Kiss and Tell (19 page)

NOT LOOKING BAD IN MY FORTIES.

Now here’s an injustice in our justice system: they dropped the case. That was it, it was over. All the money we put out; all the time it consumed. People can just say whatever they please, and you have to prove you didn’t do it! You are not innocent until proven guilty; you’re presumed guilty until you prove that you’re innocent. It was horrible; we had to defend ourselves against someone who was flat-out lying, trying to make a quick buck. There was no point even in countersuing her.

When it was all said and done, what we paid our lawyer was about the same amount the housekeeper had been seeking. But there was no other choice. Pay her or pay our lawyer—and we much preferred to pay him. What kind of precedent would we be setting by paying her? Gene was with me on this one; his principles wouldn’t allow it either.

Now I’m not afraid to fire anybody. They know that we’ll go all the way to the jury with them. We will not pay someone off; it’s not going to happen. We do not negotiate with terrorists!

The second challenge we faced because of having people working in our house involved the theft of some jewelry that was very precious to me because of what it represented. But the story starts out with our theme of being honest, loving each other enough to compromise, and the special feeling we have as a family.

Christmases are interesting at our house. I like them traditional, and Gene doesn’t like them at all. We light a menorah and have a tree because Christmas has never meant religion to me. I see it as a day of thanksgiving and joy for children. My kids are hard to please at Christmas, because they never want anything. I try to dream up things to surprise them, and they’re always glad I did.

Poor Gene, he always gets clothes, because he doesn’t like toys or gadgets or cars. He writes everything down in a notebook, so no Palm Pilot for him. He has his old cell phone from years ago—”It’s fine,” he says, “it’s working,”—while I have the latest camera phone with every accessory. He doesn’t wear jewelry and doesn’t care about his clothes (he’d wear the same shirt every day if I let him), so Christmas and his birthday are the times I buy him clothes—with his own money lately, poor guy.

The kids make him homemade presents, which of course he likes. Nick will get creative with his artful Christmas cards, always with a lovely note to us both. Over the years Sophie has made many handmade ceramic dishes to put change in. Each one has a personal inscription, so Gene loves them all. He is happy when I make him his favorite rice pudding or bring his favorite marzipan cake as a present. He’s low maintenance that way, but high maintenance enough to keep me on my toes in other ways. He’s like his mother. He likes things a certain way—not many things, but he wants what he wants the way he wants it. Toilet paper must be folded just so; coffee must be too hot and served in a paper cup so he can drop an ice cube in it; air conditioning must never blow in his face. Dogs must not be heard drinking; and birds are to be admired but not heard chirping. For someone who plays in a high-decibel rock band, it’s eerily quiet around here—but maybe that’s why.

Gene never used to give me Christmas presents; I had to make him do it. For 10 or 15 Christmases I didn’t get a gift, and I just let it go. Then one year I had finally had enough. I told him, “I am not spending one more Christmas without a present. Do you understand me? I am not!” I actually stopped the car and asked him get out, go into a store, buy me something, have it wrapped, and hand it to me. I explained that this particular store was holding an estate sale and had an Edwardian cross and a ring that I really loved. “But what about the sentimental value, the feeling of being surprised,” he sputtered. “Just go in and buy it,” I told him; so he did. He marched in and got them. Well, he had to; I was driving and said, “I’m not taking you home until you do.”

He will never forget that day, I’m sure. Later, when I received compliments on those antique pieces, Gene would say, “Oh yes, that, she made me buy it for her.” And I answered, “See? Now it’s sentimental. Are you happy now?

It’s not that Gene is stingy—far from it; he is very generous. By the time of my Christmastime showdown, Gene had given me diamonds when my kids were born and beautiful jewelry on birthdays and other special occasions. Every piece was a special memory, something my kids had picked out or, better yet, something Gene had chosen on his own. I had my Nick diamond, my Sophie diamond, and Mother’s Day gifts they had all chosen together for me. Gene preferred to buy me a present for no reason at all. One day I was surprised with a 17-karat diamond ring for no apparent reason. That was brilliant; that was wonderful, but that one year I just finally got fed up. I wanted my Christmas present at Christmastime! One December, while we were watching television, an ad for Zales Jewelers offered diamond earrings for $98. Gene remarked that I wouldn’t want those particular earrings, even if I got them on Christmas Day. I told him that I would love any unprompted gift from his heart, provided it came on the right day. To his credit, he found a Zales store—his first foray into a mall—and bought back said earrings for Christmas. I cried… then I said, “Where’s my real present?”

Sometimes, you just have to make them do it. And now we compromise: I won’t shove the tree up his ass and he gets me a present, that’s the way it works. And I would like to report that our latest Christmas was a banner year for surprises at the Tweed-Simmons household. Daddy done good!

I always stored my jewelry in a safe, which was normally kept in a vault in our home. The safe, which locked with a key, weighed 50 pounds and was too big for someone to carry away. I never imagined that someone would find the key, remove the jewelry from the safe, lock it up again, and return the key.

During the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2001 I planned to wear some jewelry for holiday parties. I immediately realized something was wrong when I saw that the key wasn’t in its usual place. When I picked up the safe and shook it, I could hear the boxes with something in them rattling around, but I couldn’t find the key. I had someone come to the house to drill the safe open; when I looked inside, all the boxes were empty. The thief had been smart enough to open the safe, remove the jewelry and leave the boxes inside with something in them to make the rattling sound so I wouldn’t notice until I opened the safe.

I was very sad, and felt even worse for Gene. He doesn’t spend his money easily; these were things that were truly an emotional sacrifice for him to buy. Buying girls diamonds? He had never done anything like that before. Now they were all gone. Gene was very calm when I told him about the theft. He said, “It’s just stuff, Shannon. We’ll get more. Relax.”

I was crying hysterically. “It’s not just stuff, it’s things you gave me, jewelry my kids gave me, things that really meant something to me, and it’s all gone!”

The same detective who had tested the crazy English nanny years before came back to assist in the investigation. Because we had been under construction, we had to spend one thousand dollars on each lie detector test administered to every person who had been working on our house within the previous month. Only one man became indignant about taking the test, which he didn’t pass. He immediately hired a lawyer—a bad sign. Then the worker quit, another very bad sign. None of the jewelry has shown any signs of surfacing, and it’s been three years now.

The results of a lie detector test are not enough evidence to search somebody’s house. Not that any of the stolen items would be at his house by then anyway—that jewelry was probably well on its way to a black market where it could be sold without drawing attention. The best the police could do was to keep an eye out for the serial numbers on the stolen watches and report them to area jewelers.

Until I let go, I wanted revenge. I was furious, and I wanted whoever did this to be punished. This is another point where Gene and I differ. He didn’t want to live with the thought that someone, angry that we went after him, might come after us. But Gene works so hard, and so much thought and love had gone into those gifts for me—I felt sad for that.

Chapter Fourteen

Till Death Do Us Part

L
ooking back has made me realize that much of what came to me was dumb luck. In many ways I feel like my life was something that happened to me. Of course I made choices and decisions along the way that led me to where I am, but so many things just seemed to fall on me. I tripped my way up the ladder; I certainly never had a master plan.

I consider myself lucky when I look at Gene—when I see him as if for the first time, or as someone else might see him. He’s handsome when he gets cleaned up. I still get butterflies.

After I turned 40, work started to slow down, and I’m not anxious to do any more love scenes or B movies that take me away from my kids. I have a soccer-mom kind of life now, and I love it. I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be all the time and doing what I was put on this earth to do, but things are changing quickly. The kids are growing up and I’m wondering what will be in store for me. I’ll have to wait and see, but one thing I am very sure of is that we’ve brought up some fabulous human beings that will make the world a better place.

These days I get up, make breakfast, and drive the kids to school. Then I head to the gym or run errands, grocery shop, pick up the cleaning—that sort of stuff. I go back to school midday to serve hot lunch to hundreds of kids! I get to see Nick and Sophie, which I like. That means on days when I pick them up from school, I have made three round-trips. It’s a lot of driving, a lot of schlepping, which means I have become addicted to audiobooks. I’m basically a shuttle driver, because the kids are still at the age where they need to be driven to all their activities. Then there are piano lessons, tutoring, riding lessons, guitar lessons, and homework. Plus I like to see my friends and other family members once in a while. My days are very full, but I can smell the day coming when I might go back to work, when the kids are grown, just to stay busy. Maybe I’ll get better roles now.

I can see the moment I come into the house what Gene’s been up to on any given day, because he leaves a trail of crumbs. I’ll see he had a meeting here, walked over there and left a soda can, and came into the kitchen and had salad for lunch—there’s some chicken left out and here’s something sprayed all over the inside of the microwave. I don’t know what that is. Usually something has exploded, because Gene believes that you have to cook things for an hour. He likes his food burnt to a crisp. I have to cook meat for the rest of us, then meat for him—charred to within an inch of its life, so it’s unrecognizable. What starts out as a nice chicken breast becomes a piece of dead black bark. Then he covers it in ketchup or salsa—everything. I did sneak some pork by him once; he liked it, until I told him it was pork.

MY BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN AND OUR BELOVED DOG SNIPPET.

Gene and I don’t drink, and we don’t even go out much anymore—maybe to a birthday party or some special event. We did attend Hugh Hefner’s New Year’s Eve party at the Mansion this year. I’m glad we’ll always be friends, and I’m happy that Gene and Hef like each other. But that was a pretty big night out; mainly, we enjoy restaurants, movies, and comedy clubs. Gene works more now than he ever has, so sometimes he has business dinners or meetings with investors, business/social occasions he needs to attend. I don’t go to many of these. He does fine without me, and I’m not the little lady who has to entertain the business clients. It’s part of the deal Gene made with me, I think, for not being married: the little woman does what she pleases. And what pleases me is taking care of our kids.

RECENT HEADSHOTES FOR WORK. MOMMY PARTS?

When I see how my life has evolved, though, it seems odd for me to be dependent on someone else financially; I’m thankful for it, but I would prefer to be working for my own money. When an acting job comes my way, I’m fortunate to have help at home so I can just take off and do it. It’s almost like a vacation, to go to work; I head off and have my hair and makeup done, and someone brings me lattes and drives me around. I love that!

Friday night is our family night when we all see a movie together. On Sundays we spend the whole day together—another movie, bowling, the beach, tobogganing, whatever—just doing regular, everyday family stuff. Only now boyfriends and girlfriends are coming along with the kids.

Here we are, twenty-two years down the road, and Gene and I have a slightly different bedroom ritual than the candlelit routine we started with. When we first moved in together, and before the kids arrived, we slept naked. Now before he gets in bed, Gene puts on sweatpants and then socks, carefully tucking the sweatpants into the socks so they don’t ride up. Then he puts on a T-shirt and a long-sleeved denim shirt, buttoned at the wrists so the cuffs don’t ride up. Once he’s all covered up, he climbs into bed and goes to sleep, bundled up like a snowman. I laugh about it every night and say,
Rock on!
to myself. Gene likes to be bundled and tucked with heavy weighted blankets. I don’t know why he needs them, because within an hour of his starting to snore he kicks them off onto me. I’m not sure if it’s my age or my hormones, but I’m already hot, so this wakes me up and just drives me nuts.

RECENT PHOTO BY RICHARD FEGELY FOR PLAYBOY.

No matter how long you’ve known each other, there’s that moment before you go to sleep when you wonder what’s going to happen that night. Always be prepared is my motto—take a nice shower, try to look pretty, put a cute little nightie on—then I come to bed and he’s tucking the sweats into the socks. Oh well, they can always come off! It’s become a comical Archie Bunker routine. Who knows what he’ll be doing the older he gets? More of those funny little things that old guys do? I’m waiting to see. And I’m sure they will seem just as adorable to me as his other eccentricities, because the man still turns my crank.