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Kathie Lee Gifford has said very little about her first marriage, to composer Paul Johnson from 1976 to 1983, and admits it in her new book, “It’s Never Too Late”, released Tuesday.
But maybe that’s because, as she reveals in her new memoir, she didn’t have much of a relationship with Johnson, who came before her marriage to famous footballer Frank Gifford.
“The truth is, it was just a marriage in the pages of the law,” Gifford writes of Johnson in his book. “Although Paul and I were married, we only shared one thing – our faith.”
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They met in 1973 while she was a student at Oral Roberts University and Johnson was a friend of the university’s founder’s son. Gifford moved to Los Angeles a year later and participated in a Bible study at Johnson’s house.
“I was a virgin on my wedding night with Paul, and I still considered myself a virgin when he left me five years later,” she recalls. “It’s hard, even now, to explain why I’ve been in a sexless marriage for so long. I definitely wouldn’t do it again. But back then, divorce was much more stigmatizing and no one in my family was divorced. I believed God could. heal our marriage and pray every day that it will. “
Gifford added that she moved into their spare bedroom less than a year after their wedding and stayed there until the marriage ended.
“Before we got married, Paul told me he was a virgin too,” she continued. “We talked about how we wanted to honor the Word of God and present ourselves as a gift to the person we would eventually marry. But after we got married, he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. Nothing.
Gifford said she and Johnson took advice, but it was “a disaster”. The counselor believed Gifford “was the problem,” she wrote, and that she should “give up” her career “to look after Paul’s ambition and talent and keep her house clean and organized” .
“Paul immediately replied, ‘No way! I don’t want her to wait for me at home. want to she at work, “Gifford wrote.” We sat in silence during the two hour trip home, no closer to any sort of breakthrough in our marital problems.
“Although we shared the same bed, we had never been really intimate, and now we had stopped talking too,” she says. “The only time I was joyful was when I was able to escape the despair of my marriage and lose myself in my job. I was grateful that I had something to distract me.”
Johnson ultimately ended the marriage, according to Gifford, without consulting her. She had been on the road for three weeks, and when she returned home, she saw that their house was “completely ransacked”.
“My first thought was, Oh my gosh, we’ve been robbed! Then I noticed that the piano was missing, and it dawned on me, No he left me“She wrote.” I had had no warning. There had been no discussion of a separation. Nothing.”
“In the kitchen I found a short note on the counter that said, ‘Maybe now you’ll know I mean it,’ with an emergency phone number. To this day, I have no idea what he meant. my young life had prepared me for such a shock, ”Gifford recalls.
She went on to explain that the process of cleaning up the house after the wreckage was very therapeutic for her, and soon after, she had her first acting gig on the # 1 morning show in Los Angeles, which ultimately changed her life.
Gifford also recalled seeing Johnson only once after their relationship ended, in 2011.
“He never said a word about why he left me the way he did or why he married me in the first place, and I didn’t ask,” she said. written. “I hugged him and wished him a happy life. I still do.
She later learned that Johnson became a marriage and relationship counselor after their separation.
“You have to love God’s sense of humor,” Gifford joked.
Gifford married a second time in 1986, to Frank Gifford; they remained married until her death in 2015 at the age of 84. They had two children together, son Cody, 30, and daughter Cassidy, 27.
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