Jeannie Out Of The Bottle (22 page)

I was admitted to the maternity ward of the hospital for the delivery, exactly as if my son had been a full-term baby destined to live. My mother came down from San Franscico to help Michael take care of Matthew.

So, on a date I can’t remember, and don’t want to, my dead baby was delivered, and I went home without him.

True to form, I threw myself into work and tried hard not to look back. It never occurred to me that I might suffer from postpartum depression. Why should I? After all, I hadn’t really had a baby. It was only when I talked to doctors years afterward that I learned that, aside from the heartbreak of having lost my child, because I’d carried him almost to term I had the same hormonal issues as a new mother.

At the time, utterly unaware of this, within days of the delivery I was back in Las Vegas again, rehearsing my brand-new act at the Landmark Hotel, where I was booked to perform for three weeks: two shows a night, seven days a week.

Work had always been my salvation, and I intended to drown myself in the show, in singing. But although I rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed, I found that I now had a lot of trouble memorizing the song lyrics, or even focusing on them at all.

A close friend approached me during that period and asked me how I felt after losing my baby, as I seemed to be very happy. My response, “You’re right! I’m fine, just fine,” I said, then flashed him a radiant smile.

Appearing in Las Vegas is lonely at the best of times, but I now inexplicably craved solitude above all things else. Between shows, it was as if a master hypnotist had lured me into my car and ordered me to drive, because I’d wake up as if from a deep sleep and somehow find myself sitting by the shores of Hoover Dam, staring at the black water, without having a clue about how I arrived and what I was doing or wanted to do there.

My mother flew down from San Francisco to spend time with me in Las Vegas. She looked at me with the loving yet wise eyes of a parent who knows and understands her daughter better than anyone else in the whole world, and said, “Barbara, you’re not well. You’re not well at all.”

I assured her that I was just fine.

Usually I tended to spend most of my time locked away alone in my dressing room. I’d warm up, do my show, and go straight back to the hotel. I didn’t talk at all, hardly ate, and wasn’t remotely tempted by even one scoop of ice cream, usually my favorite treat. My weight dropped from my normal 120 pounds to 105 pounds.

After a week, I overheard my mother on the phone saying to my sister, “She’s dying, and no one is doing anything about it.”

I heard and understood what she was saying. But even the knowledge that she was right couldn’t motivate me to try to get help for my condition.

At the end of my three-week engagement at the Landmark, all I wanted to do was go home to Los Angeles, so I raced through the desert at eighty miles an hour. But once I arrived back home, I felt empty, lost, and hopeless, unable to communicate much with Michael or feel close to him anymore. Even Matthew, sweet and loving, failed to mitigate my despair.

Gene had booked me to appear at a nightclub in Puerto Rico, then in a series of Caribbean clubs. Although I didn’t want to take the work, I knew that I had no choice. Again, if I didn’t work, who would?

Then I developed a really bad cold, and that cold saved my life. I consulted my doctor, and to my puzzlement, he asked me to hold my hand out.

I did and saw that it was shaking.

Up until then, I had truly believed that I was fine, but now I was compelled to face the truth that I was not.

The doctor told Michael that I couldn’t work and that it was imperative that I stay home and recuperate. So I did.

But instead of rallying as expected, I plunged into a deep, deep, deep depression. I was clearly in the throes of a classic postpartum depression, except that I didn’t have a baby to care for.

Instead, I’d spend hours just sitting in a chair, looking at seven-year-old Matthew, my beautiful little boy, and asking myself why I wasn’t happy. I was unable to laugh; I was unable to concentrate on television or on anything else. Sometimes it seemed to me as if I knew exactly what it must feel like to be insane.

My doctor finally diagnosed me as suffering from delayed shock and prescribed me pills to fight it, but they just made me feel even more numb than I had felt before.

Michael and I would meet friends at our favorite ice cream parlor. I’d always loved ice cream, but now, while everybody else had a scoop, all I wanted was a cup of coffee.

I felt nauseous most of the time. I didn’t want to hurt myself, but I just had no energy, no interest in anything. My big mistake, of course, was that I should have had counseling, but in those days the very thought of it was anathema to me.

At that crucial stage, Michael and I also should have had joint marital counseling, but that, too, was out of the question. In retrospect, I wish we had.

Instead, Gene came to my rescue with an offer for me to do a musical in the round in Phoenix. Michael asked me if I thought I could do it. I wasn’t sure, but I decided to give it a shot anyway, on the condition that he and Matthew come with me. I knew I couldn’t be alone anymore, and I was so very relieved when Michael agreed.

However, when I started learning the script, I was disturbed that once again my brain didn’t seem to be working as well as before. It was as if I had a barrier there that stopped me from concentrating. I was terrified that I’d forget the words or the dance steps on opening night.

By some miracle, I got through the show without a single hitch. I stayed in it for about three weeks, then went straight back on the road again, doing my nightclub act.

Meanwhile, the rift in my marriage to Michael was growing increasingly wider. As I said before, we should have gone into counseling, not only to cope with our baby’s death but also to deal with the growing disparity in our careers and earning power.

Ironically, Michael was filming Police Story when I made my decision to end our marriage. That decision was hard and painful, and even now I often question whether it was the right one.

Today, Michael and I have long since found happiness: me with my husband, Jon, and Michael with his wife, Beverly. But I still regret our divorce, because the repercussions it would one day have on Matthew would turn out to be cataclysmic. Had I been able to look into a crystal ball at that time, I would have stayed in the marriage until Matthew was an adult. But I didn’t.

It was my decision alone. Michael and I did try to talk about our marital problems, but every time we talked, the chasm between us grew deeper. In the end, he was left angry and bewildered, still not wanting the divorce, insisting that he was happy with me and not understanding my motives for asking for it.

But at the time I was in a deep, dark pit. I was so miserable. I could never quite bring myself to tell Michael the truth: that I had never recovered from the death of my baby. All I wanted was to create a new life for myself. Divorcing Michael seemed to be the only solution.

We finally separated on May 28, 1973, after fifteen years of marriage. At the time, Michael made a statement to the press claiming that he was shocked by our separation. “I don’t know what happened. She felt we’d become completely incompatible and there was no point in continuing our marriage,” he said. That’s exactly what I did say, but, looking back with the hindsight of terrible but real knowledge, I wish to the bottom of my heart that I had not.

SOON AFTER MY separation from Michael, I was in the midst of an engagement at the Empire Room of the Palmer House, then Chicago’s best and ritziest hotel, when I began receiving flowers. Every single morning, every single evening, there were glorious flowers, with no note—just an elegant card embossed with the initial C.

Right from the start, Charles Donald Fegert knew exactly how to treat a lady, or so it seemed at the time. First there were the flowers, then an invitation to a birthday party at the Four Torches, a restaurant, I later discovered, of which he was part owner. I was alone in Chicago and feeling somewhat lonely, so I accepted.

At the restaurant, he was formally introduced to me as Chuck Fegert, vice president of advertising and marketing for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News. He was tall, fair, and handsome, and he looked very much like a young Gregory Peck. Even at that early stage, I was wildly attracted to him. A newspaperman, a “civilian,” from a world so different from show business, but such a fascinating one!

Yet within a few minutes of our first meeting, his personality began to grate on me, as he moved close—far too close—to me and yelled, “Hey, somebody take a shot of me with my arm around my fantasy dream girl!” My interest in him plummeted. He was rude and aggressive, and although I posed for the photograph, I did it extremely reluctantly. A copy of that photograph is still in existence somewhere around, and the expression on my face—a mixture of distaste and annoyance—says it all.

I had always trusted my first instincts about people, and my first instincts about Chuck were far from positive. Looking back, I only wish I’d followed my gut feelings about him.

But Chuck was completely oblivious to the negative impression he’d made on me. Or, like the best salesmen, who refuse to take no for an answer, he knew but didn’t let it deter him one bit. Moreover, he understood exactly how to woo a woman, and he definitely was not a quitter. The flowers kept arriving, and so did the phone calls. And each night, like it or not, I looked out into the audience and there he was, Chuck Fegert, gazing at me with a winning combination of boyish enthusiasm and masculine lust sparkling in his eyes.

Gradually his energetic and enthusiastic courtship of me began to make life seem more exciting and full of promise. His constant presence, his unwavering focus on me at my shows, the flowers, and the phone calls all contributed to eroding my negative first impression of him.

In the end, I agreed to go out on a date with him, and it was then that I discovered that he’d been obsessed with me long before we were first formally introduced in Chicago. Over champagne and caviar (Chuck always had style, I’ll grant him that) he told me the story. He’d been staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I was in the lobby with Gene. As he remembered it, I was very, very tanned (I’d just come back from Acapulco) and was wearing white hip-huggers. From that moment on, he designated me his “fantasy girl.”

Warning bells should have gone off in my head then, but I was so dazzled by Chuck’s physical presence, his silver-tongued flattery, that I let down my defenses. Besides, he exuded power, strength, and commitment. Whatever I did seemed to enchant him, and he continually showered me with praise and made me feel as if I were the most important woman in the world to him.

Michael and I were separated, our divorce was immment, and I was, quite simply, lonely. And having Chuck around made life seem more lighthearted, easier, and more complete.

We started exchanging confidences, hopes, dreams, and, as lovers usually do, histories. I discovered that he had been born in Chicago, the son of a steelworker, and that his first job was in the mills. Switching gears, he took a degree in business administration, then got a job in advertising and marketing at the Chicago Sun-Times. There, with his style, creativity, energy, and charisma, he made an instant impact, and was quickly promoted.

Married twice, the second time to a top model, he had a photographic memory, and had his fingers in many lucrative pies (including oil wells and discos). He was a true swashbuckler and a heartbreaker to boot.

Foolish as it may seem in light of what would transpire between us, I began to feel that Chuck might very well turn out to be my happily-ever-after, a safe haven at last.

Soon I was involved deeply enough to invite Chuck to be my date at Dean Martin’s opening at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. There we were snapped by a tabloid photographer, with me, as the caption says, “snuggling up” to Chuck.

I suppose I was. He was sexy, intelligent, charismatic, full of energy, and determined to make me his, no matter what it took. And, at forty-six to my thirty-nine, he was a grown-up. Or rather, that’s what I assumed.

Before I knew it, I was head over heels in love with Chuck and seriously pondering the wisdom of creating a future with him. Then, just after my divorce from Michael became final, Chuck casually announced that he was married.

We’d been dating eight months. During that time he’d been away on various business trips, but I’d never dreamed there was anyone else, least of all a wife.

I was shocked and angry, but Chuck assured me that he and his wife were separated and that their divorce was imminent. Smooth and persuasive as ever, he somehow contrived to make me forget that for eight whole months, he hadn’t mentioned that he was married.

My mother, however, did not forget at all. She and Chuck met when I was performing in San Francisco. Normally Chuck, a consummate salesman, could charm the socks right off anyone from the very first moment, but my mother remained utterly impervious to his blandishments. When all was said and done, all his gifts given, all his flowery compliments paid, my mother still didn’t like Chuck one bit and made absolutely no bones about it.

No matter how hard he tried to get her to like him, she would just sit there, puff on her cigarette, and say, “Oh, really?” then turn to talk to someone else. She refused to ever let the name “Chuck” pass her lips, and forever afterward would refer to him only as “what’s-his-name.”

Besotted as I was, there were moments when even I had my doubts about him. Although I found his forcefulness alluring, I was uncomfortable with his relentless name-dropping. Chuck routinely reminded practically everyone he rubbed shoulders with about his stellar connections. It was Ronnie (Reagan) one minute, Frank (Sinatra) the next. Of course, he did know Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra, but not quite as well as he made out. This didn’t endear him to many people and, I was afraid, probably caused them to make fun of him behind his back. But if he knew, I don’t think he cared. He found fame by association so very dazzling.