At
her eightieth birthday celebration, in 2001, at KC’s Leawood-South Country
Club, the entire family gathered to celebrate my mother’s endless good spirits
and hospitality. Dancing and telling jokes and winking, she reigned over the
event like the dowager empress she’d become, wearing her signature red dress.
and looking for all the world like Betty White on a good day.
My mother was a force larger than
life.
Oddly enough, I met Betty White
because of Mom.
An aspiring novelist and former Mormon
bishop named James Michael Pratt sent me a copy of his self-published book, The Last Valentine. I read the
description on the back cover and thought it was maybe too romantic even for
“Mr. Romance,” as I’d been dubbed during my years in Montreal producing Shades of Love.
But the concept nagged at me, so I
sent the book to Mom and asked her to read it.
She called me two days later.
“You must get involved in this book,” she said. “It’s wonderful.”
I asked her for details. Her response
was sketchy—she was already becoming forgetful, especially of things she’d
read, which is why I’d learned to return her call the minute she reached out to
me after a read. But it was clear emotionally: Mom didn’t use must loosely.
This was beyond should!
Long story short, I did get involved.
My Writers Lifeline company helped Jim perfect the story and my management
company sold it, at auction, for a bunch of money to St. Martin’s Press. It
became a New York Times bestseller, and led to four or five further
bestselling books for Jim.
At one point in his book tour, we
converged in KC where Jim was being hosted by Barnes and Noble—and he insisted
on meeting Mom. “She’s the one who got this book published,” he said. I
certainly wasn’t going to argue with that.
You’d think a New York Times bestseller
would have an easy route to the screen. But I knew one lesson by heart: nothing
is easy in Hollywood. It took over ten years before Valentine was picked
up by Hallmark Hall of Fame. Their president, meeting me over breakfast at the
Alameda Plaza overlooking KC’s Country Club Plaza, brought up a ticklish
subject. “You know this company will never call a movie ‘The Last Valentine,’”
he told me—then tipped his orange juice in a toast.
I laughed, at what I thought was a
joke. But it wasn’t. The movie was retitled, “The Lost Valentine,” and starred
Jennifer Love Hewitt and Betty.
It was one thing to meet the
voluptuous Jennifer Love Hewitt—“Don’t avoid these,” she scolded our Director
of Photography, having checked the replay of a wedding moment where the camera
discreetly hovered above her cleavage
line, “I built my career on these beauties.” Unleashing the camera, they did a
more revealing take.
But
it was meeting Betty White on the set in Atlanta that truly thrilled me, for
two reasons. In her red dress, white hair, and feisty countenance, she looked
exactly like Mom. And I was given the chance to tell Betty the story of how my
mother had gotten this book published and this movie made.
Alas, Mom was no longer around to glory in the moment, or in the Screen Actor's Guild's "Outstanding Performance by an Actor" Award Betty received for our film.
Excerpt from My Obit: Vol 2: My Multi-Storied Mother,
forthcoming 2022.
