"Richard didn't want to think twice about it, so he decided he better do it," said Crawford. "It was fun."
What she wouldn't give now for the innocence of the good old days. Fun is the last word anyone, least of all Crawford herself, would use today to describe what seemed at first glance—and, alas, has in fact proved—a union too rich, too beautiful, too good to be true. On Dec. 1, Crawford, 28, and Gere, 45, released a brief statement announcing their separation, calling it a "personal and painful decision" that they had made five months ago.
Truth be told, there were many who from the first questioned the bond between the supermodel and the matinee idol; whispers abounded about the couple's sexual orientations and the sincerity of their feelings for each other. Until this spring, Crawford and Gere merely laughed off speculation as, in his words, "kid stuff."
Then, in April, the French weekly tabloid Void printed an article stating outright that the marriage was a sham, that Gere "preferred men," that Crawford "played at ambiguity with her female pals" and that their union of convenience was about to end. The next month, outraged and wearied by what they called a "critical mass" of mean-spirited conjecture—and calling the Void piece "a very crude, ignorant and libelous 'article' "—husband and wife took out a paid advertisement in London's prestigious The Times: "We got married because we love each other and we decided to make a life together. We are heterosexual and monogamous and take our commitment to each other very seriously. Reports of a divorce are totally false. We remain very married. We both look forward to having a family. Marriage is hard enough without all this negative speculation. Thoughts and words are very powerful, so please be responsible, truthful and kind."
Neither of them made it easy. News of Gere sneaking off just two months later for an after-dinner rendezvous with actress Uma Thurman in London (where he was filming the Arthurian tale First Knight) didn't help tamp down talk of a split. Then came his liaison with 22-year-old British beauty Laura Bailey, an honors graduate from Southampton University and a model who was spotted leaving the actor's rented home in Chelsea early in the morning three days in a row last month. Soon photographs of Gere and Bailey began popping up in newspapers. Still, the principals made their denials.
"It is really bad gossip that is not based in truth at all," protested Crawford.
"I am disgusted by what they are saying about us," said Bailey.
"She is a friend," insisted Gere.
"Six years of every rumor flying that could possibly fly," said Crawford's mother, Jennifer, 48, from Cindy's hometown of DeKalb, Ill. "I'm totally fed up. [Richard and Cindy] are fine. What more could I possibly say?"
Not much, as it turned out. Before more protestations became necessary, the couple broke the news of the parting themselves. Though their announcement may have come as little surprise to a world of cynical strangers, it left those who actually know Crawford and Gere struggling to understand. "I had heard the rumors and hoped they were just rumors," says veteran fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo with a sigh. "I was very sad to hear they were not."
"She was very happy. He was very happy," says Radu Teodorescu, the Manhattan-based physical trainer (known as Radu) who is a longtime friend of the couple's. "It was a beautiful thing."
Back in DeKalb, where Gere used to spend lazy weekends lounging with Cindy in his sweats, cooking fish and teaching his wife's younger sister, Danielle, 25, to play the guitar, Cindy's mother is no longer angry. But she is very tired, and at a loss for words. "I'm not commenting," says Jennifer softly. "I think they need to take some time to figure out what they're doing."
What they are doing, said Crawford's publicist, Annett Wolf, is far from clear. "People today seem to assume that when you say 'separation' it means that it's all over," she said. "If they'd decided that, they would have filed for divorce." Yet once friends shake free of their initial surprise, they say reconciliation seems highly unlikely. "Richard feels that they've done the right thing," says a close friend of his. "The relationship wasn't growing as a partnership." Says a longtime pal of Crawford's: "They both want to be happy and make the other one happy, but they haven't the slightest idea how they can do both at once."
How the storybook romance got to this point is unclear. Crawford has suggested that as she nears age 30 she has begun to reassess herself, her needs and her expectations. "It's really hard to know when it's your turn to say, 'I need this. This is about me,' " she said recently. For his part, Gere has long admitted having difficulty with intimacy. "I'm trying to open my heart," he said soon after the marriage. "That's a hard gig, man."
Friends can articulate what did not go wrong. "It's infamy! It's ridiculous!" says Radu of the allegations that his friends' marriage was an imitation of life. "Talk about sour grapes. I was with them when they were holding hands, riding horses together. They had all that. Family life is not necessarily a bon voyage," he adds. "They both put in work and commitment, but things started piling up."
Marriage seldom is easy, of course. And from the beginning, Crawford and Gere were an odd match. She is a self-described "good girl" who has, she said, spent her life seeking more than anything to please, who shuns drugs, drinking, smoking and even that most insidious power-celeb habit: being late. Gere is her opposite on all counts, a rebel by nature. ("I hate the world; I want to kill Daddy. Whatever is controlling me I want to kill," is how he described his early '80s mind-set, after American Gigolo made him an overnight sex symbol and star.) His fast-living days and admitted cocaine-filled nights were over by the time he met Crawford at an L.A. barbecue in 1988, replaced by a devotion to the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. But whether finding expression in indulgence or asceticism, a test-the-limits take on life is at the core of Gere's being. Punctuality, needless to say, is not.
Friends teased them about their differences—his love of jazz, the blues and classical music, her penchant for pop; her longing to stretch out on a beach in southern France, his to commune with the Dalai Lama. "She did go to Tibet once," says Radu. "She did everything. She slept in tents, she prayed every day, she ate the Buddha food. And she was not thrilled. She had no desire to do it again."
Gere, on the other hand, made no pretense of wanting the children his wife yearned for. "I am a child," he once said. And yet, as their relationship grew, he seemed to be edging nearer to a settled life. Six months after their wedding, he sold—at a $600,000 loss—his two-bedroom bachelor pad in Hollywood Hills. He was ready to move on; last year he and Crawford purchased for nearly $5 million a mansion in Bel Air complete with guest quarters, an acre of land and plenty of room for kids. Said he: "I kind of like the idea of sitting around a playpen baby-sitting for the rest of my life, playing the guitar."
Ironically, Crawford had changed her own tune by early this year. Gone was the impassioned young wife who in 1992 told PEOPLE: "More than anything, I want a family. I love kids and sort of feel like that's the thing I am going to be best at, being a mother." When asked this spring about starting her family, she said simply, "When it feels right."
Friends say the topic created tension. "She wanted to have a family and children, and he was not ready," says Radu. "She couldn't tolerate a compromise." Yet a close friend of Gere's says it was not his opposition but her own ambivalence that caused problems. "She was never at a point where she was ready," says the friend. "Richard has always said that when Cindy was ready he would have children. He would never have stood in the way."
But there were problems in other areas too. A year into their marriage, Crawford was just stepping full-stride into her estimated $18 million-a-year career, including ad campaigns for Revlon and Pepsi, hosting MTV's House of Style, exercise videos, swimsuit calendars and most recently a foray into moviemaking, with a starring role in the Joel Silver thriller Fair Game, going into production in January. Gere, on the other hand, having rebounded from a seven-year career slump in 1990 with the $455 million smash Pretty Woman, was just shifting into his warm-down lap. "I'm over the hysteria of the career thing," he said.
That he is over the career thing and his wife is still climbing, says one of Crawford's friends, was a problem inherent in the nearly 20-year age gap that separated the couple. "He's been there, done that. Her angst is two decades behind his. I just don't think he relates."
Then there is the matter of values and temperament. "We just have such different things," she told Vanity Fair in the spring. "He sees himself as an artist. I don't see myself as an artist. 'Commercial' is not a bad word for me. He doesn't understand [my career] very much. But you know, I don't understand some of his stuff either."
She did not, for instance, understand Gere's desire to run the ad in The Times of London rebutting Void's allegations. He was upset, Crawford said, by the implication that "we weren't honest people." She was equally upset, but preferred a different strategy: if they ignored the gossip, she felt, "it would go away." Giving in against her better judgment was a mistake, says a friend. "Cindy found it humiliating. It's not her style. She thought it looked desperate, and of course it did. In my opinion that was the real end. She lost confidence."
Two days after the ad ran, Crawford headed out first to a ranch in Colorado and then to the Greenhouse Spa in Dallas. Gere stayed at their Manhattan co-op to prepare for his role as Sir Lancelot in First Knight, then in late May flew to London to start preproduction. But even before the dramatic statement ran, signs of distress were clear. In April, for instance, when she was making her multi-million-selling exercise video with Radu in New York City, the trainer noticed she came back from weekends with Richard, once a source of rejuvenation, strangely fatigued. "Usually on Monday your body is recharged. But hers was not," says Radu. "She was not as happy."
He was not the only colleague to notice Crawford's unease. Scavullo was surprised when she called last-minute to reschedule an important Cosmopolitan cover shoot. "She asked if we could start at 6 in the morning instead of 9 because she wanted to take the Concorde to London," he says. "I had to say no, because I can't work at 6 in the morning and no girl looks her best then. When she said she had to take the Concorde to see Richard, I knew something was wrong."
Was her sudden request sparked by tabloid tales of Gere's new "friendship" with an unknown blonde, later identified as Laura Bailey, a fellow Buddhist whom he met at a party for the Dalai Lama at London's Grosvenor House hotel in June? No one is saying. But by the following month they had agreed to separate. By September, Gere was regularly seen in the company of Bailey, and Crawford, back in the U.S., was going to parties—at least once without her wedding ring—on the arms of two ex-beaus, actor John Enos and, more often, Randy Gerber, 30, a model turned nightclub owner.
"We are just friends," said an exasperated Gerber of the speculation that he and Crawford are an item again. Radu emphatically seconds the denial. "Cindy would never accept a promiscuous relationship. She would never cheat on her husband. She is not that kind of a person," he insists. "I would put my hand in the fire for that."
Would he stake so much on the integrity of Crawford's husband? In New York City and L.A., gossip columns are already abuzz with word that Bailey will soon join Gere on a meditative trip to the Himalayas. But whether he goes with her or not seems, in a way, a moot point. The family home Gere and Crawford bought together in Bel Air last year is back on the market (asking price: $6.7 million). And sources say attorneys for Gere and Crawford are busy drawing up division-of-property papers. "These are not people who are intent on hurting each other," says an L.A.-based lawyer familiar with the case. "Under the circumstances, we should all be so lucky."
Such civility seems bittersweet to those who have grown to care for the couple. "It's hard to believe," says Delores Welch, owner of the Godmother Gourmet in Malibu, where for three years Gere and Crawford have been coming in for take-out. "They have such a wonderful rapport with each other, always laughing and fooling around. They are very decent people. If this isn't working out for them, I hope they find what will."
KAREN S. SCHNEIDER
ALLISON LYNN and NANCY JO SALES in Manhattan, LYNDA WRIGHT, CHRIS BENGUHE and JOYCE WAGNER in Los Angeles, JONI BLACKMAN in DeKalb, TERRY SMITH in London
- Contributors:
- Allison Lynn,
- Nancy Jo Sales,
- Lynda Wright,
- Chris Benguhe,
- Joyce Wagner,
- Joni Blackman,
- Terry Smith.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
