Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, December 8th. Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We will hear today how living the party life ultimately meant that Bill and Vicki Rose were leading separate lives. Stay tuned.
And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us.
Dennis: Have you ever seen a ring that weighs 12 pounds, Bob?
Bob: Let me, I haven't held – Oh, my goodness! I can barely – you could do curls with this thing and develop biceps.
Dennis: I've seen some Super Bowl rings, and I have also seen a major league baseball World Series Championship ring. I have never seen one this big.
Bob: It says "World Champions 2000."
Dennis: Yeah, and some of the baseball fans right now will know who won in 2000.
Bob: Uh-huh, well, there's a big – the letters are right there in the diamonds – "NY," right?
Dennis: Yeah. Who would that happen to be, Bill?
Bill: Well, it doesn't stand for the Mets, I'll tell you that much.
[laughter]
Although that's who the Yankees beat that year. And, unfortunately, I hate to say this, but that was the last time we won.
Bob: Yeah, that's right.
Dennis: Oh, really?
Bill: Oh, yeah.
Dennis: Well, I just have to say this is the nicest ring I've ever been given by a guest …
Bob: Given?
[laughter]
Dennis: In all these years we've been doing FamilyLife Today. Bill, I just want to thank you for doing that. Bill Rose is one of the owners of the Yankees.
Bob: And let me just say it's the nicest ring you'll ever give back to a guest as well.
Dennis: It is, you know, and here it goes right back here.
Bill: Thank you.
Dennis: Bill represents a number of baseball players through his sports management firm, DRM. He and his wife are the proud parents of two children and, Vicki, I'm glad you're joining us as well. You're a teacher, a writer, a speaker, and you have a great story to tell.
Bob: Yeah, we're going to hear a love story that is – well, it's a powerful love story because of all that it's taken to get to where it is today.
Dennis: Now, of course, we know that Bill loves the Yankees. Now, Vicki, have you always been around baseball – enjoyed it?
Vicki: I had never been to a baseball game when I met Billy – so, no, I had no baseball knowledge whatsoever. Not sports, really – we ice-skated in my family.
Bob: Now, wait, you grew up in New York, right?
Vicki: No baseball. Yes, I grew up in New York City.
Bob: New York City, the home of the Yankees.
Vicki: Not in my family – two girls and my …
Bill: And they had bad family values, what can I tell you?
Dennis: And so when you met Billy, one of the first places he took you was to a baseball game. In fact, he kept taking you to baseball games?
Vicki: Yes, we met, actually, in November, and baseball season started the following April, and I was – the first game I ever went to was at opening day of the newly refurbished Yankee Stadium back in 1976. We went to 70 games that season.
Bill: She went to 70 out of 81 home games with me.
Dennis: Seven-oh?
Bill: Seven-oh.
Vicki: Seven-zero, yes.
Bill: I think I went to the other 11 by myself.
Vicki: Exactly.
Bob: You went from nothing to full-time fan.
Vicki: Yes.
Bob: Did you love the game as soon as you saw it?
Vicki: Billy was great at teaching me the game. I don't know if I loved it immediately, but I knew that that's where I was going to spend a lot of time, so I started to learn the game, and I loved the people, there's a fun socializing aspect to it.
Bob: Did you love the guy who was taking you to the games?
Vicki: I loved the guy who was taking me to the games, and I knew that his first love was baseball, so …
Dennis: Billy, how did you become such a romantic artist to take her to a baseball game?
Bill: You know, I just couldn't think of a better place to go.
Dennis: You've got New York City, for goodness sakes!
Bill: No, but I'd like to say in my defense, I took her to really good restaurants after the game …
Dennis: Oh, okay.
Bill: … you know, where they weren't playing when they won. I took her on road trips, too.
Dennis: Oh, really?
Vicki: It was just the home games.
Bill: Oh, yeah. So we would go to LA to see when they were playing the Dodgers in the World Series in '77 and '78, and she got to do her thing on Rodeo Drive. It wasn't so bad.
[laughter]
Dennis: So here is the question.
Bill: Yeah.
Dennis: I happen to know, through a reliable source, that you're such a romanticist you took her on a very special honeymoon. Where did you take her on your honeymoon?
Bill: We went to – first, we went to Palm Springs, to California, and that was nice, and then we spent the last, I don't know, four or five days with George on his farm in Ocala, Florida.
Dennis: George?
Bill: Steinbrenner. He had to be part of our honeymoon. He was just, like, part of our lives.
Dennis: And the rest of the story is?
Vicki: Where we went for our honeymoon is where he and his family used to go for vacation and where his prior girlfriend and he had all played tennis and all sorts of things, so it was not the best of places to go.
Bill: I thought you loved it, honey.
[laughter]
Vicki: That's when communication was not great.
Dennis: Was that the beginning of finding out you two were different?
Vicki: I don't know if that was the beginning. I just – I think before – I know before we got married, I knew we were very different, but I just – I loved him. I knew we were different. I think I saw – I just thought somehow we'd get married, and everything would work out.
Bob: When did it dawn on you that everything wasn't going to just work out because you were now married?
Vicki: I think a year into it, I think a year, somewhere around a year into it – the things that I brought with me, obviously, were still with me and hadn't gone away, and I just – my mom had died the week before I graduated from high school, and my father had remarried, so I didn't really feel like I had a home anymore, a place to belong. I thought, by getting married, that would all go away, and the emptiness, the hurt, would just vanish. Well, it doesn't. And the more I buried it, and the more I tried to find my happiness in my job or in our marriage, the glitzy life we were living, going to baseball games and Studio 54 and hanging out with known celebrities, the emptier I became, and I started to lose my temper a lot and be angry. I didn't understand what was going on, I just knew I was really unhappy.
Bob: You know, Augustine, in his confessions, starts off by saying "The heart is restless until it finds its rest in Christ."
Vicki: Exactly.
Bob: You had a restless heart before you were married. You thought maybe marriage would fix it. Then you thought maybe your job would fix it. Then you thought maybe the kids would fix it. It was just one piled-up disappointment on top of another, wasn't it?
Vicki: Yes.
Dennis: Billy, how long did it take you before you realized that there were some serious differences in this marriage? She said a year.
Bill: You know, I'm not sure I was that bright that I could figure that out in a year. I don't think I realized that she was unhappy when she was.
Dennis: Were you just covered up in work?
Bill: Not so much at that time, because when I got out of college, I worked for my dad for 11 years, and I wasn't really that immersed in work back then. But that didn't start until, really, 1984.
Bob: But Vicki talks about the fact that she was getting angry, and she was starting to shout and yell. You obviously noticed that.
Bill: I did. And …
Bob: I bet she was yelling at you a few of those times.
Bill: I bet she was, and so, you know, I think I would try to placate her, buy her something, you know, try to make things right. My parents, to me, had a great marriage. They were married for 45 years before my mom died, and I also saw in my parents' marriage, you know, my mom basically did everything to make Dad not get upset, not happy. Well, why is that not happening here, you know?
I guess I was just hoping everything would work out, you know, and that I sort of took that approach, and, you know, she would calm down, and I'd buy her something, and things would be okay for a couple of months, and something else would, you know, obviously, get swept under the rug, and then it would come out again and in a larger scale.
Dennis: And the rug keeps getting higher and higher and higher.
Bill: Absolutely. It is the worst thing you can possibly do.
Dennis: You know, what you're describing, though, is where all of us, I think, start out our marriages. Maybe, unless they've been to a Weekend to Remember Marriage Conference, and they've gotten their blueprints in advance as an engaged couple, but I think most of us get married – we don't know what a husband is or what a husband does …
Bob: Right.
Dennis: Or, for that matter, a wife.
Vicki: Right.
Dennis: And you come together in the midst of this, and you're trying to hammer out what a real relationship is, and, in the process, children come along, and now you add an additional piece of the job description that you don't know what you're doing.
Bob: Well, and you've got all kinds of expectations about what this relationship is going to do for you.
Vicki: And neither of us were – knew the Lord, and so it was all about me. Like, what are you going to do today to make me happy, and nowhere on the horizon is, like, what can I do today to make you happy or to serve you?
Bob: Yeah, and so fundamentally you bring all of that together, it's a combustible mixture.
Dennis: And you add the children to it, as I said, and so you become a daddy, and how do you do daddy, you know?
Bill: Not well at all. I was really not all that involved when they were that young. You know, I had opened a restaurant in '84 in New York, and then I was immersed in work because that was a place that just took a tremendous amount of time.
Bob: Let me back you up.
Bill: Yeah.
Bob: You talked about partying and nightlife and Studio 54 and the celebrities. Do you remember the first time that somebody laid out a line of white powder and said, "Here, you've got to try this?"
Bill: I don't. I'm not sure whether I tried it in college or not, but I know that I had been dabbling in it before I met Vicki.
Bob: So you'd been playing around with drugs off and on?
Bill: Right.
Bob: Had you ever experimented with drugs prior to …
Vicki: I did, in high school, yes.
Bob: So when the two of you got together, that was just a part of your common lifestyle and experience?
Vicki: Yes, pretty much. It was the '70s, you know, it was the time.
Bob: Going out clubbing and doing lines of coke was just kind of how people lived.
Bill: Oh, yeah. We went in the private rooms of Xenon and Studio 54, and I'm not going to name celebrities that were there because it's not, certainly, right to do that, but there were – I mean, people that you would recognize in a heartbeat that you've seen on the big screen many times, and everyone is there partying and drinking and doing lines, and, I mean, that's what happened back then.
Dennis: I also wanted to ask both of you, I mean, here you're living this lifestyle and usually where this kind of habit leads you is infidelity. Did that occur early on in your marriage with either of you?
Vicki: No.
Bill: No, no. We were always together, so …
Vicki: Until we separated.
Bill: Right.
Bob: Right, but it's interesting to stop and think that in a culture where that was commonplace, for the two of you, it wasn't.
Bill: Well, we were hanging out together, doing it together, it was fun.
Bob: Until you got home?
Vicki: Right.
Bob: And somebody got angry, and …
Vicki: Until we had to get up to go to work the next day.
Dennis: Well, you've got two children, too, I mean …
Vicki: That was really before that.
Bob: That was happening later, yes.
Vicki: I had completely been able to, before we had children, wake up one day and say, "I'm done." And actually – with drugs of any kind – and I actually went – I asked …
Bob: Yeah, tell us about – you wake up one day and say "I'm done." What caused that?
Vicki: I was addicted to cocaine. It had been about four or five or, I don't know, six months, and I'd lost a lot of weight. I was not doing my job properly.
Dennis: How do you know you were addicted? I mean, we have a lot of listeners. Is this an …
Bob: Every night you were doing lines?
Vicki: I mean, 4 or 5:00 would roll around, and I needed to do a line of cocaine to feel good, and I – in high school, my mother had been very on my case about weight, and I had, unknowingly to her, I started taking diet pills, and I was addicted to those. I mean, I couldn't not take them and through my first two years in college until I got really sick from them and stopped. So I knew – I had tried to avoid drugs from then on because I knew that if I did something, I would become addicted and I, in fact, did with cocaine.
So I asked my job to send me on a road trip, and I went away for a week, away from Billy, who wasn't interested in stopping and, literally, just stopped doing drugs.
Bob: Can somebody wake up one morning and go away for a week and just be done?
Vicki: Some can, some can't. I was able to.
Bob: And that was it – never went back, never …
Vicki: That was it.
Bob: Wow.
Dennis: Billy, what did you think about this? I mean, at this point, you're watching your wife. She says, "I'm addicted," and she doesn't like what it's doing to her. You're still doing drugs and what were you thinking at that point? I mean, I've often wondered, is the addiction so strong you just don't think straight?
Bill: Yeah, absolutely, and I don't – you know, well, I mean, I think I lost one of my playmates, you know, I had other people to do it with, and I don't think I thought of the ramifications of me continuing and her not. I don't think I really cared.
Bob: Did it make you mad that she wouldn't play with you anymore?
Bill: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
Bob: And would you lay it out for her and say, "Come on."
Vicki: Yes.
Bill: I did? I don't remember. I'm sure I did.
Bob: And what would you do when he'd lay it out and say, "Come on." You'd say, "I'm not going to do that?"
Vicki: Yeah, I can't do it anymore.
Bob: And you'd just get mad and go out and find somebody to play with?
Bill: Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't really …
Vicki: I don't think either of us remembers the very details at that point, but …
Bob: You continued, it was still a part of your life. You were done.
Vicki: Done.
Bob: But that puts another wedge in the relationship?
Vicki: Definitely.
Bob: Was that one of the things that pushed you toward separation?
Vicki: Absolutely. That was the thing, because we were living in separate worlds, literally, and not just because Billy had the restaurant and the time there, but when you're addicted to a drug, that's really your focus – when I'm going to do the next, where I can get it, what I'll do when I get it. And so that was his focus, and by then the children were born, and my focus was the children and school and living a life that was a healthy and balanced life.
Bill: One of the best commercials I ever saw about cocaine addiction was when they showed a picture of the vial – the cocaine vial – and the person actually inside the vial, and that's really what it's like. I mean, you are just trapped inside that vial. It is – for me, at the time, there was no way out. I tried to stop a number of times, but it was impossible.
Dennis: You were doing four grams of cocaine a day.
Bill: Up to – certainly not every day …
Dennis: Not every day.
Bill: But there were big party days when I would do that.
Dennis: What does that mean? I mean, I just don't have a concept of – are you with me?
Bill: I'm with you. It's a lot, and I would start, you know, maybe at 10 in the morning and finish at, maybe, 4 or 5 the following morning.
Dennis: So 18 hours …
Bill: Oh, yeah. And sometimes, you know, you'd be lucky to get a couple of hours of sleep, and the whole thing would start over again.
Dennis: Doesn't your body begin to break down at some point in the midst of that?
Bill: Well, it does, it does, and …
Vicki: You have to drink a lot of alcohol …
Bill: You have to drink a lot of alcohol – you drink the alcohol to come off the coke, and then you get to a certain point, it's a vicious, vicious cycle.
Dennis: So there is no relationship, then, really, to speak of that's occurring in a marriage where this is happening.
Bill: It got so bad for me that I'd be in the shower, and I would feel my heart start to really race and get scared that I was about to have a heart attack, and then it would slow down and be okay, and 10 minutes later, I was out of the shower doing another line.
Vicki: Before we separated, there would be moments, or maybe an hour, or maybe even a day, sometimes where Billy would be able to not do drugs, and there would be a little bit of a connection between us – from my perspective.
Bob: And you'd have some hope?
Vicki: And I'd have some hope. And I also remember the guy that I'd first met, and I loved that guy, but he was gone. But there was just that hope. And then there were the two children, and it was a daily battle in my brain, daily, a conflict – I want my family together, but I can't live like this. I mean, all day long, "What will I do?" I mean, it just would go around and around and around in my heard, "What will I do? How will I live if I make him leave, because I can't live like this anymore? How will we survive, what will we do?
Dennis: It was at that point you drew a line in the sand.
Vicki: Exactly. We, actually, went on a vacation to South Carolina to the beach, and Billy said he was going to try to detox on his own at this hotel.
Dennis: Just like you'd gotten away for a week.
Vicki: Right.
Dennis: And you'd come clean. He was going to do it while you were on vacation.
Vicki: Right, but it didn't work. It was a very miserable time.
Bill: I tried, and, I mean, I wasn't doing very much – I'd do, maybe, four hits a day just to try to feel normal, but, I mean, most people think that cocaine – and it does – it makes you speedy, racy, and all that stuff, keeps you up. But when you're really addicted to it, you need it to feel normal, and I would wake up in the middle of the night and have to do a hit just to go back to sleep, just to calm myself down.
Dennis: Amazing. You know, Bob, we get a lot of letters from listeners who talk about what drugs, alcohol, addictions of all kinds are doing to their relationship, and what we've got here is a picture of – I mean, if there is a picture of a dysfunctional relationship …
Vicki: Oh, yes.
Dennis: … it's what you guys were enduring at that point. And the reality is, apart of Jesus Christ, what's the hope? What's the chance of that relationship moving, first of all, out of bondage to freedom but then, secondly, to forgiveness of one another for all the ways you've hurt each other, but then beginning to build a real relationship between two people, and, you know, we see people come to the Weekend to Remember Marriage Conferences all the time who have come, hopeless, and they find the spiritual solution because it's God, it's His plan, He made marriage, He designed it, a husband and a wife, He knows how they fit together and how they make a relationship work and, frankly, that's what you found out as we're going to talk about further, and that's what our listeners, I think, need to find out is they needed to get the blueprints. They needed to find the Master Architect of marriage and allow Jesus Christ to become the builder of their relationship.
Bob: Well, and the reality is that most of the couples who come to a Weekend to Remember are not at the point in their marriage that Bill and Vicki got to. Most folks are coming because they recognize that if you're going to build a strong marriage, you have to spend a little time and make the investment and learn and grow and look together at the Scriptures, and that's what we do in the context of a weekend that is a fun, romantic getaway for couples.
We help couples get a better understanding of what the Bible has to say about marriage to find help and to find hope for a marriage. And our team got to thinking about this recently, and they thought, "You know, maybe we could encourage couples to give one another the gift of a weekend away as a Christmas present.
So we've taken the Weekend to Remember gift certificate and put it in a box that can be wrapped and placed under the tree, and we're making the certificate available at a special discounted rate for listeners this week. If you would like to give one another the gift of a Weekend to Remember this spring, go to our website, FamilyLife.com, click on the right side of the screen where it says "Today's Broadcast," and you can get more information about how you can get a gift certificate for a Weekend to Remember at a special price. Again, the details are online at FamilyLife.com. We'll send you the certificate in the box in time for you to have it wrapped up for Christmas, and then you can start making plans for a weekend this spring when the two of you can get away and enjoy one of these fun, romantic getaway weekends for couples at FamilyLife Weekend to Remember.
Again, the website is FamilyLife.com. There is also information there about a variety of resources designed to help build stronger marriages. You'll find that when you click on "Today's Broadcast" on our home page. Or call us at 1-800-FLTODAY, 1-800-358-6329. You can make arrangements to order a gift certificate over the phone, and we'll have it sent to you, or get more information if you've got questions. Someone on our team can let you know when the conference is going to be in a city near where you live.
Again, the toll-free number is 1-800-358-6329, 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY.
Hey, we have been the recipients of some good news here at FamilyLife, and we've been trying to spread the word about this good news. We had some friends of the ministry who came to us recently, and they said, "You know, it's been a tough year for a lot of families and for a lot of businesses, and we know it's been a tough year for a lot of ministries as well. We want to do what we can to try to help support the ministry of FamilyLife Today and to encourage our friends to do the same thing."
So they offered to match every donation that we receive here at FamilyLife between now and the end of the year on a dollar-for-dollar basis up to a total of $425,000, and we appreciate their generosity. But in order to take advantage of their generosity, we need as many of our listeners as possible to call or go online and make a donation here at year-end to help support the ministry of FamilyLife Today.
We are listener-supported, and in order to continue on this station and other stations all around the country, we really need to hear from as many listeners as possible, and we do recognize that it has been a challenging year for a lot of families, and we don't want to put any pressure you in any way, but we do need to let you know that it's been challenging for us as well.
So anything you can do at year-end, any donation you can make, would be appreciated and, again, it will be matched on a dollar-for-dollar basis up to a total of $425,000. So can I encourage you to either go online today or call 1-800-FLTODAY, that's 1-800-358-6329, and make a generous donation. We really would appreciate your support and want to say thanks in advance for whatever you are able to do.
Now, tomorrow we're going to hear more from Bill and Vicki Rose, and we'll find out how their marriage ultimately moved toward a separation, and we'll find out what happened to Vicki in the midst of that separation. That's coming up tomorrow; I hope you can be back with us for that.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We'll see you tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas – help for today; hope for tomorrow.
