The Necklace: Thirteen Women and the Experiment That Transformed Their Lives

by Cheryl Jarvis

  TINA HADN’T PARTICIPATED in any of the preparations for the fund-raising event. She hadn’t sent out invitations to family or friends or co-workers. She told Ozzie that the fund-raiser didn’t seem that important. He could go or not. He opted out.

  Tina wanted to opt out, too. She didn’t want to be with anyone, much less a crowd. She’d been reluctant to join the group in the first place. Groups had never interested Tina, and she already had friends. Plus, she didn’t know most of these women. Having to get to know them felt like more work. The only reason she’d joined was that Nancy Huff had talked her into it.

  Tonight’s event puzzled Tina. No one had talked to her about it. No one had asked if she was going. So how important could it be?

  As she mulled over that question, her Catholic guilt kicked in. The event was happening during her month with the necklace. She might as well wear it out. She certainly hadn’t worn it to school. Well, technically she had, but she’d hidden the diamonds under turtlenecks and collared shirts. She felt self-conscious wearing it in front of the other teachers.

  Tina tried on a few outfits, settling on a straight black lace skirt and a clinging black jersey wrap with a V neckline plunging into a very unteacherly décolletage. She slipped on black sequined high-heeled sandals. She freshened her makeup by adding a darker eye shadow and redder lipstick. She fluffed her short, frosted hair, then tucked it behind her ears. She added diamond studs that had been her mother’s. The diamond necklace already circled her neck, but with this outfit the jewels made sense. With this outfit, they dazzled. Tina checked herself in the full-length mirror and liked what she saw: The no-nonsense teacher morphed into a glamour girl. Tina didn’t like to party or drink during the week, but after she’d worked all day, dressing up felt good.

  At five-thirty, Tina reached Deco. She found a parking place in front of the building, as though the traffic gods were smiling on her. She climbed out of her white Volvo station wagon and walked toward the pavement. Flashbulbs popped. Unfamiliar faces smiled. Voices shouted, “She’s arrived! . . . Give her room . . . Here she comes . . . Isn’t she lovely?”

  Tina looked around her. Who was everyone talking about? Were they talking about her? Why would everyone be waiting for her? What was going on?

  The voices grew louder: “gorgeous . . . exquisite . . . spectacular.”

  My gosh, thought Tina, don’t tell me they’re talking about my breasts. She knew her neckline showed cleavage, but she didn’t think it was excessive. But why else would so many men be staring at her chest?

  “Come over here . . . over here . . . can I take a picture with you? . . . I want a picture with Jewelia.”

  Jewelia! Of course. People weren’t talking about her. They were talking about the diamond necklace. Okay girl, she thought, rally to the cause. Pull your shoulders back, your boobs up. Flash that smile.

  Tina flashed a dazzling one. She knew how to walk the red carpet.

  SHE’D WALKED IT when she was crowned homecoming queen at Mary Star of the Sea, her Catholic high school in San Pedro. She’d walked it in front of coaches and athletes when they named her runner-up for Miss UCLA. And she’d walked it when a committee of four men chose her for her dream summer gig in college: cocktail waitress at Walt Disney’s Club 33, an exclusive dining club for visiting dignitaries. The job required a French maid costume but generated the biggest tips at Disneyland.

  The job wasn’t an odd fantasy for a girl growing up in Los Angeles, twenty miles from Hollywood. A touch of glamour permeated Tina’s home life. In her eyes, her strikingly attractive parents resembled movie stars. Tina’s standard line had always been “My mom looks like Elizabeth Taylor and my dad like John Wayne.” Two of Tina’s seven brothers had acted in a movie as kids, one in a TV series. Tina used to spend three afternoons a week and all day Saturday practicing ballet at the dance studio of famous fifties dancer Cyd Charisse’s husband, Nico. Tina had loved recitals. She’d loved being onstage. After she’d seen Captain January, she’d asked her dad to please call her Star, after Shirley Temple’s character. And that’s what her dad called her until the day he died.

  Tina’s family was still in the limelight. One brother worked as a cinematographer; one taught acting and sang professionally; one performed with a band. And now the klieg lights had lured the next generation. Tina’s son Sean produced extreme-sports TV shows for the networks. Her daughter Mary had won the MTV reality show Surf Girls, which led to appearances in commercials, magazine features, and documentaries.

  Tina was content to let her children be the stars now. She’d stopped thinking about center stage long ago.

  THE FUND-RAISER WAS supposed to end at eight P.M., but at eight people stood five deep at the bar, circles of guests moving like a sweep hand on a watch, everyone in flux. Tina thought she knew almost everyone in Ventura, but the room was filled with new faces. All evening, people approached her, talked to her, wanted to hear the story of the necklace. Tina didn’t tire of telling the story. All evening, people wanted to take her picture. Tina didn’t tire of smiling.

  At nine-thirty people were still mingling and pressing the flesh, and Tina was still “on.” She hated for the night to end, but at ten, she finally drove home. On the way, she said a prayer of gratitude that she’d worn the right outfit—even more, that she’d shown up.

  She couldn’t wait to talk about the evening. But Ozzie was already asleep. And ten-thirty P.M. was too late to call anyone without feeling guilty about waking them, so she emailed a friend. Tina replayed the entire evening—the crowd, the spontaneity, the energy. Feeling like a movie star. Feeling like a blithe spirit.

  “It was magical,” she tapped out, this time with her hands doing the dancing. “A night I’ll never forget.”

  A night that kept Tina in the group.

  “BY OUR FIFTIES,” Tina reflected later, “if we’re engaged with life, something’s happened. Never did I imagine that I’d be as busy today working and caregiving as I was when raising four children. So many women as they get older hold on to their anger and become bitter, the lines on their faces drawing them down. I was determined not to become like that. When I start to feel myself thinking negative thoughts I know it’s time to go out with the girls.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mary Osborn, the competitor

  . . .

  Aiming for empowerment

  . . .

  AT THE SAME TIME THAT TINA WAS ENJOYING HER moment in the spotlight, another glamorous blonde was squeezing her way through the crowd. She shared Tina’s last name but little else. Where Tina was petite, Mary Osborn was statuesque. Where Tina was still with her first husband, Mary was on her third marriage. Where Tina had spent her working life in education, Mary had spent hers in business. But the happening at Deco aroused in the two women the same reaction: a reassessment of the group’s value.

  Mary had been one of the many who’d flatly turned down Jonell’s proposition. The idea that women could share a diamond necklace seemed preposterous to her. Everyone would want to wear it at the same time. Mary could envision catfights, but she couldn’t envision a single activity in her life where she’d wear such a thing.

  Now here she was, a guest at the fund-raiser, startled that the women were not just using the necklace to raise money for a worthy cause, but they were also socializing with friends and family and meeting interesting, new people. All in just a few hours.

  Boy, that’s maximizing discretionary time, thought Mary enviously. She’d obviously made a mistake by not signing on, but she didn’t have to live with it. She could change the situation.

  Later, at a meeting of her investment club, of which several Jewelia women were members, she sought out Jonell first.

  “I want in,” she said. “First woman who leaves, I want in.”

  Mary then made her way toward the others in the necklace coterie. “If anyone ever wants out,” she said, “please use your influence to get me in.”

  One month later, a woman left the gro
up and Mary joined it.

  MARY OSBORN KNEW how to work a crowd. At a motorcyclerights political function, she maneuvered her way through some 150 bikers to meet the speaker who’d impressed her. After discovering they shared a love of Harleys and politics, she married him. As a member of the Central Committee of the Ventura County Republican Party, she regularly performed the “meet and greet” routine with visiting politicians. As senior executive assistant to the CEO of Behavioral Science Technology, Inc., an international safety consulting company headquartered in Ojai, she met VIPs and staffers from across the country.

  Mary excelled in meeting new people. With her evenly modulated voice, her measured words, her composed demeanor, she exuded the kind of poise that defines Miss Americas. With her delicately pretty features and Vegas showgirl body, she could also have held her own in the swimsuit competition. In the office, wearing power suits, silks, and heels, she personified professionalism.

  Not wanting to hold her back, her boss encouraged her to apply for a public relations position in the company. But Mary enjoyed what she termed her “Girl Friday job,” where she did everything for her boss from juggling his calendar to preparing his presentations. She enjoyed being close to the power, on the inside where decisions were made; she’d found gratification working for a man she continued to learn from. Plus, she was compensated for the ten- to twelve-hour days with a salary that placed her in the top 4 percent of women wage earners.

  Mary didn’t like to wear the diamonds at the office. The necklace didn’t feel like an appropriate accoutrement for a corporate culture. She did, however, enjoy wearing it on the open road while astraddle her Harley-Davidson Low Rider. She also enjoyed wearing it at the gun range.

  AFTER A FIFTY-HOUR workweek Mary is spending her Saturday at a “Women on Target” workshop at the Ojai Valley Gun Club. She’s been a member of the club for six years and a member of the National Rifle Association for twelve.

  The gun range is located in Los Padres National Forest on the outskirts of Ojai, a city twenty minutes from Ventura. The mountains around Ojai were used as the site of Shangri-La in Frank Capra’s 1937 film of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. The gun range chokes in dusty desert. No “misty mountains” within miles. Here, amid sagebrush and scrub, the grass straggles, the heat oppresses.

  Despite this parched setting, Mary is the embodiment of “cool.” She’s wearing snug blue jeans, a black long-sleeved shirt, a black baseball cap with a gold NRA logo, Juicy Couture sunglasses—and a 118-diamond necklace. Her black boots with two-inch heels shoot her up to six feet tall. Mary looks a decade younger than her fifty-nine years—way too young for a sixteen-year-old boy to be calling her Grandma. She recalls such pistol-packing babes as Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou.

  Mary makes her way to her men friends, most of whom are working today as instructors. She knows them from trapshooting at the club on weekends with her husband, and she hugs one after another. She circulates among the women, too, encouraging them to become club members. “I firmly believe we have the right to protect ourselves,” she tells a woman shooting for the first time. “When my husband leaves town I feel more confident having a gun.”

  The NRA-sponsored “women only” workshop is a first for the club. The clinic is full, with twenty-seven women ranging in age from teenagers to sixty-year-olds. Participants and instructors help themselves to coffee and blueberry muffins, then congregate at wooden picnic tables in the covered shelter.

  Mary navigates this rough-hewn environment as easily and smoothly as she does her refined workplace. Not surprising, since she grew up on military bases, where her father was a career serviceman who started in the navy and segued to the air force. He presented Mary and her two older sisters each with a Red Ryder BB gun, then took his girls out to the fields to teach them to shoot. Mary’s mother, a good shot herself, sometimes joined them. Mary’s father was away so much that these times with him were memorable, all the more so because they were short-lived. He died when Mary was nine.

  That BB gun is long gone, but her interest in firearms stayed. Today Mary owns a 12-gauge shotgun, “a beautiful Beretta”; a High Standard Supermatic Trophy .22; a Colt CombatCommander; a Desert Eaglehandgun; and, for sentimental reasons, two Red Ryders. She signed up for the workshop because she’d never taken a class in pistol shooting.

  The seminar starts, with one instructor assigned to two students. Mary is paired with Stephanie Fuller, a fifty-two-year-old mortgage loan processor. The two women sit across the table from their instructor, Ralph Rendina, an auto mechanic and competitive shooter. He’s tanned and muscular, with short spiked hair.

  “There is no safety in a firearm,” he says. “You are the safety. Thirty years ago people learned about firearms from their families. Today they learn about them from Hollywood, and in the movies firearms are handled all wrong.”

  As Rendina lectures, Mary takes off her sunglasses and tucks them into the V of her shirt. She shows Rendina the gun she’s brought, her husband’s Colt Python .357 Magnum. “We share our handguns,” she says.

  Rendina demonstrates the proper grip, trigger squeeze, the technique to load and unload. Mary sits rapt. When he drops a bullet, she jumps up to retrieve it.

  Though instructing two women, Rendina focuses his eyes and questions on Mary.

  “If you were afraid for your life,” he asks her, “would you shoot someone?”

  “Oh yeah,” she says in a nanosecond.

  “Then you need to learn defensive shooting.”

  “That would be fun,” she says. “Are there classes for women?”

  ON THE SHOOTING RANGE, twenty targets are lined up at fifty feet. Mary puts on protective glasses and earmuffs. She and Stephanie alternate taking aim. Rendina talks and teaches all the while.

  “The best sharpshooters are women,” he says. “Their heart and respiratory rates are slower than men’s, so they’re steadier.”

  Mary fires off a total of twenty-three rounds. She shoots one-handed, two-handed, right-handed, and left-handed. She varies the angle of her stance. Though none of her shots hits the black center, every one of them lands within the score rings.

  After the shooting ends for the morning, Rendina walks up to each of the twenty targets to peer closely at the markings. “As for consistency,” he concludes, “Mary’s target is the best one out here.”

  “Shooting invigorates me,” she says afterward, elegantly sipping from a can of diet Pepsi. “I’d love to shoot every weekend. It’s a wonderful sport. I could never get the women of Jewelia to do this, but wouldn’t it be fun to go out with your girlfriends and shoot guns?”

  “I’M VERY COMPETITIVE,” Mary says a few days after the gun clinic. “Each time I shoot I want to do better. I wanted to do better than Stephanie.

  “I was gangly and awkward growing up so I didn’t play sports. My second husband was a competitive power-lifter. He got me into target shooting, bodybuilding, arm wrestling. We had an arm wrestling table at home, and I entered competitions. He’s the one who got me interested in motorcycles.

  “I like being in control of powerful machines. I like cars with powerful motors. I drove a race car once at Lyons Drag Strip in L.A., did a quarter mile in ten seconds. I like the adrenaline rush that comes from taking risks. And I like the sense of empowerment.

  “My competitiveness is probably an outgrowth of the fact that I didn’t have an opportunity to go to college, or if I did, I didn’t see it. After my father died, my mother suffered emotional struggles. I went to four different high schools. I was desperate to get out of my home life so I left home at seventeen, got married at eighteen, had my first daughter at twenty-two. With the exception of one year after she was born, I’ve worked full-time since I was eighteen.

  “I so wanted my daughters to go to college. I didn’t want them to make my mistakes. But they both did exactly what I did, and it broke my heart. I’ve learned that it’s more important what you model to your chil
dren than what you say to them.

  “I’ve been haunted by not having a degree. It’s why I’ve worked hard to get an informal education. I’m always seeking new information, always taking a class in something—Great Books seminars, legislative workshops, computer classes. One of my husband’s attractions is that he challenges me intellectually. I can’t get enough learning. I’m always asking myself, ‘What do college grads know that I don’t?’

  “Some days I think a degree isn’t that important anymore. I’ve met lots of people with degrees who aren’t as smart as I am. Other days, I think that I cannot die without a degree. I know that getting one would improve my self-esteem. People often ask where I went to school or what my degree is in. I’m always embarrassed. They marginalize me, even today. The result is that when I first met these women, I felt intimidated.

  “So many of them were sorority girls and debutantes and graduate students while I was coping with two difficult husbands and raising babies. I’ve never had the women to my home, so humble compared to their houses.

  “Generally we choose friends of like minds. If I hadn’t joined this group I never would have met half these women. Jonell’s liberalism was hard for me. I’ve always thought 1968 was the major dividing line for our generation. I thought it was disgraceful that people were protesting the Vietnam War, and with such anger. How could they be so disrespectful to soldiers and government? During the course of working with a life coach, I asked his help in understanding her. He gave me an article on the sixties’ counterculture, which opened my eyes.

  “I’m a black-and-white person. I don’t see too much gray. Listening to the women’s different viewpoints has made me less narrow-minded. They’ve broadened my outlook. They’ve given me a course in Group Dynamics 101. And they’re so empowered themselves that being with them has been empowering for me.”