Confidential File

An Old Man, Much in Love With Love

I went out to cover a funny story over the weekend, but I'm not laughing.

By all rules of journalism, I should be. And I should be making you laugh.

Because when you look at the story objectively, it is funny.

Very, very funny.

But
the trouble with me is — I guess — I just can't look at it
objectively any more. I know the people involved a little too well.

Francis Van Wie, age 72, is one of them.

He's better known as the Ding Dong Daddy of the D Car Line.

I drove up to the Sheriff's Honor Farm at Castaic,
where he was back in prison for violating his parole, to interview him
— to get the inside story of a man who's credited with wooing, winning
and casting aside a dozen and a half wives.

And too often taking them on in bunches. Marrying again, without benefit of divorce.

I was after sort of a "confession of an aging Don Juan."

But what I got is a bit too well acquainted with a sad, unwilling clown.

Francis Van Wie is a tired and confused old man. He's a crybaby. He cries a lot.

Partly,
I suspect, because he's aware that he's the butt of a bad joke.
Everybody in town is laughing. But they're not laughing with him, he
knows. They're laughing at him.

And partly — maybe mostly —
the tears are because he failed. What he wanted most from life — the
love and dependence of a woman — he never got.

Years ago, he
told me, he thought he had it — until she walked out on him to try the
love of another man. That apparently triggered Van Wie's erratic behavior.

Wearily,
he denied that that was 18 wives ago. "Ten, maybe. But not 18," he
said. But not then, or ever in our conversation, did the infantile old
man indicate that he grasped the fact that his bigamist marriages were
legally and morally wrong.

Rubbing his fat, fleshy hands
together, he talked frequently about 81-year-old Minnie, his latest
bride, and how he should be with her, how she needed him.

"I
don't know how long they're going to keep me here," he told me. "I'm
not sure what the judge said. When he sentenced me, the batteries in my
hearing aid weren't working.

"If you could," he added, "call Minnie. Find out if I'm still married to her. I hope they don't take Minnie away from me."

When I got back to town, I did call Minnie. And she told me that as far as she was concerned, Francis Van Wie was still very much her husband.

"I wouldn't want no better man around than Frank was," she said. "I wish they'd let him come home."

Minnie
talked proudly of how she met "Frank" in a Los Angeles bus depot, and
how, when everybody else was pushing and shoving, he stopped and helped
her with her bags.

"We got to talking and he asked to come up — by to see me. He kept his word."

Seemed the Thing to Do

After a brief engagement, Frank and Minnie were married last Aug. 21.

"He's a wonderful man," Minnie went on. "Kindhearted. No bad habits. When I felt bad, he took over the work around the house.

"The man's a Christian," she said.

Minnie told me that until the police picked her husband up two weeks ago, she know nothing of his past.

"Will you want to talk to him about it when you get together again?" I asked.

"When I get my man back," she answered, "we'll be too busy thinking about the future to be worrying about the past."

I'm no sentimentalist, but that's the way I'd like to see this story end.