A Frog Who Married A Queen

A Frog Who Married a Queen

It wasn’t easy finding Larry. The reporter had to comb through county records and then drive down a dusty road through rusty gates to a ramshackle house. Who would have figured that Larry would fall so far so fast?

Some twenty years earlier, he had been the toast of Hollywood celebrities at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. He might have been a blue-collar builder whose total assets amounted to a few tools and a pickup truck, but on that magical day he was ruggedly handsome—Joe Six-Pack in a J. C. Penney suit, living a fairy tale; the frog who marries a silver-screen queen.

There would be no fairy-tale ending for Larry. Twenty years later he was bloated, bleary eyed, and out of money. Alcohol had reduced him to a shadow of the man who once traveled the world in private jets and on luxury yachts with Hollywood royalty. His memory was fading and his words were slurred.

He showed off a few trinkets from his marriage to the Hollywood queen. He was especially proud of the wedding photo. She looked stunning in her $25,000 dress, and he was handsome in his off-the-rack suit. He looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. In reality, he was the canary who was about to be eaten by the cat and spat out five years later.

This was not a marriage made in heaven. The carpenter totaled his truck while driving drunk. A judge committed him to the Betty Ford Clinic. There he met the movie queen who was there to get clean. After a quick romance, the two got hitched. This was his third marriage and her eighth. She often boasted, “I’ve only slept with men I’m married to.” But she quickly tired of each husband. She once said, “The excitement is in the getting, not the keeping.”

The Neverland Ranch marriage was the first time that Elizabeth Taylor married a frog like Larry Fortensky. She said to her wedding guests, “I’ve finally found a man who can keep me happy.” Larry grinned like a Cheshire cat, kidding himself that he could accomplish what a hotel mogul, movie stars, and a US senator had failed to do. It wouldn’t be long before she would give him the boot too.

When the reporter finished the interview, Larry sat hunched over in a daze. Maybe he was lost in a dream of what could have been. Or he was thinking about his only daughter who hadn’t spoken to him for years because of a fight over money from his divorce settlement. Or perhaps he was looking at his reflection in the mirror behind that wedding photo, seeing how much he had deteriorated since that day at the Neverland Ranch. As the reporter got up to leave, Larry whispered, “Divorce makes you a lot less than you used to be.” Divorce seldom makes anyone bigger. If you are ready to bail out of a tough marriage, you might want to remember Larry’s story. It screams a warning to couples everywhere:

Divorce is like an amputation. You may survive, but there’s less of you.

[Jesus] said, “‘This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.’ Since they are no longer two but one, let no one split apart what God has joined together.”

Matthew 19:5-6