Prairie Tale (24 page)

A short time later, the phone rang. Since I knew it was Bruce, I answered in what I considered to be my sexiest voice. His voice was way better. To this day, his voice still kills me. It sounds like whiskey and cigars, and it is flat-out sexy without him even trying. We made small talk before he asked if I wanted to go out sometime.

“Sure, I’d love to,” I said, trying to play it cool.

“When are you available?” he asked. “Dinner? Lunch? What do you want to do?”

Normally I would have been shy and reticent about such an invitation. Given the state of my life at the time, I didn’t feel at the top of my game. In fact, I had stuffed most of my self-esteem in drawers with my summer clothes and had been living like a semirecluse in baggy sweaters for the past few months. So I am not really sure where my response came from, but I somehow channeled some forties film-star moxie and said, “Well, I’m not doing anything right now. How about lunch?”

Bruce laughed.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll pick you up in about fifteen minutes.”

I grabbed my nanny, Gladys, by the arm and raced with her upstairs, taking clothes off, putting others on, and asking her what looked good. We were going to the Cheesecake Factory and I didn’t want to look too dressy or too casual. I couldn’t wear sweats, but a dress was too much. I finally settled on the right combination of jeans, a T-shirt, and cowboy boots, which was and still is my uniform. I put on mascara, pinched my cheeks, and waited for Bruce.

I was peering out the bay window in the kitchen with Gladys when he pulled up in a little convertible Mercedes. He didn’t get out of the car as much as unfolded himself from it; it was so small, and he was so tall and lanky. Gladys turned to me and said, “Oh my God, he’s handsome.” I agreed. Then the doorbell rang. I smiled at Gladys and chirped, “I’ll be back when I’m back.”

Lunch could not have been more comfortable. Within fifteen minutes, Bruce and I were laughing as I recalled the first time we had met, which he didn’t remember. It had been on a
Battle of the Network Stars
in 1981. Rob was with me, and I introduced myself to Bruce between swim races after having stared at him for most of the day. Bruce had said he knew exactly who I was; his then two-year-old son, Sam, who was with him, watched
Little House
, which he called “the horsey car show.” Then Bruce was summoned to an event.

“You said you had to go and patted me on the head,” I said.

“I did?” he said with a wince.

“You were also wearing a Speedo,” I said, smiling. “That wasn’t lost on me.”

Smiling sheepishly, Bruce laid his cards on the table, explaining his personal life was complicated. In an apologetic tone, he said his hands were full. I understood. In case he hadn’t read it in the tabloids, I reminded him that my five-year marriage had just blown up. I wasn’t even officially divorced. We laughed at each other over spinach and artichoke dip and by the time we paid the bill we knew there was an attraction and that something was going to happen. The question was when.

I wasn’t prepared for that attraction, and it blew me away. I didn’t necessarily want to be alone, but I thought it might be nice to have a series of friends with benefits. I had a child in my life and the last thing I wanted was to get involved with someone.

Yet as cliché as it sounds, I knew Bruce was
the guy
. Did I know the straits and narrows we would have to navigate, indeed survive, before we would get to that place of happily ever after? No, I had no idea. But things happened right away that convinced me my gut was right. On the way home from lunch, I asked him to drive me to Saks while I went to the Clinique counter and bought face cream. He didn’t come in with me, but he greeted me with a patient smile when I got back. In the driveway, I invited him to a screening of my latest movie,
With a Vengeance
.

“I have no idea why I’m asking you,” I said. “But it feels right—and I think we’ll have a good time.”

“I’d love to,” he said.

Going to those types of events with Bo had been unpleasant. He was terribly insecure and became upset if I had a conversation with someone other than him or forgot to introduce him. He also forbade me to disagree with him in public and once left me standing in the middle of Benedict Canyon because I had taken exception to something he had said at the dinner table. But the screening with Bruce was different. As I chatted with people, Bruce asked if he could get me a glass of wine and some cheese and fruit on a plate.

I was stunned. For years, I was Rob’s appendage, and then I was the woman who was trying to build up Bo. Now I was with a guy who was absolutely my equal, someone who understood my responsibilities that night and decided he was going to make it easier for me. It got even better. At one point, I lost track of Bruce’s whereabouts. When I looked around, I saw he was involved in his own conversation. He knew people, and if he didn’t know them, he introduced himself.

Moment by moment, I was falling for this guy whom I’d known for only a day. Then came the pièce de résistance. The movie ended and we went back to Bruce’s for some coffee. I was mesmerized when I walked into his house—it was a major, man-size house, which he owned, at the end of a cul-de-sac (he also owned the barn with horses across the street). From the way I gawked and gazed at each room, you would have thought I had never seen furniture before. I was impressed at how together he was. Also with the way he offered me freshly brewed coffee. Instead of taking it, though, I pointed toward the ceiling. He looked up.

“What?” he asked. “Do you see something?”

“You have a chandelier,” I said.

He gave me a questioning look.

“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “You have a chandelier.”

“Yeah, it’s nice,” he said. “Real antlers, too.”

I couldn’t articulate it, but that chandelier was so symbolic to me. It meant he had a home that he owned and a career that was flourishing. He was a full-grown man, confident, sexy, smart, independent, and together. Bruce was a grown-up but he still had that bad-boy glimmer in his eyes. He was trouble. Trouble with a capital
T
. I had finally met my match.

B
ruce has since told me that when I opened the front door the day we first went out to lunch, he knew we were going to be together. He didn’t say how long he thought we were going to be together. To him, together meant going to bed. He was juggling several women, all of whom were viciously vying for his attention. But those women were dispatched within the second week of this redhead entering his life, and we enjoyed each other’s company dressed and undressed.

Because both of us had children who had been through our separate marital storms, we kept them out of the equation for a long time, and we determinedly kept our relationship out of the public eye. Aside from the physical attraction, I liked that Bruce was his own man. He was opinionated. We had been in the industry for almost the same amount of time, and we shared an appreciation of home and family.

During the early days of our courtship, he would saddle up his horse and ride over to my house. From the trail, I would hear him yell, “Hello, the house!” I would walk out on the balcony, wave, and then saddle up my horse and we would go on a ride together. One day we were sitting on our horses out in the middle of the Ahmanson Ranch, and I said to Bruce, “This feels very Gable and Lombard to me.”

“Yes, it does,” he agreed.

“But the TV version,” I added.

We had a lot of dinners at my place, and we spent a lot of nights at his house. Bruce was amazed he was dating someone who could cook. I was still impressed by his chandelier. I drank coffee back then, and I enjoyed waking up to the sound of him grinding beans and then bringing me a fresh-brewed cup of coffee in bed, where we’d watch the news and snuggle. Of course, that was the extent of Bruce’s ability in the kitchen. He could grind beans and brew coffee. He could also pour a mean bowl of cereal. That was it. There was no cooking. Period. Hasn’t been to this very day.

In that blushy, getting-to-know-each-other time, we would sit up in bed at night and drink red wine, eat brie cheese on French bread, and talk for hours and hours about absolutely everything. One of the first subjects we tackled was our pasts. There are versions people tell each other. Sensing our relationship could be long-term, Bruce and I were thoroughly honest. We agreed that neither one of us would walk into a room and be surprised by something, or someone, we didn’t know about.

On our first public date, we went to the premiere of Francis Ford Coppola’s
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
. It was right after we had gone through our lists together. We walked into the theater, sat down, and both of us at the same time half-jokingly asked, “Is there anyone in here that one of us didn’t sleep with?”

I was head over heels for him when I left to make the movie
Family of Strangers
in Vancouver. It was my second movie with Anna (Patty Duke). It also starred William Shatner. I had been warned that Shatner could be difficult on the set. One person went so far as to call him a nightmare. I loved him instantly.

Actually, the movie’s director was the nightmare. Maybe it was his bad toupee. Someone said if I walked up behind him and held out a handful of nuts, his hair would jump out and try to eat them. The man had a hedgehog on his head. At different points during the shoot, he made both Anna and me cry. However, he hit a roadblock with Shatner.

We were doing a scene where he was supposed to be watching television and change the channel with the remote control. During rehearsal, he refused to do it. The director pleaded with him to change his mind, but Bill refused. He said he would gladly walk across the room and change the channel. He just wasn’t going to use the remote. The director explained that getting up from the sofa would break up the scene. Bill didn’t care.

“I’m not holding the fucking remote,” he said.

“Why?” asked the frustrated director. “Why the hell won’t you hold it?”

“I don’t hold anything that looks like a phaser,” he said. “Got it?”

I had to run off the set, lest I upset the poor schmuck director even more with my laughter.

Bruce was a ray of sunshine during that experience, though he hit me with a surprise on his first day visiting me. He said he had something to talk to me about. I always hate when people start a conversation like that, especially when they are as serious as Bruce was. It’s a preamble for bad news. Bruce said he had seen Annie, one of his exes, a few days earlier. I was surprised, obviously. But I played it cool and very intentionally appeared calm and collected, even though I could feel the acid begin to churn in my stomach.

“How’d that go?” I asked as nonchalantly as possible.

“Well, I just wanted to make sure it was really over,” he said.

“And?” I remained blasé, as if the answer would not faze me either way.

“It’s really over.”

“How do you know?” I asked, not daring to look at him; otherwise he might see that I was freaking out.

“Because the whole time I was sitting across from her, and she was going on and on about stuff, I could only think about you,” he said. “I wondered where you were. I wondered what you were doing. I wanted to be with you.”

That was it. I leapt into his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist, smothering him with kisses. Mine, mine mine…he was all mine!

I had that next weekend off and we snuck off to the Hastings House on Salt Spring Island, a gorgeous hideaway in an out-of-the-way cove that was like something out of a romance novel, it’s so perfectly charming and peaceful. We were on fire for each other. It was intense, passionate, and hot. Then, back in Vancouver, we spent hours walking around Stanley Park and I realized we were even more compatible than I’d thought.

Bruce had been back in L.A. for a couple weeks when he called and said he had been out to dinner with friends and run into his ex again. It had been an ugly scene, he said, but the gist was that he was lonely. Since I had Saturday and Sunday off, I offered to fly home and spend the weekend with him.

“Really?” he asked.

“If you’re lonely,” I said, “yeah, I’ll come home for the weekend.”

“No one has ever done that for me before,” he said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever done that for anyone before,” I replied. “But I’m willing.” I spent a lovely weekend with Bruce, then went back on location.

It sounds like it was all moonlight and roses, perfect and beautiful, but there were glitches along the way. Sometimes I would drink too much and say something out of line. Bruce, who’s half Irish, knew how to argue right back, especially when alcohol was involved. We didn’t clash on the epic scale of Colleen Dewhurst and George C. Scott, but on occasion we rattled the walls.

I was hesitant but hopeful when we began getting the kids together. Bruce and I had different parenting skills, but the family meet-and-greets went pretty seamlessly. I credit the boys, my son Dakota and Bruce’s boys, Sam and Lee. They got along like long-lost best friends. As I told Bruce then and many times since, the best gift he has ever given me are his remarkable sons.

Only one person had a difficult time with our relationship, and that was Bo. He came over to my house one day to pick up Dakota and flew into a rage after seeing a copy of the
Hollywood Reporter
on the table with Bruce’s address on it. He threw open the front door with such fury that the doorknob punched a hole in the wall, then he fishtailed his truck across my front lawn and took off.

The melodramatic craziness continued a few nights later when he called and screamed at me until I cried. Bruce was there at the time, and he grabbed the phone. I could only hear his side of the conversation, which went something like this: “Son, son, son…leave the lady alone…son…yes, I am…yes, I am…in your bed…go ahead, because I’ve got a safe full of my own.”

Bo blamed me for many of his problems, including his difficulty getting work in Hollywood. He claimed I had destroyed his career by calling him an alcoholic. That made me laugh. The entertainment industry may be the only business in the world where it’s not only okay to be an alcoholic, it may be a requirement.

No, he had to take responsibility for his own behavior. But he wasn’t ready to do that just yet.

I
n the meantime, Bruce earned raves from my friends, the Scalias and the Peckinpahs, and that year, we enjoyed a fabulous and loving Christmas and New Year’s Eve. But the good times were too much for Bruce to handle. One night, as we watched TV at his house, he turned to me and said, “I hate to say this, but I think we’re better friends than lovers, and I think we should just be friends.”

I didn’t understand. He might as well have punched me in the gut.

“Drive me home,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“Drive me home,” I said. “I’m not staying here.”

My house was only a few blocks away. We got dressed and in the car he said, “I think I just put my foot through the Rembrandt.”

“Oh, you did worse than that,” I said.

A few days after his blunder, Bruce attempted a rapprochement. We had plans to go on an all-expenses-paid celebrity ski vacation to Austria, and he called and asked if I still planned to go with him. I did not respond kindly. I wanted to know how he saw my role on the trip—as his ski valet, his pal, his golf partner…I rattled off a long list of possibilities. He begged me to let him come over and talk.

Within minutes, Bruce was at my house, pleading with me to forgive him and explaining that he was scared to death about getting into a serious relationship. He was already a failure at marriage, he said. He didn’t want to tie the knot again. He didn’t want more kids. He didn’t want to get deeper into something he thought he would eventually screw up, so he got it over with.

“But here’s the problem,” he said. “I can’t not be with you. So what are we going to do?”

“Did I say I want to get married? Did I say this was for the rest of our lives?”

Even though I had a sense that it would be for the rest of our lives, I realized my big, strong cowboy was a scaredy cat when it came to relationships. I could imagine him breaking into a rash when he heard the word “commitment.” I thought about what pussies men are and I wanted to laugh; but I didn’t.

Instead, I told him that we should just take it a little bit at a time and see where we ended up. In the meantime, I advised him to just live the dream. I told him that over and over. Don’t worry. Just live the dream.

“I don’t know what the dream is, but live the dream,” I said. “It can all be yours, whatever you want.”

We went to Austria, and we were having a good time up until the point when I learned that Bo had filed a report with Child Protective Services, claiming that my nanny was abusing Dakota. Apparently the guy who took care of my animals said he had witnessed it when I wasn’t around. It didn’t seem possible to me. But as I said to Bruce, what if it was true? And if it was true, what was I doing in Austria?

I became hysterical. I burned up the long-distance phone lines, trying to regain control of the situation. If Bo’s intention was to make me crazy, he did a good job. I downed glasses of wine and schnapps. I took my frustration out on Bruce. We got into one of our big knockdown, drag-out fights and didn’t speak to each other for two solid days.

I was a mess until we got back home. Then I fired the nanny, got my lawyer involved, and waited for more bad news. I was like one of those women in Westerns, standing behind the front door with a rifle and waiting for the bad guys to show up. Just to add to the bizarreness, I went into the hospital for some elective surgery. Okay, I went in for a boob job.

I thought about canceling the surgery given the circumstances. But hey, the procedure had been scheduled for months and I didn’t see how postponing it would help. In fact, I thought new boobs would make me feel better. I was pretty comfortable with my body, but Dakota had destroyed my breasts after nursing for more than a year. Bo had once described them as socks full of marbles with knots at the top, and I was so uncomfortable about the way my boobs looked that I rarely took my shirt off around Bruce.

So I had the surgery, and two days later, the investigator from Child Protective Services showed up at the house to interview me. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. When she arrived, I was in the midst of having a severe reaction to the pain medication and residual anesthesia. I wanted this woman to think I was normal and my home was a paradigm of well-being. Instead, I looked like the psycho, junkie actress who got new tits for Christmas.

Apparently that was acceptable. The complaint went away after her investigation, as it should have. There was no story. It was bullshit. My chest healed without a story to tell, either. I was glad I went in for the lift, perk, augmentation—whatever you call it. Bruce was even happier. For months afterward, he asked, “How are the girls?” Then he asked how I was. I was great. With my new boobs, I had the body I had wanted my entire life.

I played a cop in my next movie,
With Hostile Intent
. Bruce came to the Florida set to visit and enjoyed seeing me in a uniform. At the end of the shoot, Dakota was also on the set with me.

Like many working mothers, I had my hands full trying to juggle my job and my number one role, being a mom to my nearly four-year-old son. One night he was cranky from what looked to be a bite on his stomach. By the next afternoon, he had a full-blown case of the chicken pox. I called my mother and asked if I had ever had the chicken pox. She cavalierly said I had, which was a relief. I took care of Dakota, letting the poor itchy kid sleep in my bed and waking up with him several times to reapply the Caladryl lotion.

Dakota healed and flew back to L.A. with Bo’s mom, Lou, aka Moomoo. A couple of weeks later the film wrapped and I got on the plane to go home. A half hour into the flight, I started to feel achy and sick. I looked at myself in the lavatory mirror and my face was blotchy with spots. By the time we got home, my entire body was covered with them, head to toe. I called my doctor, who said, “You are going to be one miserable puppy.” He was right; I was. He also warned me to call him if I got a headache. If that happened, he said it could mean the chicken pox were in my brain. Oy!