WHEN I ELOPED with my girlfriend from college, my best friend had a good laugh at my expense. “People don’t elope to Waxahachie, Texas,” he said. “Las Vegas, man. People elope to Las Vegas.”
it didn’t matter, he said. I was destined to be heartbroken.
“She’s much too beautiful for you. She looks like Farrah Fawcett. Women who look like Farrah Fawcett don’t marry guys like you. She’ll leave. She’ll run off with someone who looks like Ryan O’Neal.”
My best friend was wrong, though. When my gorgeous ex-wife ran off and married someone else, it wasn’t with anyone like Ryan O’Neal.
“She left me for a used catheter salesman,” I told him.
“She left you for a used car salesman?” My pal couldn’t believe it.
“No, a used catheter salesman,” I repeated.
“You mean like one of those things nurses stick up your you know what when you have surgery or you’re in an old folks home?”
“Exactly,” I said. “He sells and rents used medical equipment. So I think technically used catheters would be what he also deals with in his line of business.”
My friend almost choked on his hamburger. We were having lunch at some diner in his hometown on the wrong side of the Brazos River. He would’ve been the first to admit that Bellmead, Texas, had nothing over Waxahachie.
And, OK, used catheter salesman is a cheapshot. But when your Farrah Fawcett look-alike wife leaves you for another man, it would be a nice consolation — wouldn’t it? — to know that she left you for a dude who looks like a movie star.
But that’s not real life. When you live in Los Angeles, maybe stuff like that does happen. Not long after I moved here, the real Farrah Fawcett did dump the $6 Million Man for the real Ryan O’Neal.
Still, when you live in Waco or Waxahachie, Texas, entertaining big dreams of what you want to do with your life, it’s easy to get lost in thinking of yourself in an imaginary world.
I remember the late intellectually brilliant and politically savvy Houston City Controller Leonel Castillo — Texas Monthly magazine once predicted he would be the first Latino governor of the Lone Star State — being quoted in a Houston Post feature story saying that if Hollywood ever did a film on his life, he would hope he would be portrayed by Robert De Niro.
Castillo would go to an early grave regretting he had said that. He was a serious man with serious dreams, much like what you would find at City Hall at any big city in the country. But his response was understandable. That kind of fluff story — in a Hollywood movie what actor would you want portraying you? — has been a staple of American newspaper feature assignment editors for years.
Yes, we are sometimes too obsessed with movies and television show and, the lives portrayed in Hollywood, with happy endings because real life itself is rarely that way.
Hollywood offers us life’s complexities reduced to neat little packages, often resolved within an hour or a breezy hour and a half. Problems that would have us pulling our hair out in real life are solved with a few snappy dialogues, a heartfelt montage, and, voila, a happy ending!
We can’t help but love these alternate realities, even if we know they’re as real as a three-dollar bill.
Then one day as a columnist in Los Angeles, I happened to be working on a feature story that involved meeting several behind-the-scenes movie people, including one who happened to be Ryan O’Neal’s younger brother Kevin. It was one of the all too often Hollywood coincidences, as was his interest in Texas, Tejanos and the Southwest.
At a post-production party later, we happened to be talking about ourselves, and I told him that crazy story about how my one time best friend thought the girl I was in loved with was much too beautiful for me and would one day leave me for Ryan O’Neal.
“If that was your best friend,” said Kevin, “I’d hate to meet your enemies.” He was right, but that wasb another story.
Still, it made him curious. What did my ex really look like? Did I have a photo? No, that had been years ago. But he was insistent, obsessive even. He was dabbling at writing, I learned, and he certainly had the curiosity for it. On his iphone, he found my ex’s old high school yearbook online and her photo as a valedictorian popped up.
“Oh, yeah,” she does have that Farrah look,” he said. “But you know what? I think she looks more like Leigh Taylor-Young, even more beautiful than Farrah.”
“Leigh Taylor-Young?” I remembered that name from a television soap and a favorite movie, The Adventurers, from years ago. “Wasn’t she…”
I didn’t even finish the sentence before Kevin finished it for me.”
“Yeah, that Leigh Taylor-Young,” he said. “She was married to my brother, too. She was the second Mrs. Ryan O’Neal.”
“The second?” Actually, I didn’t really know much about Ryan O’Neal’s real marital life. My interest had ended with Jennifer Cavalleri of Love Story.
“Yeah, I don’t know what it is about him,” he said, “and I’m his brother. When you’re Ryan O’Neal, all the women just seem to fall in love with you.”
TONY CASTRO, the former award-winning Los Angeles columnist and author, is a writer-at-large and the national political writer for LAMonthly. org. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.
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