Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [76]
But at the time I was in a deep, dark pit. I was so miserable. I could never quite bring myself to tell Michael the truth: that I had never recovered from the death of my baby. All I wanted was to create a new life for myself. Divorcing Michael seemed to be the only solution.
We finally separated on May 28, 1973, after fifteen years of marriage. At the time, Michael made a statement to the press claiming that he was shocked by our separation. “I don’t know what happened. She felt we’d become completely incompatible and there was no point in continuing our marriage,” he said. That’s exactly what I did say, but, looking back with the hindsight of terrible but real knowledge, I wish to the bottom of my heart that I had not.
SOON AFTER MY separation from Michael, I was in the midst of an engagement at the Empire Room of the Palmer House, then Chicago’s best and ritziest hotel, when I began receiving flowers. Every single morning, every single evening, there were glorious flowers, with no note—just an elegant card embossed with the initial C.
Right from the start, Charles Donald Fegert knew exactly how to treat a lady, or so it seemed at the time. First there were the flowers, then an invitation to a birthday party at the Four Torches, a restaurant, I later discovered, of which he was part owner. I was alone in Chicago and feeling somewhat lonely, so I accepted.
At the restaurant, he was formally introduced to me as Chuck Fegert, vice president of advertising and marketing for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News. He was tall, fair, and handsome, and he looked very much like a young Gregory Peck. Even at that early stage, I was wildly attracted to him. A newspaperman, a “civilian,” from a world so different from show business, but such a fascinating one!
Yet within a few minutes of our first meeting, his personality began to grate on me, as he moved close—far too close—to me and yelled, “Hey, somebody take a shot of me with my arm around my fantasy dream girl!” My interest in him plummeted. He was rude and aggressive, and although I posed for the photograph, I did it extremely reluctantly. A copy of that photograph is still in existence somewhere around, and the expression on my face—a mixture of distaste and annoyance—says it all.
I had always trusted my first instincts about people, and my first instincts about Chuck were far from positive. Looking back, I only wish I’d followed my gut feelings about him.
But Chuck was completely oblivious to the negative impression he’d made on me. Or, like the best salesmen, who refuse to take no for an answer, he knew but didn’t let it deter him one bit. Moreover, he understood exactly how to woo a woman, and he definitely was not a quitter. The flowers kept arriving, and so did the phone calls. And each night, like it or not, I looked out into the audience and there he was, Chuck Fegert, gazing at me with a winning combination of boyish enthusiasm and masculine lust sparkling in his eyes.
Gradually his energetic and enthusiastic courtship of me began to make life seem more exciting and full of promise. His constant presence, his unwavering focus on me at my shows, the flowers, and the phone calls all contributed to eroding my negative first impression of him.
In the end, I agreed to go out on a date with him, and it was then that I discovered that he’d been obsessed with me long before we were first formally introduced in Chicago. Over champagne and caviar (Chuck always had style, I’ll grant him that) he told me the story. He’d been staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I was in the lobby with Gene. As he remembered it, I was very, very tanned (I’d just come back from Acapulco) and was wearing white hip-huggers. From that moment on, he designated me his “fantasy girl.”
Warning bells should have gone off in my head then, but I was so dazzled by Chuck’s physical presence, his silver-tongued