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GEISTER and RON MILLER |
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of 'R.J. SYNDROME'
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You thought he was just
an actor? Guess again!
written exclusively for TheColumnists.com
When the actor Robert Wagner played his famous bit part as the injured Marine in "With A Song in My Heart, " the 1952 biographical movie about singer Jane Froman, a girl named Patricia fell madly in love with him.
"All my allowance and babysitting money went for the movie magazines with his photos," Patricia recalls today. "I'd cut out those sexy, hunky, bare-chested shots of him and tape them on my bedroom walls. He was hot! Ah, young lust!"
At about the same time, a boy named Ron walked by the school locker of a pretty eighth-grade girl named Darla and saw she had a picture of Robert Wagner pasted on the back of the locker door.
"You like that dork?"
he observed. "He couldn't even get in the Army because he
couldn't pass his physical. He was 4-F! What a loser! You probably
like Roy Rogers, too. Grow up, girl!"
The girl named Darla snuffled back tears. How could that awful
boy say those things about "R.J." He didn't look 4-F
to her, not after seeing him in "Halls of Montezuma"
and her favorite, "Stars and Stripes Forever." And,
yes, she did like Roy Rogers. What was wrong with that?
Now Patricia and Darla did not know each other and, in fact, lived in far different parts of America. But they were united in their passion for Robert "R.J." Wagner. In retrospect, it's probably fair to say Patricia's passion ran a bit hotter.
"I knew in my teenage
heart that he was waiting for me to finish school, get myself
to Hollywood, and we'd live happily ever after," Patricia
remembers. "Those empty-headed 'boys' I spent time with
until I could get to my 'man' were my training wheels. That vixen
Natalie Wood really stabbed me in the back. She knew R. J. and
I were meant for each other, the steaming schemer! The studio
forced them to marry. Oh, you didn't know? Remember, you read
it here first."
Now that's where Patricia and Darla parted company. Darla did
not want to marry Robert Wagner because he seemed a bit old for
her and she wanted to finish grade school before thinking of
such things. She had even thought about going to college someday--and
she doubted if R.J. would want to wait that long for her. She
liked Natalie Wood and, if she couldn't have R.J., then Natalie
seemed exactly the right sort of girl for him.
As for that rude boy Ron,
he, too, liked Natalie Wood, but thought she should marry somebody
really cool, like that new guy Marlon Brando. His distaste for
R.J. grew even more intense when he learned Natalie had fallen
for him. What was going wrong with American girls these days?
Well, time passed and our three central characters--Patricia,
Darla and Ron--all grew older, along with R.J. Wagner. Strange
things happened in their lives. Perhaps the strangest was that
Darla married Ron. They both had studied journalism in school
and wound up working on the school paper together. Eventually,
they both began writing about movies and television for a big
California newspaper.
Meanwhile, Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood became the most popular young couple in Hollywood. They were on all the magazine covers. Darla would see those pictures and shake her head sadly.
"Why don't you be like R.J. and give up those glasses and that stupid crewcut look," she told Ron. "Look how nice he dresses, how neatly his hair is combed, like the breeze just stirred it up a little. You look like you're all greased up."
That hurt Ron's feelings. How unjust to compare him with a movie star who had professional stylists working on his hair day and night! R.J. probably even had makeup artists working him over. Ron wanted to remind Darla one more time that R.J. was 4-F, but thought better of it since he had turned out to be 4-F, too, thanks to his messed-up eyes.
Then events began to work in Ron's favor. Rumors of trouble between R.J. and Natalie surfaced. She was getting more famous than R.J. and he was no longer being offered hero roles. Instead, they had him playing drunken playboys in pictures like "Harper." His career was finished, Ron thought.
"How do you like your pretty boy now?" Ron asked Darla when R.J. and Natalie split up.
While that was going on, Patricia was married--and divorced. She found herself single again--and working at a new job in a new place...Los Angeles, that big city next door to Hollywood. She didn't fail to recognize the significance of so much serendipity in her life.
"R. J. and Natalie also were divorced, so it was only logical that this was our time," Patricia thought.
But Patricia waited and R.J. never called.
"Wouldn't you know, R. J. turned out to be like all the other guys not looking for their next wife," she recalls. "The ungrateful fool! I was crushed. I forgave him, but I couldn't forget."
Patricia decided to run
away from the source of her frustration and took a job transfer.
She wound up in Morocco, for a woman the closest thing to joining
the French Foreign Legion.
"While I was there, R. J. came to his senses. I didn't.
I had remarried. He was heartbroken over this, so he went back
to Natalie and remarried her. We sublimated our desires for the
sake of his career. I'm a very understanding woman, you know."
Years went by and Patricia now believes it was a mistake for her and R.J. to stay apart as they did.
"We both secretly
regretted not being together," she reflects now, rather
philosophically. "Being the noble sorts that we are, we
never let our spouses know they weren't our first choice. Natalie
died in that tragic accident, and shortly after that I divorced
the lout of that era to make myself available once more for R.
J.
"Well--and I say this with mercy--Jill St. John needed a
venue to revive public interest. Smart cookie that she is, she
appealed to R. J.'s generous nature. Gentleman that he is, he
took pity on her. He called me and asked for my advice. We just
couldn't hurt Jill's feelings the way we had broken Natalie's
heart in times past."
Patricia now paints this picture: "We spent years trying to be single and available for each other at the same time. Alas, we decided to sacrifice our own true desires to join our hearts in love, thereby sparing our present spouses from the tragedy of losing us. Omnipotency has its drawbacks, you see. Neither Jill nor Rupert (my present husband) will ever know or appreciate what we did to make them happy."
For Ron and Darla, those years were difficult. Ron was depressed to see that R.J. made a spectacular comeback as a big TV star with such hit series as "It Takes A Thief" and "Switch." Darla seemed always to have this satisfied smirk on her face whenever R.J. appeared on TV, looking trim and handsome and oh-so stylish.
Then, when Wagner landed in his biggest hit show of all, "Hart to Hart," Ron decided to release all his pent-up humiliation over this constant comparison of him to R.J. by the cruel and vindictive Darla. Ron was then a nationally syndicated television columnist, so he finally went public with the story of his decades-long struggle to get out from under the "R.J. Syndrome." It was published in scores of big newspapers around the country.
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Ron was forced to grow one, too |
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One night at an ABC network party in Century City, Ron finally came face to face with his nemesis, R.J. Wagner. After they were introduced, Wagner said, "Say, are you the one who wrote that hilarious story about living under my shadow all these years?"
Ron had to admit he sort of was warming up to this actor dude, so he acknowledged he'd written the column. Wagner was like a kid.
"Natalie and I howled over that," he told Ron. "I mean, we really howled. We had it framed and it's hanging in our guest bathroom right now."
Though Ron thought it might have been nicer to have his work displayed in a better venue at the Wagner-Wood digs, he realized a compliment when he heard one and thanked R.J.
"Say, where's your wife?" Wagner then asked Ron. "I have to repay her for her loyalty for so many years."
When Ron told R.J. that Darla was back home in Northern California, the actor immediately asked for Ron's home number. Before he could be stopped, Wagner got on the phone and called Darla. It was late in the evening, but Darla picked up right away and heard this man's voice calling from what obviously sounded like a wild party.
"Hi, Darla," said Wagner. "This is R.J." There was a pause. "R.J.Wagner," he went on. 'You know, Robert Wagner. Remember the picture in your locker? Right. That's me. " Then he was quiet for a moment and finally put down the phone. "I think she just hung up on me," he said.
Yes, she had. As Darla explained much later that night when Ron finally got her to pick up again, she thought it was a gag. Her dream guy had called her and she hung up on him. Secretly, Ron was delighted. He didn't want anything to get going that he couldn't control.
Now Patricia's story doesn't end so happily either. She wound up becoming a columnist for www.thecolumnists.com and wrote her part of this "tell-all" story. Unfortunately, her loving husband, Rupert, read it and decided to take immediate steps.
"He's taking me to Swedish Hospital for a not-so-random drug screening test," Patricia reports. "Damn! All these years wanting to be a big Hollywood star, and now the only screen test I can get is for drugs. There ain't no justice."
Ron's story about his encounter with the "R.J. Syndrome" has an additional twist that's worth repeating. It seems Darla accompanied him to Hollywood a few years after that bungled phone call and was waiting in their hotel room while Ron was out doing an interview. The phone rang. It turned out to be the one and only Robert Wagner, who had come to know Ron a little better and was trying to get some information about the pending funeral of a mutual friend.
When Ron came back from his interview, he found Darla's note with the names of all the people who had called. He glanced up at her, startled, when he saw R.J.'s name on the list.
"You talked to R.J. at last?" he asked. "What did he say to you?"
Darla looked up, smiling quite smugly.
"I think that's something for us to know," she said quite placidly, "--and for you to wonder about for the rest of your life."
©2003 by Patricia J. Geister and Ron Miller. The photos are from Ron Miller's files from studio sources.
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