No Ordinary Woman

by Valerie Byron

  When “Islands in the Stream” was completed, Peter began work on the film “Starting Over,” which starred Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh. He allowed me to make casting suggestions, and I felt in my element. I really pushed for Dick Cavett for the starring role, but was overruled. I had always wanted to be in casting, and felt that this was perhaps another avenue for me to explore. The project was eventually handed over to another production company, and Max and Peter waited for a few years before they produced “Fun with Dick and Jane” with George Segal and Jane Fonda.

  CHAPTER TEN

  In late 1972, Bill and I decided to take a trip to England. He had never been to Europe and I wanted him to meet my English friends and family. My brother, Alan, and his wife, Jackie had three children, and this would be the perfect opportunity for us all to get together.

  We decided to leave baby Vanessa with my mother, and took off for two weeks in London and points north. We visited my old friends from Granada, Sue Pethybridge and Richie Stewart, and then travelled to Sale to see Aunty Mary.

  Upon our return to Los Angeles, I called the office to let Peter know I had come back and would start work the next day. To my dismay, he told me that he had decided to keep the temporary secretary he had hired to take my place. Apparently she had been the secretary of some bigwig at MGM, and had more than filled my shoes.

  I was heartbroken at the loss of my job, and it took me several weeks to get over it. In the meantime, I was not really enjoying living in the large four-bedroom house on Maple Avenue. It was too big, and the garden was a mess of unkempt lawn and unattractive shrubbery.

  We celebrated Vanessa's first birthday in that house, with Mo and her two boys joining us for cake and ice cream. Bill was working as a Court Reporter for the Juvenile Courts in Inglewood, about twenty minutes away. He always seemed to get off work early, and often arrived home by 3:00 o’clock, in time to relieve Mo of her babysitting chores.

  I quickly found myself another job in West Los Angeles at Allied Builders, working for the President. It was nothing like the show business atmosphere I had been used to, but it paid a good salary, and I could be home in time to bathe and feed Vanessa. My boss, Sol Skolnick, was a hugely obese man who wore the same black shiny trousers every day. At first I was taken aback by his grotesqueness, but soon became used to him. It didn’t take long for me to get the hang of a completely new business and I started to rise up the ladder, securing a position for myself in the Finance Department.

  My mother spent many weekends with us, enjoying her grand-daughter. I tried to include her as much as possible and would drive to Los Angeles most weekends to pick her up and bring her back to our house. Bill's mother, now a widow, moved to Santa Monica and had an apartment on Lincoln Boulevard. She was getting on in years and had stopped driving, so we had to pick her up as well for weekend jaunts. We saw both mothers often, and they became good friends, despite a seventeen year age difference. On one occasion, they even took a cruise together, and I was happy that everyone in my increasing family got along so well together.

  I was cooking dinner one evening, when the phone rang.

  “Hi, it's Mo. Is Bill there?”

  Surprised, I handed the phone to Bill.

  He listened for a moment, nodded his assent, and hung up the phone.

  “What did she want,” I asked, still stirring the soup.

  “Oh, she said she wanted to visit us later on, and asked if I would get her some cigarettes.”

  I thought nothing of this, although a tiny, niggling feeling of irritation was growing deep in my stomach. Why did Bill have to buy her cigarettes? Didn't she have her own money?

  I decided to say nothing, and when Mo arrived later on that evening she told us that she had decided to return to England with her estranged husband. They were going to try and repair their marriage. She indicated that it was tough financially for her living alone, and that it would be better for the whole family to return to England and try again. Feeling sorry for her, I immediately went to my freezer, and handed her a week's worth of frozen food.

  I thought her decision was probably for the best and spent the next few days shopping for gifts, as she planned to leave the next week. I bought her a gold cigarette lighter and lots of clothes for the boys. We hugged and kissed on our last visit, and she promised to keep in touch.

  Bill and I had purchased an apartment building in Hermosa Beach, with the help of Bill's mother. We felt it would be a great investment for the future. Unfortunately, out of the blue, our landlord told us he was selling the house on Maple Avenue, and we would have to leave before the month ended.

  In a panic, we sold the new apartment building in order to have money for a down payment on a house. I don't think we looked at too many homes, because I was enchanted by a one-storey home in the hill section of Manhattan Beach, on 9th Street.

  The house was beautiful. It had a gorgeous back yard with a swimming pool, three bedrooms, and a wide, airy living room with huge picture windows and a white brick fireplace. I fell in love with it immediately, and we were able to purchase it and move in two days before Vanessa's second birthday. We celebrated Vanessa’s birthday on March 3, 1974 with a pool party, and included all our friends and relatives. It was a wonderful occasion and I was thrilled to finally have the house of my dreams.

  The months flew by and I got into the groove of working and being a mother. I found a local babysitter for Vanessa, who lived a few blocks away, and took my toddler to her house each morning.

  One afternoon, I decided to take Bill's car to the store for some milk, as mine was in the garage. For some reason, I opened the glove compartment of his VW bug to discover a packet of airmail envelopes, containing letters. Curious, I opened one and read it. My heart almost stopped and I felt quite faint and nauseous.

  It was a love letter, written by Mo, from an address in England. She talked of her love for Bill, the times they had spent making love at a motel in Marina del Rey, and how she could not wait for him to leave me and bring Vanessa to England.

  I drove around the block, trying to think straight, tears streaming down my face. We had only been married three years, and already he was cheating on me? I tried to figure out why on earth she would have betrayed me this way when I had been so good to her, and then it hit me. As close girlfriends often do, I had sometimes confided in Mo. I had told her how I disliked going to church, since I was not Christian. I had also told her about my dissatisfaction with our lovemaking. It was obvious what had happened. She had used this information against me in order to get Bill for herself.

  She had used her trickery to be at church every week when he was there. She threw herself at him physically when I was at work, until he succumbed to her advances. I could not believe he would be such a weak man to be taken in by this nasty little woman, and to even consider taking my child from me.

  Later that evening I confronted him, and he didn't deny a thing. They had apparently been writing to each other for weeks, and she had been pushing him to divorce me and bring the baby to England.

  Bill was not the kind of man who could show his emotions easily. It was like pulling teeth getting him to talk to me. He did admit that the affair was over, and that he had no intention of going to England, but our relationship became very strained.

  I cried to my mother, and his mother, when I told them what had happened. There was not much they could do, especially since both mothers were very attached to Bill. I was surprised at not getting the support I had hoped for from my mother, and started to look inward, wondering what I had done to cause his unfaithfulness. I knew what it was – the lack of true sexual intimacy.

  I found myself driving to his office in Inglewood in the middle of the night, opening the door with his key, and rummaging through his desk. I found copies of letters he had typed and sent to Mo, and took them home to read later.

  He talked about me in a cruel fashion. His words were cold and cutting as he told her how I cried and begged him for a fresh
start. The uncaring, heartless tone in his words cut me to the core. I went back to his office for weeks, reading the letters that they sent back and forth to each other. How fortunate that he had made carbon copies of his typed letters, or I would never have known how he really felt about me.

  Eventually their written affair petered out and Bill agreed to give us another chance. I took full responsibility for his cheating, although in retrospect he should have been man enough to tell me how he felt, rather than resorting to an affair with the babysitter. I think a conversation about our sexual needs would have done wonders for our marriage, or even a marriage counsellor might have helped. Unfortunately, Bill never felt comfortable discussing these issues, and I was still put off by his constant sinus problems.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The years flew by. Our marriage seemed to improve and we made many new friends. Vanessa went to the local Montessori school when she was three years old, and we were able to take several trips abroad – Hawaii, Greece, London and France, taking Vanessa with us and introducing her to family and friends in England. Life was good again, although I changed jobs a few times, trying to find the perfect match. I tried working as a fitting model for a uniform company for a few weeks, then for the Honda Corporation, but ended up with a fabulous job working for the Union of Flight Attendants, Local No. 1 in 1975.

  I loved working for the Flight Attendants of Continental Airlines. Again, it was a one-woman office, where I had complete autonomy. My job was to write their newsletters, type grievance letters, and pay the office bills. Vanessa was still in the care of a local babysitter and had made friends of her own, including her new best friend, Maya Sanchez. Maya's parents, Henry and Marsha Sanchez, also lived in Manhattan Beach, and they quickly became close friends. We spent a lot of time with them, and our two girls grew up almost as sisters.

  Over the years, I had asked Bill if he would consider us having another baby. I had always longed for a son and thought this would make our family complete. He had never bothered with birth control, as Dr. Adler had told us that I would need an operation in order to conceive again.

  Some days he would say “maybe” and other days he would say “no.” I was thirty-three years old by this time and Bill was forty-three. He felt he was just too old to have another child, and of course he already had his son, Larry. By this time, Larry was twenty-one years old and a recovering drug addict. He had previously been convicted for a robbery and had been sent to jail for three months. Bill had tried to bail him out, but to no avail. The time in jail had apparently done him good, and he had come out a “saved man”, praising Jesus to whoever would listen.

  Larry came to visit us shortly after his twenty-first birthday and was the same sweet boy he had always been. Unfortunately, now that he had become a “Jesus Freak” he was constantly pushing religion down my throat. We would take him out to dinner in nice restaurants, only to see him walking to each table on the way out, handing out religious tracts. I was embarrassed and angry, and didn't know how to handle this new Larry.

  I was happy to see him leave when he returned to Oregon. It wasn’t much later that he met and married Suzie, and shortly after became a father to Joshua. The three of them came down for a weekend visit, and I hoped that family life would be the making of him, especially since he had decided to pursue a career as an opera singer.

  I was getting tired of begging Bill to let us have another child, and decided to let nature take its course. I figured that if he didn’t make the effort to use protection, then it would be just as much his fault as mine if I got pregnant. We made love one night, and when Bill was in the bathroom cleaning up, I lay on the bed, with my feet up in the air, wiggling my body, willing the sperm to fertilize my egg. And it did!! I knew from the actual second of conception that I was pregnant.

  I waited two months and when it was confirmed, I broke the news to Bill. He wasn't at all happy, and suggested I have an abortion. I could not believe my ears. An abortion? After all I had gone through in my life? There was no way on earth I would do that, and I told him as much.

  We took a trip to St. Michael's the next weekend, and I told the minister, Weaver Stevens, that we were expecting a baby. Weaver clapped Bill warmly on the back and said “It'll keep you young, Bill”.

  That was all it took. Bill was always quite easily influenced, and these words were enough to have him accept my pregnancy and the new baby that was on the way. However, he did insist that I have my tubes tied once the baby was born. I agreed, just happy that I was having another child, perhaps the son I had always longed for.

  I spent my entire pregnancy working for the Union of Flight Attendants until November 15, 1976. That morning I had taken a shower and was standing in the small bathroom drying off. As Vanessa, aged four and a half, took a swipe at my naked body with a towel, my water broke, again three weeks early. Bill stuffed towels between my legs and drove us quickly to Torrance Memorial Hospital.

  As promised, I reluctantly allowed the doctor to tie my tubes and underwent another C-section, but without the convulsions experienced in my prior delivery. The doctor had told us to expect a girl, due to a rapid heartbeat, and I had picked out the names Chelsea or Hailey. When it was announced that I had given birth to a son, I could not believe my ears and was filled with euphoric joy.

  Nicholas Cameron William Fee was the most beautiful baby, with long dark eye lashes and a happy disposition. I brought him home to Bill and Vanessa, convinced that everything I had always wanted was now firmly in my grasp.

  The Union of Flight Attendants was constantly urging me to return to work, and after six weeks at home, I found a local babysitter for Nick. I hated to go back to work, but we needed the income. Nick had the same projectile vomiting that Vanessa had suffered, and had to be put on goat’s milk.

  Vanessa was attending the local Montessori school and making friends of her own and Nick seemed happy with his babysitter. The years sped by and before I knew it 1980 was approaching fast.

  Nick had turned into a delightful toddler, and I had signed him up with Evelyn Schultz at the Wormser Agency, since he was more outgoing than Vanessa had been. I took him on numerous auditions and, although he didn’t book anything, he enjoyed the experience, becoming more and more confident as the months went by.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In 1979 Vanessa was seven and Nick was almost three years old. Our good friends, Patricia and Ron Nash, whom we had met three years prior, agreed to take a trip with us to the South of France. We arranged to meet Sue Pethybridge and Richie Stewart, who had just had a baby, and all have a wonderful vacation in Canadel, near Nice. We decided to take Vanessa with us as we felt the experience would do her good. She had previously been to England and Greece, and enjoyed herself enormously. Several other friends joined us there, and it was a large group of people who shared a villa near the beach.

  My mother and Aunt Betty came to our house to look after Nicholas while we were away, and they had a splendid time playing with the adorable little boy that he was. We returned from our trip tanned and happy, and very anxious to get back to our son.

  I was wondering what to do with the children after school as I was still working. Vanessa was in first grade and Nick was still with his babysitter. I found an after school day care centre called Rainbow River in Manhattan Beach, and arranged for Vanessa to attend after school, as they would pick her up by bus.

  It was at this time that my mother phoned me with some very interesting news. On the advice of a friend, she had attended two weekends of a seminar called EST, developed by a man called Werner Erhardt. I had no idea what she was talking about, but since she was so excited about it, I took the time to listen.

  Apparently she had spent two weekends, sixty hours in total, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, undergoing some sort of “training.” She explained how the purpose of EST was to allow participants to achieve, in a very brief time, a sense of personal transformation and enhanced power.

  “Valerie, I think
you and Bill would really benefit from this,” she eagerly exclaimed. “It has made me look at my life in a totally different manner,” she went on.

  Always one to try something new, I enrolled the two of us in the programme, thinking it couldn’t hurt. I don’t think the two weekends had much effect on Bill, but they certainly did on me. I found myself standing in a line before what appeared to be “trainers.” They were almost like military instructors, who battered at us emotionally until we broke down in tears.

  The whole idea of the weekend sessions was to make us take responsibility for our lives and actions, without blaming other people. That was it – in a nutshell. I came out of it transformed, ready to take on the world. I had an idea, and I was eager to proceed with it.

  I called my friend, Marsha Sanchez, who was a teacher, and invited her over for dinner. Her daughter, Maya, and Vanessa, were both attending the only after school day care facility available in Manhattan Beach. I wanted to discuss with Marsha the possibility of us opening our own daycare centre.

  Marsha was thrilled with the notion. She was working as a teacher but had the necessary credentials for us to open our own business. We worked together, pulling in ideas from friends, and eventually opened our very own after-school day care centre in Manhattan Beach, called “Young Visions”.

  By January 1980 we had secured vacant classroom space at an empty school in Manhattan Beach. I furnished the classrooms with all the necessary equipment, purchased supplies, a refrigerator and hired staff. I made all the expenditures myself, even though Marsha was my “partner.” By the time I had finished I had fifteen children signed up, with more enrolling every day. After six months, we were to capacity and it was becoming a full-time operation for me, even though I was still working at my day job.