He couldn't have sounded more grateful, more loving, more sincere. "Grade's the reason I'm able to get out of bed every morning," TV talk show host Montel Williams told PEOPLE in November, just months after stunning fans with the news that he suffers from multiple sclerosis. "She's taken care of everything, allowing me to keep it together." As he spoke, his wife, Grace, sat by her husband's side in the wood-paneled study of their 13,000-sq.-ft. home in Greenwich, Conn. Alternately lacing her fingers through his and patting his hand when he broke into tears, Grace demurred: "I don't think I'm so strong. I think it's just pure belief and love in this person."

If those declarations weren't testament enough to the strength of the Williamses' marriage, friends and family vouched for their bond. The couple, they maintained, had only grown stronger since Williams, 43, had been diagnosed with MS in March 1999. "Thank God for Grace," said Montel's sister Clolita Williams, 48. "I have all confidence that she will always be there for him." Echoing that sentiment was family friend Kim Hines, who put the couple up when Williams visited the Salt Lake City doctor who helped to put a name to the debilitating symptoms that had plagued him on and off for 10 years. "Every time I see them," she said, "it seems like they're happier."

A touching picture. Or was it a pose? On April 10, Williams made another shocking revelation: "After going in separate directions for quite some time, Grace and I have decided to end our seven-year marriage. In light of our difficulties, we agreed to divorce last November." Since then, he added, they have been working out the details of their separation and making arrangements for joint custody of their children, Montel II, 6, and Wyntergrace, 5. He went on to praise Grace for being "very supportive concerning my medical condition." In her own statement, Grace, 36, said, "It's a difficult time for the whole family."

Both comments came shortly after Grace was contacted by the National Enquirer, which claimed to have photos of Williams with another woman, and asked how she felt about that. Shortly after that call, Grace tossed her husband's clothes onto the lawn of their Greenwich home. The following day, Williams moved into a New York City apartment. Grace's friends quickly rallied in support. "She must have felt incredibly betrayed and hurt," says a former roommate. "I've never seen her throw a fit or a tantrum or even raise her voice."

The couple met in 1991 during the first year of the syndicated Montel Williams Show, when Grace and her mother were tapped for a segment on mother-daughter showgirls. Grace, who danced topless in Las Vegas under the name Bambi Jr., was hard to ignore when she appeared on the show in a white corset, garter belt and thigh-high stockings. "By this time I had interviewed dozens of gorgeous women," Williams wrote in his 1996 memoir, Mountain, Get Out of My Way, "but no one had ever struck me in quite the same way."

Williams asked her to dinner, only to be rebuffed. But Grace finally agreed to lunch, then another lunch, until he persuaded her to join him for dinner. Before they slept together, he wrote, they agreed to take an AIDS test together as a sign of their caring and commitment. Their courtship warmed quickly. "They were always laughing or telling jokes or silly stories," recalls a former production assistant on the Williams show. "He always described it as a love-at-first-sight kind of thing." The following June they married at the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas.

The wedding came shortly after Williams's divorce from his first wife, Rochele See. Though that marriage lasted nine years, Williams wrote in Mountain, "I knew it was over after a month." He and See, whom he met in the mid-'70s while both were serving with the military in Guam, had two daughters. "But in every other respect the relationship was a disaster," he wrote. "We drifted apart as quickly as we came together."

Their daughters, Ashley, 15, and Maressa, 11, attend boarding school in Connecticut and otherwise live on Williams's five-acre Greenwich estate, which includes a pool, a guest house, a go-cart racetrack and a movie theater. Grace's mother, Dori Moehrle Kotzan, 69, who for years has divided her time between Las Vegas and the Greenwich mansion, where she helps out with the kids, told PEOPLE, "How [Grace] handles all this—she is a miracle woman. There are two daughters from the previous marriage and her own two."

Whatever the immediate cause of the couple's split, there is at least some suggestion that Grace may see a silver lining. Last November, Grace, who has taken bit parts in TV shows in hopes of jump-starting her acting career, was finishing Little Pieces, a film she cowrote and starred in, and which Williams directed and coproduced. Explaining how she came to write the script, she said, "I gave up my career to be with my husband and have children." Then one day, when her husband and kids were away, she realized, "I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted, but nothing came to mind. I just cried for hours because I felt I had lost the person I am." She explains that the film, which has yet to be released, describes "how women give up little pieces of ourselves little by little, and then we are left with nothing." Now, it appears, she will have the chance to prove she can pull the pieces together on her own.

Jill Smolowe
Fannie Weinstein, Bob Meadows and Elizabeth McNeil in New York City and Giovanna Breu in Chicago