JILL

With many of the actresses I’ve written about, you can get a sense of who they really are just by attentively watching them on-screen. That won’t work with Jill St. John, my last—I promise—wife.

I had worked with Jill three times before she came into my life at its lowest point. The first picture we worked on was called Banning, and then we were paired on a TV movie called How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Years later, she appeared in the pilot of Hart to Hart. In all these cases, our relationship was purely professional. If someone had taken me aside and told me that one day I would fall in love with her, I would have had them committed. I thought she was pleasant and a good actress, but there was no spark between us.

I didn’t really get much of an insight into who she really was until years later, soon after Natalie’s death. Jill had sent flowers to the house, and I called to thank her. Six or eight months later, I asked her out. She called our mutual friend Tom Mankiewicz, who was a creative consultant on Hart to Hart, and asked him what he thought she should do.

“Well, if you don’t go out with him, someone else will,” he said. You can’t argue with crushing logic like that, so she accepted my invitation. And that was when I figured out that she was actually the reverse of the characters she played. Her mother had nudged her into show business and she went along grudgingly; she didn’t run after movies, they ran after her.

I remember her apartment in Beverly Hills was decorated in Italian Modern, which surprised me. And then she told me, “Come to Aspen, and you’ll see a whole different side of me.” So I did, and I saw how Aspen was the place where Jill relaxed and allowed her authentic self to emerge. In Aspen, she blossomed in front of me. She’s a Cordon Bleu chef, she’s a superb gardener, she excels at skiing and handling dogs and everything in general. Whatever she undertakes, she masters.

Jill St. John

And beyond all that, she reads everything and is ridiculously smart, one of those people who sees the endgame while other people are still mulling over their opening move.

People who know Jill only through movies like Come Blow Your Horn or Diamonds Are Forever don’t have a clue. Hollywood typecast her as a sexy bombshell, and Jill got bored with that very quickly, because the gap between what she played and who she is was so vast. She is as attached to the earth as anybody I’ve ever met. Whether it’s flowers or love, she has the ability to create an environment where things grow. She can bring the world around her to its fullest possibilities.

If somebody sent her a good script today, she’d probably do it, but she doesn’t really care about acting—it doesn’t fill her heart the way living in Aspen does; it doesn’t satisfy her the way cooking or gardening does.

And here’s my deepest truth: We’ve been together for more than thirty years, and I still have a sense of discovery with her every single day that accompanies an underlying feeling of security and contentment—the best of both worlds.

I owe her everything.