Our House After Five Years of Work

Things Get Even Worse.

Of course, what I didn’t know then, but do now, is that he was actively involved in his secret relationship and an alternate plan for his life which meant getting rid of me. I don’t know how far it went or if his old paramour was still crying on his shoulder or even if she was still married. Tom certainly was. Whatever the temptation was that she offered, he was frantic in his attempts to pursue her, because things got much worse.

What happened very soon afterward effectively ended our marriage as any kind of real partnership, although I didn’t figure that out until decades later, after he’d passed over to the other side. For years, what he did next perplexed, infuriated, and confounded me. When Tom at last got fired from The Guiding Light, he had not been off the show more than a couple of months when he got an offer from another Proctor and Gamble show. It was a very good role and they wanted Tom and only Tom to play it. Yes, it was a bona fide offer, not an audition, but a straight out offer of a main character part. Great! We’re saved. It’s a miracle! A job!

Okay, we knew the soaps were dying, but they’re dying slowly. And yes, the last couple of years on Guiding Light had been an ordeal. But he could try working at this new show where the situation might be better. He can go on making good money, possibly get to do some interesting acting and perhaps even receive a little notice in the industry for being such a popular actor. We can keep our house. And we won’t have to start over in California cold turkey.

Only he turned the offer down instantly, and what was absolutely unforgiveable, he turned it down without ever telling me he’d gotten such an offer until it was way too late to retrieve it. He made the biggest, most important decision of his entire life without consulting me or even telling me what was going on. Yes, the marriage was definitely over, if indeed it had ever been a real marriage in Tom’s mind.

I was livid, outraged and stunned. He trotted out all the things we'd talked about when we'd planned to go to California as excuses, but that was all hogwash. There was no question that we had to go to California. That was where the show business industry was. The trick was to transition to LA without crashing and burning. Everyone we knew who’d gone west had done so by creating some career heat as an entrée into the LA scene. There were many ways to try to do that, but it was never easy.

However, I was a complete idiot not to have realized that Tom had a secret agenda which didn’t include me. Why the secrecy? What was really going on?

Clearly, once he’d turned down the best job in New York that he was ever likely to be offered, I did know there was a big problem. But with bills to pay that needed two incomes, I barely had time to think about what had just happened, because it was up to me to support us and try to keep us afloat as best as I could.

But then he did something even more baffling; after claiming that he turned down the soap job because we were supposedly decamping to California's greener pastures, he refused to put the house on the market and get going. He protested that we could keep the house because he was convinced something would turn up for him here in New York. Yeah right. I have a pretty good idea now of what he expected to turn up, and it wasn’t something in New York.

Now, I can make a good guess as to what he was waiting for. He turned down the great job which he’d been offered because he was such a popular and successful actor, in order to wait for a ticket to Los Angeles courtesy of his secret contact. I suppose he wouldn’t sell our house, because he planned to dump that in my lap, when LA woman got him the soap job offer in California. How easy it would be to hop a plane to an exciting new job on the coast, leave me with many kisses, assuring me that he’d send for me as soon as I sold the house. Then he’d explain via a long-distance call, or better yet, a letter, that it was over; he was now with so and so, and he really did want to divorce me. He was planning to execute the three-thousand-mile clause. again. I love you, goodbye, I’m leaving for LA.

He waited, and waited, but nothing happened. All the while, he was going on auditions for jobs that wouldn’t cover his bar bill. Spring turned into summer, and when his secret LA plan B feel through, we were screwed.



When the money ran low, we had to sell our wonderful house. His secret life was destroying every good thing he’d ever achieved in his life. He’d thrown away his job success, his house, sold out his wife as a loser, and planned to end his marriage. What in the world was the matter with him? The decision to accept the soap opera offer in New York was a no brainer, but he messed up. It’s just stunning to look back and understand for the first time how his mental problems destroyed both our chances of success. Yes, his inner secret devil popped up and drove him ever closer to the cliff of no return.