Above is the headshot I did of Tom in our Upper Westside Garden

Young people must always be racing to get somewhere. It’s the make or break time of life. For a while, Tom and I seemed to be making good progress, but as I look back now, there was always a sense of impermanence dogging our successes. Having been raised in a family where my father always had a nine to five job, I attributed this unease to our financial insecurity, not uncommon among artists. But now I know it was something much deeper than that.

It’s hard to make a living as an actor, but everybody knows that. I knew just what he was going through and gave him the benefit of all my experience in television and advertising. Because of his height, moustache, and brawny physique, he’d always been cast as a blue collar, rough and ready kind of guy. Not having classically chiseled features, he hadn’t gotten up for leading man roles. He thought of himself as a character actor and was very comfortable with those roles. But his personality seemed just as well suited to leading man roles. How you see yourself as a performer has a great deal to do with the kind of roles you get to audition for.

Unlike many of the other actors and male models I’d dated, Tom was the opposite of a narcissist. He was very uncomfortable looking at himself, and when he did, he was convinced he was not good looking at all. This was also a clue to his deeper problem. I believe that feeling good about himself was always a very fleeting sensation for him.

Once we started living together, I began my campaign to turn him into a more castable actor, the kind who could do character roles and leading man roles. Actually, many great leading men start out as character actors because the character parts are usually meatier roles you can really sink your teeth into.

The first thing we had to do was fix Tom’s hair. Believe it or not, great hair can make an acting career. As a model, I knew we had to give Tom’s hair a ‘look’, other than the wild man of the mountain, slightly unkempt look he was using in his headshot. And the moustache also had to be tamed, made more kissable, and less assertive. We had to broaden his range. How many beer drinking, blue collar commercials can you do? It required much convincing to get Tom to agree to adopt a new look. I took him to a great hairdresser and got him a stylish new cut and got the ‘stache trimmed.

Tom loved photography and owned a very good Nikon and a tripod. I’m not very skilled with f stops, but I knew how to get a good headshot. Well-groomed and suited up, complete with a white shirt and tie, I took him into the garden of my studio apartment and got to work creating a new black and white headshot. He hated getting photographed, preferring to be acting a scene, unaware of camera or audience. A headshot requires you to look into the camera with an easy, unforced, and winning smile. Smiling into the camera made Tom very self-conscious, so to relax him, I embarrassed him by describing all sorts of naughty sexual acts we might do when we were finished. If the neighbors were eavesdropping, they got an earful, but it worked. His self-consciousness dissolved into helpless laughter. I kept that Nikon firing and got a great shot of him looking every bit the relaxed, successful, intelligent man of the world he was.

I think it was important for Tom to see himself as a regular, middle-class guy. He could always do the tough guy, the army guy, and the outdoors guy, too, but to get a good role on a soap opera, he had to be a leading man. And soap operas were the best jobs for an actor in New York City in those days, when there were over a dozen soap operas being filmed in the city.

Using the picture we’d shot, he began to get submitted and seen for more and better roles. As he saw that casting people accepted him as a leading man, he got more comfortable playing that type of character. There we were, two people standing on the brink of life, hoping things would work out for us so our love story would have a happy ending. But even then, something was terribly wrong with Tom, though I couldn’t figure out what it was. When he suddenly decided he had to leave our New York City bivouac in the war on show business and head to California, if I’d been more perceptive, I might have seen that this wasn’t quite right.

We’d been living together about seven months when Tom’s savings started to run low. He couldn’t seem to connect with a job. Suddenly, he decided to go to California and see if he couldn't get something going out there. With the last of the money in his savings account and a few West Coast contacts, he borrowed my Volkswagen bug and headed across the George Washington Bridge for Los Angeles in late January.

Six-foot-five, two-hundred-and-ten-pound Tom squeezed into my Volkswagen bug and began the three-thousand-mile solo trip, in the dead of winter, by way of his old stomping grounds in Chicago and Nebraska, with less than a thousand dollars in the bank. Pure idiocy.

I could certainly understand his frustration. He'd been pounding the pavement in New York City for several years before we'd met and getting nowhere. At the time, it seemed to both of us that by going to Hollywood he was seeking a quicker route to success than he'd found in New York. That was a very plausible goal which all our friends understood and agreed with. No one in New York had a very clear idea of how the acting business in Los Angeles worked, so Tom was essentially scouting the LA scene.

However, there was something suspicious about this trip, which I seem to have noticed since he mentions in his letters that I have accused him of not being totally committed to our relationship, of always having one foot out of it. That turned out to be a far more insightful observation than I could ever have guessed at the time. I felt his hesitancy at being part of a relationship but had no idea why or what was causing it.

However, nothing about this trip went as planned. He didn't get any work in LA. His California female agent, who had handled him in New York and had promised to help, got fired very shortly after his arrival, broke up with her boyfriend, and became suicidal. In his letters, he tells me they took long walks on the beach together as he tried to cheer her up. He was so disarmingly honest about her and her situation, that I trusted him completely. Yeah, probably not the smartest thing to do.

But she was only the beginning of his troubles. His apartment was horrible. Agents kept cancelling their meetings with him. It was the wrong season to find work in Hollywood. In short, he was miserable, and his meager bank account was almost empty.

Now, when I reread his letters, trying to figure out who the man I married really was, I see danger signals in everything he writes. Back then, I saw only the passionate outpourings from my lover, who was missing me as much as I missed him.

One of the things that strikes me now is that his letters were far more candid and unreserved about his feelings than Tom ever was in person. I'm grateful to have them, because they are a written record of what he was going through. I don’t think either of us understood the magnitude and significance of that trip.

        Here are several of the very revealing quotes from Tom's letters: “When you drive great distances like I have been doing lately, you have all kinds of time to think about all kinds of things. Sometimes you say you don't feel I am totally committed to our relationship, that I have "one foot out of it." Jesus, sweetheart, let me assure you that I'm as committed to you and our relationship as Thomas Jefferson was to the American Revolution. I love you with every fiber of my being. I'm giving my all in this relationship, something I have never done before…I want so much for us to have a wonderful life, full of warmth and love and romance…."

From a later letter, after he’d been in LA for a couple of weeks: "After I talked to you on the phone last night, I cried like a baby for the first time in years. I have never known loneliness like I am experiencing now in all the years and traveling I have done, and I think the reason is that for the first time in my life I feel I have something, someone who really loves me and whom I really love and want to be with always."

He confesses his love for me and his dreams for us in writing, and he allows himself to actually break down and cry out his lonely despair, but only when he’s three thousand miles away from me. In thirty-five years of marriage, I never saw him cry, not even when they told him he had terminal cancer.

Rereading this gives me new faith that no matter what happened later, he did truly love me at one time as much as I loved him. He speaks of his terrible loneliness and crying like a baby. I think what he went through on this trip was much more emotionally overwhelming than he was ever willing to admit, even to himself.

Another letter referring to his agent friend: "We were invited to the party afterwards at some rich lady's home up in the Hollywood Hills with a spectacular view of the city. When they live right out here, they really live right. So, we all stood around and talked theater etc. Needless to say, there were numerous women there, all available. To tell you how much I love you, (and the relationship we have is the only reason I mention this fact) I love you above all temptation. I am neither attracted to nor tempted by other women. And I was happy and content at that party with the thought of you. I love you so much toots. It's such a pure, fresh love, it reminds me of the snow I saw in the Rocky Mountains, clean and beautiful and breathtaking, almost defying description."

He has run away to California, and, in a roomful of women who are in show business, he says he loves me above all temptation. And it sounds like he means it, but why is it so important that he mentions it to me? What is the temptation that these women offer that might be such a threat to our love? It’s easy to say that these women might offer him good parts and a chance at success as an actor. But it’s doubtful that he was at a party full of A list Hollywood players, so the most any of these women could do for him was throw an audition his way. It’s not sex that’s tempting him, either, because he wasn’t some sex addict who constantly had to get laid; and according to his letters, he’s very much in love with me.

Something was going on that I don’t believe Tom ever fully understood. He was all alone fighting some overwhelming urge that he couldn’t admit even to me.

Another letter: "I hope I don't sound like a crybaby when I tell you all the things I am feeling or all the things I fear. What I am about to tell you is pure truth. I stress this because you may doubt what I am about to say. I have never in my life let anyone see me weak or terribly afraid like I have you. I confess all to you, my fears, doubts, jealousy, weaknesses. I trust you like I've never trusted anyone before."

I was naturally thrilled to read this and so happy that he loved and trusted me. But frankly, I never saw any unusual weaknesses, fears, doubts, or jealousy in Tom, quite the opposite. I think one of the things that attracted me to him was that I sensed he was a man who could survive anything. Everyone who knew him sensed his inner strength. Tom would always come through. He’d fight till his last breath. What were the terrible weaknesses he was so afraid of confessing?

In light of his posthumous dream confession that he constantly cheated during our marriage, it’s evident he did always have one foot out of our relationship, the foot heading toward the door. What was driving him away from me? These events happened long before he was famous or even very successful, so his infidelity wasn't because he suddenly got carried away with himself when he became a TV star. Some impulse drove him three thousand miles away from the woman he professed to love. In a way, it seems as if this trip was actually some kind of self-induced emotional breakdown. Or was he testing himself to see if he really loved me?



He stayed for two lonely months in Los Angeles and, when he couldn’t get any acting jobs, he gave up his apartment and came back to the east coast. The trip home was an epic disaster. However, he did get a big and unexpected career success from his experiences on the road trip home, only it took about twenty years to come to fruition. The cross-country drive home was a misadventure that he later turned into a screenplay, the only one that ever got made into a movie. Getting a screenplay turned into a film was one of the great triumphs of Tom's life.