Hello, pleased to meet you. I’m Lucinda Loveface. (I named myself that the day I realized that Love has pretty much always been my focus—no, I’ll admit it, my obsession.) I’ve been married four times, proposed to nine and a half times. And there may be more ahead. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Right?
Of course, maybe you could say one of those marriages, to a movie-star-handsome, alcoholic screen writer, (I call him Writerman to myself) never really happened. I’ll explain what I mean in a minute. (This one I’m going to talk about now was “Number Two” in chronological order. It was the shortest, and maybe easiest to talk about, so that’s why I mention it first.)
What happened in that case was that he knew, had worked with, a psychic. He took me to meet her in San Diego, and I presumed, to have her give him the ‘go ahead’ about me. She supported our relationship (often by playing relaxing music before a ‘session’). She officiated the wedding which took place on the three concrete front steps to my apartment, which was in a cluster of one-bedroom apartments at Hollywood and Western. Not a great part of town, but I had moved there from San Francisco, so what did I know? At the point we were married, Writerman had been unable to pay his rent and had moved in with me a few months before.
The day we were married, right after the “I do” and the rice parts, I went to find him among our guests. He was still in the cluster of apartments, although in someone else’s apartment, of all things in a bedroom, surrounded with four beauties (my girlfriends, supposedly) and I heard him saying to one, “You have gorgeous lips like Jane Russell.”
I mean, who does that—talk to a woman about her lips? Unless they’re trying to seduce the woman, right? (Writerman and I met about ten years after we went our separate ways when he came into Los Angeles for a director’s meeting. I agreed to meet him at lunchtime at my office, during my workday. I was dressed in a professional-looking cranberry pantsuit, hair: short and neat. (I mention that because we had been together during my wild-hair days when I tried to emulate a lion. I had thought that was kinda sexy.) He had brought along a bottle of champagne. Really? I’m working, Dude. So, I sure refused that. He opened the bottle anyway and drank right from the neck. He said he had always wanted me to wear the professional pantsuit type of garb and business-y hair. Oh, and the main part I was trying to tell you: He also confessed to me, “You know how I am. A woman to me is like a ten-dollar bill on the sidewalk. I have to pick her up.” If only he had told me that before we were married!)
Anyway, a year after we married, when I couldn’t stand his drinking and pulling up my plants and punching holes in my walls and he couldn’t stand my reactions to his behavior, I thought I would have to go through another legal divorce. So, it took me a while to gear up for the conflict, confusion and let’s face it, aloneness. When I had got myself together and called the psychic to get info to use for filing for divorce, I was shocked. She said quietly, and very very kindly, I think, “I had psychic knowledge that things would not work out for you, so I never mailed in the documents.”
Whew! That made the whole divorce or nondivorce thing easier. At least from logistical and financial points of view.
So that was one marriage. The next marriage I’ll tell you about, my number four, was my next shortest one, and getting married was my really my fault.