After
30+ years all the pain, hurt, accusations, threats, law suits and
negatives have mostly disappeared and one remembers the good things.

I remember the 'coat of arms' that Bernie had made for me one year and the drawing from a  photograph another.

He was there when my father came to see me after years of our ignoring each other and he was there to praise me to Jean Nidetch when she came to visit and he made me the center of attention of the business and his life.

And
yet--and yet I can look at hundreds of pictures of us and we are very
seldom touching. Part of that had to do with his still being in the
closet to a certain degree not wanting Memphis to know he was gay and
yet Memphis know we were 'lovers'. And yet I learned through therapy
that our relationship on a personal level was, and had been, destructive
to, and for, both of us. One of the major decisions I had made was to
end the personal relationship. Joe, my therapist, warned me to expect
anger, possibly violence. We went over every scenario and the possible
results of what I was doing including how it would effect our business
relationship.

In
the 1980s I wrote a 274 page book called, "The Looks Of Love" that told
the complete story of Bernie and me from beginning to end. It starts
with Bernie saying:

    "I will destroy you if it is the last thing I do!"

I
have very few regrets in life and one took place a few minutes before
he said that to me. I was leaving on a trip to Dallas, Honolulu, Papeete, Bali, New Zealand,
Australia and would be gone for a month. He had come over from the
office to say goodbye and I turned to him and said, "Bernie, it is over.
I want you out of my personal life and for you to have your things out
of my place by the time I get back. Except on a  business level I want
nothing to do with you."

In spite
of all that happened when I got back from the trip, and what followed, I
have never regretted breaking up the personal relationship but I have always regretted the way I had done it. It was cruel and I didn't realize how cruel until I saw the depth of the love Bernie had had for me and I had stomped on it. No one deserves that and I could have handled it differently, better.