Wedding Bells... Not! -- Archived Nonfiction

I married well known Czech photographer, Werner Forman, on a dark rainy day at a registry office in London, largely because my mother, who had a crush on him, insisted. Her feelings for Werner, her desire to keep him in the family, were what led to his proposal of marriage and everything that followed.

I married well known Czech photographer, Werner Forman, on a dark rainy day at a registry office in London, largely because my mother, who had a crush on him, insisted. In fact, those were the words he used: “Your mother (pronounced mozair) thinks we should marry.” We were in New York City at the time he asked. We had just been through an upheaval -- the Soviets had invaded Czechoslovakia, Werner had managed to get out and was now a British resident alien, traveling on a stateless passport. When, pushed by circumstances, I told my parents about our secret love affair, they insisted we both come straight to New York. In a sense, we put the cart before the horse because what ensued months before that dark wedding day in the registry office was, with my parents’ encouragement, a honeymoon-type trip through the south Pacific with Werner who was doing a book on the explorer, Captain James Cook.

In New York, when my parents first met the now stateless Werner, it was instant love and appreciation. Why not? They were all from the same region and culture. My father was born in Hamburg, Germany, but his family was originally Czech, and my mother, daughter of an opera singer, was also from Hamburg, which meant all three were German speakers, had grown up with the same art, books, music... in the same era of growing fear and repression leading into Nazi times. So they all immediately bonded. I was the odd man out, the “adolescent” who knew nothing. This made for a very weird situation. My mother, at sixty, was only twelve years older than Werner (I was a vast twenty-six years younger). The girlfriend Werner had before me, a woman named Trude to whom he was still very attached, was fourteen years older than he was. My mother, who’d already had at least one facelift, was drop dead gorgeous -- tall, dark-haired, slender, with the high-cheekbones and thin eyebrows of Greta Garbo (the resemblance was so striking that people used to chase my mother through the streets of Paris, demanding autographs).

It had been planned that Werner would stay in a hotel during his month in New York, but my mother, with her growing crush, insisted he stay at the house.

This meant he moved into my room on the third floor of our townhouse while I moved upstairs to share a room with my governess (yes, I still had a governess, Suzanne, now my mother’s chief confidante and companion). I’d start on the top floor and then sneak down to spend the rest of the night with Werner. In the meanwhile, my mother’s fondness for Werner grew by leaps and bounds. We could see this in the way she dressed, the way she did her hair and put on makeup, the soft flirtatious way she spoke to him. Neither my father or I said anything about it, but for sure her feelings for Werner, her desire to keep him in the family, were what led to his proposal of marriage and everything that followed.

I wore a very ordinary orangey-red sheath dress to my wedding. The event was last minute; we’d made no real plans for it, more or less jumped out of bed and said, “Okay this is the day,” a day that was hastened by the fact that Werner was returning to Prague for what would probably be his final visit the following morning. Celia and her boyfriend were our witnesses. To me, the whole thing was slapdash and a little comical. Our car had broken down, so we took a bus to the registry office. Inside the judge’s chamber, I realized we had no ring. When the judge placed a small black velvet cushion in front of me and whispered, “For the ring,” I slipped the jade band I always wore on my right hand from my finger and put it on the cushion, switching it to my left hand during the ceremony. There were no photos, no rice or confetti, no clapping or cheers. When we left the registry office, it was pouring rain -- a truly dark and gloomy day. We went to a Wimpy’s for lunch (the equivalent of McDonald’s). Then we went home to the apartment we still shared with Celia to pack.

I was going to accompany Werner to Prague. This was against his wishes, but I ranted and made such a big fuss that he finally gave in. The problem was, we couldn’t let it be known we were married due to possible difficulties with the Czech government. I had to travel on a business visa, with a bullshit story that I would be visiting with an editor from a Czech publication to discuss a story I was writing. And we had to act like we didn’t know each other.

This was the day after we married, remember. I was to stay in a hotel by myself and Werner would be staying with his former girlfriend, Trude. Originally he had told me he would be staying with his elderly father who was on his deathbed with some sort of cancer, but as soon as we arrived, he changed his mind -- his father’s flat smelled too much of illness and medicine.

I really had no idea what Werner was up to during our week in Prague. I only saw him once that whole time. Mostly I stayed alone in my hotel room, had dinner by myself in the hotel dining room where I got drunk every night on glass after glass of wine, or went out and drove around the city with Werner’s brother, Bedrich, who spoke no English.

The one time Werner visited me, it was to make love, and he wordlessly lay down on top of me on the bed and held his hand over my mouth so no one could hear my screams of pleasure. We practically didn’t talk at all, and when we did it was in whispers because the room was bugged.

Prague itself at that time was a dark and dreary place, nothing like the charming city filled with tourists it is now. It was depressing to be there and I couldn’t wait to leave. On Sunday morning, my second to last day, Werner showed up and told me to get dressed in something nice; we were going to visit his former girlfriend, Trude. Well, that scared the shit out of me. The sun had just come out. I’d bought a bottle of good scotch in the duty free shop at the airport, and I quickly slipped the bottle into my tote bag, thinking I could secretly fortify myself with it in the girlfriend’s bathroom.

I knew next to nothing about my new husband’s former girlfriend, Trude. She was from Vienna, he’d met her just after the war when she was working at a displaced person’s camp, she was Jewish, and she’d been trained as a nurse. She was sixty years old (Werner was forty-eight). I was terrified of meeting her.

Werner led the way into her apartment building. I probably had scotch on my breath. She lived on the fourth floor and before we even pressed the button for the elevator, she leaned her head over the upstairs railing and yelled, “Halloooo!”

All I could see were blond curls. “Hallo!” I yelled back. And then, impetuously: “I’m a little drunk.”

“So am I!” she sang out.

I entered the elevator, thinking maybe this wouldn’t be too bad.

And I was right. Trude was drinking scotch, too, and she immediately poured me a glass, saying, “You may have to catch up.” Werner wasn’t a drinker, so she and I were on our own, and we proceeded to get quite tipsy, toasting each other with each of the many glasses we downed. So booze was one thing we had in common, but also cigarettes… that afternoon Trude and I must have gone through well over a pack-and-a-half as we kept lighting up and talking, talking, talking about everything under the sun. Werner was the odd man out. I don’t remember what we talked about, only that we genuinely liked each other, and that, for some reason, Werner seemed unimportant. I think we would have been drawn to one another no matter what. Trude was short, energetic, youthful-looking, with bright blue eyes and an attractive, highly intelligent face. She worked as an editor for a local publisher, which meant she had a better, brighter, more accessible apartment than most people. She and Werner hadn’t been lovers in years, but they were family to one another, extremely close, and looking back on it now, I’m surprised she approved of me at all since I was so young and frankly foolish, just a girl who hadn’t even finished school and didn’t really know yet what she wanted to do with her life.

A girl who drank too much and clearly had a problem with booze -- a problem everyone would ignore for years until it brought me to my knees and nearly killed me.

But on that day with Trude, it was all laughter and light-hearted conversation. Werner and I would be leaving for a month in Morocco twenty-four hours later (he was working on a book called Cities of a Thousand and One Nights), a trip that I thought would be the beginning of our true honeymoon.

I was twenty-three years old, a slim girl with a narrow face, dark eyes, long black hair and a generally exotic look. In other words, I could easily pass for Moroccan. Up until now, I had traveled with Werner as a companion, with no real involvement in his work. But in Morocco I became useful as a model since he could not easily photograph native women up close… or, to be a little clearer, he could use his camera in secret, artful ways, no problem, but why do that if there were an easier method?

So one of the first things we did, arriving in Marrakech, was buy me a light-colored, cotton djellaba, which I slid over my clothes and wore proudly. This, unfortunately, caused problems. Werner needed a young Muslim woman for a certain photo, so he situated me several yards away at the end of a long, narrow street and told me to just stand there as if I were part of the landscape. Okaaaay. But eventually I got bored and had to pee and he was so far from me that I couldn’t see his face or what he was doing -- had he perhaps already finished the shoot? “Hey!” I called to him, raising my voice above all the street noise. “Are we done? I have to pee!”

Everyone around me turned to stare. Why was this Moroccan woman yelling at the top of her lungs in English? Werner immediately started gesticulating. I sensed from his body language he was angry, but I didn’t know how angry until he marched up to me and said I’d ruined the shot, which he’d set up perfectly, everything exactly as he’d wanted it, perhaps one of the best pictures he’d get on the whole trip.

This was the first time I’d seen Werner angry. Up until this very minute, he’d been kind, courteous, a well-mannered, older, European gentleman, always quick to see to my needs and make sure I was okay.

Not only was he angry, but he wouldn’t talk to me; for the rest of the day, I received the silent treatment, and it was awful -- Werner with a pained look on his face, as if there were a horrible smell in the room, refusing to say a word. He lay on the hotel bed with his back to me, and the more I did to try and make him talk or placate him, the worse it became. I’d never experienced anything like this. I didn’t know what to do. And of course, I was sure it was all my fault and felt guilty as hell.

The thing I didn’t understand at the time was that Werner’s silent treatment formed a pattern that I would have to endure for years. If I was seated next to another man at a dinner party, he wouldn’t talk to me for hours afterward even though I’d been punctilious about ignoring the man. If I went for drinks with girlfriends, stayed out too late, there’d be days of silence. The incident in Morocco was just the beginning.

I would be remiss to write about my “honeymoon” in Morocco without mentioning a dramatic, even possibly dangerous, incident that occurred during the trip. Werner, whose overall goal was to present the mystery and beauty of Islamic cities that had been rhapsodized in Scheherazade's A Thousand and One Nights, was determined to photograph a certain fountain he’d read about. We searched all over Marrakech for this fountain, but couldn’t find it. So Werner decided to hire a guide, something he almost never did. The guide was a heavyset young man whose name I don’t remember. He, too, couldn’t find the fountain, but suggested we visit a small town in the Atlas Mountains that had interesting architecture -- he could take us there that same afternoon.

We started our journey after lunch. The town was about an hour outside Marrakech, and for most of the journey the road was good. But then we turned off onto an overgrown dirt side road too muddy to negotiate without getting totally stuck. That didn’t make too much difference, however, because the road ended abruptly. All that was left was a trail, and beyond the trail, a distant view of a steep mountain slope with what looked like a beautiful town etched into the side of it.

That, of course, was the town we wanted to get to, but between us and it was difficult terrain: a raging creek filled with slippery rocks and boulders, a steep, perilous climb over more rocks, a dangerous-looking, deadly approach up a naked mountainside. No way we could get there without killing ourselves.

Before we could say anything, however, a group of young boys appeared with horses for us to ride. How they had known we were there, was a question I asked myself later.

We mounted the horses, Werner clutching his camera bag, and started our journey across the raging stream. Even for me, who’d ridden most of my life, it was a scary ride; but for Werner, who’d hardly ever been on a horse, it was petrifying. He hung on for dear life as the horses moved through the water. One wrong step and we were both goners.

The horses actually had to negotiate a series of slick, slab-like, stone steps to get through the gates of the small, walled city. At the top of the steps stood a man in Beduoin-style clothing who beckoned to us.

Thami el Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakesh (Musee du Luxembourg Collection)

Werner and I had stepped into another world, a timeless world that could have been many centuries old. The man who greeted us at the entrance to the walled city was to be our host; he gestured for us to dismount and for the boys tending the horses to lead them away. We never learned his name. He told us he was the “Glaoui” of the city and surrounding area, a term we took to mean “Lord” or “Mayor.” (This was a historical term that was somewhat lightly thrown around, and we later learned that many people called themselves Glaoui.) He was middle-aged with a friendly, but also slightly crafty look on his face; instinctively I didn’t trust him.

Still, our guide had disappeared and we were in this man’s hands, so we followed him into a steep, narrow, three-story house. On the second floor, we were ushered into a gorgeous living room, one that might have been a movie set for typical Islamic style and luxury, with keyhole-shaped windows that looked over the green valley below, scattered floor pillows, thick Berber rugs. Werner explained that he was a photographer eager to take pictures of the house, the town, the Glaoui himself. Glasses of iced tea were brought to us, and I immediately noticed that Werner’s tea was different from mine — filled with sugar and a little jungle of mint, whereas mine was plain, honey-colored. As we drank our tea, the Glaoui, whose English was quite good, told us we were esteemed guests and he hoped we would spend the night.

“That won’t be possible,” Werner said.

“I insist,” said the Glaoui.

Already the light was failing, it was growing dusky. A number of burly men in djellabas had entered the room and were standing around, staring at us. I was beginning to feel uneasy.

Once again, the Glaoui insisted that we spend the night. A sumptuous meal would be prepared and we would sleep in luxury. And, once again, Werner said no — he had to return to Marrakech for a different camera but would come back to the village the following day. He was very excited; the shots he would set up would be perfect for his book, Cities of a Thousand and One Nights.

The Glaoui made it plain that he was disappointed. But somehow Werner was able to explain to him that we really would be returning the following day. And that we had to leave NOW because it was already practically dusk.

But that was the weird thing: Werner, who was extremely nervous about the horseback ride back to the car in the dark was now dawdling, staring out the windows and around the room, and saying in a slow, rubbery, halting voice that this place was more beautiful than any place he’d ever been.

That didn’t make sense to me. I knew something was wrong.

I didn’t want to stay overnight in the mountain village our guide had brought us to. The journey there, across a roiling stream filled with slippery rocks, had been difficult -- not one to be undertaken in the dark. I knew Werner was nervous about the ride back, not only because of having to cross the stream, but also because the dirt road that led off the highway was so extremely muddy that it would be easy to get stuck. The light was leaving the sky. We would have to leave immediately if we wanted to be safe. And yet, at the last minute, Werner lingered, staring around the room and rhapsodizing about the beauty of the place. If he had had the camera he needed, we would have spent the night as guests of the glaoui, something I knew was a very bad idea.

Assuring the glaoui that we would return the following day, we prepared to leave -- the guide was summoned and the horses were brought to the downstairs door. On the way to the village, Werner had clung to his horse, terrified of being tossed off at any minute, but now he swung himself into the saddle like an experienced rider and sat as easily as if he were in an armchair. Which was crazy since we had to negotiate a steep stairway of rocks just to get out of the village, and then there was the perilous stream filled with more jagged rocks, many of them invisible in the growing darkness.

Sitting loosely in his saddle, Werner turned to me with a shit-eating grin on his face. “I can feel the moonlight on my skin,” he said.

Really? That sounded pretty weird to me, especially as the horses began to pick their way across the stream. But I didn’t say anything. Once we had traversed the stream and crossed the fields that led to it on the other side, we dismounted and handed our horses over to the group of boys who suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Our car sat proudly just there on the muddy dirt road where we’d left it. We climbed in, Werner and I in front, the guide in the back.

It was about a fifteen minute drive through the dirt to the asphalt highway leading to Marrakech. As he switched on the ignition and the car lurched forward, Werner, who’d been so nervous about getting stuck, said: “I think this is going to be the most beautiful drive I’ve ever driven.”

Well, that was out of character, but I didn’t think much of it till Werner stopped the car and grabbed a camera from his bag on the back seat. While he busied himself setting up a shot of the mountainside village where we’d just been, the guide leaned forward and murmured, “Why do you want to be with such an old guy?” Then he kissed me on the back of my neck.

I yanked myself away from the guide. He gave me the creeps and I didn’t want to answer his question. Werner got back in the car and we rode the rest of the way in silence. When we were back in Marrakech, Werner, who was thrilled with the guide’s performance, invited the man to join us for dinner -- not something I wanted, but there was no way, at that point, to make my wishes known.

We went to a small French restaurant in the modern part of the city. Werner ordered wine for the three of us, and he seemed absolutely fine until he had his first sip. Then his face turned a putrid green, the color of decay and death, and he slid from his chair to the floor.

I stared at him out of disbelieving eyes. Werner lay slumped on the floor, and to me it looked as if he’d just had a stroke... as if he was going to die.

A man leaped up from one of the tables, yelling in French that he was a doctor. While I stood there uselessly, he examined Werner and announced that he was calling an ambulance. “Is he going to be okay? What’s wrong with him?” I kept asking, but the doctor ignored me. Meanwhile, the guide, who I really could have used right then, vanished -- slithered away just as we heard sirens. A small, boxy-looking ambulance pulled up in front, and Werner, who by then had regained consciousness, was lifted onto a gurney. This all happened very quickly. Before I could understand what was going on, the ambulance disappeared and I was left on my own, trying to figure out the way to the hospital.

We had a rental car, a shift, but I didn’t yet have a license or really know how to drive. No matter. I got in the car, switched on the ignition, and began cranking gears. Where had the ambulance gone?

No idea.

Where was the hospital?

No idea.

I drove in jerky stops and starts, windows open, yelling at passersby for directions. People would point and I’d shoot the car up and down different streets, praying I wouldn’t kill myself or anyone else. I don’t think I’d ever in my life felt so helpless.

Study of Yves Saint Laurent by Reginald Gray

Somehow I got myself to the hospital, parked haphazardly, and ran into the building, where I expected a receptionist to tell me where to find Werner. But there was no receptionist; the place was empty, no doctors, nurses, patients, just a few brightly lit corridors and a lot of closed doors. I opened one of the closed doors because I heard voices behind it, and struck paydirt: Werner lay on a narrow bed, blinking his eyes and looking really out of it. A doctor was attending him, a short, skinny, dark-haired man in a white coat. Another man, taller and wearing a very colorful tie, was acting as translator.

It turned out the “translator” was the iconic fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who, we learned later, frequently traveled to Morocco in search of interesting fabrics for his clothing line. He’d been at the restaurant where Werner had passed out and decided to come along in case we needed help. Since I was a fluent French-speaker we were okay in that regard, but Yves hung around for a while, perhaps curious about what had caused Werner’s plunge from the table to the floor.

The doctor examined Werner thoroughly and couldn’t find anything wrong. Over the next few days, we had to return to the hospital so Werner could undergo a series of tests, but still nothing revealed itself. The doctor didn’t seem surprised. He asked us a lot of questions, zeroing in on the guide, the mountain village we’d visited, and the glass of tea Werner had gulped down while we were at the glaoui’s house. “You were very lucky,” he said. “Your story could have ended differently.”

And he went on to tell us about unscrupulous guides and about people -- tourists -- who had disappeared in the mountains, been beaten up, raped, had money and passports stolen from them. The expectation, he said, was that Werner would pass out, go dead to the world after drinking an iced tea heavily laced with some sort of opiate.

Once he was unconscious, the men of the house would have had their way with me, any money or valuables on us would have been taken, and we would ultimately have been dumped god knows where in the mountains.

He added that these sorts of misadventures happened all the time. And that what had saved us was both Werner’s weird, belated reaction to the drugs, and his insistence that we would return to the village the following day so he could take more photographs.

We never did return to the village. Instead we flew to Zurich a few days later, where my parents and other family members had gathered in a kind of reunion, and where, for the first time since the morning in a London registry office months before, we truly celebrated our marriage… not with wedding bells exactly, but with a good meal, champagne, and with my gossipy relatives holding back judgment and snide remarks on how my husband and father looked the same age.

This story was originally published in nine parts on May 18, 2021, on nicolejeffords.com.

Cover photo: S. Ruvalcaba

Wedding Bells… Not!

It had been planned that Werner would stay in a hotel during his month in New York, but my mother, with her growing crush, insisted he stay at the house.

The one time Werner visited me, it was to make love, and he wordlessly lay down on top of me on the bed and held his hand over my mouth so no one could hear my screams of pleasure. We practically didn’t talk at all, and when we did it was in whispers because the room was bugged.

A girl who drank too much and clearly had a problem with booze -- a problem everyone would ignore for years until it brought me to my knees and nearly killed me.

This was the first time I’d seen Werner angry. Up until this very minute, he’d been kind, courteous, a well-mannered, older, European gentleman, always quick to see to my needs and make sure I was okay.

Before we could say anything, however, a group of young boys appeared with horses for us to ride. How they had known we were there, was a question I asked myself later.

Already the light was failing, it was growing dusky. A number of burly men in djellabas had entered the room and were standing around, staring at us. I was beginning to feel uneasy.

It was about a fifteen minute drive through the dirt to the asphalt highway leading to Marrakech. As he switched on the ignition and the car lurched forward, Werner, who’d been so nervous about getting stuck, said: “I think this is going to be the most beautiful drive I’ve ever driven.”

I stared at him out of disbelieving eyes. Werner lay slumped on the floor, and to me it looked as if he’d just had a stroke... as if he was going to die.

Once he was unconscious, the men of the house would have had their way with me, any money or valuables on us would have been taken, and we would ultimately have been dumped god knows where in the mountains.

Munchausen Marriage

Love at First Sight