Free Not Young, Still Restless by Jeanne Cooper Page A

special connection to her—as different as our personalities have always been, raising her was like watching my own childhood repeat itself right before my eyes.
    I can’t begin to count the number of times I begged Harry to spend time with his children, especially Corbin and Collin as they got old enough to start really wanting and needing their dad. Play with them, I said. Get to know them. They’re fabulous, funny, wonderful boys. I know you love them, but you’ll also enjoy them if you’d give yourself a chance to find out who they are.
    And so it was that when Corbin was about eight years old and Collin was four, Harry decided that on Saturday mornings when he was home, he would go on outings with his boys. What that translated to on the Planet Harry was that he would take his sons with him to do what he always did on Saturdays anyway—drop off and pick up his laundry (which for some reason he loved and wouldn’t dream of letting anyone else do for him), get a haircut, and go to the car wash. After the third or fourth Saturday of this, Collin finally asked his father if they could please not play with him anymore because it wasn’t any fun. To the best of my recollection, that about wrapped up the father-son bonding between Harry and the boys until they were old enough to play Little League baseball, which Harry did enjoy, especially when he discovered what gifted athletes our sons were.
    F or the most part, life was filled with blessings when the 1960s began. I had three beautiful, healthy children, plenty of adoring help from Auntie Mamie and Aunt Elsie, and a steady stream of work I loved, from more episodic television work to the role of a “hooker with a heart of gold” in a wonderful film called Let No Man Write My Epitaph with my old friend Shelley Winters. Harry, in the meantime, was spending a lot of time in Rome, partly to set up an Italian branch of the Jaffe Agency and partly to take care of a client, Dolores Hart, who was there filming Francis of Assisi with Bradford Dillman and Stuart Whitman, and directed by the great Michael Curtiz.
    I don’t remember which one of us suggested it, but somehow, Harry and I headed off to Rome together, a business trip for him and a much-needed vacation for me. I was looking forward to going to the Francis of Assisi set and meeting Dolores Hart, who was a beautiful, young up-and-coming star at the time, but Harry informed me when we arrived that it was a closed set—no visitors allowed. (I know. If it was a closed set, what was Harry doing there? But I didn’t push it.) My friend Ethel Levin was living in Rome at the time, and over lunch one day, when I explained that Harry couldn’t join us because he was on the set with Dolores, she gave me a very intense look and said, “Jeanne, I’m telling you this as someone who cares about you—keep an eye on those two.”
    It felt like a punch in the stomach. For one thing, it caught me completely off guard. For another thing, while I can’t claim that the thought of Harry being unfaithful had never entered my mind, I’d never had anyone strongly suggest it to my face before. For still another thing, nothing I’d heard about Dolores Hart implied that she would have anything to do with a married man. I didn’t ask Ethel what prompted that warning. I probably wasn’t ready to hear it from anyone but Harry, if at all. It ate at me, especially in my hours alone in our hotel room while he was “working” and “running late,” but I wasn’t about to confront him about it based on nothing more than a comment from a friend.
    The coup de grâce of that trip actually didn’t involve Dolores Hart at all. It involved another of Harry’s clients, a handsome actor named Guy Madison, television’s “Wild Bill Hickok,” who also happened to be the former husband of a stunningly beautiful actress named Gail Russell. Guy was in Rome for some reason or other, and Harry and I met him for drinks one night. We were chatting