Danielle Steel - Honor Thyself

“Wow… that's a big question …” He wasn't sure she was ready to hear it all, but she said she was. She needed to know who they had been, what had happened to them, and why they had gotten divorced, as well as what had happened since. She knew about Sean now, from Stevie, but she knew very little about her life with Jason, except that they had been married for ten years, lived in New York, and had two kids. The rest was a mystery to her. Stevie knew none of the details, and Carole wouldn't have dared to ask her kids, who were probably too young at the time to know what had happened anyway.

“I'm not sure, to be honest with you,” he answered finally. “I tried to figure it out for years. I guess the easiest answer is that I had a midlife crisis, and you had a major career. Both of those elements collided and blew us up. But it was more complicated than that. It was great at the beginning. You were already a star when I married you. You were twenty-two and I was thirty-one. I'd been lucky on Wall Street for about five years by then, and I wanted to back a movie. There was no great financial benefit to it, it just sounded like fun. I was a kid myself, and I wanted to meet pretty girls. Nothing much deeper to it than that. I met Mike Appelsohn at a meeting in New York, he was a big producer then, and had been acting as your agent since he discovered you. He still does.” He filled her in. “He invited me to L.A., he was putting together a deal. So I went, put my name on the dotted line to finance a film, and I met you.

“You were the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen in my life, and on top of it, you were nice. You were sweet and young and innocent. And still very southern then. You had been in Hollywood for four years, and you were still this adorable, innocent kid, and already a big star. It was like all that stardom and fame hadn't touched you. You were the same decent, warm, honest person you must have been growing up on your dad's farm in Mississippi. You still had a southern accent then. I loved that too. And then Mike had you get rid of it. I always missed it. It was part of the sweetness I loved about you. You really were just a kid. I fell head over heels in love with you, and so did you, with me.

“I flew out a dozen times while you were making the movie, just to see you. We wound up all over the tabloids and the trades. Wall Street Whiz Kid Courts Hollywood's Hottest Star. You were the real deal. You were about as glamorous as it gets.” He smiled at her then. “You still are,” he said generously. “I just wasn't used to it then. I don't think I ever got used to it. I used to wake up in the morning and pinch myself, unable to believe I was married to Carole Barber. How much better could it get?

“We got married six months after we met, when you finished the film. At first you said you were too young to get married, and you probably were. I talked you into it, and you were honest. You said you weren't ready to give up your career. You wanted to make movies. You were having a ball, and so was I being with you. I've never had so much fun in my life as we did then.

“Mike flew us to Vegas one weekend in his plane, and we got married. He was our witness, along with some girlfriend of yours at the time. She was your roommate, and I can't for the life of me remember her name. She was the bridesmaid. And you were the most gorgeous bride I've ever seen. You borrowed a dress from Wardrobe from some nineteen-thirties movie. You looked like a queen.

“We went to Mexico for our honeymoon. We spent two weeks in Acapulco, and then you went back to work. You were doing about three movies a year then. That's a hell of a lot. The studios had you cranking them out one after the other, with big stars, big names, major producers, and turning down scripts as fast as they came in. You were an industry unto yourself. I've never seen anything like it. You were the hottest star in the world, and I was married to you. We were in the press constantly. That's heady stuff for two young kids, and I guess it gets old eventually. But it didn't for you. You loved every minute, and who could blame you? You were the darling of the world, the most desirable woman on the planet … and belonged to me.

“You were on location most of the time, and between pictures, we lived in New York together. We got a great apartment on Park Avenue. And whenever I could, I'd fly out to see you on location. We actually saw a lot of each other. We talked about having babies, but there was no time. There was always another film to do. And then Anthony came along. He was kind of a surprise, and we'd been married for two years by then. You took about six months off, as soon as it started to show, and went back to work when he was three weeks old. You were doing a movie in England, you took him with you, with a nanny. You were over there for five months, and I came over every couple of weeks. It was a crazy way to live, but your career was too hot to put a damper on, and you were too young to want to quit. I totally understood. You actually took a few months off when you were pregnant with Chloe. Anthony was three years old. You took him to the park, like all the other moms. I loved it. Being married to you was like playing house, with a movie star. The most beautiful woman in the world was mine.” He still had stars in his eyes when he said it, as Carole watched him from her bed, wondering why she hadn't slowed down. He didn't seem to question that as much as she did. Her career didn't seem as important now, to her anyway. But it had been then. He made that clear.

“Anyway, a year after Chloe was born, when Anthony was five, you got pregnant again. A real accident this time, and we were both upset. I was building my business and working like crazy, you were working like a dog on movie sets all over the world. Anthony and Chloe seemed enough then, but we went ahead with it. But you lost the baby. You were devastated, and I actually was too. I'd gotten used to the idea by then of a third child. You'd been on a set in Africa doing your own stunt work, which seemed crazy, and had a miscarriage. They made you go back to work four weeks later. You had a miserable contract, and two pictures backed up behind it. It was a constant merry-go-round. Two years later you won your first Oscar, and the pressure only got worse. I think something happened then, not to you, but to me.

“You were still young. You were thirty when you got the Oscar. I was turning forty, and I never admitted it to myself then, but I think I was pissed off having a wife who was more successful than I was. You were making a goddamn fortune, everyone in the world knew you. And I think I was tired of dealing with the press, the gossip, everyone looking at you every time we walked into a room. It was never about me, always about you. That gets old, or it's hard on a guy's ego. Maybe I wanted to be a star too, what do I know? I just wanted a normal life, a wife, two kids, a house in Connecticut, maybe Maine in the summer. Instead I was flying all over the world to see you, you either had our kids with you, or I had them, and you were miserable without them. We started fighting a lot. I wanted you to quit, but I didn't have the balls to tell you, so I took it out on you. I hardly saw you, and when we did, we were fighting. And then you won another Oscar two years later, and I think that did it. That was the end. I felt hopeless after that. I knew you were never going to quit, not for a long time anyway. You signed on to do a picture for eight months in Paris, and I was pissed out of my mind. I should have told you, but I didn't. I don't think you knew what was going on with me. You were too busy to think about it, and I never told you how upset I was. You were making movies, trying to keep our kids with you on the set, and flying around to see me whenever you had a couple of days off to do it. Your heart was in the right place. There just weren't enough days in the year to do everything you wanted to do, your career, our kids, and me. Maybe you'd have quit then if I'd asked you. Who knows? But I didn't ask.” He looked at her then with regret for not having asked her to quit. It had taken Jason years to acquire the insights he had now, and he was sharing them all with Carole.