twenty-five
Bruce and I were busy shooting our series. We stayed at my house during the week, when both of us worked, and we bunked at his place in Hidden Hills on the weekend. My hours on Sweet Justice were often in the fourteen-to sixteen-hour range, excruciatingly long by any standard, and I blamed Cicely Tyson for the delays, as did everyone else in our otherwise outstanding cast.
Her mesmerizing performance in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was a gold star on her résumé, but she was extremely difficult. She insisted everyone call her by her character’s name, though she never remembered the names of any of our characters. She rarely knew her lines. One day she kept everyone waiting hours because she didn’t have the proper bra. Another time she slapped a director across the face. And still another time guest star Cotter Smith stormed off the set after a lengthy courtroom scene and fumed, “I’m never working with that woman again.”
We had a giant makeup trailer where everyone gathered in the morning, listened to music, and drank coffee. Cicely would come in, turn off the music, dump the coffee because she hated the smell of it, and then make us sit quietly while she got her makeup done. I learned early on from my grandfather, whose mantra was “Don’t start,” not to start trouble. I was a team player; years later Aaron Spelling would refer to me as his quarterback. But this stuff with Cicely was out of control. Because of her, I was unable to spend quality time with my family.
She insisted on hiring a woman to help with wardrobe who was inexperienced, and I paid dearly for her lack of qualifications when she failed to wet me down properly for a scene where I was supposed to walk inside from a rainstorm. My feet went out from under me, and I landed flat on my back and head. I got my first ride in an ambulance that day. It was scary as hell. Production shut down for a few days while I healed, though ultimately that fall caused damage in my neck that would lead to surgery years later.
I finally snapped. I called NBC president Warren Littlefield and insisted he get a separate trailer for her and do something about the delays. Having grown up with Michael Landon, one of the biggest stars in TV history, who insisted that no one get their own trailers or any other special treatment, I never understood Cicely’s divalike temperament.
Sweet Justice debuted the same year as Friends and ER. Early on, it was pretty clear the show wasn’t going to make it, but we got in a full twenty-two episodes and I made some really great friends.
During hiatus, as we waited halfheartedly for the pickup that never came, I was cast as the lead in Danielle Steele’s miniseries Zoya, a lavish historical romance based on a novel about a Russian ballerina/countess who flees the 1917 revolution for Paris and then America. Bruce also landed a costarring role as one of my husbands, though he wouldn’t be able to join me until he wrapped Babylon 5.
To prepare, I vowed to get in the best shape of my life. I quit smoking, adopted a mostly vegan diet, and worked out with my childhood ballet teacher, who got me back up on pointe for the first time in fifteen years. By April, I felt wonderful. I was so healthy, in fact, that I got pregnant.
I want to say I was delighted, and I was, but truthfully, I was also mystified. We weren’t trying, and there were so many barriers in place that either Bruce had supersperm or I had crazy eggs or it was a combination of both. A few days before I left for Russia, I was in ballet class and doing spins across the floor when I felt unusually dizzy. I stopped the lesson early, went home, and tried to figure out why I felt crappy. I flipped through the old Filofax and saw I was two weeks late.
“Of course,” I blurted.
I immediately knew I was pregnant, but I didn’t want to say anything to Bruce or my family until it was confirmed. After a blood test at my doctor’s office, the nurse came in and said, “Congratulations!” I turned white and began to hyperventilate. I had to sit down. I was leaving in a few days for a three-month shoot in Russia and then Paris, London, New York, and Montreal. I would be gone the entire first trimester, playing a ballerina/countess from age seventeen to seventy. It was hard to fathom.
On the way home, I started making a mental checklist of the things I had to do to take care of myself now that I was pregnant, including taking vitamins and adding stuff to my diet. I had a little laugh as I realized Bruce and I would be shooting a scene where my character loses her virginity to his character. I was going to be playing a virgin while pregnant, whereas years ago on Little House I was a virgin playing a pregnant woman.
But there was a problem. I had to tell Bruce, who had the day off and was waiting for me at my Valley Village home. After I broke the news, he looked at me for an uncomfortably long time and then in a calm but firm voice said, “No.” I said, “Yes, I’m pregnant.” He replied, “No. You’re. Not.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“No. No. No, no, no, no.”
“Are you telling me I’m lying?” I asked.
“You can’t be pregnant,” he said. “How could you be pregnant?”
“Do I need to explain it to you?” I said sarcastically. “I think I have a pretty good idea how it happened.”
“But—”
“I guess both of us are fertile people.”
I saw that Bruce was on a slow boil and decided to wait it out while he cycled through his emotions, which he was entitled to do. First he accused me of getting pregnant to trap him into marrying me. Hilarious! I pointed out, of course, that we were already married. Then he began to pace, muttering to himself. I heard a lot of “Oh my God” and “How am I going to take care of this kid?” coming from him in a barely discernible, guttural mumble. Then he stopped and turned toward me, looking like a helpless ten-year-old boy in a jam.
“Another child,” he said. “I’m not ready to do this right now.”
“Look,” I said. “Let’s take a breath and just sit with it for a while. We’ll see how you feel.”
Two hours later I was sifting through clothes and starting to pack when Bruce came into the bedroom looking very different—almost satisfied with himself.
“Well?” I asked.
“I think it’s time to call our parents,” he said. “My baby is having a baby.”
“Really?”
“Even with all the preparation in the world, you’re never ready, so I might as well just roll with it,” he said.
The rest of the evening was filled with joyous screaming and carrying on as we told our parents and our boys. A couple days later, I took off for St. Petersburg, Russia, by myself. Well, not by myself. I had someone else growing inside my tummy.
When I first heard I was going to be shooting in Russia, I was excited. I would be working with producer Douglas Cramer, who did everything first-class, and Diana Rigg, one of the coolest actresses ever (I mean, Emma Peel—come on, it doesn’t get better than that). I also pictured myself drinking vodka, eating caviar, and whooping it up between visits to the Hermitage and other sites. Instead, I got there and my morning sickness was so bad that all I ate was porridge.
Plus, St. Petersburg wasn’t at all what I expected. I thought it might be like Paris, only less sophisticated. But it was dirty and bleak. As for the people, what I saw was either extreme, ridiculous wealth or extreme, horrific poverty; either young girls in Chanel and Dior spilling out of limos with mob dudes trailing behind them, or an old woman with missing teeth pulling a cart down the street. I ate at one restaurant where an offering on the menu was “neck.” Not whose neck or what kind of neck or how it was prepared. Just neck.
The highlight of my ten days there was shooting with the Kirov Ballet in the famed Mariinsky Theatre. Then we went to Paris, where I met up with Bruce, who played my first husband. It was his first trip to that romantic city, and luckily we found ourselves with an unexpected day off when the Russians held up all of our film equipment for some unexplained reason. I whisked him through the Louvre, down the Champs-Elysées, and up the Eiffel Tower, cramming three days’ worth of sightseeing into eight exhausting but thrilling hours.
We were in New York for my birthday and Mother’s Day, and then we settled into Montreal for the bulk of production on the miniseries. The director was an interesting guy, an ex-hippie sort with long hair. We had met privately before shooting and had a nice, flirtatious talk, and though I was married, I detected a you’re-my-leading-lady-so-I-can-have-you kind of thing. But once he found out I was pregnant, every day was ridiculously adversarial.
On the bright side, Jennifer Garner played Bruce’s and my daughter in what was her first job. She was especially beautiful, amazingly talented, and sweet. On the third day, Bruce and I predicted she would become a big star. I remember saying to him, “Just watch. She’s something special.” I am so very proud of her.
Despite all the hard work on the movie, we enjoyed some beautiful, peaceful early summer days in Montreal as well. At night and early in the morning, when we had time for ourselves, Bruce and I began trying to figure out what we were going to name our new baby. I bought books full of baby names. We knew right away if it was a girl we would name her Ruby. We also knew the middle name was most likely going to be Garrett, since we wanted to honor Garrett Peckinpah. But neither of us could come up with a boy’s name that we liked. Every day we riffled through the pages of the naming books, as if a name we had overlooked would miraculously jump out.
It didn’t. But one day I turned the page, looked up, and slapped myself on the side of the head. Bruce asked why I was upset and I shook my head and simply said, “Michael.”
“Of course,” he replied. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of it earlier.”
We returned home in June and moved into my Valley Village home for about a month while I gutted and redecorated Bruce’s place to make it more family-friendly and reflective of my taste. I wanted to rent out my house, but I let Bo move in when I heard he didn’t have anywhere to stay. I thought I was going to be able to kick back between July and the baby’s due date on Christmas Eve; Bruce was returning to Babylon 5, and I envisioned myself getting fat and shopping for baby things in his absence.
But the stress-free environment I craved didn’t materialize. In mid-July, my publicist, Colleen, called and told me to brace myself for a scathingly bad cover story in the National Enquirer. I took a deep breath and asked, “Again?”
She warned it wasn’t like before. This time the tabloid quoted Bo as saying I was a “deadbeat mother.” They claimed Dakota ran up to strange women on the street and asked them to be his mommy. They said Bo had had to get up at night to feed him when he was an infant. It also said I refused to take care of him when he had the chicken pox, and I forced him to watch reruns of Little House.
Over the years the tabloids had called me manipulative, accused me of having people fired on Little House, followed Rob and me like vultures, and paired me up with people I never dated. But this was beyond the pale. It planted a seed. For instance, Bruce’s relatives in the Midwest didn’t know this was untrue, and they received calls from people delicately inferring that maybe Bruce shouldn’t be having a child with me. It was ugly. I decided I wasn’t going to shrug it off and walk away.
I hired powerhouse attorney Larry Stein and sued the National Enquirer and Bo for defamation, invasion of privacy, and infliction of emotional distress. The suit would drag out for nearly three years. I went to a couple hearings and opened every facet of my life, including my entire financial history. I felt like I’d been pinned and dissected without anesthesia. The lawyers were cold, crude, and unflinchingly callous.
At one hearing in early September, I was plainly sick and uncomfortable. I asked my attorney if we could postpone the session for another day. After he made the request, the attorneys for the National Enquirer and Bo conferred with each other, and then the Enquirer’s attorney said, “We’ll move forward. We have no sympathy for Ms. Gilbert.”
I thought, Okay, you motherfuckers, game on. I was already committed to seeking justice, but at that point I vowed to see the suit through and win, come hell, high water, or severe nausea.
Unlike me, the tabloid had limitless resources and money. It was a mess, and it filled my otherwise perfect life with an unhealthy dose of daily stress. The stuff they threw at me was brutal. But I soldiered on, knowing I was in the right. On October 1, I had my baby shower. Five days later, I woke up and was lying in bed, plotting out my day, which I thought would include writing thank-you notes, when suddenly I heard my water break. I knew the sound. Then I felt wet. I thought—hoped—that maybe I had lost bladder control, as that happens to some pregnant women. I was still in denial when I stood up and watched water gush out of me. I thought, This is wrong, very wrong.
Thank God Bruce was home. I called out to him and I was crying and shaking when he ran into the bedroom. I said, “We have a problem.” Though it was early in the morning, I called my doctor and had her paged. She called me right back, listened to me describe the problem, and calmly said, “Why don’t you come into the office and we’ll see what’s going on before we get hysterical. Just have Bruce bring you in.”
“Okay,” I said. “When?”
“Right now. I’ll meet you there,” she said.
Thus began an unforgettable ordeal.
I felt panic surge through my body as soon as I stretched out on the examining table in her office and began the wait for my doctor to tell me what was going on. Tears dripped into my ears as she did a litmus paper test on the fluid and confirmed that my water had broken. She did an ultrasound and estimated Michael—by this time, we knew the baby was a boy—weighed about three pounds. She called ahead to Los Robles Regional Medical Center and told us to go straight there. I left her office shaking with fear but managed to mutter, “I’m not going to have this baby now.”
At the hospital, they put me in a room and gave me an IV of magnesium sulfate to slow down the labor. The doctor came in and said they needed to keep the baby in me for at least a day, and in the course of that day they were going to give me three steroid injections to speed up development of the baby’s lungs. They also put me in bed in the Trendelenburg position, but turned on my side, with my feet higher than my head, to remove as much stress as possible from my uterus.
Bruce and I called everyone and told them what was going on, and that we were in a holding pattern. The magnesium sulfate gave me a wicked headache, which wasn’t fun. It also made my lips puff up, which I didn’t mind. Around 1:00 p.m., I sent Bruce home to go for a run, pick up some of my stuff, and come back around dinnertime. My mother, Sandy, and my midwife, Sage, took his place. Sandy put makeup on me, saying I’d thank her later when I looked at pictures. It was also very comforting feeling her hands on my face.
A while later the doctor did another ultrasound, which showed that I had lost all my amniotic fluid. The head of the neonatal intensive care unit, Dr. Paul Hinkes, came in and explained that he wanted my doctors to do a C-section as soon as possible. Keeping the baby in me any longer, he said, posed numerous risks. He pointed out that Michael’s heart rate was dropping, and he also cautioned that his lungs weren’t going to be able to breathe on their own, so he’d have to be hooked up to a ventilator. Then he ran down a list of things that might be wrong with him after they got him out, such as a cerebral hemorrhage, blindness, a perforated intestine, or a hole in his heart.
At the time, none of these horrible things registered in me. They would later, for sure. But I didn’t hear a word after he said “If he makes it through the first twenty-four hours, it’s good. If he makes it through the next twenty-four hours, it’s better. And if he makes it through the next twenty-four hours, we’ll be okay.” I just wanted to get him out. I said as much over and over. “Let’s get him out.”
By then it was four o’clock. Bruce rushed back to the hospital and got into surgical scrubs. On my way to the OR the nurses were kind enough to stop the gurney so I could see my mom and Sandy one more time. We all kissed one another, crying and repeating that everything was going to be fine. As I was wheeled into the operating room, I started to panic a little. Bruce put his mouth right next to my ear and kept whispering, “It’s okay, baby. Everything’s going to be okay.” Both partners from my ob-gyn office, Dr. Ambe-Crain and Dr. Taylor, performed my C-section. There was also a respiratory therapist, a neonatologist, and the NICU nurse in the room. I’d had an epidural and was awake through the surgery. As with Dakota’s birth, the doctor asked if I felt the first cut. I said no, and she said, “Okay, then, here we go.”
With Bruce holding my hand, I listened to the doctors exchange procedural small talk. Then I heard one of them say, “Here he is.” The other said, “Oh my goodness, isn’t that silly.” I asked what was happening and someone said he had reached his little hand out of the incision. Then it got very quiet, too quiet. I heard whispering, and then I began to get scared.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
My doctor walked to the side of my head so I could see her and explained it was hard to get him out. There was no lubrication, she said, and he was hiding from them. She warned, “He might be a little bruised, but we’ll get him out.” Though it seemed like an hour had passed, it was only several minutes later that I heard them say, “He’s out.” I waited to hear him cry. I knew he would be okay if he cried; it would mean that he could breathe.
Sure enough, I heard a cry. It was barely audible, but it was the first glimmer of hope that things would be all right.
They whisked him to the side of the room and put him in an open incubator, where they began to work on him with practiced precision and determination. From where I was lying, I could only see his foot—one little blue foot sticking out from all the activity. Then his foot turned pink and I thought, Okay, he’s getting oxygen. I heard another little cry, and the people in the operating room cheered.
“He looks so tiny,” I said.
“He looks beautiful,” Bruce replied.
They quickly put a breathing tube into his lungs and brought him to where I could see him. He was the tiniest thing, like a little bird that fell out of a nest. At just twenty-eight weeks, he already had a head full of blond hair. He also had Bruce’s profile, his exact nose. He was unmistakably a Boxleitner. My God, he was so beautiful. He was also pink, and I heaved a sigh of relief. He certainly wasn’t out of danger, but I had a feeling that he was going to pull through.
Bruce didn’t know where to go. He wanted to stay with me, but ultimately, we decided he should go to the NICU with Michael. I told Bruce to watch him and take pictures while I was sewed up and taken to recovery. After a little bit, the neonatologist came in and reported that Michael was a fighter, but not out of danger. I gave him a steely look and said, “It’s not going to happen. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
I barely slept that night, and in the morning I called friends and relatives with the latest news before it hit the tabloids. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened ten years earlier when I had my appendectomy and it was reported in a dozen different ways by the media. As I later joked to People magazine, “I think my internal organs actually got higher ratings than my face.”
After breakfast, I was taken to the NICU for my first visit with Michael. I was shocked by the way the tiny infants were laid out in open beds—Michael, in particular, reminded me of the frogs we dissected in high school. He was lying with his arms and legs spread out and attached to various lifelines. One line went right into his belly button and into his heart cavity. He had a pulse oximeter light on his foot, measuring his blood’s oxygen level. He had one IV here, one there. A wire attached to the top of his head monitored his body temperature. He was the exact antithesis of the baby whose welcome to the world is a cozy swaddle in a warm blanket. It almost struck me as barbaric. And yet he was so serene, so peaceful. When I talked to him, he turned toward me and gave me a little peek out of his eyes. That’s how he got his nickname, Peeker. I thought, Okay, you’re going to make it.
Fortunately, Michael’s next few days were unremarkable for a preemie, though there was nothing unremarkable about them for Bruce and me. Bruce has since confided that he refused to let himself become too attached to Michael in those first few days in case something happened. He didn’t want to care in case our son died. He also later admitted that he had actually feared losing both of us on the operating table.
I was a focused soldier. On October 8, two days after giving birth, I was able to sort of hold Michael for the first time, along with the padding from his bed. The next day he was taken off the ventilator. On the tenth I went home, which was excruciatingly hard. Leaving my child behind, despite knowing he needed to be at the hospital, was gut-wrenching. My days fell into a blurry, methodical schedule. I got up, pumped breast milk, got Dakota off to school, went to the hospital, watched Michael, went back home, pumped some more, had lunch, checked in with Bruce, picked Dakota up from school, got homework started, pumped again, fixed dinner, spent two more hours at the hospital with Michael, came home, pumped one last time, and passed out. I was never as happy as the day I was actually able to hold him without the mattress pad.
We weren’t out of the woods, though. Nine days after he was born, I showed up at the hospital and Michael had two big tubes up his nose. He’d been put on a CPAP, a special kind of ventilator, after having had trouble breathing the night before. They had to force air into his lungs because he’d been working too hard to breathe. I was assured he wasn’t as uncomfortable as he looked, but I saw that and fell apart.
I was a jumble of emotions I couldn’t begin to figure out. Walking in and out of the NICU every day with other parents worrying about their child’s condition was a strange experience. We shared our love and fear in a communal silence that was like a fragile crystal bubble. It was as if we didn’t want to shatter the status quo by talking. Monitors beeped, lights flashed, parents whispered to doctors and nurses, and in between all of us prayed.
If bad thoughts crept into my head, I would write out dosage charts for Michael’s medications or I would make detailed lists of things I had to do. I had never been so purposeful.
One day I was at the hospital kangarooing with Michael—meaning I held him against my bare chest, with blankets on the outside, a practice adopted from Third World countries where modern NICUs weren’t readily available. The idea was the mother’s body would regulate the baby’s temperature. Suddenly his temperature dropped and the two nurses monitoring his vital signs came over.
One nurse reached out for Michael and said it was time to put him back in his heated Isolette. Then the other, seeing the look on my face, said, “Let’s wait. Give her ten minutes.” Within a few minutes, Michael’s temperature regulated again. Then they took my temperature. It was 101. My body had heated up in order to provide him necessary warmth.
I was aware that thirty-one years earlier I wasn’t held like that, nor was I wanted, but dammit, my kid was—and I just wanted to get him home.
Michael thrived. On October 17, he received his first taste of breast milk through a tube in his nose. Six days later, he fed from a bottle. During this time friends and family would visit. His brothers made drawings and cards that I taped around his Isolette. My grandfather came to visit, took one look at the tiny boy, and said, “What’s he doing in that thing? He looks like he should be sleeping in a hollowed-out melon.” Things were not only on course but a little bit ahead of schedule. I felt like I took my first deep breath in nearly a month. I wanted to know when I could take him home.
I pestered the doctors and nurses with questions, showed them that I knew all of his medications and doses, and had home nurses and special lights for his jaundice all lined up to care for him at home.
On November 15, Bruce and I were finishing breakfast and talking about the day ahead when the doctor called and said we could bring Michael home. I screamed. Bruce canceled whatever appointments he had and we hurried to the hospital. Normally they don’t let babies leave the hospital until they weigh five pounds; Michael was only four and a half. But I knew if I could get him home, tuck him into my bed, dim the lights, feed him whenever he wanted to eat (every two hours, it turned out), and just love him up all day and night, he would do well. And that’s exactly what happened.
Once I got him home, he blossomed. A nurse came every other day and assessed him, and I took him to the pediatrician once a week. On his first visit, he was in the seventh percentile for weight, if that. By Christmas, he weighed about ten pounds and was in the eighty-fifth percentile. The doctor marveled; I beamed. My little guy was an early overachiever, just like I’d been.
So much attention had been given to Michael that I wanted to get Dakota a special present for Christmas. When I asked what he wanted, Dakota said he wanted his dad and me to get along. Bo and I had had little to do with each other since I filed the lawsuit, and what interaction we did have was fraught with strain and tension stemming from the fact that I knew he had fabricated the story for the National Enquirer, which I held responsible for creating the stress that had caused Michael’s premature birth.
But for Dakota’s sake, I called Bo and invited him over to talk. Because nothing in my life ever happened the way I expected it to, he and Bruce hit it off immediately and I was pushed out of the equation. Their bromance robbed me of a chance to unload on him. And despite my considerable resentment, I dropped him out of the lawsuit without any satisfaction for the suffering he’d inflicted.
I continued to pursue my claims against the Enquirer, though. I wasn’t about to quit that fight. For me, the issue was no longer about restitution for what they did to my reputation and me; it was about the fact that their disregard for both the facts and human decency had nearly killed my kid.
I felt like David fighting Goliath. As the lawsuit moved forward, the tabloid’s attorneys pulled my medical records, starting from my first gynecological checkup when I was eighteen. They were threatening to use some of that information against me in court. I saw their gambit; they wanted me to meditate on the threat of not just public embarrassment but downright mortification. They couldn’t have tried any harder to make the situation more ugly.
I tried to focus on the good stuff. At Michael’s one-year checkup, I was told that I didn’t have to bring him in once a month anymore. The doctor said he might still be a couple months behind developmentally, but he would catch up soon enough. To celebrate the good news, we threw a first-birthday bash for all of our family and friends who had prayed along with us for the past twelve months. Just before everyone arrived, though, I fell apart in our bedroom.
Bruce came in and found me curled up on the bed, crying and unable to catch my breath. When he asked what was wrong, I told him that I was suddenly and unexpectedly overcome by thoughts of all the things that could have gone wrong with Michael—the heart problems, the bleeding in the brain, the drama of those first twenty-four hours, everything. It was a delayed reaction to the worry I had kept bottled up for the past twelve months. The dam just burst.
I was feeling things and I didn’t like it. That’s when an occasional glass of wine turned into two at five in the afternoon. Three glasses was even better. My drinking escalated from there.
The lawsuit wasn’t quite finished. At one point, after I won a small pretrial motion, I received a call from Screen Actors Guild president Richard Masur. He explained the union was working diligently on privacy legislation to curb the tabloids and paparazzi, and in exchange for speaking up on my plight, he offered me support from their government relations office and legal department. To thank Richard, I said, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” He would eventually take me up on that offer.
The suit would drag on for nearly another two years until finally we had to end it. The cost was staggering, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and by then all I wanted to find out was why—why they would print a story they knew was blatantly untrue and obviously damaging to my life and career, and my children’s lives. My attorney arranged a meeting with the National Enquirer’s editor in chief, Steve Coz, and their attorney, at their headquarters in Clearwater, Florida.
We flew to nearby Miami and checked into the Delano Hotel. I was a nervous wreck. Before the meeting, Larry took me for a long walk on the beach. He knew that despite my uncertainty, I was anticipating the face-to-face with the fuck who had approved the story about me. Larry told me what to expect and urged me to remain centered, focused, calm, and to keep my wits about me. I took his counsel to heart. It enabled me to contain my anger so that I could focus it and use it with laserlike precision.
The meeting lasted several hours. We agreed the details would remain confidential. However, I can say that it was a remarkable experience for me. I had the opportunity to confront someone who I thought had wronged not only me but my family.
And I learned a great deal that day, starting with the revelation that the National Enquirer’s attack on me was not at all personal. It was purely business for them. Stories like the one they wrote about me sold magazines, period. It convinced me more than ever that gossip rags were a cancer on our culture and individual sensibilities. I wanted to run to every newsstand and grocery store checkout line in the country and tell people how much pain they were inflicting on people by buying those pieces of trash.
I also learned how to walk away from a fight. At one point during the meeting the lawyer for the Enquirer said something that caused me to almost explode. I wanted to fly across the room and rip that guy’s head off. Fortunately, Larry squeezed my hand tightly and suggested that I go for a walk.
I did and went to my suite. I called Bruce at home and told him what was going on. He calmed me down and helped me see that the fight, whether or not I got everything I had wanted, was over. I had made my point. There was a deal on the table. As he said, it was time for me to agree to it and come home.
“In some victories, you don’t always get everything you want,” he said. “But this is a victory. It’s over. Walk away. Michael is fine.”
“He is fine, isn’t he?” I said.
“He’s better than fine,” Bruce said. “He’s exceptional. So are you. Now put your sword down and come home!”