Lindsay Wagner And Husband Separate After 5-Month Marriage!

The lines of anxiety and fatigue were evident on the usually carefree and sun-filled face. Lindsay Wagner was just not herself. Everyone connected with The Bionic Woman could tell that something serious was bothering her. Then Lindsay broke down, revealing to a close friend that her husband, Michael, had to leave town for ten weeks on a film assignment in Houston, and she was feeling lonely and abandoned.

In the days that followed, things seemed to get worse; so finally, Lindsay was given a few days off from her filming schedule, but not before a guest star on the show had been fired in the resulting uproar. Yet, Lindsay couldn’t help the way she was feeling. In the two years of their pre-marital relationship, Lindsay and Michael had been virtually inseparable. Now, it seemed, after agreeing to the ultimate love commitment by marrying, Lindsay was going to see less of Michael than ever before!

Lindsay said she never would have married unless she and Michael could be together all the time. Indeed, when they first met, she and Michael secreted themselves at his ranch and got to know each other totally. They are happiest, they assert, when they are alone, Lindsay cooking and Michael chopping wood—or perhaps riding their horses. Yet, their work commitments interfered with their blissful state; and so, to be together even while working Michael sublimated his own profession goals—in acting and writing—to concentrate on Lindsay.

“I used to help Lindsay with all her scripts when she came home,” Michael explained of his new-found interest in screen writing. “We decided to do something we can do together. For a long time we’ve wanted to work together in a film. So I wrote a love story for the two of us.”

For a while, they system worked. Michael wrote a two-part segment for The Bionic Woman, and was scheduled to act in it as Lindsay’s love interest. Michael even wrote a play called Star Man, Lindsay told us, “about a woman who’s fallen in love with a man from another planet. Michael will play the interplanetary man. Then we’ll really be inseparable,” she laughed.

“Still, all that togetherness did have its side effects. Lindsay and Michael had begun to turn into recluses, hiding out in their sparsely decorated Laurel Canyon home, rarely seeing visitors. Lindsay reportedly began changing their telephone number every few weeks, and people began to speculate about just how long Michael would stand for her overprotective attitude towards him.

In a very real sense, this separation will be a good test for Lindsay and Michael. Unlike other couples, who learn late in their relationships about whether or not they can succeed as independent individuals, Lindsay and Michael are having that opportunity now, before it’s too late.

Lately things have begun to sour. The Hollywood gossip mill has started churning out its destructive innuendos. Someone even had the nerve to compare Lindsay’s and Mike’s relationship to that of Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters. Michael understandably bristled at the unflattering comparison. “You can’t compare us,” Mike answered with obvious annoyance. “Peters didn’t have any career in this business before he met Barbra Streisand. I did, as an actor. Writing’s new, but I did some screen writing before I met Lindsay.”

Michael was getting tired of people asking him what it was like to be “Mr. Lindsay Wagner,” riding on the coattails of his wife’s fame and fortune. That kind of outside pressure is very destructive in a relationship, and Michael realized he needed to succeed on his own, so that the rumors would stop. To the gossip-mongers, Mike said, “Lindsay’s success is something I’m proud of. It stimulates me.” And he has set off to Houston to prove that to the world and to himself and his wife.

Michael was involved romantically with several other big-name actresses before Lindsay— among them Carrie Snodgress and Kim Novak. That’s why he is aware of the traps a man can fall into, married to a star. In his perceptive way, Mike explained that his relationship with Lindsay is different. “She’s made me grow,” he insists.

“The trouble with the other relationships was that they were either on my trip, or with Kim, I was on hers.” Mike realizes he has got to keep his individuality. That’s why he and Lindsay spent hours before their wedding talking with pastor William Hornaday, the man who performed their quiet nuptials at the Founder’s Church of Religious Science in Los Angeles on December 19th. Michael made it clear to the pastor that he was concerned about the prospect of being called “Mr. Wagner.”

“He told me,” said Dr. Hornaday, “that his relationship with Lindsay has stimulated him to do more than he’s done in years. He’s burning the midnight oil writing, and has just written one play which I believe he has sold. I believe that for this marriage to be successful,” the pastor went on, “Michael has to match The Bionic Woman.”

Much as they try to deny it, Lindsay and Michael are subject to the pressures of Hollywood and the community of which they are a part. That is why Michael responded to one reporter who was probing a little too deeply, saying, “Look, we love each other, and I’m busy enough to support us both, if that’s what convention insists upon. But we live our own lives!”

It will be an adjustment learning to live apart and produce professionally without the comfort of each other, but we’re sure Lindsay and Michael can do it. After all, they’ve done it before, and just knowing that there’s someone at home, waiting with loving, open arms, is enough to make the time apart pass quickly.

THE END

—BY HILLARY KAIN

See ABC’s The Bionic Woman.

 

It is a quote. SCREEN STARS MAGAZINE JULY 1977