Chapter 25: Scandal and Star

A second part of the news stories about the kidnapping attempt and car chase followed a day or two later. The initial stories had noted that I was with ‘another’ woman – one Marjorie Henson, who was listed as a close friend and consort of Princess Caroline.

The way the story broke indicated that Carrie was bisexual, and had a deep relationship with both Marjorie and me. Of course, the story was accurate; however, the way the media treated it was as ‘breaking news’ of a huge scandal. Side bars talked about other sexual scandals the royal family had endured: Prince Harry and the stripper (and a few others), Prince Andrew and underage girls that worked for Jeffery Epstein, and Prince Charles and Camilla when he’d been married to Diana, just to mention a few they raised in appealing to the prurient interests of the readers.

The U.K. papers picked up the ‘scandal’ and blew it up even further, and that just made the American press even more eager to trade on the malicious gossip. We received several calls asking us to comment on the allegations and the scandal; however, we got so we didn’t answer or at best said, ‘No comment’.

Carrie got an idea from the whole exposé-oriented press and ran it by the programming staff and executives at WDC-TV where she worked. They liked the idea, if for no other reason than the same reason the newspapers liked it – it brought in revenue based on the lascivious interests of the population.

Marjorie and Carrie spent the next two weeks working twelve to fourteen-hour days on the new ‘Special.’ During the daytime hours they were on the road, sometimes together and sometimes apart, doing interviews, usually with a cameraman. A few times one or the other flew off to New York, Boston, or some other major city. I also heard mention of videoconferencing they’d been involved in. I had to appear at the studio one evening while Marjorie, Carrie, and I sat and talked about how we lived. We laughed a lot but got through the videoing.

I plodded along in my strategic systems management work, figuring out how to lace together some disparate systems so they could exchange data, and raise the bar considerably on our competitors. Of course, I got no end of questions at work, but for the most part my living arrangement had been well known about since before I married Carrie and did the commitment ceremony with Marjorie.

WDC-TV started to promote the TV Special about a week before airing in prime time. This also gave them the opportunity to sell advertising in the hour at outrageous prices per second.

The title of the special was ’Marriage and Partnership Arrangements: Princess Caroline Speaks Out.’ A few salacious one-liners were used to accompany the short commercials promoting the broadcast: ‘Every man’s dream?’ ‘Having your cake and eating it too,’ and ‘Bigamy is alive and well’.

Polls on the street revealed that a huge viewership would be guaranteed. This was coming in the midst of a meaty scandal where sex, in some form, was at the core.

As before with Carrie’s specials, NBS snapped up the rights to also broadcast the one-hour program; however, they left the airing as an option to the other stations in the franchise. The Washington station hosted another viewing party, and this time practically every person at the station showed up to watch the final presentation, and to assess the first hours’ worth of comments from the social media.

The TV show started with a close-up Carrie. She said, “Good evening. I’m Carrie Westerly, and many of you also know me as Princess Caroline. Recently, there has been much salacious, titillating, and even licentious press about my lifestyle, as though it was new news. That approach infuriated me at first, and then gave way to this hour’s broadcast, not only to clarify exactly how I live, but also to take a look at how what we believe is the traditional model of family or home life is, in reality, all but gone – and the little that’s left is shrinking every year.”

The camera panned out to include the three of us. Carrie said, “This is Jim Westerly, my husband and lover, and Marjorie Henson, my closest friend and lover. Yes, I live in a threesome and we have a comfortable and happy partnership with each other. All our relatives know of our arrangement, and have since Jim and I got married, and on the same day, on television that many of you might have watched, we held a short commitment ceremony with Marjorie so she too would feel included in our living unit – in our family. Many of you watched the entire ceremony on television, including that ceremony. Our lifestyle is not new news except to those media outlets trying to use it to inflame and incite – or too dumb to remember past broadcasts.”

“We are not unique. Plural or polyamorous relationships comprise about five percent of current living households. One estimate is that up to fifteen percent of the population has at one time or another lived arrangements such as ours. So, you see, we are not a rare exception deserving of news coverage, although I guess Marjorie’s fame as a network anchor and host, and mine as a producer of notable specials and a princess, has brought the visibility of such arrangements to the forefront of people’s minds.”

She went on, “Here are a few of the statistics that we’ll explore in this hour. There are widespread variations in living arrangements. The news has focused on gay and lesbian marriages; however, those are just a few of the unique living arrangements around. We’ll show you some others.”

“Today in America, and in some European countries, less than half of family units are married, and this is a long-term trend we’ll trace back to the 1940s when over 70 percent of units was married. Today, that number is forty-seven percent and dropping each year. Further, with gay and lesbian marriages, not all of those married units are comprised by a man and woman.