Grace After Midnight_ A Memoir - Felicia Pearson [24]
“And I was in love. I don’t want to name him, but a famous movie star fell in love with me. He was married at the time, but his wife wasn’t interested in lovemaking. She was a social climber and just using him to get to all the parties you read about in the magazines. She didn’t love him. I thought I did. I thought he’d build his world around me. That’s what he said. That’s what the man promised. He took me to Hawaii, to a luxurious resort right there on a private beach. Every day at sunset, the hotel would move the massage tables out by the water and I’d have my massage out there in the open with the breezes from the ocean and that Hawaiian music floating in the air. It was quite something. That’s where I learned about skin care products.
“The movie star set me up in business. I was doing extremely well—it was a mail order business—and then I became pregnant. When my first baby came, the movie star left his wife for me. Yes, he did. We moved to a different part of Los Angeles, a very exclusive part, and I became pregnant again. That’s when I knew he was cheating on me. But it didn’t matter all that much because I’d known for a while that he wasn’t the man I’d met in the beginning. He was addicted to gambling, he started getting fat, and his career was going downhill fast. He gave me a settlement for the kids. Big settlement. By then I was fed up with Hollywood. Hollywood is so phony. I wanted to come back to the East Coast where people are more educated and not as crude.
“When I moved back, I had many opportunities to marry. Men have never been a problem for me. There was a banker who wanted to marry me, and there was also a gentleman who owned a chain of fine clothing stores. He bought me a full-length mink coat. I have pictures of me in that coat. I went to New York many times and stayed at the Waldorf, the best hotel in the city, and ate in restaurants that overlooked the river and the bridges. There were very wealthy stockbrokers who wanted to marry me and a man from Egypt who owned factories all over the world. But these men meant nothing to me.
“Then Prince Charming came along. I call him Prince Charming because he was Prince Charming. Tall as a prince. Handsome as a prince. Dark eyes that melted you the minute he looked your way. Big hands and beautiful teeth. Size thirteen shoes. Low, sexy voice like Barry White. He had houses all over the state. A Bentley, a Ferrari, two motorcycles—one white, one black. He had white blood in him, maybe more white than black, because his skin was lighter than mine. He said he had a gold mine in South Africa. He showed me the pictures. He was going to take me there. He said he’d been looking for me his whole life and now that he’d found me, he could never let me go. He was the one.
“We’d talk for hours on end and never got bored. We’d talk all night. We’d love all night. He was one of those men who could control his body. He’d say, ‘I’m not coming until you come at least five times.’ The lovemaking was like nothing I had ever known. Even now, talking about him gets me wet. He was a man among men.
“He was writing a book about his life and told me, ‘Now I have the final chapter. You are the final chapter.’ Different businessmen from foreign countries would come to his house for dinner and he’d introduce me as a queen. He gave me a diamond necklace worth eighty thousand dollars. He gave me a gold diamond watch worth fifty thousand dollars. He took me to Florida where a designer custom-made all my outfits and modeled a line after me. The line became famous. The designer wanted to photograph me for his