Diplomacy and Diamonds

by Joanne King Herring

  Robin, only seven at the time, also had to have a motorcycle. Fixing motorcycles was second nature for Robin, who always had a knack for such tasks. Even before he could read the instructions, Robin could assemble the most complicated model airplanes by himself. He was a marvel. Putting those toys together foreshadowed his ability as an adult to understand complex machinery, including his boat, huge tractors, and the other ranch equipment that he needs to maintain the hundreds of acres at his country house.

  Bob and I were different parents with each child. We were afraid that the wealth around Beau would spoil him (we were rich in those days), and we wanted to make sure he did not mistakenly believe money made him better than anyone else. If he learned early on the value of hard work, my husband and I thought that would ultimately make life easier for him.

  But by the time Robin was born seven years later, we had reevaluated (not the part about the money but the part about how hard we made our sons work for the things they wanted). We felt that we had been too hard on Beau, and so we were easier with our second child.

  I think, too, that because Robin was sick when he was little, we found it hard to discipline him. Robin had asthma when he was a little boy. He had matchstick legs and arms, but because he was on so much medicine, he was never still. He was upside down and backwards every waking minute of every day, but he was so frail, he looked like he was starving.

  To me, asthma is the most terrifying illness that a parent and child can endure. When your child cannot breathe and you cannot help, the fear is beyond description. The years between birth and age six for Robin were a competition with death. He almost died four times before he turned three, but I vowed that my child would not die.

  Once when Robin was hospitalized, the hospital staff rolled in a breathing machine to help him. When I saw his tiny body relieved of his struggle to take his next breath, I wanted that equipment available to him all of the time.

  “I will mortgage my house, my virtue, and my life, but I want that machine,” I declared.

  The doctor looked thoughtful, then said, “Why not?” He knew of a smaller machine we could take home. “Keep it with you at all times,” he advised. “The moment Robin coughs, start the machine. Perhaps you will be able to stop or even prevent the asthma attacks.”

  I would have done anything to minimize the attacks. It was horrifying to watch Robin’s chest suck in, not out, with the sheer effort of breathing, hour after painful hour…

  He was so brave, though. He never cried or complained. His stoicism hurt me more than anything else. “Mommy,” he said, “please don’t look so scared. I’ll be fine.” But he wasn’t fine! I was so in tune with his body, I could hear his first cough from the opposite end of the house, the length of a football field. Then everything stopped, and the machine was turned on.

  It seemed to me that my darling children disappeared at age thirteen. That’s when my not-so-darling children went into a cave. They came out three times a day to eat and grunt “uh-huh” and “uh-uh.” Around age seventeen, my darling children came back, but I never felt important around them.

  I always felt that this was a sign of God’s cleverness. Think about it: If our children remained as adorable as they were when they were young, we could never bear to let them go. But when they are teenagers, we become… rather willing.

  Every working woman fears that her children may not have gotten the attention they deserved. I know I worried about that. When their father was no longer there, I tried to provide masculine experience for my sons, as well, including thrilling activities such as riding galloping horses on pencil-thin ledges (but not riding on motorcycle death machines).

  I’m glad my sons made it to adulthood, not a sure thing given their daredevil sensibilities. I think it was just these risk-taking tendencies, though, that gave Robin and Beau the desire to push themselves more than most people.

  Both of them got pilot licenses. Beau has an Airline Transport Pilot License for multiengine, complex, and float planes. He is instrument trained, meaning that he can fly under any conditions using instruments only. Continental Airlines begged Beau to come to work for them, and he considered the offer, but he decided he wanted his own business. He made a good choice, and he eventually bought his own plane—without the burden of passengers in the back.

  In the water Beau was known as the miracle man. He could free dive to a depth of sixty feet, then find and shoot a fish with a challenging bow-and-arrow device called a Hawaiian sling, rising to the surface triumphantly with a big squirming fish as his prize. It takes huge discipline to get in that kind of shape. Even today being fit is a priority with Beau, who works hard at exercising and staying healthy. And it works: he looks like a picture on a magazine cover.

  As a teenager, Robin was often written about in the paper, sometimes on the front page, for his daredevil activities. I would know nothing about his recreational pursuits until I read about them. He would get injured, not from a fall on the stairs or working as he would tell me, but from riding broncos in a rodeo, for example. He didn’t want to worry me, he said. Robin got several types of pilot licenses and worked his way through college as an offshore helicopter pilot. He flew when and where others refused, for instance, landing on wet, sloping decks in the middle of a storm. Like me, he isn’t afraid of anything. (It was the rattlesnake cure for me. I shudder to think what my daddy cooked up for Robin’s “cure.”)

  The boys’ daredevilry continued on other continents. Once, when we were on vacation in Africa, an elephant chased Beau while he was out taking photographs. To escape the charging elephant, Beau climbed up a tree—but he continued snapping photos the whole time. The pictures showed the elephant at different angles and then looking straight up at Beau as he perched on a limb. Thank God for the tree! The images were so remarkable, I showed them on my television program. Unfortunately, the production department never returned them, and Beau, of course, never forgave me.

  Beau is a father. He has two boys, my beautiful twin grandsons, Beau and Beckett, who have big blue eyes and blond hair. Beau’s beautiful Barbie doll wife, Stanisse, can do anything—and do it well. The chief financial officer of Beau’s many companies and a very good mother to her boys, Stanisse has a special quality that draws everyone to her and makes them love her. She dresses her sons like pictures from a magazine, and everything around her is sheer perfection. That takes time and effort, and I don’t know how she does it. I wish I had accomplished half of what she has.

  Robin has girls coming and going like streetcars. I have liked those I knew, but as yet I have no daughter-in-law or grandchildren from my second son. Still, I have him, and that is enough.

  Beau and Robin are the men they are. I accept their differences and glory in their strengths. If I could have any other sons in the world, I would never trade mine. Would you? Of course not!

  CHAPTER 14

  Dilemmas: Divorce, Debt, Dates, and Bangladesh

  After sixteen years of marriage, Bob King and I divorced. I thought carefully and for a long time before I left my husband. He was such a fine man, but our life goals were too different, and the gap between us widened until it became too great to bridge. The divorce was hard on me, of course, but it was very hard on Beau and Robin—so hard that if I had known beforehand, I would not have done it. My life would have been different, I know, and some say history would have been too.

  So in 1969, I found myself a single mom responsible for two boys and for my aging parents as well. Everything I had was mortgaged to the hilt except two hundred choice acres we were trying to sell (which were later worth millions). Bob owned a third, I owned a third, and the boys’ trust fund owned a third, but 100 percent of the title was in Bob’s name. If I could make the payment for the boys and me, I could save our shares.

  My children’s trust fund and the land were my family’s future. There was nothing else for me and the boys. We had huge payments coming due, however, two-thirds of which I was accountable for, as I assumed responsibi
lity for the trust fund. Bob told me he could barely make his own payment and could not help me. He said the boys’ trust fund had to go. “Forget it,” he said. “There is no money to make the payments.”

  I refused to give up on my boys’ only financial hedge. I tried selling my jewelry, but my lawyer laughed. Its sale would make only a pinhole in the debt. I asked Mr. Coffield (my almost-father-in-law) to back my loan. He ran so fast you couldn’t see his smoke. Prior to this, I had lots of men tell me, “Honey, if you ever need anything, you just come to me.” But when I went to them about my house and land, they ran like rabbits.

  One man was willing to help—but he attached strings. I was not raised that way, though, and it was essential to my sons and to me that I remain respectable. So word got around that there were limits to what I was willing to trade for financial security, and I became known in certain masculine circles as the “Unf—able Joanne.”

  It crushed me that I couldn’t count on the people who had vowed to be my friends in good times and in bad. I wasn’t asking for money. All I wanted was someone to sign a note at the bank so that I could get a loan to make the imminent payment. This would give us time to sell the land. The land itself would serve as collateral until I did. It was pure business. But since I had no title to the land, everyone said I had no real collateral, and so requests for business help became baseless. Any future calls I made would be purely to request charity for a destitute woman.

  My only income at that time was the TV show salary, which fed us. Viewers thought I was still living a fairy tale. In reality, it was the lowest point in my life. When I had been sick to the point of dying, that was hard, but this was a different kind of despair. This was as close to hell as I ever want to come.

  I never anticipated the difficulties I would encounter as a single mother, chief among them the financial burden and the burden of simply coping. This is perhaps the toughest job in the world.

  I was taught to live by a code. No charity, no bankruptcy, no breaking your word, no stealing of husbands or money, no reneging on a business deal, no selling of virtue.

  Now I had good land to sell, but no one would buy it.

  My last hope was Vince Kickerillo, a hugely successful land developer who had built hundreds of houses. Born the twelfth child of an Italian sharecropper, he started with nothing and earned millions. He made so much money, he started his own bank. If Vince did not want to buy the land, I was licked.

  When I drove from the house to my appointment with Vince, I felt despondent, desperate, and defeated. I couldn’t consider my father’s offer to sell everything he had, to save me. I had tried everything else I could think of, with no success, and I had not one cent beyond what I earned at the television station. But as I drove down the drive, at that instant, the Lord sent me a message: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” After that, He said into my consciousness, “The Lord knows you have need of these things” (from Matthew 6:27–29).

  The Lord knew I had need of everything. All alone, I was faced with supporting, educating, and housing my children, helping my parents, keeping a demanding job—doing so much with so little. But these Bible verses changed everything. I suddenly knew in my heart that the Lord was walking beside me. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew there would be an answer.

  Going to Vince’s bank that day, I dressed in my best, smiled, and held up my head as I had been taught (shades of Scarlett and her dress made out of draperies!). I was trying desperately to keep up appearances, even with my own children, whom I was trying to shield from our dire circumstances.

  The longest walk in the world starts with one step. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other. So I got out of my car and walked to Vince’s bank.

  Houston is a business town, and businessmen make it their business to know everybody’s business. An astute man, Vince must have known of my desperation.

  He looked at the plot of the land, paused, then turned to me and said, “Joanne, you are asking more than I usually pay for the land I buy. I don’t want to bargain with you.” (So many others had offered half of what it was worth.) “I cannot buy your land.”

  “However,” he added, “I am also a banker and I admire you. I will lend you a million dollars [a huge amount of money in 1969] on your name alone… No collateral or interest necessary.”

  I must have seemed terribly unappreciative because I simply thanked him briefly and left. When Vince said he was not going to buy the land, something in me folded in on itself, and I didn’t hear another word. I just knew it was the end. The light around me disappeared, and I felt blackness envelope me.

  “Joanne, do you realize what he said?” asked the friend who had accompanied me. I shook my head in despair. He took me by the shoulders and said, “He said he would lend you a million dollars on your name alone.”

  Realization struck me. I was paralyzed with surprise. It was one of the most amazing moments of my life. I had never had an experience like that. I was saved.

  The money had to be repaid, of course, but there was time. The dreaded note that was due immediately could be paid. For at least a year, I could make the payments on my house, keeping it until I could sell it. Most importantly, I could take care of my boys and help my parents.

  God had created a miracle, but the money wouldn’t last forever. I had to get married. It was all I knew how to do. But the world had changed since my cloistered childhood and early womanhood. Most of the men I met didn’t have marriage in mind. Their proposals were for “flings and things,” and I wasn’t a seasoned player in this market. I had flirted with playboys under the protective cloak of marriage, but now I was out there, fair game… and I didn’t know how to play.

  The funniest “candidate” was an Arab prince, a slim, attractive sheik whom I had never met before. He flew in from Marbella, Spain, where he lived, and earnestly explained in perfect English why I should marry him. He spent a week pressing his case. Then, rejected, he flew away in his private jet. I later saw pictures of him and his new wife (an Italian movie star) in People magazine.

  And there was Raymond Marcellin, the French minister of the interior, waiting in the wings. He knew I was married when I met him. Now I was not. But was he suitable for my boys?

  Although we didn’t know it, for a time I dated the same man as Joan Collins, star of the television series Dynasty. Our mutual boyfriend had a house in a posh London neighborhood and the de rigueur château in Provence, France. He was young, good-looking, and hot stuff, he thought.

  He suggested that he have a dinner in my honor, but he had invited Joan to the same dinner. Joan plopped herself down by his side and explained to all and sundry that she was there to stay the night—and I do mean all night.

  I had no intention or desire to change her plans. I ate and ran. In fact, I ran (literally) every time I saw him. What was that idiot thinking by inviting us both to the same dinner?

  Louis Dorfman, another big-time playboy, invited me to come for a week of skiing at his home in Aspen, Colorado. I suspected that I might not be the only ski bunny in his hutch, so I brought my children and an Italian princess with me to the mountains. Sure enough, as I deplaned from Houston, I saw him bidding good-bye to actress and Bond girl Jill St. John, who had just spent a warm and cozy week with him in his chalet. Now he was ready for the next adventure… me. But as he saw my entourage, I explained, “I was sure you wouldn’t mind.” I smiled, and you should have seen his face. He was a darling, and he entertained us all like the good sport he was. Louis and I became friends, and I love him to this day.

  I had one more Louis Dorfman weekend, which was almost beyond belief. Louis and comedian Buddy Hackett were fast friends (“fast” being the operative word—they scooted around the world with the fastest hot ladies in Christendom on their arms). The only problem was that Buddy loved to drink, carouse, and curse. He could not
utter three words without using the foulest language ever invented. Louis wanted me to meet him because Buddy was considered the funniest man in show business at that time.

  “Buddy, you cannot do bad things,” Louis told him, “no matter how funny you think you are. And you can’t drink or curse the whole weekend. Joanne is a real lady, and you must behave like a gentleman.”

  “Okay,” Buddy responded.

  So when Louis and I walked into the suite for the weekend, Buddy met us with his head, face, and neck completely covered in shaving cream. “Louis says that I must be lily white around you, so I’m practicing,” he said, smiling wickedly through the shaving cream. Louis looked worried.

  At that time, there was a trendy psychological counseling movement popular with the glamour crowd that taught that it was healthy for you to sit in groups of people and—no matter what question was asked—to answer with the complete truth. Even if you were asked the worst and most embarrassing question—about your menstrual cycle or any other intimate thing; nothing was out of bounds—you had to tell the truth.

  Buddy had just arrived from such a clinic outside of San Francisco and suggested that we all sit in a circle and re-create his experience. We were up for it.

  But Buddy had decided in advance that I was a prude and that he wanted to punish Louis for making such “clean-living” demands of him. So Buddy planned the whole sequence to embarrass me and show me a thing or two. His scenario was diabolical.

  As we sat down, Buddy introduced his date, who was very pretty and nice. As we went around the circle introducing ourselves, each of us explained exactly what we did with our lives. There were many interesting explanations, and then we came to Buddy’s date.

  “And what do you do?” Louis asked.

  “I’m a whore. That is my full-time profession.”

  Buddy had hired the genuine thing just for the occasion. He sat covered in shaving cream, holding his sides with laughter. Louis almost fainted. It didn’t bother me at all.