I met Kris Nelson around 1970. She came with Rick on one of his trips to play the Cellar Door, in Washington, DC, where my husband, Buck Jones, and I had first met Rick in 1968. Rick, like many other musicians at the time, liked to try out new material here playing several sets a night every night for a week at the Door, a small intimate club that unfortunately no longer exists.

I liked Kris immediately when we met. She sat with us during performances on several occasions. I wondered later: what did I have in common with Kris Nelson? She had been on the cover of Life magazine when she was only four. Her parents were well-to-do and well known. I am the granddaughter of Pennsylvania coalminers and steelworkers. Perhaps it was because Kris was an artist, trying to find time to make art while raising children, just as I was trying to carve out time to write from the full-time job of motherhood.

I remember Kris as fun and full of laughter. We corresponded infrequently and exchanged Christmas cards for many years. We wrote each other about our lives -- the kids, the L.A. smog, my return to college, her new art gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, and when they might return to Washington, DC. We exchanged bits of our lives. Somehow I think we understood each other, despite the differences in our backgrounds and lifestyles.

One time Kris sent me a note on a personally designed notecard. Her art-work on the front included a Cancer crab (her astrological sign) lying on a wooden table. Carefully scrolled words around the painted portion of the notecard quoted Kahlil Gibran: "We live only to discover beauty...all else is a form of waiting."

I wrote back, "Married to the men we are, we wait a lot...and all else is beauty." Kris knew what I meant. Like me, she waited at home a lot in those days. Being married to a musician is not as glamourous as it sounds.

"The Last Time Around"*

Kris was, in general, not well-liked by many of Rick's fans. Like many other wives of rock stars, such as John Lennon and Elvis, she had to compete with the fans for attention and time. And she had to compete with the "boys in the band" as well. If the wife of a rock star complains, the general public sees her as "a bitch." Even worse is to be called a "controlling bitch." If she tries to live her own life, she is seen as abandoning the man in need. These viewpoints, angry name-calling, and even more deadly accusations have been applied to Kris Nelson.

Perhaps reflecting Rick's disappointment and anger toward his ex-wife after the break-up of their marriage, two recent biographers of Rick Nelson, Joel Selvin and Philip Basche, have verbally battered Kris. She has been described as "vindictive" and insincere, as well as a controlling wife. Selvin, an L.A. Times reporter, claims that it was Kris' "threats that sent him off on the fatal trip" (p. 288) in 1985 when he died in the airplane crash.

Evidently Kris had threatened him about that time with legal action for child support or alimony payments, as she had previously, but it is ludicrous to say that she was, therefore, responsible for his death. Rick was on the road most of the year because that was the life he had chosen. Travelin' Man. The life of the musician. He had spent 250 nights on the road in 1985 -- that had been his life for many years.

Rick died very much in debt (reports vary greatly -- somewhere between $1 million and $34 million). Many creditors were suing him. But an enraged David Nelson did not call them "murderers" at Rick's funeral, as he did Kris, according to biographer Philip Basche.

"When he died, people said I didn't show grief, but it was so profound. I'm not sure that I've totally accepted it [even now]. About a year and a half after he died, I went into the hospital. It was very emotional. But then it was easier [for people to say] that I was a drug addict and that I had lost my mind. I think the expression of grief came out in this way."

Psychologists point out that grief has many faces, many expressions. Anesthetizing the emotional pain inside us with pills and alcohol is one of the most common ways of dealing with grief. Just think about the phrase most often used to describe being drunk. "Feeling no pain."

"That Ain't the Way Love's Supposed To Be"

Both of Rick's recent biographers interviewed David Nelson and Greg McDonald, Rick's manager, about Kris, but they appear not to have interviewed her at any length about how she experienced the same events. Both biographers have underplayed the part Rick may have played in his own destiny, both in his marriage and his career. In my opinion, in any relationship, rarely is one person totally the passive victim and the other person, totally the mean-spirited prosecutor. From my viewpoint, sadly, both Rick and Kris contributed to the disintegration of their marriage.

However, most of Rick Nelson's fans, like his brother and his biographers, have laid the blame squarely at Kris' door. Whenever I have pressed people to be more specific, they usually say that she had one or more affairs. As one fan put it, "She treated him dirty, and he deserved better."

Rarely is a word said about his affairs, only hers. Yet, even his verbally applauding biographers admit that Rick Nelson had affairs. They describe an attractive musician with many offers who did not often sleep alone. Once, when I pressed further about why he didn't like Kris, another fan said, "Yes but he did it while he was on the road. She did it at home in L.A. That's worse."

Both Rick and Kris evidently had extra-marital affairs, but, then, so did many people in the 1960s and 1970s. Those were different times, pre-AIDS and pre-Herpes days when making love might not lead to incurable disease and/or death. Those were the days of war protests, love, peace, casual sex, recreational drugs, rebellious values, and sexual liberation. Posters admonished us to "Make Love, Not War" and always to "Question Authority."

Rick is said by one biographer to have preferred and really "liked those street women," meaning the women who were wilder, cheaper, less attractive, undomesticated. Sometimes they were addicts, as his fiance who died with him was said to be. I can understand the impulse. To the cleancut son of Ozzie and Harriet, whose early years were quite sheltered, these women must have seemed to be from another culture. They might have held an irresistible attraction. But what a life for a wife in love like Kris Nelson was.

Kris has a temper, even she agrees with her critics on that point. But her side of the story remains to be told. That she has not chosen to tell it yet does not indicate that she is to blame. In my eyes, they were clearly a couple very much in love who ran into difficult times.

I know. My personal experience is not that different. My marriage did not survive the l970s either. And the reasons were not that unique. He had affairs; I drank and took pills. But when I had an affair, he left. End of Marriage #1 for me and a painful lesson in the double standard.

Rick and Kris were divorced in December 1981 after much hostility. That decade of the 1970s was a time when a whole generation was learning that even true love can founder and fail. Elvis and Priscilla. Lucy and Desi. Ian and Sylvia.

Somewhere in the years of the 1970s and the 1980s, along with the end of the Viet Nam War, the end of marriages, and the illnesses and death of parents -- came the loss of innocence. Many of our generation experienced this. Kris is not alone. Many of us would remain cynics ever afterwards. A cynic is simply a romantic who has lost her innocence.

"It's Another Day"

In early December 1987, I had the opportunity to interview Kris Nelson in Los Angeles. After completing business elsewhere in southern California, I arrived in L.A. and called Kris from my hotel. After we established a time to get together the next morning, she said something that tore right through the center of me. She said, "Oh, Sandie, I hope you understand. I had to leave him; I couldn't stay. We both were going downhill, and I would not have survived. I left and took the kids. I wish I could have helped him, but I couldn't."

I was surprised that she felt she needed to explain it to me. I was saddened at her having to leave him, but I understood. Sometimes it is a brave step to leave the known pain for the great unknown world out there. The greater grief came in December 1985 with Rick's sudden death in a fiery plane crash in Texas. I was somehow surprised to hear the feelings of guilt I heard underlying her words.

Why, I wondered to myself at the time, do we all feel so guilty when someone dies? Why do we all examine our past and wonder why we didn't help them more? We could have visited our grandmother everyday in the hospital, but when she dies, something in us wonders why we did not go twice a day.

Then, I realized that I too had felt some guilt too about Rick's death. Oh, how egotistical it is to think one might have said something that mattered. Many times I had wondered to myself why I had not recognized the signs of cocaine use the last time I saw him. His nose was runny. He said he had a cold. It was backstage in the locker room of a country club in Crofton, Maryland. I berated myself for not mentioning my own recovery from addiction to alcohol and amphetamines. But I hadn't, and when I heard Kris express those feelings on the phone, once again I felt I understood despite our differences and the distance of our experiences.

In interviewing Kris in her home the next day, I began by asking her what were some of the good parts of the marriage. She answered, "Oh, there were lots of good parts. He was kind, considerate, very gentle, and very caring for many, many years. He listened. Something I wasn't used to. And I trusted him for a good long time. Before the drugs. For maybe about 15 years. I have good memories."

For a minute my mind flashed back over the years, and I recalled the Christmas cards I had received from Kris -- photographs of Tracy and the twins, Gunnar and Matthew, at various stages of growing up. Yes, I knew she had some good memories.

Later, when we drove by the house on Iredell Street in Studio City where they once lived (along with numerous horses, dogs, and other animals), I saw her smile softly when she said they had affectionately called this home "The Farm." I felt the warmth in her voice of the good memories.

"Something You Can't Buy"

Kris has been called a spendthrift (among others, by Bashe, p. 196). In the 1970s, it looked to me as if both Rick and Kris became extravagant, spending more and more money as their relationship deteriorated. Married people frequently do this when their marriage founders, just as they often have a child, hoping the birth of a new baby will bond them together. Rick and Kris did that too. I think they were desperately in love, and yet the marriage continued to grow troubled.

They tried. They bought an extravagant home on Mulholland Drive overlooking the San Fernando Valley in April 1980, a ranch-mansion once owned by Errol Flynn. But at some point while living in the 7-bedroom house, there came to be too much distance between them, too many infidelities, too much alcohol, and too many drugs, especially cocaine.

Rick was a modest and passive person. At the Tribute to Rick in L.A. in Spring 1992, Joanie Summers described him as a "gentle man." Two words were never truer. He was so gentle, he could be viewed as passive. Passivity was a pattern in his life. He let his father, then Kris, and finally, his manager make major decisions for him. "Rick was so used to being taken care of his whole life," Kris has said. "When his Dad got sick, I did it. I just couldn't do it anymore. After Ozzie died [in 1975], Rick was never the same. He missed him something terrible."

The Nelson Family (Ozzie, David, Harriet, Rick)

More than once, she found him in bed with someone. But perhaps the biggest competition that a wife of a musician has is the affair that he has with the audience. They compete with her for his attention. They feel that the performer is theirs. The musician pays attention to the audience, spends more time with the band, preparing to meet the next audience, than he does with his wife.

How she ever got the courage to leave, I do not know. She did not take up karate, like Priscilla Presley did, thereby gaining a measure of confidence in herself. As far as I know, she did not join a 12-step support group before she left. She just left and took the kids.

After she left the marriage in 1981, Kris said that "it was a struggle to get rent money. Rick didn't seem to care. When we were married, I had a car; he had a car; and then there was this trash station wagon that the people who worked for us that they used to take to the market and do all the hard work in.

"That's the car that I ended up with when we separated. One time I drove back up there to the house on Mulholland Drive just real worn out, and probably hung over, and looking terrible, and there were a couple limousines in the driveway. Rick was going to the airport. I got in a rage."

After separating from Rick, Kris had a difficult time emotionally as well as financially. "I had the kids, and I had to work," she says. "I didn't have any skills." And then she added jokingly, "I couldn't type." For a minute as we laughed together, I saw the Kris I had known years before.

"So, it's funny how a sense of total primitive survival takes over," she continued. "I knew on some level that I had to deal with people, or I would have closed up totally -- and just holed up. I had to find something that I could do and I knew it had to be with people, so I got into casting. I started assisting in casting. Being with over 100 people a day was something I needed. It helped.

"I got the job for $200 a week. I had no money. I thought, "Oh, he'll always take care of the kids." But that didn't happen. They had to be pulled out of school and put in public school. Men just believe its really our problem -- raising the kids, it's just our thing to do -- It's not up to them."

Nelson Children, 1974

"Alone"

In one of his earliest autobiographical songs, Rick sang, "I guess I'll go back home. I guess I'll always be alone."

Kris said that before his death, Rick had grown to be reclusive during his last years. After Rick died, Kris went back briefly to visit the last house they had lived in together, the house near the top of Mulholland Drive. She said, "It was awful. Blackout shades on the windows. Did you see the Elvis special on TV? They showed how Elvis in the end would go into Vegas and a team would staple these blackout curtains over the windows, so he couldn't tell night from day. And that's what Rick had done. And they had been stapled over and over gain like some sort of insane paranoia. I believe that cocaine had taken over."

Conclusion: "I Shall Be Released"

I think it is time we gave Kris Nelson a chance. Rick and Kris were once very much in love. That point is inarguable. In how many of us, does love at some point turn into its raging, seething opposite? In how many of us is there an understanding of the relationship that must have been very painful for both Rick and Kris? I'm certain I'm not the only one who can identify with the highs and lows of a powerful First Love.

While I was visiting Kris that day in December 1987, the phone rang and Kris answered it, chatting as if to a close woman friend. When she had made her plans, she hung up and turned to me, saying, "That was Harriet. We are getting together tomorrow."

Since then I've read that Harriet is the only one who has stuck by Kris during her bouts of depression, addiction, and through her well-publicized custody battle for Sam, the youngest of Rick and Kris' children. Even when the Harmon clan, her own family, turned against her, criticized her, and sued for custody of Sam, Harriet Nelson supported Kris.

Harriet sent flowers and notes when Kris was in the hospital for addiction treatment. She remained close to Kris after the marriage broke up. If Harriet Nelson, the mother who obviously adored her musician son, can find the understanding in her heart to be kind to Kris, why can't his friends, fans, and biographers?

Purchase Kris Nelson's autobiography OUT OF MY MIND online from amazon.com bookstore

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