Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [79]
But even without her spelling it out, I knew that, unlike Michael, Chuck was not good husband material. Everything about Chuck was the opposite of Michael Ansara, with his honesty, his integrity, his steadfastness. Chuck was all about frivolity, excitement, and drama.
By then, I knew his character. I knew that he could be mean, but I didn’t quite accept it, and blamed myself instead. I thought that his unkindness to Matthew and his friends, his controlling way with me, were all down to the fact that he wasn’t used to living with a career woman.
Matthew didn’t warm to my new husband, either. He was nine when I first met Chuck. Soon after, Chuck and I took his two children and Matthew to a Nevada dude ranch for a vacation. We rode horses and had fun. But when I broke the news to Matthew that I was marrying Chuck and that we very much wanted him to be part of the wedding, his answer was brief and to the point.
“Oh boy! We’re going to have trouble with Daddy.”
Trouble?
I dug deeper and got the real story out of Matthew. Michael had made it clear to our son that if I married Chuck, he didn’t want Matthew to live with us in Chicago; rather, he wanted him to stay in Los Angeles with him.
I prepared for battle and contacted my attorney, Joe Taback. To my surprise, Joe suggested that I take a meeting with Michael’s attorney.
In advance of the meeting, I consulted a child psychologist, who confirmed my deepest fears at the time: experts firmly believed that it was better for a teenage boy to live with his father, not his mother.
Perhaps. But not in my case, I told myself. Not in my case, given all the love I possessed for Matthew, how much I adored him, and how I lived to make him happy. Besides, I was his mother, and no man could ever compete with that.
I arrived at the meeting with all guns blazing, my attorney by my side, ready to battle to the death for custody of Matthew.
So I was floored when Michael’s attorney greeted us with the announcement that Matthew wanted to live with Michael, not vice versa. I didn’t believe him. Then he produced a letter in Matthew’s childlike writing.
I want to live with my daddy, it said, almost breaking my heart.
I left the office in tears and rushed home to talk to Matthew. I wanted to find out what had prompted his decision, and how much pressure his father had put on him to make it.
At the same time, I was determined to be understanding. I took one look at his face and saw how crushed and hurt he was, how tragically his loyalties were divided between Michael and me. That was my worst nightmare. So I kissed him and said, “Don’t worry, Matthew. It’s all right, it’s your daddy, and of course you want to live with him. I understand.”
From then on, I did and said what I thought was best for Matthew, no matter how tough that was for me. I believed that a good parent shouldn’t put an innocent child in the middle of a conflict between a mother and a father, and I lived up to my beliefs, no matter how much it killed me emotionally.
Back in Chicago, Chuck still wanted to promote his playboy image, despite the fact that he now had a wife. To that end, when the Chicago Sun-Times came to photograph us for a feature, he insisted that I be photographed in a bubble bath, while he lounged next to me in a cherry-red satin dressing gown, Hugh Hefner style.
They say that the universe sometimes sends you subtle—and not-so-subtle—signals that show you what is really going on in your life, if only you pay attention. And I believe that what happened next was the perfect example.
Just before Christmas, I was in the elevator, taking the dry cleaning downstairs, when all of a sudden the elevator ground to a halt between floors. Then it began bouncing up and down frighteningly fast.
Someone once told me that if an elevator drops, you should lie flat on the floor, so that you can protect your spine and spread the shock when the elevator hits the ground. So that’s what I did: I threw myself onto the elevator floor.
Just