Melissa, as they say, has been there. She confessed her own affair on local and national talk shows and again in her 1978 book, The Mistress' Survival Manual, thus becoming a heroine to those hopelessly in love. Then, last Valentine's Day, she turned into the Enemy—a wife—when she married Michael Sagarese, 32, the man who had been her lover. "That doesn't mean I won," she says. "Nobody ever wins in a triangle. The mistress who marries her man has still lost some productive years, spent as a basket case."
Although she's forsaken mistressing as a role, Sands is not about to give it up as a cause. Already in the typewriter is her next nonfiction book, The Making of the American Mistress; coming up is a thriller in which the Other Woman gets murdered. Melissa's also planning a series of syndicated radio spots offering advice to the lovetorn.
Her new husband, who teaches music in an elementary school near their Long Island home and plays in a dance band on weekends, is a partner in the business too. They've collaborated on an unsold screenplay about their romance, and Michael will record some of the radio programs himself "to give the married man's point of view." In public they call themselves Michael and Melissa Sands, because, he says, "I come from a large Italian family and some of them understand this better than others." Melissa earlier had changed her surname from Scharr to Sands to avoid embarrassment to her own family and her first name from Margaret to Melissa because "I hated Margaret."
Although she sees Mistresses Anonymous as both an anti-adultery crusade and a profit-making enterprise (through her media ventures), Michael thinks of it as a way for Melissa to further her literary career. "She can and will write other things," he says. "It's like the difference between pop music and classical. I have a degree in classical clarinet, but I play Proud Mary at weddings for money."
Like most mistresses, Melissa was astonished to discover she had become one. The daughter of a Mount Vernon, N.Y. cargo claims inspector and a teacher, she majored in sociology at the State University of New York at Albany. While trying to write a book on pop sociology, she worked as a waitress and substitute teacher. She was "slinging prime ribs" at a wedding reception in 1974 when she introduced herself to Michael, who was playing in the band. "She was a lyricist looking for a composer, and I was a composer looking for a lyricist," he says. They made a date for him to look at her lyrics, and though their music went nowhere—"We've written a lot of songs for Bette Midler and Barry Manilow that they've never seen," says Michael—he and Melissa became good friends, then lovers.
Michael was three years into a troubled marriage but afraid to leave for fear he'd never see his two children. "I built more and more of my life around him," says Melissa, "but I never got to see him. It was a miserable, miserable time. People say to me that only a moron could have an affair, but I was independent, liberated, career-oriented, smart. I couldn't figure out how this had happened to me."
After a year they agreed to break up and Melissa started meeting regularly with other mistresses whom she had encountered in her various jobs. "The goal of the group, and the book," she says, "is to let mistresses know they're not alone and that they have the power to resolve their triangles. I'm in the business of breaking up affairs, not marriages."
When one group member told of a local woman who had committed suicide over a married man, Melissa begged the Long Island newspaper Newsday to write about M.A. as a refuge for the distraught. That led to an appearance on Good Morning, America. The next day she was fired from her job as a stewardess on a commuter airline. Only after that did she write The Mistress' Survival Manual, which came out in September and has sold some 100,000 copies. The publicity, however, meant group meetings had to be stopped because "the press and wives kept busting in with cameras."
On talk shows Melissa still takes a beating from the audience: "Women say: 'You knew what you were getting into. Why should your kind be helped?' And I answer, 'Would you feel that way if I were your daughter?' " Backstage, she adds, "People are always telling me secrets. The producer will say she's having an affair with the host, and the receptionist with the cameraman." Every program brought forth case histories to use in her book.
Because "I didn't wreck Michael's marriage," Melissa says, "and because it was so obvious to me that I made him happy," she never felt like a scarlet woman—except at one of Michael's gigs. "He was singing songs that we'd written together, but his whole family was there. I had to sneak in and out, and he couldn't acknowledge me. It was awful."
Furtiveness became a way of life. Usually they met at a beach because his 73 Land-Rover was too recognizable in their small community to park outside Melissa's apartment house. "I was very unhappily married," says Michael. "I couldn't think of not loving her. I would have gotten divorced anyway."
Born in Brooklyn and educated at the Manhattan School of Music, Michael was working three jobs during the affair. Finally, in 1975, four months after he split up with Melissa, he left his wife. (He has a daughter, now 5, and a son, 7, whom he sees on weekends.) After his separation Michael and Melissa were wary about renewing their romance. Then he caught her on TV and "found out things I never knew about her feelings. It brought us closer together."
They were married a year after his divorce became final, before a justice of the peace, Melissa wearing bunny slippers because of an injured toe. Their honeymoon was a trip to Houston for a Donahue taping. In the modest suburban tract house they just bought, Melissa writes on a portable, cooks, redecorates and leads a pleasantly un-glamorous life.
Their unabashed retelling of their story makes some people queasy—"Not everybody understands," says Melissa. It hasn't helped Michael's fight for visitation rights, either. (His ex-wife is moving with the children to California.) "We just want everybody to get on with their lives," he says.
They do have supporters. "My mother was embarrassed at first, but then she was very proud that I had written a book," says Melissa. "Now we're so conventional that when we're with my family all they ask about is what Phil Donahue is really like." Says Michael: "My friends realize I'm much happier than I was before."
A little too often for their comfort, people ask the Sandses if infidelity might be a problem again. "I don't worry," Melissa says. "We never, ever want to go through that again."
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