“This is yours! Yours!” she shouted.
Then came the “good” stuff.
“Take it, nigger! Go ahead, take it!”
I cleaned that up a little bit, but you get the idea. Well, George couldn’t get his ass out of there fast enough. Me? All I heard was someone shout, “Nigger!” and my ass was up in bed.
“What the hell?” It was déjà avu Southeastern Oklahoma State—“Who’s-that-fucking-my-white-daughter?” shit. Then I realized it was Carmen doing the shouting.
The next morning we went downstairs to breakfast, and Carmen, George, and I were sitting in a booth. George held off as long as he could, and then in mid-bite, he said, “So Carmen, what’s with the racial slur?”
Carmen turned bright red and I started laughing.
“You heard that?” I said. “Man, she called me ‘nigger,’ and I jumped up to see if there was somebody else in the room.”
Now Carmen hadn’t meant anything by it. She’s not like that, you know? She was just trying to heat things up, milk the moment for all it was worth. George knew that. He was just giving her a little shit. We all ended up laughing about it.
So that was our first time—just another romantic evening with Dennis Rodman.
After that, we made up for lost time and had sex like seven days straight, ate Chicago up behind closed doors. There was a ton of pent-up energy to release, and we were like two tigers going at each other. We’d throw each other here, throw each other there. She’d slap me here. I’d slap her there. I would do this to her. She would do that to me. We were bouncing off the walls, throwing lamps, breaking tables. I mean, I don’t know how many hotel rooms we destroyed having sex. Anybody who heard it must have thought we were fighting, or trying to kill each other.
When we tired of hotel rooms, the Berto Center, the Bulls’ practice facility, became our domain. We had sex in the training room, the weight room, this, that. We did everything under the sun at the Berto Center, everything that you could name. We didn’t care where we had sex. All the guys are going to read this book and go, “Damn!” It was intense. It was crazy, but it worked for me and her. It worked. Sexually, she made me feel like I was different.
After Toronto, even though there were always other girls lurking around in the background, Carmen took center stage in my life. She was always the lady of choice whether it was coming to games, clubbing, charity events—whatever—and every chance I had, I’d either fly to see her or fly her to see me. Still it wasn’t unusual for me to put Carmen on the plane in the afternoon and meet another girl for dinner that night.
We kept hanging out and hanging out and she eventually confessed that she had always wanted to meet me, that she’d told her girlfriends, “That’s the guy I’m going to marry—that guy.” And I looked at her like, “Wow! You want to marry a guy like me? I don’t know about that, girl. I don’t know about you and me getting married.”
I wanted to, and I didn’t want to. One day “yes.” The next day “no.”
After the 1997-1998 season was over (the Bulls won a third straight championship beating the Utah Jazz in the finals), I flew to France to make a movie called Simon Sez. In my first starring role, I would play a secret agent trying to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a close friend. It had a happy ending. During the filming, I flew Carmen over to join me. One day, we ended up shopping for watches in the city of Nice on the French Riviera.
I have had a thing about watches ever since the bone-headed stunt I pulled when I was a 19-year-old janitor/master criminal working at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. I stole 15 watches, was caught—on video no less—and ended up in jail. This was like grand larceny, and they could have locked my ass up for years. You might think I lifted the watches to supplement my pitiful $6.50-per-hour paycheck. Nope, I was playing the big shot. I gave the watches away to my mother, sisters, and friends—didn’t sell one—and the cops were able to recover all of them. That saved my ass, and they let me go, but not before I had spent a scary-as-hell night in jail. An angel was looking over my shoulder in those days. So now, one of my trademark moves is to buy people close to me a watch. Like George—he still wears a Rolex I gave him as a “thank you” after my first year with the Bulls.
Anyway, we were wandering around in this French jewelry store looking for something nice for Carmen. Turned out she didn’t need any help. The girl felt perfectly at home in a jewelry store. While she didn’t get a watch, she did pick out these nice diamond earrings, this nice diamond necklace, this nice diamond ankle bracelet, and this nice diamond toe ring. The prices were marked in francs so at first I didn’t know what the hell I was getting into. Then they brought me the American Express thing to sign, the total translated into good old American dollars. My hands started shaking. I started to hyperventilate. I went outside and sat on the steps, and George joined me, placing his hand on my shoulder.
“You okay?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“You know, if this relationship with Carmen doesn’t work out, you have to get all this shit back.”
My three-year run with the Bulls was over, I wasn’t sure I’d even have a job the next year, and this wasn’t some $10,000 outfit at Versace or even a $50,000 Mercedes. I was about to sign for $250,000 worth of jewelry.
Carmen took off for L.A. with her bling, and a few weeks later, the film wrapped. The night I got home, George and I took the Bentley into L.A to have dinner with Carmen and some friends, and afterwards we went clubbing, hitting every joint in town. When it came time to leave, George was driving, Floyd “Mr. Social” Ragland was in the passenger seat, and Carmen and I were in the back. Within 10 or 15 minutes, Floyd was passed out, slumped against the passenger side door, and Carmen and I were naked in the back seat.
George was like, “I’m over this shit,” and he’s flying down the road at 80 miles per hour trying to get us back to my house in Newport Beach. Yet, for George, this backseat coupling turned out to be more than the usual heels-to-the-back-of-the-driver’s-head routine, turning into what almost amounted to a three-way.
At the beginning, Carmen was facing me, sitting straight up in my lap. Then she started to bend over backwards. First, her hand was on George’s shoulder, then on the dash, and, before it was over, her torso was arched like a bridge over the front seat—all but lying on top of Floyd, who had chosen a very bad time to pass out. As for George, if he had turned his head, he would have gotten a nipple up the nose. Now Carmen, she’s not what you’d call a shy, retiring flower, and she really didn’t give a shit. After a while, she even struck up this running conversation with George.
“George, would you tell Dennis to stop? I’m getting tired.”
“Sweetheart,” said George, trying to keep his eyes glued to the road, “all you have to do is get off him.”
Then she gave up on George and went directly to the source.
“Honey,” she said to me, “I’m getting tired.”
I laid off. I’d like to think that I laid off for good—George says that’s not how it happened.
“It was like a Three Stooges skit,” George recalled. “Dennis would wait like 30 seconds, then he’d say, ‘Are you okay?’ Then he’d start up again. Then she’d be like, ‘George, I’m tired. Dennis?’ He’d stop for 30 seconds, start up again, all the way to Newport Beach.”
Now George denies ever slowing down to prolong the show, but the evidence is stacked against him. For while it may have been very late and very dark, this was a busy California freeway, and there was always oncoming traffic, headlights flashing across Carmen’s naked body. Then there was the up close and personal Debbie-Does-Dallas soundtrack. What we’re talking about here is a live sex show featuring one of America’s leading sex symbols being witnessed by a man who confesses to having had a hard-on that he “could have chopped a tree down with.”
Didn’t slow down?
Shit, I would have.
About this time, word got out that Carmen and I were seeing each other. Now there trul
y was a threesome: Carmen, me, and the media.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE MARRYING KIND
One night Carmen and I were out drinking in Newport Beach, my hometown, and we decided to fly to Vegas. Then we decided since we were going to be in Vegas anyway, we might as well get married. Made perfect sense to a couple of drunk people. So Carmen called her best friend and a couple of other folks to be witnesses, somebody thought to bring roses, and we were on the way to the airport in the Bentley—George Triantafillo at the wheel.
So far, so good.
Carmen and I had been talking about marriage off and on, seriously and not so seriously, drunk and sober ever since Toronto. Today if someone asks me who was hottest on the idea, I’d have to say that tilts in favor of Carmen. She was the girl—no big news there. Not that I wasn’t for it. I was just waiting for the right moment. So were my handlers.
George, my then agent, Dwight Manley, and my lawyer didn’t want to see me lose everything I had to some gold-digging scumbag. Long before Carmen came along, they had a contingency plan in place. At any serious mention of marriage, George was to call Manley and then stall until somebody got there with the papers. Anybody who wanted to marry Dennis Rodman had to sign a prenup agreement. Once the girl signed, I could do whatever I wanted.
No signature, no marriage.
So George woke up Dwight Manley.
“Dennis wants to get married,” he said.
“Not until she signs,” said Dwight, as he dispatched my lawyer to the airport.
When we pulled up on the tarmac at the Orange County Airport, the plane was all gassed up, ready to go. George pulled the pilot aside.
“We can’t go yet,” he said. “We’re waiting for somebody,”
“Bullshit!” I said. Pre-nup or no pre-nup, I wasn’t going to wait. “We’re leaving now,” I said, and everyone got on the plane.
The pilot shrugged. “He’s paying the bills,” he said to George. “We’re leaving.”
Clearly, this was a guy who didn’t know George Triantafillo.
“No way,” George said. “If you start that son of a bitch, I’ll blow a hole in the engine.”
The pilot was bug-eyed. I don’t know what he was more worried about—the plane or George packing heat.
“That’s a million dollars,” the pilot said.
“Dennis can afford it,” said George.
Then the pilot, co-pilot, and ground crew gathered around and started yapping about George’s threat, and if they could get past that, whether it was legal for George to get on the plane with a gun. I tried to get them back on track.
“Come on, let’s go, fuck it! I don’t need no stinking pre-nup. She doesn’t want my money. She loves me.”
The pilot came out of the confab and informed us that he wasn’t flying anywhere with all the hassle. That was when I fired George for the millionth time.
“Cool,” said George, “but since you owe me a shit-load of money, I’ll be taking the Bentley.”
“Fine,” I said. “Go fuck yourself.”
By this time, Carmen had started crying. I couldn’t handle that.
“Fuck the plane,” I said. “We’ll drive to Vegas. George, give me the keys.”
“Don’t you remember, you gave me the car,” said George.
“Okay, whatever. Drive us to Vegas.”
“You fired me. I’m not driving your ass anywhere.”
“Okay, you’re rehired. Drive.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“I’ll double your salary.”
Done. So we were off to Vegas—I thought. Before we could get back in the car, George put in another call to Manley.
“Just drive them around in circles until they pass out,” said Manley. “I’ll meet you at Dennis’s beach house.”
About an hour later, I woke up just as we pulled into my garage at Newport Beach. “What the fuck is this?” I said. “We were supposed to go to Vegas.”
“Vegas is closed,” said George.
Motherfucker.
After that miscue, Carmen and I were even more determined. We kept trying to get married, trying to get married. Would you call that stupid? Would you call that idiotic? Would you call that downright immature? I don’t know what it was, but we wanted to get married so badly. It was something within us that wanted us to be together—almost as if it was out of our control. It’s amazing we didn’t get married sooner than we did.
Las Vegas, November 14, 1998. It was five o’clock in the morning and my right-hand man Thaer Mustafa and I were playing blackjack, winning for a change, at the Hard Rock. We had been up all night, of course, and I was pretty much wasted. Carmen had gone to bed hours before.
“Go get Carmen,” I suddenly said to Thaer. “I want to talk to her.”
Thaer knew better. Wake Carmen up, and you have a hornet’s nest. She’s throwing shit—yelling and screaming. There has to be a fire in the building to get her out of bed.
“You nuts?” answered Thaer. “I’m not doing shit.”
I went to my backup, this goofy security guard we had hired for the trip. This guy thought he was James Bond, but was really more like Barney Fife. So I called the clueless one over, whispered something in his ear, and he was gone. Thaer shook his head, expecting we had a 911 call in our future.
About an hour later, Deputy Fife and Carmen showed up, and Thaer couldn’t believe it. Carmen’s make-up alone usually took that long, but there she stood. Thaer asked me how Fife got her moving.
“I told him to tell her, ‘Get up. Dennis wants to get married.’”
Thaer was like, “Holy shit!” He even seemed happy for me for about a minute. Then he started worrying. “You’re wasted, I’m wasted,” he said. “How you going to get married right now?”
“Fuck it,” I said. “I love her. I want to get married.”
And this time, it wasn’t even faintly her idea. The four of us borrowed this Range Rover and headed over to city hall to get a license. It was maybe 7:00 a.m., and there was already a line. We paid our $35, and, license in hand, took off for this chapel that I knew about because it is right next to Olympic Gardens—my favorite strip club. The chapel was named “The Little Chapel of the Flowers.”
We woke up the reverend, opted for the basic $185 wedding package, which included “the groom’s boutonnière,” according to the New York Post, and Barney Fife went to work. He practically frisked the reverend before beginning a search for cameras and microphones. He was looking behind pictures, shining a flashlight into air vents, crawling around on the floor, looking under benches. Thaer and Carmen were making fun of the guy. Finally I said, “Dude, come on. That’s enough. Let’s get on with it.”
We were standing there at the altar, Carmen wearing “a dark colored pants suit and a black leather jacket,” and me “a baseball cap and khaki shirt,” according to the Post, and the reverend wanted to know if there was a ring.
Yes and no.
Carmen was wearing this, like, $80,000 ring that I’d bought her. It wasn’t a wedding ring, but it would pass. The reverend took the ring and started talking about unity, what the ring symbolized. He was going on and on and on because it was Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra. He was putting on a show, really getting into it.
Finally, I’d had enough.
“Listen, dude,” I said. “Get on with this bullshit before I change my mind.”
That set Thaer off, and he fell on the floor laughing. Carmen? Most women would go, “What’d you say?” and stomp out. Carmen didn’t blink an eye. She just looked at me and smiled. The reverend was shocked. I turned around to tell Thaer to chill, and then I started laughing.
Somehow, we made it through our vows, and, the deed done, the question was what to do for a reception.
“Why don’t we go to a strip bar?” I suggested.
Carmen was like, “I can’t. I have to get back to L.A.”
Some work thing. A Hyperion Bay shoot, I think. I had a car drop her off at the airport
and ended up spending my wedding night, morning, whatever, partying with Thaer and Barney Fife.
Years later Carmen told a reporter for a website called FemaleFirst.co.uk that she knew the marriage was a mistake from the first, and she “… had a feeling of dread as soon as she got on the plane.”
“When I married Dennis, deep down I knew it was stupid,” she said.
Bullshit. She’s just trying to rewrite history. If ever there was a couple in love, it was us. I’ll go to my grave believing that.
The wedding was all over the news within an hour of us leaving the chapel.
Enter the spin doctors.
“From what I can determine, it’s not legal. It sounds like he was deeply intoxicated,” my agent at the time, Dwight Manley, told the New York Post two days after the wedding. “Obviously, anyone that would marry someone that was intoxicated to the point that they couldn’t speak or stand had ulterior motives of some sort.”The word “leeches” made it into print.
Manley’s spin was that this shameless gold digger named Carmen Electra had tricked a shit-faced Dennis Rodman into getting married. Carmen’s publicist was quick to deny it, “Inaccurate and untrue,” she said.
But Manley’s version stuck. Even today, the average person you ask on the street will tell you the same thing: Carmen scammed Dennis.
What a crock.
I heard Manley’s spin, and I was like “What the fuck?” My publicist sent a handwritten note to Carmen’s publicist, which appeared in print the next day.
“I love Carmen and am proud to be married to her,” the note read. “I apologize for any false statements given on my behalf regarding my marriage to Carmen Electra.”
I don’t remember this, but later Carmen would tell the Post that she “… drove out to see me to try and figure out what was going on. We watched it [the Manley statement] together on every news channel.”
Carmen was way pissed, of course. We ended up fighting, fighting, fighting—trying to figure out what to do about it.
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