by Stacey Dash
When I began packing Austin’s clothes, Kevin simply wouldn’t accept what I was saying. We had been together five years, though the marriage had lasted just a year. In spite of his protests, we remained friends, but the divorce was pretty devastating to both of us. Of all my broken relationships, this is the one that still burns. He was a great guy and a great husband. He loved Austin. In fact, Austin still considers Kevin his father. I still call him if anything happens, and he’s immediately there for me.
My main problem with Kevin wasn’t a problem with Kevin after all. It was a problem with me. I had never seen what “domesticity” looked like. When you grow up in front of a television in the South Bronx, raised by drugs addicts, it’s honestly hard to know how to be a good wife. When I’m out in public and see families hanging out with each other, I always marvel at their casual affection and interactions. I just don’t know what it’s like. The closest thing to a functioning family I had was my grandparents’ life-long marriage . . . which itself was rife with affairs. Infidelity and broken families perpetuate themselves. That’s the thing.
I really wish that marriage could’ve worked. At the time, I didn’t understand what love was. I still don’t understand.
Austin and I moved to Sunset Plaza. I used the money I’d made on the show and lived a little bit of a freewheeling “single life.” Well, as freewheeling as you can be with a child. I met a woman named Linda who introduced me to her set of British pals, and suddenly I had a group of friends with incredibly cool accents. One night we were at a restaurant called Tangier when a man I had never seen walked in.
“This is George, everyone,” said our friend Dorian. “He’s staying with me on his way to Hong Kong.”
“I’m on a layover,” he said to me, seeming to think that he needed to explain his presence in our otherwise tight group. George carried himself like an upper class Englishman. Over the course of dinner, I discovered that he had gone to Eton College, Britain’s most famous boarding school, in the shadow of Windsor Castle. There young men network with the sons of their fathers’ friends, learn to use the proper grammar, charm the right ladies, and prepare themselves for a possible life on Downing Street. The school has educated nineteen prime ministers—including David Cameron—and George confided that he was a third-generation Etonian.
“So why aren’t you prime minister yet?” I asked.
“Someone has to do sports marketing,” he laughed. That’s exactly what he did, for big world events like the World Cup, cricket, rugby, and soccer. He was traveling to Hong Kong for an event the very next day.
We stayed together all night and bonded immediately. After our night together, we dreamed about one day having a baby. I have no idea why we started down that line of thought, other than just the headiness and novelty of a new relationship.
“If we had a little girl,” I said aloud, “what would we name her?”
“Lola.”
That’s how I met my second husband, and that’s how we chose the name of our—eventual—daughter.
A lot can happen in a layover.
He left on Sunday to go to Hong Kong, and three days later my phone rang. “Will you come meet me?”
“Where are you?”
“I can’t stop thinking of you.”
So I went to Hong Kong for a memorable few days.
“That’s it,” he said. “It’s you and me. You’re my girlfriend.”
One night, about three months later, we were making love. Just at the climax, he put a ring on my finger.
And it was a big one.
The ring, that is.
I looked at the four carats on my hand and smiled. “I do.”
Three months later, I drove him to the airport to take him to a business trip. We couldn’t keep our hands off of each other. Finally, I pulled over at the Airport Hilton near LAX and we got a room, which we used for about an hour. Soon, I found out I was pregnant . . . a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
“We have to delay the wedding,” I said. “I’m not walking down the aisle pregnant.”
George belonged to the Church of England, and he had told me of a special place in Britain where he wanted to get married. “We can just delay it,” I said.
Over the next nine months, we had a lot of work to do. We decided to set up house in Los Angeles. We bought all our furniture in South Africa and had it shipped home. When it arrived, I had a month to go before my due date.
We were unloading the beautiful furniture, putting it in the house, and dreaming of what our new home would look like.
“Uh-oh,” I said, looking down at my leg.
“Did your water just break?”
“No, I’m just leaking fluid,” I said. I dismissed it, because it was little bits of fluid that came throughout the day. It was easy to ignore with all of the unpacking and decorating.
About 9:30 at night, I finally called my doctor. “I’ve been leaking fluid all day.”
“What do you mean, ‘all day’?” he said, the sound of sleep thick in his voice. “Why didn’t you call me earlier? Get to the hospital right now.”
“You can’t hold onto this baby,” my doctor said after checking me. “If we don’t induce you, you’ll have to be on bed rest.”
He gave me medicine to sleep, and we selected a time for her birth: 5:25 p.m., June 21—the same birthday as Prince William. George, my mother, my best friend Cynthia, and Austin were there in the room when little Lola made her debut. George and Austin cut her umbilical cord together. I could barely contain myself. I finally felt that my family was complete.
We were so happy . . . for about two years. Then we began fighting more and more. Regardless, we thought we could make our family work, so we decided to go ahead and marry. The idea held less magic than it once had for me. Our relationship seemed to have already run its course. Though I loved George—and still do—it simply didn’t seem to be working between us. But family was so important, we wanted to make it work. For our daughter’s sake.
“What should we do to get married?” he asked as we sat around the house one night. Lola was already asleep in her crib, and we realized that we’d neglected to deal with this detail of life. The church wedding didn’t seem like a good idea.
“Let’s go to Vegas,” he said, which sounded fun at the time. How many people have gotten hitched there, taken by a bit of spontaneity and romance? Turns out, it wasn’t as ideal as I’d hoped. We went to one of those ugly little chapels, he walked ten feet in front of me the whole time, and we got back on the plane as man and wife. It was a way to tie the knot without very much fuss, without very much fanfare.
If you’re trying to have a wedding with as little effort as possible, that’s probably a sign that it shouldn’t happen. When Lola was barely able to communicate ideas, she stood between us during one particularly cruel fight. “Don’t talk to my mommy that way,” she said to her father. We were divorced three years later.
After the divorce, I moved with Austin and Lola into a teeny eight-hundred-square-feet apartment. I shared a bedroom with Lola, who still slept in a crib even though she was three. Austin’s room was right next door. By this time, he was a teenager! Though cramped, it worked for us. I needed to get away. From men. From expectations. From everything.
I guess I should go ahead and tell you that precisely zero of my marriages worked out. And I wasn’t done yet.
After my divorce from George, I made a proclamation. “I don’t want a man, I’m never gonna see a man, I don’t want to think about a man,” I told my manager over the phone. “I’m focusing on my career.”
Within eight months, I was engaged to an Italian actor named Francesco, who’d had roles in some major films. I found him irresistible and charming—until he wasn’t. After two years of his unemployment, the bloom came off this rose as well.
“Okay, this is not working for me,” I said. “I can’t do this. You have to get a real job, the kind that pays money.” Instead of pursuing acting, he got a real estate
license and began establishing a business there in Los Angeles. He tried, but we’d gotten down to our last dime.
“I need $3,000,” I said into the phone to my business manager. I was at Saks and had found a perfect dress.
“Um, Stacey, I’m not sure how to tell you this, but . . .” My business manager sighed. I could tell this was hard on him, but I was about to have a hard time if I didn’t get to buy this dress. “You just don’t have it.”
“I have it, Don,” I insisted. “I’ve worked my ass off, I know I’ve got the money.” It felt like every time I called my business manager I was met with hesitation and mumbled apologies. But that day it was different.
“Stacey, this is Gina,” said an unfamiliar voice on the line. She spoke with confidence and authority, as if she had earned the money and had full rights over the way it was divvied up. “I can’t give you $3,000, but I can give you $1,500.”
I paused for a moment. “Who the hell are you?”
It was an interesting question. Gina, in her career, had toured with NSYNC, Toni Braxton, Reba McEntire, Britney Spears, and Janet Jackson and had assisted Shanice Wilson, the first African American to play Eponine in Les Misérables on Broadway. She had handled finances for Pat Boone, Matthew Hines, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jennifer Aniston, Elise Neal, Juliette Lewis, and more. I met her right after she’d decided to quit the business, except for a short stint to help out with the estate of Michael Jackson after his death. For a few days, she was neck deep in organizing his materials for the court hearing. Every single time I called, she noticed how my handlers panicked. They didn’t know how to say no to me.
She had seen my movies, so she was familiar with the roles I’d played . . . but she didn’t connect my name to the person on the phone. Gina wasn’t bothered at all to tell me that I wasn’t going to get money. “You don’t have it, so I can’t give it,” she’d say, matter-of-factly. I respected the woman. Later that day, I called my manager and he simply passed the phone to Gina.
“Do you realize your tags on the BMW are expired and your driver’s license is too?” she asked.
“No they’re not,” I said, before realizing she was exactly right.
“Just meet me at the DMV,” she said with the same confidence as when she was telling me I couldn’t have my money. She had a certain manner that made me want to do what she said. And I rarely have that feeling with anyone. When I got to the DMV, I came face to face with Gina. She was a little Mexican woman with green eyes who seemed to know everything about my bills and personal files. True to her word, she took care of my license and vehicle. On our way out, I mentioned that my phone was acting up.
“Let’s go to the phone store and check on your plan.”
That was how I met the woman who would take care of me . . . possibly the only woman to ever consistently take care of me in my life. She began helping my business manager part time and then would stop by my house and work until 5:00 in the afternoon or so. There, she’d take care of everything. If she noticed dimmed light bulbs, the next thing I knew she’d be teetering on a ladder replacing them. She made sure that all of the little household annoyances were taken care of before I even noticed that they needed attention. She tried to make sure she was gone before Francesco came home, because he found her suspicious.
“Why is she working for free?” he asked me one night as we got into the bed. I didn’t know. I just knew that I valued her so much that I hoped she’d stick around. “It just feels like she’s after something.”
One day, Francesco came home and saw Gina on her way out of the house carrying clothes to take to the cleaners.
“The next thing I know I’ll come home and you’ll be in bed with my wife,” he said.
“No thank you, but if you don’t take her car to get the oil changed soon, I will,” she said as she walked out the door.
Turns out, Gina did have an ulterior motive. Things started getting really shady with Francesco, and I began to fear that he just wasn’t right. Eventually, he got abusive too. But I was done letting guys use me as their punching bag. I went to the police, filed a report, and got a restraining order. I had no job—and even less money than I thought. Turns out, Francesco hadn’t paid the rent on our house for three months.
The day the restraining order was granted—requiring he stay one hundred yards away from the kids, our home, and me—I filed for divorce. I had hit rock bottom, with no real options for getting back up.
Turns out, Gina knew all along. When she had started to look into my finances, she realized that Francesco was bad news. She knew he was in over his head, that he had been “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” and that I was headed for financial ruin. I guess she didn’t want me to go through it alone. And so she worked quietly, waiting for the moment when the truth would come out. It always does, eventually.
Gina, God love her, still stuck around even though I had less than no money to pay her. By the time Francesco left, we’d gotten to be friends—almost like family. I was determined to make enough money to start paying her. But how?
“Why don’t you do a reality show about your life?” my brother suggested. It sounded like a reasonable idea. Honestly, I had never met anyone with a life quite as dramatic as mine. We put together a sizzle reel—a video presentation of what my show would look like—and VH1 loved it. But it would take a while to determine if they actually wanted to buy it.
About a month after Francesco left, Gina walked into the house holding a piece of paper.
“This was on your front door,” she said. It was a handwritten “3 Days or Quit” notice. This is what California has decided landlords must do to give notice to occupants who haven’t paid their rent in too long. It had the name and address of my landlord and said that I’d have to move out if I didn’t pay in three days.
“I bet all my neighbors saw that!” I wailed. “What are we going to do?”
“Well, we’ve got three days,” Gina said. “It’s not over yet.”
One day after this notice, I got an audition. VH1 was producing their first scripted show, and I auditioned for it at their request.
“Listen, we love you for the lead,” the head of VH1 said. “Please reconsider the reality television route. Wouldn’t you rather do this scripted show instead of the reality one?” The new show, produced by Queen Latifah, was called Single Ladies. I didn’t have a great feeling about it, but I needed the money. “Let me put it to you this way. Do you want to be Kim Kardashian or Carrie Bradshaw?” he asked, implying that scripted roles carry more prestige. I looked up at the ceiling as I tried to weigh my options. Turns out, I didn’t really have any options. “Plus there’s this. If you don’t do the scripted show, we’re not gonna do your reality show.”
In other words, he was holding my reality TV show hostage. Without a real alternative, I agreed to be the lead in Single Ladies. After I shot the pilot, I met a guy named Max, a very wealthy man from Texas who lived in Copenhagen. He was in the process of getting a divorce from his wife. They’d been separated for a while, so the legal divorce was just a formality. After we met, he called me and said that he had literally turned his plane around to come back to see me.
“Please come to New York,” he asked. “It’s a great place to be over the Fourth of July, and I have to be there for business.”
After our wonderful weekend in New York, he asked me to meet him in France. Paris is the City of Lights, but it’s also a city for lovers. Max and I made love there for the first time. It was so romantic, and I couldn’t believe how deeply I felt for him after such a short time. I spent the entire time in Paris at the hotel, waiting for him to show up to see me. In fact, I never left the hotel while he was at his business meetings.
“I want to see Paris!” I said, grabbing his arm after days of room service. I wanted to go shopping for shoes, to experience the most romantic city on earth.
“Listen,” Max said. “I have something to tell you. We can’t go out.” Apparently, he was worried that word would get o
ut that we were lovers.
“Are you ashamed of me?”
“Well, I wouldn’t want my wife to find out.”
“She has to face facts eventually,” I said. “You’re separated.”
“Well, we’re still technically together.”
“What do you mean technically?” I said.
“We’re not quite separated,” he smiled. “We’re nesting.”
“You’re birds now?”
“I live in the downstairs and she lives upstairs,” he explained. “That way, the kids don’t have to switch between both of our homes.”
“You don’t want her to know about me?”
Something wasn’t adding up. I left him at the hotel, feeling betrayed. Max had lied to me. I walked down the cobblestoned streets of Paris, looking at the lovers walking hand in hand right next to the River Seine. Bicycles with baskets leaned against lampposts, stylish women carrying large shopping bags stopped at cafes for a snack. The city was alive and vibrant, but I felt dead inside.
This is never going to work, I thought. I should stop this now. I shouldn’t go any further. But there was one small problem. I had already made love to him—a married man! Suddenly, I was “the other woman” again—something I had never wanted to be again since I cheated with Axel. I felt that I loved him. No, it was more than just a feeling. I did love him.
And because of that feeling, I stayed with Max, and hoped that his divorce would work out soon enough.
Within weeks, I found out the pilot for Single Ladies had been successful. The show had been picked up, so Lola and I moved to Atlanta to start shooting. Though I have had trouble keeping my personal life in order, I’m a consummate professional at work. I’m on set, on time. I know my lines. I can give you an eight-hour day or a twelve-hour day with no problem. But many of the other actresses and actors on the set didn’t have the same idea about work. The acting was horrible, the plot was raunchy, and the hours were long. No matter how late we stayed up the night before, I was always on time. If we had to be there at 7:30, Gina and I were there at 7:00. Meanwhile, everybody else got there at 8:15 or 8:30 and still needed three hours to do hair. Most of the other girls had black hair, which takes a lot longer to do than Latin hair. I’d end up waiting for hours in my trailer.