We Are Still Married (7 page)

Why not, indeed! Tomorrow they'll be sitting pretty, their pictures in the financial section—a hundred thousand shares of ChumCo snapped up by hungry investors at $17.375—and you'll be wondering, “Why not me? Why didn't I think of that? Francine doesn't know beans about transceivers, she's in women's shoes, for heaven's sake! And yet here she's flipped the whole industry over on its ear! What's going on here?”

I know that feeling; it's exactly how I felt until ten days ago. I was in the slide business, cranking out those packets of color slides you see in souvenir shops—Yosemite, the Everglades, Homes of the Stars, Scenic Indiana—and going nowhere, while
Bam! Bam! Bam!
other people were hitting pay dirt. One day they were like anyone else and the next I knew they were off in another world. My racquetball partner, Bobby Lee, canceled a Friday match saying his head hurt, and the next Monday he was into soybean microchips and formed BLeeCo, and Tuesday he spun off two subsidiaries, BLInc and BLAmCo, to get into mood publishing and to shelter some of his earnings in forests. I had never even
heard
of mood publishing! On Wednesday, it was the old guy who lives across the alley from me and raises tomatoes and keeps about thirty-seven cats—one day a sad old duffer and the next thing he's chairman of the board of Down Home Video, and suddenly next to Ms. PacMan and Donkey Kong you see Ringalario and Kick the Can and Starlight Moonlight and Mumblety-Peg and Video Whist, and the old geezer is raking in the loot, sitting around with a noseful of quarters.

After a while, you get tired of being gracious and saying, “Gee! That's wonderful! I'm really happy for you!” You want to hide in Bobby Lee's bushes and wait for him to come out the door whistling. You want to jump on Bobby Lee and get his leg in a toehold and make him roll around in the dirt while you yell, “Tell me, Bobby Lee! Tell me fast! Tell me two or three good tips right now this minute or I'll bust your foot!”

That's what I did eleven days ago last night. He told me, too. The next day I was in business as MeCo. We make a little ultrasonic thing that attaches to your dashboard and turns red lights to green in every state but Nebraska. Right now I've got more money than I know what to do with. You know what that's like? It's like breathing a different air. Like the law of gravity doesn't apply to you. Colors are brighter, food tastes better. You tell jokes and people laugh their heads off.

I'd like to share my secrets with you. Actually, one secret. It's so simple you'll wonder why you didn't think of it years ago. I'd like to blurt it out
right now
—at
no charge whatsoever.
You won't owe me so much as a
thank-you.

“Why?” you're probably wondering. “Why would a rich guy be giving away his secret to people like us? There must be some hitch, some string attached. A guy like him isn't going to share secrets just like that! A guy like him isn't about to hand out the
secret inside
information that has earned him incredible sums these past ten days! Who is he trying to kid? Whom does he take us for? We weren't
born yesterday!”

Okay, forget it.

That negative attitude wasn't the one Janice Johnson took when I told her a couple of things, but, then, she isn't suspicious and small-minded like a lot of people. She's Methodist, like me. Our church is well known for having a generous nature. Sunday morning, Janice slipped a hundred thousand dollars into the collection plate. Now, that's stewardship! We're like that. We're not stingy and mean. We don't hold with the idea that America is slipping and the economy is drying up and everyone will have less and hold on to it tighter and tighter. We think the opposite. Fabulous possibilities are all around us! Wealth abounds, if only we open ourselves up to new ways of thinking!

That's why Janice, Bobby Lee, and myself formed the Birds of the Air, Beasts of the Field Foundation over the weekend. BOTABOTFF believes that animals have much to tell us, that they
can
communicate with people and do—on a daily basis!—and that these important messages are lost simply because we are not receptive to them. BOTABOTFF will be spending more than six million dollars in the next few weeks on research aimed at training people to hear messages, verbal or telepathic, from the animal world.

“What sort of messages?” you're probably wondering. “Might they include business advice or investment tips?”

Sure, they might. It all depends. Depends on the animal, too.

Janice is very high on cats right now, which she sleeps with two of and claims they speak to her in dreams, sitting around a long dark walnut conference table. Me, I don't trust cats, and if a cat walked up to me this minute and said, “Mutual fund,” I'd pay no attention. If I heard it from my dog, Buster, I'd listen, but not from a cat and not from snakes. Bobby Lee swears by snakes. He keeps three of them under his bed.

We all agree on one thing, though. Whales are the smartest creatures on earth, smarter than dolphins. A dolphin's ideas are ideas that whales had months ago. Humpbacks communicate halfway around the world, emitting a vast range of sounds, most of which concern food and sex, but some are about marketing and development. Of course, most people can't profit from interspecies exchange because they're too dumb. They don't have the sense that God gave geese, to use an extreme example.

Let's take a purely hypothetical case. Let's say that your dog, Buster, had an ear infection, so you put him in the car and drove to the vet's. Let's say Buster was agitated and stood on the front seat with his forepaws up on the dashboard and made this strange whining sound. Let's say that you drove 6.5 miles through busy streets and never had to stop for a single red light. In addition, a pain in your left elbow went away and your car radio started picking up ship-to-shore from off the coast of Portugal. Let's say you happened to have a cassette recorder in the car with you. Would you press
Record
and capture Buster's vocal secrets while sailing through intersections where long lines of cars on the cross streets wait for you to pass? Or would you pull over to the curb, stifle the mutt, and wait for the lights to turn red?

Let's say you do the first thing and a week and a half later you become a multimillionaire. You decide to tell someone else about it. Now let's say you're that other person. Someone tells you he got rich and offers to share the secret for free and you don't believe him, but then he tells you more and suddenly you sort of do but now he is asking $239.50 for the secret, postpaid.

How long do you think that offer will stand? Is it too late already? Is that your dog? Is that a smile on his face?

E
LLEN IN WICHITA was troubled that her husband, Jim, and three boys (eleven, fifteen, and sixteen) took advantage of her cheerful nature, expecting her to put a good dinner on the table every night, and not spaghetti but things like stuffed pork chops and creamed potatoes, and also to keep their three-bedroom home bright and attractive, and to be a warm and funny person—all of this on top of her full-time job in sales! She resented their expectations, which, being unspoken, were hard to argue with—especially for Ellen, who believed that love is meant to be given without reservation.

Then the phone rang one night after dinner, while Jim was watching the finals of a professional fishing tournament on television and Ellen was up to her elbows in dishwater. It was Richard Gere. “I want to speak with Jim, please,” he said.

Jim was on the phone for twenty-three minutes and all he said was “Uh-huh” and “Sure, I can see that,” and when he hung up, he was pale and shaking. The young star of
Breathless
and
An Officer and a Gentleman
had given him a dressing-down he would never forget, pointing out his insensitivity to Ellen's needs. If she had told him about it, he would have shrugged it off, but coming from Gere, it made a deep impression on him, and he decided to change. Thanks to one film star who cared, a family started to function as a team.

The call was no random shot in the dark but a carefully planned and researched project of Hollywood Calls, an organization of screen luminaries who want to use their influence to do good. Of course, movie celebrities have always been active in good causes—endorsing charities, appearing at fund-raisers, speaking out on public issues—but many of the younger stars feel that they can have more impact on a personal basis, and dozens of them spend as many as three hours daily on the phone, speaking up for persons like Ellen, whose problems tend to be overlooked by the Red Cross and other major organizations. Unlike the older Hollywood idols, who plunged into well-publicized humanitarian efforts in order to assuage intense guilt for amassing fabulous wealth and fame, the young stars feel that they are “actors, no different from anyone else” and prefer little unsung acts of charity; as one says, “How I spend my time is my business.” Few outsiders are aware of the good these celluloid giants do.

It is known that Tom Hanks and Harrison Ford work tirelessly in behalf of young victims of misunderstanding—teen-agers regarded by friends and family as “ordinary” although they are filled with deep longings, passionate feelings, and inexpressible thoughts; Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton devote countless off-screen hours to women suffering from poor self-image; Dustin Hoffman is working to get men more involved in early child care; Clint Eastwood is on the phone every night with men who have lost their individuality in large corporations.

“He cares deeply,” a source close to Mr. Eastwood says. “The corporate lifestyle is so all-encompassing that after a few years a man who fails to acquire real clout feels terribly diminished. Many of these men relate to Clint, and a few minutes on the phone with him can really turn things around. It's nothing that he tells them necessarily but just the fact that he's there, listening, sharing feelings, responding as one man to another.”

“Acting is not an expository skill, it's an illuminative art,” says one Hollywood Caller, “so an actor can sometimes clear up a problem with one phone call when years of intense therapy haven't helped. I dial a number and say, ‘Hello, this is Warren Beatty and I want to talk about you and Janice,' and instantly they see the importance of the relationship, they see where they're at with it, it's almost electric.” Beatty is referring to Janice and Mike's relationship, a marriage of ten years that was threatened by her training in auto mechanics and karate and his inability to accept a shift in sexual roles. Why? Mike didn't know. He knew it was right for her to expand her skills, that his feeling of inadequacy came from fear and was trivial compared with the incredible richness she brought to the relationship, and yet he couldn't get beyond it—until Hollywood called. A top box-office draw saved a marriage. It's as simple as that.

A top draw, it should be said, who himself had failed thus far to make a lifelong commitment to another person. A top draw whose multiple romances filled gossip columns but never gave him the sense of bonding he sought in the shallow, fast-moving film world.

“When I call up these people, ordinary people, middle Americans, and assist them with a problem, I always receive more than I give,” he says.

Beatty had no idea how much he would receive until a month ago, when the white phone rang in his Malibu hideaway—the ultra-secret phone, the number of which was known only to six persons—and he answered it. “Warren, this is Julie Dittman, in Muncie, Indiana,” said a soft and yet incredibly strong voice. “I want to talk.”

His first thought was to hang up, but something—her sincerity, perhaps—attracted him to her, and he sat down and listened for almost two hours as she poured out her concern for him, not as a screen star but as a human being.

“You're defensive, and of course you have to be, with so many unscrupulous people trying to get a piece of you, and yet it has left you hungering for real intimacy in a relationship built on absolute trust,” she said, and instantly he knew she was right. She sounded wonderfully close and real as she said, “I hate to intrude on your privacy, and yet, when I sense hurt, how can I distance myself? How can I pretend that it's not my problem, too?”

He was moved by her concern, moved in a way he had always wanted to be moved and yet had never dared to ask to be moved, and instinctively, not taking even one second to think about it, he asked her to marry him.

She hesitated, wondering if at this point in her life her own growth as a person might be threatened by marriage to the sexual fantasy of millions of women, and then said yes.

It turned out to be the best thing either of them had ever done in their entire lives.

In the fuzzy photograph of them emerging from a Santa Monica laundromat that appeared in
People
recently, Julie Dittman appears to be no starlet but a fifty-one-year-old divorced mother of three who could stand to lose a few pounds. Yet to Warren she is a woman of fantastic vitality, a deeply caring woman, a woman who loves sunsets and children and laughter and long conversations and cats and quiet dinners and going barefoot and listening to Vivaldi, and he nurtures her, accepting his half of all household chores—even though she protests, “No, darling! You have commitments, multi-picture contracts, development deals, artistic obligations!” The forty-five-year-old screen idol scrubs floors, shops for fresh vegetables and fruits, repairs appliances, even cleans the oven.