I went to bed the night of September 13 feeling completely lost and empty inside. After all that my life in showbiz had allowed me to do for my mother—sending money back home, buying her a nice condo—it was my life in showbiz that now kept me from being at her side in her time of need. I couldn’t be with her because of my job—the job that had been my sole focus for the past three years to the exclusion of just about everything and everyone else in my life.
I woke up that morning praying to Jesus, which is something I hadn’t done in a very long time. With all the New Age stuff I had been practicing since the mid-1970s, I thought I was in charge of everything! Suddenly, I wasn’t. I was helpless. Completely helpless. I was alone in my bed, in that gigantic house in Beverly Hills. More alone than I had ever been in my life.
That is the moment when everything changed—at 7:15 a.m. on September 14, 1984. I said, “Jesus, if you give my mother more time, I’ll turn my life over to you. I don’t care if I act anymore. Just give my mother more time.”
Thoughts were coming out of my mouth that I had never even considered before. Acting, the thing I thought I cared about most in the world, meant nothing to me in that moment. It was inconsequential. I was willing to trade it away without any hesitation. I was willing to do anything to save my mother—and the one thing I wanted to do, the one thing I felt I needed to do, from the bottom of my heart, was to give my life to Jesus. I didn’t even know what it meant to give my life to Jesus. I just somehow knew it was the one thing I wanted—and needed—to do.
I was ready. I was willing. For the sake of my loving mother, who had already led such an impossibly tough life. My mother, Margaret Theresa Shea See.
I prayed to Jesus. I offered my life to him. And the moment I laid my head back on the pillow, I sensed a voice saying, Call Patti. I had no idea where that came from, but suddenly it was the only thing that mattered.
Enough time had gone by that I didn’t have Patti’s number.
I called my secretary, Judy. “Judy, are you awake?”
“Yeah, boss.”
“Do you have Patti’s phone number? I’ve gotta call her.”
Judy had been there through it all. She knew I hadn’t spoken to Patti since we split up. She was baffled by the request. “Why do you have to call her?” she asked.
“I don’t know! But I have to.”
In the past, whenever I called Patti from work or from the road, she always hit me with a lot of questions. When we were married, I used to feel as though I had to prepare myself before I called. To get ready. She’d want to know how things were going, what was going on, where I’d been, what I’d done, how I was feeling. I know in retrospect she just wanted to feel connected to me—at a time when I wasn’t allowing myself to fully connect with her. I know that now. I didn’t know it then. But on this morning? I didn’t even think about it. I wasn’t nervous. I wasn’t worried. I just knew I had to do it, because that voice said, Call Patti.
I prayed to Jesus at 7:15. It was barely 7:20 when Judy gave me the number. And I dialed.
“Hello?”
“Patti, this is Gavin.”
“I was just thinking about you!” she said.
It was breathtaking. I still tear up at the memory.
I said, “Can I see you?”
I didn’t understand why I was saying this, or where it was coming from. But I continued. I said, “Can we be friends?”
“That’s all I ever wanted,” Patti said.
My eyes filled with tears. I could hardly speak. “Can I see you?” I repeated.
“I would love to,” she said. “But I belong to a support group called LADIES—it stands for ‘Life After Divorce Is Eventually Sane’—and this support group, we travel all over, and I’m just getting ready to leave. I have to be gone for a week.”
I was flummoxed. She didn’t say no!
So I said, “Okay, well, how about next Monday?”
“I’ll be home,” she said.
“Should I come down?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll have dinner for you.”
That is how it all began. Again.
Later that day, I got the call: my mother’s surgery went well. In fact, it went perfectly, the doctors said. She was doing fine. She was going to be okay. My mother was already in her late seventies. To survive a surgery like that was a big deal. Recovery would not be easy. But to know that she was alive, to know that she was still with us, meant one thing and one thing only to me: Jesus had answered my prayer.
That Monday of the following week, I drove straight to Santa Monica after work. Our Ocean Towers apartment was on the third floor, and you had to walk past all the people downstairs and the desk staff in order to get to the elevators. With all of the stories about me in the Enquirer, I was worried about who might see me, and who might say something, and all that.
There was no way around it. They all saw me, they all knew me, and they were all very friendly. I just hoped no one would dime me out to the tabloids. Not today. Not now.
I went up and knocked on Patti’s door. No answer.
Second knock. No answer.
My heart sank. I thought, She’s standing me up. I don’t blame her.
I knocked a third time, and the door opened—and there she was, standing there in an apron—my beautiful Patti. Without a moment’s hesitation, we hugged each other. We held that hug for what seemed like an eternity. I didn’t want to let go.
Finally, Patti spoke to me. “I’m sorry your dinner’s cold,” she said. “It’s been waiting for three years.”
Patti invited me in, and we never ate that dinner. We sat down and just started talking. She seemed so centered. So happy. So together. Here I was feeling like a complete mess of a human being, and Patti was just glowing.
“What’s happened to you? You have it all together!” I said.
“I’ve been born again,” she answered.
“What does that mean?” I asked her.
And she explained it to me.
She shared passages from the Bible, and specifically spoke about a man named Nicodemus, a Jewish leader who went to see Jesus in the dark of night—afraid to be seen in Jesus’ presence in broad daylight, fearing someone might report him. (Suddenly this felt familiar to me.)
Nicodemus asked, much like I was asking, “How can you be ‘born again’? What does that mean? You can’t go back into your mother’s womb!” And she explained that Jesus said, “No. You recognize me as the Son of God. I eradicate all your sins.” She explained to me that sins are “mistakes.” I’d rather call them “mistakes” than “sins,” because that’s more understandable, especially to those of us who were raised in a way that made us fear God, and fear punishment.
I’m clearly paraphrasing everything here, because I want it to make sense the way Patti made it make sense to me. But you can pick up any Bible and look this up for yourself in John 3. Patti basically explained that being “born again” is to recognize Jesus as your Lord and Savior. “You recognize me,” Jesus said, “acknowledge me as the Son of God, and then eternity is yours.” After you die, Jesus said, “You’ll see my Father. There is only one way to the Father, and that’s through me, and he sent me here to teach you that.”
Patti went on. To be born again is to start over, she said—to begin life anew. Your past mistakes are forgiven, and you begin with a clean slate. With Jesus as your Lord and Savior, the life you once led is put behind you, and you begin a new life in his name.
“I want that,” I said. “That’s what I want, Patti!”
She turned on the TV and we watched televangelist Kenneth Copeland for a little while, and the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and all of these sorts of programs that she had been watching for the past two years. I had never seen this sort of kindness in the name of God. It was very different from anything I had ever known from the church.
Patti had become very good friends with Shirley Boone, Pat Boone’s wife, and she talked about how Pat and Shirley had helpe
d her. They introduced her to a ministry called Born Again Marriages, which was made up of people who stood up for their marriages. People who had been dumped, walked out on, left behind. People, I’m ashamed to say, like Patti.
She told me she had been praying for me to return. Outside of Born Again Marriages, there was a whole different group of supportive women who prayed with her, and who prayed that I would come back to her. In fact, this group—led by Bonnie Green, the wife of the talented musician and composer Johnny Green, and a wonderful woman named Louise French—had prayed for me on the night of September 13. Up until that time, so many people, including Patti’s therapists on both coasts (we still had an apartment in New York at that time), had told her to “let go.” To “forget about Gavin” and “move on.” But she wouldn’t hear of it. She knew that our love was real and that for some reason I had gotten lost.
The story gets even more interesting, because on the night of September 13, I went to the theater with Bernie Koppel and his wife, and when we left that theater—that very night—I thought, I wonder how Patti is doing? It was the first time I had thought about her in a very long time. I think the power of their prayers was already at work!
As I sat in that apartment, Patti handed me a Bible with my name printed on it. She had kept it there, waiting for me. She told me that each time she came home to our apartment, for all that time, she would walk in and say, “Honey, I’m home!” as if I were still there.
She wanted me to meet all of these people who had helped her, and I agreed. I was so moved by the whole experience. I was so moved that Patti would not only open that door for me but let me walk through it.
To think that she had been praying for my return, after what I had done to her.
To think that we had both given our lives to Jesus, at different times, and for different reasons, and that Jesus had now brought us together again.
We talked for hours. We fell asleep. We woke up and talked and talked again. We fell asleep again. We woke up the next morning, and kept right on talking. There was nothing physical at this point—this was a very different kind of reunion. It was just us and our words—and the Word of God.
Patti and I were together frequently from that day forward. Jesus and I were together too. Even though I had already given my life to Jesus that morning when I prayed in my bed for my mother, I wanted to make sure it was legit. I wanted it to be “official.” Patti laughed at me for that, but she also thought it was absolutely fantastic. So we made an appointment for me to go see Pat and Shirley.
Pat Boone was the number one entertainer in the world at one point. He had his own TV show while he was still a student at Columbia University, and he still managed to graduate at the top of his class while juggling that career. Who does that? I would come to learn that Pat is one of the greatest, smartest guys I’ve ever met in my life. He has a heart for the Lord and a heart for people unlike any I’ve ever seen.
The following Sunday they took me to a place called Church on the Way, on Sherman Way in the San Fernando Valley. It was so unlike any church I had ever entered. So big. So full of love. I felt as if the entire congregation embraced me the moment I walked in! And that morning, I made it official. I publicly acknowledged my commitment to Christ.
It was a wonderful, uplifting day. In fact, everything Patti and I did from that moment on was wonderful and uplifting.
A short while later, I decided I wanted to be baptized. Patti had already been baptized, but she offered to come along with me—so we could both be baptized together. Oh, what a moment that was. I couldn’t stop crying! The whole thing was just so moving. I realized that I had been living my life the wrong way, living selfishly, for almost as long as I’d been alive, and I was so glad for that to be over. I was so elated to be starting again. Patti was happy, too, but she wasn’t crying in that moment. She was laughing! She wore these loose, flowy pantaloons into the water, and they kept floating way up to the surface. They were billowing all around her! She just laughed and laughed, while I cried and cried.
Right before that moment when the minister dipped us into the water, he said, “Nothing before this moment has ever happened.” So you are washed clean. Washed clean. I know not everyone who reads this book will fully understand what that means, but I hope you’ll think about it for a minute: Everything you’ve done wrong in your life is forgiven. You’re given a fresh start. For me, it meant my drinking. My first divorce. My second divorce. My selfish ways. All of it. Wiped clean.
I didn’t stop crying for three days. To think that such a thing was possible, that I could be given a whole new beginning. I wasn’t a bad person. I think I lived my life pretty positively most of the time. I never purposefully hurt anybody in my life. But it was that selfish nature inside me that put me before anyone else, especially God. Until that moment when I gave my life to Jesus, I didn’t realize just how much guilt I had been carrying around inside of me. How much sadness. How much disappointment in myself. All of the mistakes I made—and you can call them “sins” if you want to—but all of those mistakes, all of them were forgiven.
At the age of fifty-two, I was starting over—with Patti at my side—determined to make the most of every bit of this gift I had been given.
21
MOVING ON
THE YEAR 1984 WAS ALL ABOUT CONNECTIONS: new connections and reconnections.
When I returned to the set of The Love Boat after being born again, people noticed a change in me. I had always been positive. I had always been the Captain of our show, but I was truly becoming a new person. Just like that. I didn’t want to hear people’s off-color jokes anymore. I was hearing with new ears. I also smiled a deeper smile, and people noticed.
Two of our new producers, Michael Warren and Bill Bickley, came up to me. They had heard what happened, and they told me they were born again too! It was wonderful to connect to two members of my Love Boat family in a whole new way. Some of the cast and crew were curious about what had happened to me, and some were even a bit uncomfortable with it. It was understandable. I might have felt a little funny being around someone who was “born again,” too, before I understood what it meant, what it felt like, what it did for my own life. I suppose some of them worried I would judge them, or try to sway them to my faith. That simply wasn’t the case. I would never force my beliefs on anyone, and I didn’t even talk about it all that much those early days. It would take time for me to fully understand what Paul said in the Bible: that when you’re born again, you become an “ambassador for Christ.” For me, that role would evolve and grow stronger with each passing day, as I lived my life to the fullest and gave thanks to Jesus for this new life I had. But it would take some time before I stood comfortably in those shoes.
Instead, I just kept living. I woke up every day not only grateful for what I had, but grateful to Jesus for blessing me with all I had. There’s a big difference in that!
One of the great blessings that came into my life during that time was the woman who would eventually become my manager, Susan Munao. We met at Church on the Way, and she was a sister in Christ from the start. She managed Donna Summer, Nell Carter, Tony Orlando, and The 5th Dimension, and was such a force of nature! For someone to become involved in your work life after being introduced through your spiritual life is a wonderful gift. She’s been with me for almost thirty years now. In fact, her sister, Anne Marie Merz, eventually became my secretary. She runs my office and takes care of all my fan mail, and she loves Jesus too! I love them both dearly.
It’s a funny thing: as we entered that second-to-last season of The Love Boat, the writers decided it was time to give Captain Stubing a serious love interest on the show. Here I was on a show about love, having come from the MTM Show with the theme song “Love Is All Around,” and now I had found Jesus who was all about love! I was surrounded with nothing but love, love, love!
The producers came to me with some ideas for casting this love interest, and they had some pretty popular actresses who were
ready and willing to do it. But I had the perfect actress in mind, and they were so thrilled when I mentioned her name: my old friend Marion Ross. “Mrs. Cunningham? From Happy Days? That’s fantastic!” they said.
Marion signed on, and she and I played opposite each other for the next two seasons, working together week after week and culminating in the final show, where Captain Stubing and the love of his life get married on the deck of the Pacific Princess.
Oh, and guess who I convinced my producers to cast in the part of the minister who married the two of us? Jan Peters! One of my dearest, lifelong friends (who, I’m sad to report, passed away while I was writing this book). He was my pal in college, and in New York, way back in the beginning, who helped me pick out the name “Gavin MacLeod.” I loved having the sway to be able to pull favors like that and to get to hang out with old pals again as we got a chance to act together. What a dream this whole experience had been!
Yet I wasn’t sad when the show was over. When The Love Boat shot its final episode in the early part of 1986, I felt very much as I did at the end of The Mary Tyler Moore Show: like a bird set free from a cage. Only this time, I knew for certain I would be happy wherever I landed, because now I had Jesus in my life.
No matter where life took me from that day forward, I would never walk alone.
Patti and I remarried on June 30, 1985. I wanted to get married in Pastor Jack Hayford’s office, with just us and the kids. Small. Simple. But a lady we met at Born Again Marriages, a wonderful older woman named Beulah Ward, whom we met through her daughter, Vida, kept talking to us about it. She would always say, “When are you two young’uns going to get married again?”
This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life Page 20
