Heaven Knows, Anything Goes

About the Book

In 1979, Beverly Hills psychotherapist, Dr. Dianne de la Vega, meets movie star and vocalist, Dick Haymes. Dianne is enchanted with his remarkable baritone voice. After an intense fourteen-day courtship, she moves into his apartment. For Dianne, the first three months of their relationship is sheer bliss, a series of Hollywood banquets, parties, and hilarious housekeeping. Dianne learns the meaning of celebrity. Only references to ex-wife Rita Hayworth mar her excitement and break the spell. The two lovers are confident, in spite of Richard's health and financial problems, ex wives, and drinking. A second chance has been granted to them. Dianne flies to Detroit for the closing night of the Big Broadcast of 1944 with Harry James, starring Dick Haymes. Sitting on the edge of her seat in the audience, Dianne realizes Haymes has been drinking to find the strength to go on stage. The last song he ever sings is for her-:"The More I See You." Haymes tells the press from his hosipital bed when asked if he is ready to go, "I've had it all, known everybody, had everything except love. Now I have that, too." He glances at Dianne who is devastated. The morning after his death, she finds a single red rose wrapped in baby's breath on her doorstep with a card-"In Memory of Love." She knows it's from Haymes, who guides Dianne to Hawaii, Alaska, and Findhorn, Scotland. She learns life does exist after death and unconditional love lasts forever.

About the Author

At the age of 5, my Father, Gerald DeMarinis, arrived in Connecticut from Sorrento Italy. The Woodruffs, my Mother's people, settled in the same state a few years before 1635. Since her ancestors fought on both sides of the War of 1776, I became a Daughter of the American Revolution and a Daughter of the Empire. The losing family fled to Canada, leaving behind valuable tracts of land on the Hudson River near NYC, where my Mom and Dad took up residence as young adults from two culturally different worlds. The stock market crash of 1928 moved my parents to Cleveland, Ohio where I was born in time for the Great Depression and WW11. I entered life as a first generation American on one half and very American on the other half. My Canadian grandfather, a descendant of the 1776 exodus to Canada, died at the moment my parents needed a down payment for our home in up-scale Rocky River, suburb of Cleveland, where I thrived, with two sisters and a brother, on spring daffodils, autumn colors, warm sand on Lake Erie's, summer beaches, and ice-skating on frozen ponds swept by icy winds from Canada. At 16, visiting family friends in Mexico City, I fell in love with tropical nights, swaying palm trees, and the once white, white city of modern buildings, broad flower filled avenues, mixed with Spanish colonial architecture and Aztec pyramids. I also fell in love with my Spanish-born husband. After 25 years, with my three Mexican-born children, I moved back to the U.S. to further their education and mine. In Hawaii at Blow Hole, my son lost his life scuba diving, a shock following Richard's (Dick Haymes) death by four years, leaving me emotionally crippled. I left my private practice as a licensed psychotherapist in California to begin a 17-year career acculturating foreign students for Los Angeles Unified School District. The children healed me. My two daughters remain in California. The eldest, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco, specializes in Human Rights. The United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, passed two laws she wrote on immigration. My three grandchildren Chase, Ana Alicia, and Casey attend university, the latter at U.C Santa Cruz.