Patrick received a scholarship to study dance in New York City, and for his final Houston evening, he picked up Lisa (once more staying with her family) and took her for dinner, where she gave him a fifty-cent coin for luck. He gave her a broken Mickey Mouse watch from Disney on Parade. He also presented her with a card expressing his love, one that she would keep forever. It ended, “Work hard on your dancing and I’ll do the same, and maybe, someday ...! My heart be united with yours, Buddy.” Unfortunately, the night ended on a low note. After he had dropped Lisa off, he was arrested for a traffic violation, and the fine forced him to part with his lucky coin.
Two years later, in 1974, Lisa received the same ballet scholarship and joined him in his New York City apartment as a roommate. However, when their platonic relationship evolved into a physical one, Patrick insisted that they get married, and they were wed in Houston on June 12, 1975, two months after getting engaged. The ceremony took place in her family’s backyard, and the reception was held in the dance studio where they had met. Lisa sewed both her wedding gown and her groom’s three-piece suit. For their honeymoon the newlyweds borrowed a motorcycle and rode to Lake Travis, 180 miles outside Houston. Patrick wrote of the low-cost getaway, “We had the time of our lives.”
In the tradition of “Go west, young man, go west,” Patrick and Lisa decided that opportunity beckoned in Hollywood; armed with $2,000 in savings, they said farewell to New York City. Upon arrival they stayed in a hotel that rented by the hour.
Swayze landed on Hollywood’s radar when Francis Ford Coppola hired him as well as other unknown young men (all of whom would achieve star status) to play the Greasers in The Outsiders, the 1983 adaptation of S. E. Hinton’s teen-angst novel. However, immortality truly knocked when he played the role of a Catskills dance instructor in Dirty Dancing. Swayze and Grey danced as if they had been going cheek to cheek and pelvis to pelvis all their lives, and females fantasized about being Baby to Patrick, who was profiled in 1991 as People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. The film seared the catchphrase “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” into the lingo of every female who saw it, and the blockbuster became one of the most reliable date movies ever.
However, although having attained sex symbol status, Patrick only had eyes for Lisa, with whom he had practiced all his dance moves. In fact, one of the film’s main songs, “She’s Like the Wind,” was written by Patrick for Lisa.
Patrick had the armor of love, fame, and fortune; depression, nevertheless, still slipped through the chinks. This was brought on by a series of slings and arrows: the death of his father, the suicide of his sister, Lisa’s miscarriage, and the passing of a beloved dog. For consolation, Patrick began drinking, which led to tensions in his marriage. Lisa had been there during the lean years and several death-defying injuries (her husband said he was an adrenaline junkie), but her husband’s alcoholism was something she could not tolerate, and she moved out of their ranch. Patrick went cold turkey, and through the assistance of a psychic the couple reconciled, much to their mutual relief. Lisa said, “Love is supposed to start with bells ringing and go downhill from there. But it was the opposite for me. There’s an intense connection between us, and as we stayed together, the bells rang louder.”
In Aspen, as Lisa and Patrick toasted the New Year in 2008, Patrick felt ill; the diagnosis was stage four pancreatic cancer. He battled his disease with a cowboy’s grit and a dancer’s grace. In the summer of 2008, the couple decided to have a second wedding ceremony to commemorate their union. In front of a few guests, Patrick rode to his beloved bride on a white stallion and recited his last vows to his first love, “You are my woman, my lover, my mate, and my lady. I’ve loved you forever, I love you now, and I will love you forever more.” Ironically, the lyric that Patrick had composed became a metaphor for himself; like the wind Lisa would never see Patrick, but his presence would forever be felt.
Postscript
On September 14, 2009, Patrick passed away; he was cremated and his ashes were scattered over his New Mexico ranch.
33
Prince Charles and Camilla Shand
1971
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” However, at least in one instance, this did not hold true in Britain, where Prince Charles was able to find in middle age the love that had eluded him in his youth. He was able to obtain that rarest of gifts: a second chance.
Camilla Rosemary Shand was born in Sussex, the oldest child of Major Bruce Shand, a wine merchant, and Rosalind Cubitt. As the daughter of wealth, Camilla was educated in Paris and Switzerland; she graduated with an ability to fence and a £500,000 inheritance from the Cubitt family, who had developed much of Belgravia. When she returned to England she became part of the moneyed horse set of London, where she pursued her passion for all things equestrian, including fox hunting. Her only connection with royalty was that she was a descendant of Alice Keppel, who was King Edward VII’s mistress. Camilla’s station groomed her for a place in society as the wife of a wealthy aristocrat. However, the Fates had far too fertile an imagination for such a mundane scenario.
Camilla’s destiny, Charles Philip Arthur George, was born in Buckingham Palace and baptized with water from the River Jordan by the Archbishop of Canterbury. At age four, when his mother, Princess Elizabeth, became queen, his titles exceeded even the length of his name. He was raised by a nanny until he was sent to school in Scotland, of which dreadful experience he said, “Colditz in kilts.”
As the Prince of Wales, heir to the powerful, prestigious, and fabulous fortune that went along with his role as the man who would be king, his every romantic gesture was a matter of public speculation, and a bevy of beauties were willing to fall into his royal arms. Nevertheless, irrespective of the truth of rumors, the hurdles of marriage for the heir were high ones; his wife had to meet certain exact standards as she had to produce future monarchs, and, because of a 1772 Act, he was legally obliged to obtain his mother’s approval of spouse as a condition of ascending the throne. For his first marriage, approval was granted with alacrity; for the second, he was to have to wait three decades.
The first time Camilla met Charles was in June at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor when she approached him with her British variation of chutzpah: “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather, so how about it?” With such an opening gambit, what man could resist? The icebreaker proved refreshing to a man treated only with the utmost politically correct obsequiousness. Prince Charles was immediately captivated by the “breath of fresh air,” as he later described Camilla. And so commenced a courtship cemented by time-honored relationship glues: a shared sense of humor; a love of dogs, horses, polo, gardening, and the countryside; as well as a passion for blood sports. They became inseparable and were the high-profile couple seen in London’s hottest spots.
Alas, the course of true love, even for him who would wield the scepter, did not run smooth. Had the prince then proposed, tabloid journalism would have lost its crown jewel of scandal. Instead, unable to navigate his heart, Prince Charles went to serve his stint of eight months in the Caribbean with the Royal Navy, only to find, upon his return, that Camilla was engaged to cavalry officer Andrew Parker Bowles, with whom she was to have two children. The price of prevarication was to lose the one woman with whom he could have found happiness. This left the bereft prince to troll the aristocracy, dating the kind of girls who would make a fitting consort for a king. Heartbroken, Charles wrote to his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten (who was later killed in an IRA terrorist attack), “I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.”
Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 at St. Paul’s Cathedral in a ceremony referred to as “a fairy tale wedding,” one in which she rode to the church in a glass carriage and white gown with a twenty-five-foot train. The television audience numbered 750 million and the occasion was a national holiday in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, the coach soon turned into a pumpkin. Al
though Diana quickly became the people’s princess, emotionally there was no connection between the royal couple. Diana may have been a godsend for the House of Windsor’s gene pool and for the tabloid press, but she was a complete mismatch for her spouse. She was twelve years his junior with a life experience of absolutely nothing beyond some light work as a kindergarten teacher. Diana’s interests were a passion for fashion, celebrities, and, later on, humanitarian causes; Charles’s interests are architecture, horses, the environment, and philosophy.
Marital tensions began even before the tying of the Windsor knot when Diana chanced upon a bracelet Charles had bought for Camilla, engraved with the letters “GF” for Gladys and Fred, nicknames the childhood sweethearts had conferred on one another from Charles’s beloved Goon Show. Similarly, a few days after the honeymoon, Charles appeared at an official dinner for President Sadat of Egypt on board the royal yacht Britannia wearing new gold cuff links—a present from the other woman in the form of two interlinked Cs. However, as her face was already on the tea towels of the souvenir shops and too timid to break it off, Diana plunged ahead, naively believing that love was to follow marriage, rather than the other way around.
A few years later, their only commonalities were their two sons, as well as a mutual dislike of one another. Diana was angry at being one side of a royal triangle, with the other two being Charles and Camilla. Diana’s name for Camilla was “the Rottweiler”; Camilla called Diana “that ridiculous creature.” The media chronicled Diana’s misery through reports of bulimia, crying jags, and suicide attempts.
One pro-Diana source, in an attempt to deflect the negative spotlight onto her philandering husband, created a scandal known as Camillagate, one of the least proud moments in the history of the British monarchy. The individual taped a mobile telephone call in which Camilla told Charles, “I’d suffer anything for you. That’s love.” Charles replied, a tad less lyrically, that he hoped to be reincarnated as her tampon. Queen Elizabeth’s private reaction to the public tidbit is not known, but suffice it to say that the servants must have ducked for cover.
The tape’s leak served to turn the Windsors’ marital tribulations into the most publicized in history, and life at Kensington Palace became an international soap opera. People were sharply divided into who was more the sinner or who was the more sinned against, but in one area they were united: How could the prince prefer the other woman to the princess? In an effort at damage control, the prince agreed to appear on BBC television, and though he did not mention Camilla by name, he did admit he had committed adultery, though only after his marriage had irretrievably broken down. This public mea culpa signaled the death knell of the Parker Bowles marriage, and they amicably divorced. Diana went on to state in her own television interview, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” Charles and Diana acrimoniously divorced, thus ending the War of the Windsors. One year later she was dead as a result of a Parisian car crash. A backlash of anger was turned on Camilla. However, with time, and with a carefully orchestrated campaign of public appearances and Valentino gowns, the British populace grudgingly came around. After all, Charles was their prince and had a right to his happiness.
In 2005, Prince Charles, wearing his most expensive Savile Row suit, knelt to ask for something that, for years, Camilla had always extended—her hand. On her finger he placed an engagement ring that had once belonged to the Queen Mother. Charles’s mistake was to get his weddings out of order; he married his true love second and his trophy wife first.
The April 9 wedding (which had been postponed for a day so Charles could attend the pope’s funeral) did not possess the pomp and circumstance of his first, and Camilla was not the stereotypical princess bride, but this time the groom’s feeling of emptiness had finally passed. In the sense that love can endure over time, this too was a fairy-tale wedding, one in which we can only hope the erstwhile star-crossed lovers will, at long last, live happily ever after.
34
René Angélil and Céline Dion
1980
French Canada’s most famous face, Céline Dion, made her American debut in Beauty and the Beast with her song “Tale as Old as Time”; she earned the moniker “the voice of the century” in Titanic with her song “My Heart Will Go On.” However, Celine had the wisdom to understand that the acclaim of the many was nothing compared to her relationship with René, the man whom she described as “the color of love.”
René Angélil was born in Montreal in 1942, a French-Canadian of Catholic Syrian-Lebanese ancestry. As a teenager, he developed two passions: playing cards and performing pop music. He, along with three friends, formed the group the Baronets (named after a hockey team) which catered to the short-lived Quebec market for translations of English-language pop hits from Britain and the United States. At age twenty-four he married Denyse Duquette, with whom he had one child, Patrick, in 1968; the marriage ended in 1973. After the dissolution of his group, he became a managing artist for singer Ginette Reno. However, a future client would introduce him to the international spotlight and a romance that is the stuff that dreams are made of.
René’s destiny, Céline Marie Claudette Dion, was born in Charlemagne, Quebec, in 1968, to a mother who already felt overwhelmed with thirteen children. She received her name because of the Hugues Aufray song “Céline,” which was a huge success in her province. From a young age, Céline would perform on the kitchen table, a fork as her microphone. Her first public appearance was in her parents’ small piano bar, where the family performed in a French-Canadian version of the Austrian von Trapps. Word spread that the little girl possessed a voice that would make even the angels weep.
When Céline was twelve, her mother decided that her daughter needed an original song to break into show business; the result was “Ce n’était qu’un rêve” (“It Was Only a Dream”). Her mother Thérèse and brother Jacques composed the lyrics, and Céline supplied the vocals. It then fell upon her brother Michel to find the agent, whom he discovered on a Ginette Reno album. The demo was sent off in a brown paper bag, tied with a red ribbon. After two weeks, when the desperately desired call never came, Michel contacted the agent and asked why he had not listened to his sister’s tape. When the man asked him how he knew he hadn’t, Michel replied that if he had done so, he would have called. An audition was arranged that very afternoon.
The first time René met Céline was when she and her mother entered René’s office, where he asked her to sing. When she said she needed a mike, he handed her a pen. During the rendition, René had tears in his eyes.
René was so convinced that the girl was Canada’s Judy Garland that he mortgaged the home he shared with his second wife, singer Manon Kirouac, and their two children, Jean-Pierre and Anne-Marie, to produce Céline’s first album, La Voix du bon Dieu (The Voice of God). On the cover of the album she refused to smile because two of her teeth gave her a vampire look, which had made her classmates dub her “Dracula.” With her first paycheck she indulged in her first high-heeled black shoes.
At age eighteen she told René she wanted to be a star like Michael Jackson, which meant breaking into the American market. René arranged for her to disappear from the spotlight while she underwent dental work and learned English. She also used her hiatus to work on her sex appeal; the girl who always sang about the power of love had fallen hopelessly in love—with her manager. During her break she set herself a goal: “I was going to train myself in the art of seduction, like a top athlete, and snag René Angélil once and for all.”
When she returned and he got his first glimpse of his protégée, she noted with elation that “she could see him reeling.” She recalled, “For the first time, I felt him looking at me the way a man who desires a woman looks at her, not just looking at me the way an impresario looks at his artist.” Céline knew one day they would be intimate, and, in the words of her song, their love would go on.
When René’s wife asked for a divorce, Céline saw a glimmer of hope, wh
ich her mother did not share. Thérèse wrote a furious letter to Angélil accusing him of betraying her trust and that she wanted a prince for her princess, not a twice-divorced man, the father of three, who was two and a half times her daughter’s age.
In Dublin, on April 30, 1988, after Céline won the Eurovision Song Contest, René accompanied her back to her room, as he had after each performance since he had become her manager. While he was talking about her success, she was pleased to be alone in a hotel room (her mother was ill and had not accompanied her) with the man she loved. Picking up on her intent, René inched to the door and was about to exit when she kissed him on the lips. He fled. Céline immediately called him and said if he didn’t return immediately she would go to his room. He stammered that he needed time. René called several minutes later from the lobby and said, “If you really want to, I’ll be the first.” Her answer, “You’ll be the first. And the only.”
René insisted on secrecy of their affair, fearing that fans would think of her as his Lolita, as they had met when he was thirty-eight and she was twelve. Although Céline wanted to sing of their love from the rooftops, she reluctantly agreed, until she no longer could. At the Academy Awards, on Céline’s twenty-fourth birthday, she performed “Tale as Old as Time” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, for which she had won an Oscar. That evening, even though she sang for an audience of a billion, she also sang for one man. René had tears in his eyes as he listened to his protégée, the woman he loved.
When René gave Celine an engagement ring, she knew she could finally break her vow of secrecy. On her album The Color of My Love, she wrote, “René, you’re the color of my love.”
Celine and René were married on December 17, 1994, at Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal. Thousands of fans were massed along the bridal route in homage to French Canada’s royal wedding. The bride walked down the aisle on her father’s arm with her eight sisters carrying her twenty-foot train; during the procession the instrumental was “The Color of Love.” The royal wedding ceremony was broadcast live on Canadian television.
And the Rest Is History Page 18