Tommy and I pulled off the wedding. The next day we flew to Hawaii. I can’t, in good conscience, refer to what we did as a “honeymoon.” It was not sweet. It was not dreamy. At. All. We were staying at someone’s house, which was already pretty lackluster. I didn’t really care that much, since my relationship with Tommy was never about romance, but still, it was technically my “honey moon-ish” …
Thankfully, the house was on the beach, and being near the ocean is always a comfort to me. The next day I had gone to the bathroom to change into a swimsuit when I heard Tommy ranting on speakerphone. I could tell he was arguing. Great.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. He was on the phone with his very high-powered publicist, who was going ballistic, screaming and cursing because he didn’t want our wedding photos on the cover of People, as we’d planned. The publicist was telling Tommy that it wasn’t appropriate for his executive image. His image? I mean, why go through all of that grandiosity for some little corner picture, as the publicist was urging? I shared this opinion with him and Tommy. The publicist exploded.
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” he yelled at me.
Tommy didn’t come to my defense. So here I was, twentyish, on my honeymoon-ish with a fiftyish-year-old man screaming and cursing at me over the phone while my fortyish husband sat there, not doing a damned thing about it. And to top it all off, I was right! Of course our wedding should have been a big cover story. It was planned that way—this was show business!
While the two angry men yelled at each other and me like children, I broke out crying and broke out of that house. I just started running aimlessly down the beach, tears streaming down my face. We hadn’t even digested the wedding cake, and here we were again, back to bickering, back to raging, back to me being dismissed and outpowered. Nothing had changed or calmed down. I just ran, not knowing where I was going. Eventually I came upon a hotel with a beachside bar. Perfect, I thought, I could use a drink.
But when I sat down I realized that I had left empty-handed. I didn’t have a phone or a purse, no cash, no card, no ID. I couldn’t even get myself a sympathy drink to cry into. With my hair bunched up in a topknot, wearing nothing but a bikini and a sarong, I looked like a thousand lonely young women on the beach, not like a famous pop star who had sold millions of records worldwide. I most certainly didn’t look like a honeymooning bride. If anyone did recognize me, they left me alone—and no one could imagine how alone I felt.
I asked to use the phone and made a collect call to my manager (remember when you had to memorize important phone numbers?). I asked him to give the bartender a credit card number so I could at least get a drink. I ordered some sweet and sorry frozen daiquiri. I sipped on it and listened to the waves crashing on the shore as the reality of the situation began to sink in.
Eventually I made my way back down the beach and to the house. But I knew the drill. Once again Tommy and I would sit in silence, after all was said and done. The little bit of hope I’d had that getting married would change him washed away like footprints in the sand. That was the day I began to hold my breath and resist the undertow of Tommy.
THANKSGIVING IS CANCELLED!
And I missed a lot of life, but I’ll recover
Though I know you really like to see me suffer
Still I wish that you and I’d forgive each other
’Cause I miss you, Valentine, and really loved you
—“Petals”
I called him T. D. Valentine. That was his stage name back in the day when he fancied himself a musician. He loved music, that much is true, and he found a way to have a lifelong affair with it. As I’ve said, our mutual love of music, ambition, and power was completely intertwined with our personal relationship. Music was the relationship, but try as we might, that couldn’t make it a marriage. I sincerely believed in my heart I would be with Tommy forever. But my sanity and soul would not surrender to my heart, and the marriage swiftly began to harm me on an emotional and spiritual level.
There was a popular mythology that I was some sophisticated gold digger who bagged a big-time hit maker who was now bankrolling my princess lifestyle—that I was just sitting pretty on a throne in my thirty-million-dollar mansion. The wedding certainly gave that illusion, and that’s all it was, an illusion. If there was any perception of a fairy-tale marriage or life, it was absolutely smoke and mirrors. The ironclad safety that Tommy provided from my family turned into an ironclad dungeon.
The control and imbalance of power in our relationship accelerated. My manager was a childhood friend of his. His preferred security was the tough guy he idolized from his school days (even though I towered over him when in heels). Everyone whose job it was to look after me had deep connections to him. I was very young and inexperienced when Tommy met me; he knew so much more about a lot of things, especially the music business. But I knew some things he didn’t know too, particularly when it came to trends and popular culture, which I suspect made him feel threatened. He seemed threatened by anything he couldn’t control.
Even the idea of me doing something he couldn’t control would send him into an irrational tailspin. One prime, ridiculous example:
