The only reason he married Diana, in fact, was because she was pregnant. He was already married to Carolyn, of course. He went down and got the annulment in Mexico from Carolyn. I’m not positive that’s what really happened. Neal told me that Carolyn refused to give him a divorce, so he went to Mexico to get an annulment, which he figured was the same thing. There are a lot of different stories about what happened in Mexico. But Diana was getting bigger every day—just like Carolyn was getting bigger a year earlier—and Neal was desperate to do the right thing. Neal told me when Diana got pregnant, just as he had with Carolyn. But this time, Neal wasn’t all that het up to get married again. I didn’t bother him that much about other women—that’s why he could talk to me.
I’m troubled by what Carolyn has written about me in her book.14 It seemed like in her book—I haven’t read it yet—but if the movie script is any indication, it seemed like I was supposed to be following Neal, chasing him all over. And it was exactly the other way around. The only reason I came out here to California, for instance, is because of these mad love letters Neal was writing to me: “Come! Come! Come! … You’re my eyes—I’m blind without you! I’ve lost my eyes!” They were the most insane, mad, romantic letters I’ve ever seen. And so I came. And then, even after he and Carolyn had gotten married, he showed up at my apartment one day—which Al Hinkle will tell you—and he was gonna commit suicide.15 I was either going back to Denver with him, he said, and we were gonna start over and forget all this bullshit, or he was going to end both our lives right there. He was talking like he was tired of it all—this whole domestic life he’d started with Carolyn in San Francisco—and this time he was sure we could make it together, and that was the end of it! He wasn’t going to let me turn him down. And he had this gun.
Neal was in pretty bad shape at that time. I don’t know what was really happening between him and Carolyn. When we got the annulment, I had accepted that our marriage was over. That was it. I mean, we were still close and everything, but I was now trying to make a new life for myself. But he kept coming over and coming over. But this one morning when he came over—about six in the morning—he was very quiet. Neal was never quiet, and this was the quietest I had ever seen him. He just walked in and pulled the gun out of his pocket and laid it on the table, and he told me, “You’re either packing and we’re going home together, or we’re neither one of us going anywhere.”
Al Hinkle will tell you how Neal went by himself to ask Al for his gun. We were both surprised by what he did. Like I said, I don’t know what was happening really with him and Carolyn at the time. I don’t think she’d had the baby yet16—or maybe she’d just had it—but here he had married her, and I’d accepted it, and now he was trying to undo all of that. I won’t go through the whole day; but, in any case, he left for a while, but he was supposed to come back and pick me up. When he came back, I was gone. But he made the trip back to Denver alone anyway. Then he apparently had a change of mind and came back again. Neal often changed course like that. I remember how it took Neal a long time to marry Carolyn after we got the annulment. I had been a little miffed at that time, thinking that they had rushed me around—you know, I had to get to Denver before my birthday—and then they screwed around and didn’t do anything about themselves afterward. Neal didn’t actually marry her till a month later, on April Fool’s Day.