The Vow: The True Events That Inspired the Movie (20 page)

Tom’s words sounded almost like a warning. But hadn’t it been only a week ago that we were saying, “Lord, we have this great story. How can we use it to show others how amazing you are?” So we talked, thought, and prayed about it, and we felt like it was what God wanted us to do, so we agreed. We honestly didn’t think much would come of it, since by that time it had been nearly two and a half years since the accident. We couldn’t imagine that our story was big enough for national news. But it turned out that Tom knew what he was talking about. As soon as our story broke nationally, our lives truly did change. But if anyone was equipped to deal with change, we were.

The calls increased in number every day, until the phone would ring again as soon as we hung it up. The day before our wedding there was a feature article about us in the
Los Angeles Times
. And that night Jay Leno even mentioned us in his opening monologue on
The Tonight Show.

We talked to as many media people as we could during our second “engagement,” but it was overwhelming. We had to make some decisions because not only did we need to know how to respond to the various requests we were getting about media coverage for the wedding, but we were also trying to
plan
that wedding. It’s no secret that weddings take time to coordinate, but we found that all of our time was being eaten up with dealing with the media.

In the end, we decided to give
Inside Edition
the exclusive video rights to cover the actual wedding ceremony. They had offered to pay for the wedding and honeymoon in exchange for those rights. Though we had finally settled matters with our insurance company, our finances were still very tight, so we felt like
Inside Edition’s
offer was the wisest option for us to take.

Though
Inside Edition
had the exclusive rights to the ceremony, that wasn’t all they would cover. They wanted to feature us several weeks before the wedding to give their viewers something to whet their appetites. They sent a reporter and crew to our house in Las Vegas and set up shop in our living room. They captured us on film as we watched the video of our first wedding and as Krickitt looked at pictures and other keepsakes from a day she no longer remembered.

There wasn’t a bride’s room in the tiny log church at Pendaries, so Krickitt’s parents had parked their RV outside for her to use as a dressing room. True to their name, the
Inside Edition
crew was in there with her, squeezed in with bridesmaids and everybody else, talking to Krickitt about her dress, her feelings about what was happening, and all the other things that go along with a bride’s big day.

While
Inside Edition
was the only video publication allowed on the inside of our wedding festivities, there were plenty of other people on the outside. Among many others hoping for a glimpse of us on the church grounds was a photographer from the
London Times
and another from
People
magazine.

We had tried to keep the location of our honeymoon a secret, but we heard a rumor that
Hard Copy
had learned we were going to Hawaii and were going to have a crew waiting for us at the airport in Honolulu. While we wanted to share our story with others, that was not welcome news. We had no desire to share our honeymoon with anyone else, especially a television news show. So I called the airport in Honolulu and explained the situation. We didn’t see a trace of them when we arrived.

The staff at the hotel where we stayed on Maui was under strict orders to keep our presence a secret. We registered under aliases, so they were telling the truth when they told callers that there was no Mr. and Mrs. Kim J. Carpenter registered there. But there was a radio station from California that had guessed we would spend our second honeymoon on the same island as our first one, so they started calling every hotel on Maui trying to find us. They had called all but two when they got to us . . . at 4 a.m. Hawaii time. It obviously wasn’t ideal, but we spoke to them. I never heard that interview, but I can guarantee it wasn’t one of our best.

Inside Edition’s
second feature on us ran while we were in Hawaii. As a result, people started recognizing us on the street in Maui. “Hey, didn’t I see you guys on TV yesterday?” So much for anonymity. We were thousands of miles from home and people knew who we were. It was a bit surreal.

When we arrived at Los Angeles International Airport for a layover on our way home from Hawaii, we were shocked to see our faces in
Star
magazine. We hadn’t realized they were at the wedding, but it didn’t take us long to realize which of the people present that day had reported the story and taken the pictures for them. There had been one particularly obnoxious stranger hovering around the front of the church during the ceremony, getting in front of our family video camera and that belonging to
Inside Edition
. We had tried to keep an eye on him and told one of the ushers to make sure he didn’t get inside, but in the end there was too much going on to really worry about him. Thanks to our lack of attention, we were now stars of the supermarket tabloids.

We had no sooner returned to Las Vegas than we were flooded with requests and invitations from syndicated TV shows. We wanted to accept as many of the offers as we could, which meant life was going to get more hectic than ever. For the first shows we did, crews came to interview us in New Mexico. It wasn’t long before we got invitations to New York and L.A. to be interviewed in person by the hosts. Except for Krickitt’s mission trip to Hungary, neither of us had traveled much, so it was a new experience for us. We sometimes traveled to two or three different places in the same week. When we were in Seattle for a show, some Japanese tourists approached us outside the studio. Apparently our story had gone global; they had seen our story on television in their home country. We also learned that we had been featured on a television show in Germany.

We were fortunate to do some television interviews with celebrities we had watched over the years, and we enjoyed meeting them and getting to know them on a more personal level. It was interesting to see what they were like when they weren’t on camera.

One of our most memorable interviews was with Sally Jesse Raphael. Her producers asked us to appear on her show because Sally has a son with a head injury caused by a motorcycle crash. Sally saw our story as a way to help educate the public on the devastating effects of such injuries. As tragic as it was, her experience gave us a shared understanding of what a life-changing event a head injury can be. She could talk to us on a deeper level than others could because she knew firsthand what we were going through, and vice versa. Because of this connection she was able to interview us with extra insight and sensitivity.

We also got a call to be on
Oprah
. We were able to share our faith with her audience, which made it possible for us to reach more people at once than we ever had before. We also appeared on Leeza Gibbons’s talk show,
Leeza,
and we found that she was truly an elegant and classy lady. In addition, Anne Curry interviewed us on
Dateline
and Maury Povich and Montel Williams invited us on their shows.

Though we spent much time on the talk show circuit throughout the rest of 1996, we also continued to do interviews with newspapers and magazines. There were major stories published about us in
McCall’s
(“The Wife Who Forgot She Was Married”) and
Reader’s Digest
(“For Better, For Worse”), among others.

During all of our trips we were taken to the best restaurants, chauffeured around town in our own limousine, and generally treated like celebrities for a day or two. The best thing about it, though, was that having a taste of show business was a great way to reaffirm what was truly important to us in life. For all the attention we started getting, we were the same people after we went on TV as we were before. We were just two people trying to work out our lives together, keep our promises to each other, and make sure God was in the middle of it all.

We also got wonderful support from the Christian media. James Dobson of Focus on the Family wrote about us in his “Family News” newsletter in June of 1997. He said:

In this day when the culture teaches us to bail out at the first sign of frustration or pain, it is uplifting to see this young couple work to recapture what they had lost and to remain committed to each other even in the face of tragedy. Their example will, I hope, be relevant to many of my readers who have lost the passion in their marriages—not as a result of brain injury, but from whatever has driven them apart. Perhaps Kim’s decision to win Krickitt’s affection anew will be especially helpful to those who have misplaced the “memory” of love. If you have been considering a divorce, wouldn’t it be better to begin courting your spouse again and seeking to rebuild the marriage from the ground up? That is never easy and I’m sure Kim and Krickitt have not yet faced their final challenges. But it is the right thing to do, and ultimately, the most rewarding response for disengaging husbands and wives. And it is definitely in the best interests of children.

Let me conclude by offering a word of advice to young men and women who will be joining hands in holy matrimony during this summer. . . . I urge each of you to enter into marriage with an unshakable commitment to make it last a lifetime. Let nothing short of death separate what is about to be consummated. When the hard times come (and they WILL come), I hope you will remember the story of Kim and Krickitt who are weathering the storm together—hand in hand and soul to soul. That is God’s plan for the family—and for your family.

A year and a half after our second wedding we were surprised to be the cover story for
Christian Reader
magazine’s November/December 1997 issue. Soon after that we began working on our first book
The Vow: The Kim and Krickitt Carpenter Story,
which was published by Broadman & Holman Publishers in 2000.

In the midst of the media frenzy surrounding our second wedding, Hollywood came calling. Tom Colbert, who had helped us with media relations from the beginning, stepped in to guide us through the motion-picture industry maze. Several studios wanted to take an option on our story.