Luck or Something Like It (23 page)

I was separated and going through my divorce with Marianne, and for one fleeting moment, I had an epiphany. I realized I could do things now that I had not done nor had wanted to do for fifteen years or longer. I could date women and have some wild times without feeling guilty. Being married so many times, I probably had an urge for adventure that had been pent up as I spent every waking moment crafting a career. This seemed very attractive and enticing to me at the time. It was never really about having sex with other women, as much as it was that I could now think about it with a clear conscience and no guilt. That was very exciting to me.

At that point in my life, I enjoyed talking to beautiful, alluring women on the phone. I would have to equate it to today’s online chat rooms, but these were private conversations, intended only for me and whomever I invited in. To do this, I used, in what now sounds like something from the Ice Age, a restricted phone number that only this group and I had access to and that required a code to access.

Let’s start with this. I have a friend in Dallas, Texas, who was the ultimate single guy at this point. He had access to all the party girls in his area. So very quickly, I established a relationship with two of his “friends.” I met them in person while in Dallas one weekend and developed a long-distance telephone relationship with both of them.

I mean, this was to be the ultimate “safe sex” for me. This was never about physical contact, just erotic and sexually explicit messages left on a limited-access phone line that was always solicited by the other parties, and remember, I wasn’t doing this with random people I had met. These were my friend’s friends and I trusted them. So I felt comfortable that this was happening with consenting adults.

It didn’t take me long to get right in the middle of the fast track in the Dallas nightlife. But no matter how much fun I thought I was having, I couldn’t shake the fact that I wasn’t completely divorced and my guilt kept nagging at me. This was all new. I rationalized it by thinking this activity would be far enough from home that it was safe and at the very least, if it went as planned, respectful to my soon-to-be ex-wife, who theoretically should never know about it.

I must admit in retrospect, I think the problem was I saw these girls as my friends and they saw me as their opportunity.

I will tell you the one thing a public person treasures most, of all his or her possessions, is his or her public image; these girls either knew that when this started or figured it out very quickly. They knew that this would be my Achilles heel—something I would protect at all costs.

So recordings made in the privacy of this little group were then recorded by them and distributed to the
National Enquirer
for money.

This was devastating, and they knew it would be. In the context of tabloid exploitation, no matter what I intended, I came off as sleazy.

I refuse to play the guilt card on anyone. I was a grown man, and I knew what I was doing. These conversations were sexually explicit and designed to arouse the listener.

The plot unfolded with the
Enquirer
in full front-page banner mode. The women hired lawyers who went for the throat. They wanted money, lots of it, claiming I had sexually harassed these obviously young pure women (in their thirties) to the point of damaging them beyond repair, even though the way this worked, they didn’t have to call the number and retrieve the message if they were offended. They also asked me to do this for them.

Whatever damage I had done to them, I figured, could be solved by money.

In all honesty, I did settle this lawsuit, but for nowhere near the amount of money they wanted. It was over then, and I was thrilled to have it behind me.

The press was following me everywhere. If I checked into a hotel, they knew I was there, and somehow they got on the movie sets. To see where I’d been the last week, all I had to do was pick up an
Enquirer.

In 1993, I was Lindsay Lohan for the tabloids, kind of the celebrity du jour whose every dirty secret the tabloid press could either dig up or invent. I sold a lot of magazines and they wanted a piece of me and everything I did. There were hungry young would-be journalists around every corner, in the bushes, behind garbage cans—everywhere I turned—and while it may seem flattering to someone who’s never been through it, I can assure you, it is not a pretty thing. These guys were everywhere, and the worse the picture, the more money they made.

Honestly, looking at it in retrospect, I don’t think it was as bad then as it is now. There is a take-no-prisoners attitude now. Tabloid photographers have absolutely no concern for what you feel or what people think of you when your fifteen minutes are over, and they smell blood.

The good news in all of this bad-news period—the flat career, the failure of yet another marriage, all the tabloid character assassination—is that while this was going on, I met my wife, Wanda.

Chapter Seventeen

Wanda

So I was on my own
again, not a common experience for me but one that I could see could open new possibilities. I had been dating around Atlanta aimlessly and was on a date with a girl I had met through a friend of mine, Charlie Minor, the national promotion man for Capitol Records, when I bumped into my future wife, Wanda.

We had chosen a little Italian restaurant called Pricci and were in the middle of our “getting to know each other” banter when the hostess walked by our table. I’m honestly not sure she even looked at me, but I saw her. I don’t know what and I don’t know why, but there was just something incredibly different about her from the minute I saw her. She had a smile, not a hostess smile, but something more genuine, and believe it or not, it rocked me to my core.

Bear with me for this next part, because I know how shallow it might make me sound, but it’s exactly how it went down. If things hadn’t turned out this well, I probably would never be telling this story. I honestly don’t remember how my date ended, but it did. I would like to believe I was nice and courteous to her, but early on, we both knew the food was great but the relationship wasn’t going anywhere. I dropped her off at her apartment and went back to the hotel where I was staying.

I had no clue what I would do next. I didn’t want to go back to the restaurant, but I couldn’t miss this opportunity, if there was one. My friend Charlie had been at the restaurant that night, at a table not far from me. I also knew this was a restaurant he frequented. Maybe he even knew this girl. So I decided to enlist his help.

This was 1992, long before everyone had pocket cell phones. If anything, people had those
big
spy-looking cell phones. I called the restaurant and asked for Charlie. I knew he was well known there. When he got on the phone, I asked him if he happened to know the hostess on duty. He said he didn’t know her, but he did know she had an identical twin sister. My exact thought was
How can you not know someone and yet know she has a twin?
, but I didn’t ask. I was just happy that he knew who I was speaking about. He suggested I speak with the manager, a friend of his named Jesse, if I wanted to meet her.

Having never done anything like this before, I was very uncomfortable asking a restaurant manager about one of his employees, but I did it anyway.

Jesse said her name was Wanda Miller. He went on to tell me she hadn’t been working there long but that she was a really sweet girl. He asked if I would like to meet her. For some reason I was taken aback by the suddenness of it all. I knew she was young, so I felt compelled to ask him how young. Jesse said, “I’m not sure, but I think she’s maybe twenty-one.” My heart sank. I told him that as much as I would love to, “I can’t do twenty-one,” and thanked him. I was fifty-four at the time, so that was way too young for me. We hung up, and I assumed that was the end of it. As disappointed as I was, I couldn’t imagine what we could have had in common. So I had to let it go.

Then the phone rang. It was Jesse. “She’s not twenty-one,” he said. “She’s twenty-six.” I don’t know what I thought the difference was, but I remember saying, “Well, I can do twenty-six.” He said he had spoken with her and she had given him permission to give me her phone number.

To say our first date was awkward is an understatement. Wanda had the same smile I had been drawn to the night before, but I swear she now looked like she was twelve years old. She was wearing a simple black dress with the biggest yellow bow I have ever seen in my life on the front. I felt like I was having dinner with my granddaughter. But she was beautiful and incredibly interesting, so as awkward as it was, it was fun.

She had chosen a little Russian restaurant on Roswell Road in Atlanta to have dinner. I have no idea why she chose this place. I can only surmise it was because it was two hundred yards from the safety of her apartment, her sister, and her friends. Just so you know, I have never eaten in a Russian restaurant before or since. But we got through the Russian restaurant, her yellow bow, and my age just fine, and we actually had a great time.

We decided after dinner that, in the future, I would dress a little younger and she would dress a little older and we’d meet somewhere in the middle. We agreed to get together the next day for lunch at Houston’s and she would bring her sister with her. I had never dated an identical twin before, but having spent that little bit of personal time with Wanda the night before, I was comfortable I would be able to tell them apart.

One thing I hadn’t counted on: twins like being twins and they often dress alike. So here they come, and the entire Houston’s restaurant watched them as they came in. Individually they were beautiful, but together they were stunning.

I was maybe twenty yards from the front door when they arrived, and from that far away I’m embarrassed to say I couldn’t tell them apart. They were both extremely beautiful girls and seemed to walk in lockstep. I made the snap decision that I didn’t care who was who, and since I didn’t know, I would gladly accept whichever one sat next to me. Tonia, Wanda’s sister, had that same unmistakable Miller smile, and in all fairness was equally as beautiful, but Wanda and I had made a connection the night before that somehow made her different.

So Wanda and I began dating, but in those early months, we kept a low profile. At this point her parents didn’t know what we were doing, so out of respect for them and for Wanda’s safety, we avoided the public eye.

Wanda was with me while I was doing a concert in Chicago that still brings back such great memories for me. I had Ray Charles and George Burns, of all people, opening for me. George had a hot new single on the radio called “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again.” At the age of ninety-six, he was still working. So I pulled him aside and asked him, “George, how do you keep working at ninety-six?” In typical George Burns fashion, without even breaking stride, he said, “You stay booked.” As simple as it sounded, it was profound. You must have a purpose in your life, a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to keep pushing forward.

George and I had met years before and become friends when I took his photograph for my book of celebrity portraits,
Your Friends and Mine.
He was truly amazing that night in Chicago. He came down the aisle, walked up the stairs to the in-the-round stage, walked all around the stage, acknowledged all sides of the audience, did about twenty minutes of his sly, witty comedy, then sang his song with my band playing for him. He got the longest standing ovation I have ever seen. The audience stood the entire time it took him to walk back down the aisle and into the dressing room area.

As if that wasn’t enough for one night, my idol, Ray, came out after that and completely dismantled that group of people just by being Ray Charles. I have never in my life, before or since, witnessed how such simplicity could create the kind of emotional response those two guys received that night.

I was not looking forward to walking out on that stage after they finished. I do think the audience appreciated me making this night available to them, so things went well for me, too.

All this proves a theory I have long had about performing: the audience expects to be entertained 100 percent for their ticket dollar. If the opening acts give them only 10 percent, I have to give them 90. If the opening acts give them 90 percent, I have to give them only 10 and they’ll be satisfied. All I had to give was 10 percent that night, and we were all happy.

The night before that concert, the Chicago Bulls were playing the Phoenix Suns for the NBA Championship. I tried to reach Michael Jordan to see about getting tickets for Wanda and me as well as for Kelly and Rob, who were acting as our foils for the tabloids. The magazines would have loved to have gotten a picture of me with a beautiful twenty-six-year-old girl. That would have added fire to what they were already saying about me, and I didn’t need that.

After attempting to reach Michael and having no success, I had just about given up when we ran into the Phoenix Suns star player Charles Barkley at our hotel. Charles had come to my farm for the Classic Weekend and was happy to help us out. He said, “You don’t need Michael Jordan, man. I can get you tickets,” and he did.

The four of us went to the game, making sure Wanda and I were never standing together. They were great seats, however, two on one side of the arena and two on the opposite side. So Rob and I sat on one side, and Kelly and Wanda sat on the opposite side. We waved at each other a couple of times but had no personal contact during the game, so there were no pictures of us for the tabloids. What a game it was. Chicago went on to win their second of three consecutive NBA Championships.

It never dawned on me that Wanda was just there to see the game and didn’t care where she sat. She was just impressed that I knew Charles Barkley but not totally sure I really knew Michael Jordan.

It was on a trip down to Mexico during this period that I realized how crazy this press stuff was getting. Wanda and I checked into our room and there was a photographer for one of the tabloids actually in our room, ready to catch us in our “secret Mexican getaway.” The hotel arrested him. Down in the lobby, the Mexican authorities showed up and were ready to take him off to jail. I didn’t want to see that happen and did not press charges, so they let him off. The next week, the pictures and story of the trip were on the front page of the tabloids.

Wanda and I dated for almost six months before she worked up the nerve to tell her parents about me. Actually, I’m not sure whether she told them or they read it in the tabloids. Either way, it was not pleasant. The fact that I was two years older than her parents put an awkward slant on things right from the start. Not for me, but I’m sure it would be troublesome to any caring parent, and I understood that.

The timing of this could not have been worse. This was at the end of the “phone sex” issue in the magazines, and her family did not deserve to be put through that. Even I knew how bad it looked for all of us. But as wrong as it may have looked, I also knew this—my relationship with Wanda felt right to me. After allowing her mother and father to explain their concerns in a phone call, I assured them that I respected their feelings. I made them a promise that I would never lie to Wanda, and I would never lie to them. We reached a shaky understanding that as long as “I gave respect, I would get respect.” That was good enough for me, and for Wanda.

After Wanda and I
had been together for the better part of a year, we were living in a house I bought in Las Vegas. Her sister, Tonia, was a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines and stayed with us on her Las Vegas layovers, so the two of them got a chance to catch up every now and then. Things could not have been better for us.

However, we had one small hurdle to get over—Wanda’s parents still had not met me. Her father, Charles, decided he needed to see this man who had taken his daughter and moved her in with him in, of all places, Las Vegas, Nevada. His mind was racing as he imagined what her life must be like. Our arrangement, on the surface, was against everything both he and her mother believed in.

To his credit, I believe that when Charles came to Vegas, he saw that we had a respectable life. We didn’t drink, we didn’t smoke, and we weren’t doing drugs, so I’m sure he felt that he could relax a bit. I’m also sure he had no idea what Wanda saw in a man my age, but he trusted and respected his daughter enough to allow her to make her own decisions. That took a lot of strength for a father, I know.

I also knew that since he didn’t gamble and had very little use for Vegas as a city, we had to find some other way to entertain him for three days. Fortunately I had the perfect answer. About three months prior to her dad’s visit, Wanda and I had purchased a fifty-foot houseboat on Lake Powell, unquestionably one of the most beautiful places in the world. It’s basically the Grand Canyon with water in it. By anyone’s standards it is breathtaking.

Charles had been on the lake about twenty minutes when he called his wife, Tina, and not so jokingly said he wanted them to move there. It is that beautiful. The best news was, we all had a great time and he felt comfortable Wanda could make her own decisions about this relationship. One in-law down, one to go.

Every three or four years, it seems, I work an event called the Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City, Florida. It’s a huge festival in that area, which includes Valdosta, Georgia, where Wanda’s parents lived. I was on a collision course with the other half of Wanda’s parents. I was determined to make her see how happy Wanda and I were. Her blessing would be crucial. By the time I left Florida, she would either accept me or kill me, I figured.

Having never met Clomenteen (Tina) Miller, I really had no idea which option—accept or kill—was most likely. But from our first telephone encounter, I knew Tina was a no-nonsense person. When it came to her girls, there were no exceptions—they came first. She would speak her mind freely and let you know the truth about how she felt. I must admit I liked that about her. There would be no room for misunderstanding. She and Charles were the salt of the earth. They had worked very hard to give both Tonia and Wanda a good perspective on what life was like. Now I felt like I had come in and thrown a monkey wrench into their dreams for their girls.

For forty years or so, Charles Miller had worked for the railroad as a conductor and as the main man in the caboose. His life had been, and still is to some extent, trains. This job required that he be gone from home quite a bit, but when he was in Valdosta, he forgot about the trains, and his girls were his life. Tina had a lot of time at home while the girls were in school with not a lot to do, so she had taken up cutting hair as a pastime and had become very good and very well respected in the area.

Our fateful meeting took place in Plant City, a large outdoor venue with a series of big dressing rooms. Wanda and I were set up for her to give me a haircut in one of these dressing rooms. (Wanda has cut my hair for the twenty years I’ve known her.) When Tina came in, I was surprised and shocked. This was not how I had hoped our first meeting would be. As I started to stand up for Wanda to introduce us, Tina politely said, “Keep your seat,” and I did. As she came around behind me, I noticed she had taken the scissors from Wanda.