Photo is of Jamison Parker (Later star of Simon and Simon), his wife, Bonnie, and Tom in Paris

       Tom proposed May third, but our marriage didn’t come off till April second of the next year. I have wondered how I didn’t notice the change in him, but landing a big important lead role on a soap opera was such a life altering event that I think an atom bomb could have detonated in Central Park and we wouldn’t have noticed. Fame is thrilling and humbling, even the small-time soap opera fame we had for seven years. For the rest of his life, people came up to Tom and remembered him as Justin on The Guiding Light or had seen him on Law and Order.

Although we could easily have gotten married at any time over the next year, Tom stalled. He claimed wanted a big wedding, till he found out the cost, then he scaled that back a bit. Then he wanted a memorable honeymoon in Europe. Two nights at the Plaza would have been fine as far as I was concerned. I reminded him we weren’t rich yet, but he insisted that he was only going to do this once, so he wanted to do it right.   

So, we waited. He said they couldn’t give him two weeks off from the show, and maybe it was true, but now I doubt that. He had very conflicted feelings about love and marriage, which he never shared with me. I became rather exasperated with the whole thing. It was impossible to plan something when Tom wouldn’t even set a date. Again, I should have known something was wrong. But he kept throwing excuses at me, so I tried to be patient.

This is one case where I don’t think patience was a virtue. Marriage is one of the biggest decisions anyone ever makes. We’d been living together happily for two years. Tom had proposed. I thought the marriage was a pleasant formality. Obviously, there was some problem, which Tom refused to discuss or even acknowledge.

I guess I was just too busy, too much in love, and too naive to address the issue. It never occurred to me that stalling was his way of covering feelings that he didn’t know how to deal with and either couldn’t or wouldn’t confess to me. Since he was unwilling to explain his frustrating behaviors, my assumption was that he was a very temperamental actor type person, given to sudden freaks of behavior which had to be humored, or he’d just shut down emotionally. He would often become almost silent for several days. I would know something was bothering him, but he refused to discuss it. Now, the truth most likely was that he had some woman problem that he wasn’t going to talk about to his fiancée.

Perhaps he hoped the other woman would offer him some proof of her interest, or maybe her situation was as complicated as his. Most likely, he wanted to be available to take advantage of whatever proposition was on the table from her. But he was living with me, sharing a life, and pretending to be perfectly happy. We had so much in common, many friends from my modelling world and from his soap opera, an apartment, a history, and shared interests. It must have been hard to make the decision to give it all up.

But the secret urges and narrative propelling Tom’s affairs and career ambitions were growing more powerful. I think his woman friend on the soap must have balked, because he finally gave up on her and agreed to a date for the wedding, when he could put it off no longer. We hastily threw together a wedding and a trip to Europe. We did have four weeks’ notice, because they needed to write Tom’s character out of the soap opera plot for two weeks. That was another reason I hadn’t wanted to go to Europe and take two weeks off. But in trying to put off marriage, Tom made problems for himself at his job. This was one of the first times his emotional confusions made a mess of his personal and professional life. It didn’t seem like much at the time, but anything to do with marriage has deep roots.

It was insane to have a wedding for a fifty at our apartment, and then to leave for a two-week trip to Europe the next day, while both of us were working full time right up to the last moment. I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to pull it all off. The first part of the honeymoon was visiting a photographer friend of mine who was married with a new baby and living in a splendid mansion in Ireland. Tom and my friend, Richard Noble, had become friends, too. And Richard’s wife Joan was someone I was just getting to know.

By the time we got to London, Tom was in a foul mood. He hated our hotel. Too late, we realized it was Easter weekend and every place we wanted to visit was closed. He wasn’t actually mean to me, but he shut down emotionally. It was as if this disaster called marriage was all my fault. He was cheerless and took no pleasure in anything. Our honeymoon of love was over before our real honeymoon had properly begun. It was grim, but what can you do thousands of miles away from home?

By the time we got to Paris, Tom was in a slightly better mood. Once again, he didn’t like the hotel, but he spent a day searching the city and found one that he preferred. We moved and he was mollified. Friends of ours who had also just gotten married came to visit us for a weekend. They were the soap actor Jameson Parker, who went on to star in Simon and Simon, and his new bride Bonnie, both very good friends of ours. She was an airline stewardess for Pan Am. Because of her flight privileges, she had promised that they would meet us in Paris for the weekend. They said if they made it, they’d meet us outside the American Express office at noon on Saturday. When we saw them standing there by their luggage, it was just a terrific and wonderful surprise. That finally cheered Tom up. For the first time, he started smiling and having some fun. Perhaps marriage wasn’t the end of the world.

I was scheduled to remain for an extra week to work in Paris. Why I agreed to do this, I can’t remember, but working in Paris was usually fun and the reward was getting great pictures for your book. In those days, no one did fashion better than the French. However, a few days before Tom was to head home, I came down with the flu. As always, there was no getting out of doing my booking. I’d have to remain behind in Paris, with a high fever, sick as a dog and working with strangers, all by myself.

My brand new husband was booked on a flight home in a couple of days, so we called a doctor. I’m sure the spirit world was doing their bit to save our love story, because the doctor who arrived was positively the handsomest man either of us had ever laid eyes on. He was tall with thick dark hair, chiseled, aristocratic features, and a St. Tropez tan. He seemed to have walked right out of Central Casting as the epitome of a French heartthrob. A breathtaking man. And he spoke only French, so only I could communicate with him.

Doctor Gorgeous spent twenty minutes or more alone with me in our hotel bedroom taking my temperature and writing prescriptions, while Tom waited outside. When the doctor exited and shook hands with Tom, even in my feverish, suffering condition, I could see that Tom was seething with jealousy and suspicion. I think it was the first time since he proposed marriage a year ago that his former passion for me was inflamed again. The handsome doctor ministering to his wife’s physical condition had made him recall that he very much wanted to be the only one ministering to all my needs. It really shook him up. That was the upside of having the flu in a foreign country.

When it came time for him to leave for New York, Tom was genuinely sorry to part with me. He had to go back, because in those early days, The Guiding Light was shot as a live feed, with only a twenty-four-hour lead time. Dr. Marler had to be back at Cedars Hospital. Sick as I was, I wonder if he feared he might never see me again. He kissed me goodbye for so long that even the French bus driver, who’d been happily ogling our passionate kiss, finally had to honk for Tom to get on the bus to the airport. I suffered through a week of shooting at the Chantilly Chateau in beautiful spring weather, coughing and pale as death, but applying lots of blush to make up for it.

Of course, I have no idea what Tom did while I was away. But being under the skies of Paris, “Sous Le Ciel de Paris,” as the song says, really did mean something to him that he never forgot, as I found out much, much later, from the afterlife. In spite of all the problems and conflicts he had about marriage and love, for a few days in Paris, he was glad he’d married me. This was all part of the hidden drama in Tom’s heart that was his version of our love story, so very different from my own.