable as the sun coming up. Harry showed up in court with a team of attorneys and a stack of falsified documents. I showed up with one lawyer and the truth. Harry thought he should receive alimony. The judge and I thought he shouldn’t. He thought I should continue living in our Beverly Hills house and pay him $5,000 a month rent. The judge and I thought the house should be sold and I should pay Harry $0 a month rent. The house went on the market the same day the divorce was finalized, and frankly, at that point, I didn’t really care where I went from there or what, if anything, I took with me. I just wanted
out
.

Fortunately, my children did care, and Corbin found a wonderful house for me on Coldwater Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. It was beautiful, secluded, and peaceful but still an easy drive to work, and I loved it there. I spent countless hours decompressing in that house and thinking (maybe even obsessing) about how I got there. The truth, I came to realize, was that while Harry was happy to take every possible advantage of my success, he also resented me for it, and I promised myself I would never again put myself in the position of feeling apologetic for any achievement I damn well knew I’d earned. Nor would I ever again ignore for the sake of convenience what my heart was telling me—in this case, that I’d stayed far too long in a marriage to a man I no longer loved and had honestly come to dislike.

I would and will always give him credit for two things: being one of the most brilliant agents I’d ever seen before his greed and amorality ruined his career, and being the one and only man who could have given me these three magnificent children I wouldn’t trade for any other children on this earth.

And while I thought, and regrouped, and relaxed, and faced facts, I drank. I tricked myself into thinking it helped, that it gave me added clarity—in vino veritas and all that. I became an enthusiastic social drinker, telling myself the lie that it didn’t affect my behavior in the least except to possibly make me more fun at parties, and I drank alone, which did make me privately wonder from time to time if I might be developing a problem. In general, though, having clearly learned nothing at all on this subject from Katherine Chancellor, by the time she’d become clean and sober, I’d become a full-blown alcoholic, and I stayed that way for a good—or frankly not so good—three or four years.

Any illusion I might have had that I was a productive, high-functioning, discreet alcoholic (if there is any such thing) was shattered one day when my son Collin knocked at the door.

“Pack a bag, Mom,” he said as he came striding into the house. “I’m taking you to St. John’s hospital.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked him.

He stood facing me, and to this day I remember and admire how neither his voice nor his eyes wavered for an instant. “Bill Bell called. He has a big storyline coming up for you, and he needs you in rehab.”

I took that in for a long time. Finally I managed to ask, “Is this mandatory?”

“Yes, it is,” he answered, quiet but firm.

My response was as big a surprise to me as it was to him—I blurted out a truly joyful, “Thank God!” and hurried to my room to pack.

I loved rehab. Even during its hardest moments, I was aware that a team of people who’d been trained to help was leading me along an escape route from the prison of alcohol addiction I’d wandered into. I couldn’t have become clean and sober without the entire staff and the ongoing support of Alcoholics Anonymous. (Yes, I’m proud to say I’m a “Friend of Bill.”) Parenthetically, it was an ongoing source of fascination to me that during my stay at St. John’s, I was constantly greeted, even by my therapist, with a cheerful, familiar “How’s it going, Mrs. Chancellor?”

I have no idea what the “big storyline” was that inspired Bill Bell to send me to rehab. I’m not even sure there was one; I think it was just his excuse to demand I get the help I needed. And believe me, I’m convinced that if I had refused, he would have fired me, and good for him. Good for him for caring enough about his show, and about me, to see to it that both of us had the best possible chance to succeed, no matter what it took. There are some network executives and producers today who could learn a valuable lesson from his example and probably save some lives in the process, just like, in so many ways, Bill Bell and
The Young and the Restless
saved mine.