This involvement of Tom’s at the soap was a disastrous for our chances of happiness. Tom’s psyche was far more fragile than mine. I had been seeing a psychiatrist for several years to recover from my psychological problems from my narcissist mother and to help me deal with the high pressure, highly competitive business I worked in.

        But I can see now as I look back that whatever slender thread of love, loyalty, and even respect he ‘d felt toward me was muted almost instantly after he started work at the soap. Success and money had lured Tom into secret life and a cynical web of deceit.

Once my dreams gave me such a startling insight into a Tom I’d never known, I dug out his old diaries and read the entries from those early, exciting days on the soap. Reading them for the first time, I was struck by how unselfconsciously condescending and patronizing he had become toward me. I find comments like 'Marcy's feeling better about herself.’ 'Marcy seems to have more confidence', and 'Marcy's really come a long way'. Suddenly, Marcy, who’s been the rock for two years, paying bills, working in the high power, very competitive world of advertising, meeting new clients, and doing new and challenging jobs every day, has been turned into a helpless weakling. He’s undermining me as a person and belittling my career and success.

As I read his entries, I had to remind myself that I was a steadily working TV actress and model, in New York and all around the country. Does his new disparaging opinion of me reflect the influence of another woman who is competing for his affections?

He was a very insecure guy, and he knew nothing about modelling or the fashion world. I don’t think he’d ever even heard of Eileen Ford before we met. It must have been easy for his new romantic idol to make me seem like a loser in his eyes. He seemed to believe that she was his one hope for success, and he was aiming pretty low.

As a model, I did hundreds of different jobs every year, working for probably a thousand different people over the course of twelve months. You learn a lot when you have to earn each job. People in advertising are trend makers and trend followers. Over the years, I had gotten very shrewd about how to survive and keep working in such a capricious and competitive environment. Consequently, I knew it was going to be just as difficult to establish Tom as a working actor as it had been to keep my modeling career going. No one person was ever going to make you a star, not even the greatest director in Hollywood could do that.

Perhaps, he never got over his first impression of me as not very successful from my sparsely furnished apartment. But my longer experience in advertising had given me a clearer idea of what we were up against. The kind of success we needed was going to be a long, steady, cleverly planned siege of show business. You know, another one of those overnight successes that take ten years to accomplish. But he started hiding his secret agenda from me from the moment he got the soap opera job.

Yes, looking down on me from the lofty heights of soap stardom must have helped him explain his wandering affections. How very convenient. But to sell me out so quickly looks like he was eager to downgrade me. There was more to this than just a troublemaking woman. He must have wondered what was wrong, too. Why, if he was so madly in love with Marcy, did he find himself eager to play around with other women? He must have questioned himself and his conscience. I can assure you he did have one. He’d completely committed himself to a secret narrative that provided an answer to that question, but it was the wrong answer. And it ended up costing him everything, eventually, even his life.

Secret condescension is a slow, but very effective poison. He closed every door I’d helped open for him in my face. He never encouraged me in anything, always claiming to love me, but excluding me from his professional life in every way he could, making up all kinds of excuses. I was never invited to visit the television set when he was working, or to the after-work gatherings at the local bar with the cast members. He was hiding a terrible secret, but I never guessed that.

To all appearances, I was the pariah he was stuck with. We were married, but not married. It was very damning that the man I was married to restricted my participation in our professional social life as much as possible. 

And looking back now, I find irrefutable proof that if he’d really been even slightly concerned about helping my confidence as an actress, there was one thing he could have done that would have helped me enormously. Just like Tom, I was also a member of both film acting unions. Any other actor married to such an employable wife would have been down in The Guiding Light production office every week looking for some small role for her to do, some day-player role or some part that lasted a week or a month, if for no other reason than the union benefits. They were always casting parts like that, and as popular as Tom was on the show, I'm sure they would have been happy to oblige him, at least once. But in all his seven years on the show, he never got me so much as one day’s work. His going to bat for me would have done wonders for my confidence, as well as giving me some valuable experience working on a TV soap set and something to put on my resume.

Tom was always a good negotiator who made sure he got everything he deserved from any deal he made. The union benefits of his wife occasionally appearing on the show were a perk that in normal circumstances he wouldn’t have passed up. But he never so much as suggested it. When I brought up the possibility, he made it sound he was working in a Gothic horror show, a place so malevolent and so rife with intrigue that I was better off not working there or even visiting the set. How convenient, it you’re playing around at work, right?

With some skepticism, I accepted his appraisal of the situation. It sounded a little paranoid, but Tom’s survival instincts were usually outstanding, so I didn’t really doubt him. And he was my fiancée. I had no reason to suspect that he had an ulterior motive. But he didn’t have an ulterior motive, he had an alternate storyline, the one with a tragic ending.

Now that I read his diary, I’m very hurt by his betrayal not only of our love, but of me as person. I, too, was a budding actress with ambitions of making a career in show business. Any little boost along the way would have opened many doors for me which would have made both our lives much easier and more prosperous. When we first met, I had worked very earnestly to help his career, giving him tips on how to land commercials, a better head shot, and emotional support. The minute he had the chance to return the favor, all he forgot about me, except to keep me from interfering with his secret life.  

As I reached this stage in researching our past searching for evidence of his chasing other women, he was looking very much like a dastardly villain. Was he a total, unfeeling cad? Along about here, when I began to see how deliberately Tom thwarted all my hopes and dreams and betrayed my love, I started cutting up old pictures of him and throwing out memorabilia that I’d been keeping since his death. How could I have loved a man so much who had been working so selfishly against my happiness even before we were married?

Of course, hindsight is twenty-twenty. I should have known right then, when he never did a thing for me, that something was off kilter. But Tom had already gone very far down a dangerous path. By some trick of conscience, he’d exempted himself from playing fair with me and being honest.

But as I looked back at more of Tom’s career choices, the mystery only gets worse. There had always been a sense of turmoil in Tom. He always had to be in motion. Just sitting peacefully and enjoying the sunshine or a cup of tea was out of the question for him. He was being eaten up by something. But at the time, I simply thought he was a real go getter.



After proposing in the first flush of success, Tom put off getting married for almost a year. He made lots of excuses for the delay. We were busy moving to a one-bedroom apartment, and with all the excitement that went with Tom’s new success, a year’s delay didn’t seem excessive. At last, we got married.