The Magnolia Story (with Bonus Content)

by Chip Gaines

  Chip told me he’d been invited to a private concert, and he asked me if I wanted to go. He was vague about what kind of music it was or what this concert was all about, but I didn’t care. I pretty much wanted to go anywhere Chip wanted to take me.

  “Okay, great!” he said. “Well, you’ve got to get really dressed up, and it’s in Archer City.”

  I knew that both of Chip’s parents had gone to high school in that sweet little town, which was the setting for Larry McMurtry’s famous novel, The Last Picture Show, and the movie of the same name starring Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges. The old theater that inspired the book and film was still there, and I knew they had concerts in that venue from time to time, so nothing seemed unusual about Chip’s request, even though we would have to drive four hours to get there. I honestly didn’t suspect a thing. I was just excited.

  We wound up rolling into Archer City at about seven o’clock that night. But instead of pulling up near the theater, Chip pulled into this little shopping center and drove us around to a door in the back.

  “Chip, where are you taking me?” I asked.

  “Just come on,” he said. He was all smiles.

  I was thinking, Well, this must be a super private concert. He took me into this unmarked hallway, and at first he seemed kind of lost, as if he was trying to figure out where he was going. Then all of a sudden Chip fell down to one knee and sort of wobbled to one side. I thought he was having a heart attack or something.

  “Chip? Are you okay?” I said.

  I was wearing a peacoat—it was cold out—and when I knelt down, my knee pinned the bottom of my coat to the ground so I couldn’t sit back up straight. I had to put my hand against the wall so I could lean and get the jacket out from under me.

  Then he looked at me. I realized he was down on one knee on purpose. He got real calm, and he took my hand, and he said, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” I was in total shock—even more so than I was on my dad’s driveway basketball court when Chip first said, “I love you.”

  “Oh my goodness!” was the only thing I could get out. I was so taken aback, and so happy, but so confused.

  “Chip,” I said, kind of giggling and giddy at the whole thing. “Babe, why are we doing this in a hallway?”

  Chip got a funny smile on his face, a smile I’d never seen before, and he said, “Well, knock on the door.” We were standing beside an unmarked door in that unmarked hallway, and I could not figure out for the life of me what he was up to. I shook my head and went ahead and knocked—and the door opened.

  Behind it stood a man who looked like Geppetto from Pinocchio, wearing a leather apron and a magnifying visor on his head.

  “Welcome to my jewelry shop,” the man said. “You’re here to design your ring.”

  I just about melted. The shopping center was closed, so we had the whole store to ourselves. The jeweler was a man named Billy Holder, who had gone to high school with Chip’s dad, and they’d worked this whole thing out in advance. The fact that the selection of the ring tied back to Chip’s roots and family history made it all the more special for me.

  I couldn’t get over the fact that Chip had arranged all of this just for me. When did he have the time? How did he keep it all a secret? I wondered. I basically got the chance to sit and sift through Billy’s entire inventory of diamonds and settings and pick my engagement ring right there on the spot.

  I gave her the pick of any eighty-dollar diamond she wanted.

  He’s kidding. His budget was actually quite a bit more than eighty dollars. We joked about that, though, because my dad had only had eighty dollars to spend on my mom’s engagement ring, and she’d loved it anyway. As soon as they could afford it, she upgraded. But I was so happy, I think I would have been happy with an eighty-dollar ring if that was all Chip could afford.

  Sure, if you were the one to pick it out! Even back then, I was smart enough to know you were real opinionated. If I’d gone and picked out the ring myself, I could literally have seen you going, “Hey, I really do love you, and you and me are gonna work out fine, but there’s no way that’s the ring I’m gonna wear.”

  Oh, and just to clarify about my answer to Chip—at some point after saying, “Oh my goodness,” I did say yes.

  Chip said his mom had loaned him some money, so I was able to get something really special. We didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spend, and thankfully we weren’t buying diamonds in Beverly Hills. I was able to pick out a nice round diamond and a beautiful, antique-looking platinum setting.

  I had a blast sitting there with Billy, designing the perfect ring. Chip just sat there, patiently observing every second of it. After we finished designing, Billy said he would need some time to work on the ring, so he gave me a substitute to wear for the time being, just for fun. It was a great big, gaudy fake diamond that he’d put together so I would have something to show off to my friends and family.

  “Your parents are gonna go crazy wondering how much money you spent on this!” Billy said to Chip with a laugh.

  There was no private concert that night, but Chip did have more in store for me. From Billy’s shop we drove over to this cute little Archer City hotel for dinner. My parents, my little sister, Chip’s parents, and his sister were all there waiting to celebrate our engagement with us.

  There were all sorts of hugs and tears of joy that made that night the most perfect night ever, and of course they were all taken aback by the size of my “diamond.” It’s funny to me that, even way back then, they all seemed to realize that a flashy ring just wasn’t my style. They expected to see me wearing something a little subtler, a little smaller, a little more classic maybe. But we strung them along for a good long while, and we all had a good laugh when Chip finally revealed that the ring was fake.

  Twelve years later, we had the opportunity to invite Billy Holder out to the farm for our anniversary party. Chip surprised me that night with a twelve-year anniversary strand of pearls that Billy hand-delivered to me, and we had the cameras there to capture the whole moment. It aired as part of our third season. But what the cameras didn’t show was the moment when we went back to the farm and found Billy sitting on my front porch holding a selection of diamonds on a black velvet tray. “Chip wants you to upgrade,” he said to me.

  “My engagement ring?” I said.

  “Yes! He knows you love the setting, but he wants you to be able to pick out a better diamond like your mom did.”

  That first diamond was beautiful, but it was simple in nature. It was all we could afford back then, but at this point I wanted to do something nicer. Something bigger. So I’d told Billy to bring some options so we could replace it with something else. I thought of it as an investment of sorts, and I wanted it to be perfect.

  So Billy showed me all of these beautiful diamonds and told me I could have my pick. That’s supposed to be every girl’s dream, right? But I looked him in the eye, and I said, “I’m sorry, but no. This is the original diamond I picked, and it’s perfect just the way it is.”

  It wasn’t a “perfect” diamond, but it was perfect for me. I felt bad that Billy wasn’t going to make the big sale he was hoping for that day, but I don’t ever want to replace that diamond or that ring. To me, my ring is part of our story.

  If I looked down at my hand and saw a more expensive diamond in that setting, it somehow wouldn’t fit. I would know that we couldn’t have afforded that diamond back when we first got engaged. The story wouldn’t add up.

  But this ring, with this diamond, the one I wear every day—this ring fits. When I look at it, I remember picking out that very diamond on the night of our engagement and looking at it through the little magnifier. I think about the look on Chip’s face when he looked up at me in that hallway. And inevitably, I can’t stop myself from thinking of where it led us six months later: our wedding.

  THREE

  SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

  Sometimes I think, If I were to do my wedding
today, I would do things differently. With everything I’ve learned, the places I’ve gone, the design ideas I’ve seen, I would want to include all sorts of details that I never could have even imagined back then.

  But then I flip open our wedding album and see the smiling faces of the people we love all gathered in that place where we chose to celebrate our special day together, and just as with my engagement ring, any desire for something different or fancier melts away. Our wedding was perfect just the way it was. Everything we cared about was exactly the way we wanted. When I look back, I realize I wouldn’t change a single thing.

  Chip and I got married here in Waco on May 31, 2003, at the Earle Harrison House, a historic mansion that looks an awful lot like the place where we had our first date—a stately manor with grand pillars and a gorgeous garden. We actually chose the location primarily because of its parklike setting. We wanted an outdoor wedding, and the gardens there were filled with roses.

  The place was completely covered in flowers climbing high on grand arbors that our guests would walk under. The setting was so beautiful just the way it was. I didn’t need much of a budget for flowers. I loved magnolias even back then, before the shop came along, so we cut individual magnolia leaves for our guests to use as fans.

  My parents had sat us down shortly after we announced our engagement and made us an offer. They’d been married on the steps of a courthouse, and with that in mind they’d said they were going to give us a certain amount of money as an up-front wedding gift. We could use that money for whatever we wanted—to throw a nicer wedding than we could afford on our own (although anything would have been more than we could afford on our own at that point) or to throw a simple wedding and use that money on a down payment for a home or a honeymoon or whatever we chose.

  Chip and I decided that we would use the money for the wedding. Since our plan was to move into one of his soon-to-be-vacated student rental houses on Third Street for the summer, we didn’t need extra for a down payment. And Chip’s parents had been kind enough to take care of the honeymoon, so we were set.

  I had no desire for a high-priced designer dress, so I went out shopping with my mom and found one off the rack for around five hundred dollars. Just a simple, white, Cinderella-looking dress with a lace-up back—narrow at the waist and then flowing out through the skirt. Chip and his groomsmen wore rented tuxedos from the mall. We weren’t interested in capturing the latest trends or trying to impress anybody. We just wanted it to be beautiful, and the best way I knew to do that was to stick to a classic, timeless look, so black-and-white attire with red roses was the palette we chose. Plus, we knew all of those beautiful white roses in the Harrison House gardens would give us the perfect backdrop we dreamed of.

  The day before the wedding, we went over to the property for the rehearsal and I just about died: the estate had pruned all of the roses. They were gone—every last one of them! There was nothing there but empty stems. The arbors, the arch over the altar, everything was just leaves and thorns.

  Sadly, it just happened to be the time of year to prune the roses. It was a professionally kept garden, like an arboretum, and the time had come. I mean, I think they could have waited an extra day or two knowing they had a wedding that weekend, but it was too late to argue. In a last-minute attempt to save the scene, we scrambled to our parents to ask for a flower budget. We bought hundreds and hundreds of white roses and stuck them in bunches all over the arbors and barren bushes, doing our best to fill in a million holes and make it look like the real roses were still there.

  When I look at pictures now, it may be obvious that those roses had been stuck in by hand, but that wasn’t the point. It was honestly almost better that all of our closest friends and family had come together at the last minute and tried to turn this venue back into the place we’d been dreaming about.

  It really was perfect—perfect for us—and part of the reason for that is we broke tradition in some ways. For example, Chip insisted that his dog, Shiner, be in the wedding. We haven’t mentioned Chip’s dog yet, but that mutt was Chip’s best friend. I still swear to this day that he loved that dog more than he loved me. My bridesmaids weren’t crazy about the idea of Shiner being a member of the wedding party, but Chip wouldn’t budge. Heck, Shiner would’ve been Chip’s best man if he could’ve stood at the end of that aisle and held those rings. But we compromised and set him up under a gorgeous oak tree so he could be comfortable in the shade as he watched his old man get married.

  My dad and I arrived at the ceremony by horse-drawn carriage. A trumpeter played us in. We had a little string quartet and a beautiful couple who sang during the ceremony. All of our closest friends were there. It was a day we’ll never forget.

  I still look back at it as one of the best days of my life. A lot of my friends and her friends met for the first time at this wedding, because we were literally from different universes. But they were all so important to us, and I just remember that all my buddies were like, “She has got the sweetest friends!”

  All these people kind of came together and became buddies. It was great. And there were some funny coincidences too. Jo had twins in her wedding party, and I had twins in mine. I mean, what are the chances of that?

  Chip’s dad was his best man. My sisters were my maid and matron of honor. The fact that our friends got along so well and that we both put family first were just more signs to me that Chip and I weren’t all that different where it counted. There were a lot of similarities between us, and that day seemed to be filled with affirmations of just how much we truly belonged together.

  The wedding seemed to have a ripple effect too. My sister Mary Kay brought this guy to the wedding that she’d only been on a few dates with. His name was David. Well, she caught the bouquet, he caught the garter, and they wound up getting married too. How’s that for a story?

  Chip and I started our honeymoon off in New York City, where I had done my internship. One of my favorite things to do when I lived alone in New York was just walk its streets. There are fascinating landmarks around every corner, people of every culture and background and style you could ever imagine, and so many interesting shops and restaurants. No matter how many times you walked those streets, you would always, always find something new.

  One of the most surprising finds to me were the little individual shops and boutiques, whether they were clothing stores or home furnishing stores or gift shops. It was almost as if the owners of those little individual shops had to work extra hard to make sure their businesses could compete with the big chains and expensive stores all over town—and the results were incredible.

  There always seemed to be a candle burning, filling those shops with the delicious scents. It wasn’t unusual to see fresh flowers on the counter next to the cash register or for the shopkeeper to offer you a cup of coffee or tea while you browsed. There was something just wonderfully inviting and warm about those places that made me feel very connected in a city that could sometimes feel big and overwhelming.

  I loved taking Chip to that great big city and showing him a side of me he hadn’t seen before. We acted like rich kids and stayed in a suite at the Drake Hotel, a high-end, first-class place on Park Avenue that had once played host to celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Lillian Gish. But that was just the starting point for our adventure.

  We set aside a full two weeks for our honeymoon, and other than those couple of nights at the Drake, we made no plans whatsoever. We decided to rent a little car and just go wherever the day took us. We headed upstate and marveled as the massive city gave way so quickly to hills and rivers and fields full of flowers. Before long the tallest buildings around were the silos on old-fashioned farms that dotted the landscape.

  Chip and I both had an affection for farms and old barns and silos, and we decided it would be fun to go explore. If we saw an abandoned barn, all gray and weathered and tipping over in some empty field, we’d stop and go walk around it, even duck inside just to see what was there. Occa
sionally we’d find old bottles and farm equipment, and I always wondered why someone had just up and abandoned them there for all those years.

  The thing I found interesting was just how beautiful everything looked. The rust, the age, the weathering—maybe it was just because we were in love, but everything we saw in those old abandoned barns, both inside and out, seemed to capture and reflect the beauty of the land and the air and the early summer scents in that beautiful corner of the world. Even the dust in those old barns seemed to rise up on purpose, helping to illuminate those old forgotten spaces with streams of sunlight that crept through the cracks in the wood.

  We didn’t have Google Maps in 2003, so we spent that honeymoon road trip following our intuition and heeding the attraction of little signs on the side of the road: “Antiques” or “Bed & Breakfast” or “Pick-Ur-Own!” We agreed that we would drive until we were both dead tired and then find someplace to lay our heads wherever we happened to wind up.

  On the first night we ran into this place called the Mohonk Mountain House. We’d been driving along the cliffs of the Hudson River, and then all of a sudden this hotel made of stone rose up in front of our eyes. It looked just like some sort of medieval castle.

  It was late, and we were exhausted from all of our exploring, and we both thought we’d died or something. “Is this place for real? Or did we just drive off that cliff to get here?” It was so weird just to cruise into some driveway and have no idea what to expect and then find a place like that.

  We wandered into the lobby half expecting it to be our final resting place.

  The good news is we weren’t dead, and when we told the nice people at the front desk that we were on our honeymoon, they put us up in a gorgeous penthouse suite for the price of a regular room.