What it was like for him to come out of the closet with that kind of message.” Randy Quaid and Cindy had come to prominence in the ‘70s. Early in the decade, Randy starred in the hit film The Last Detail, which also featured Jack Nicholson. It was based on the novel by Darcy O’Brien and made $50 million. Randy was nominated for his work in 1977’s The Last Picture Show. Then he landed a role in 1978’s Midnight Express with Brad Davis and Peter Boyle. For his performance, he was nominated for an Oscar. Cindy had her own success a year later with her debut role in the hit film Breaking Away. Then came 1979. The “Breaking away” of Quaid and Cindy's marriage “Cindy and I were very good friends,” Randy says. “I have seen her out at some Hollywood dinner parties with my wife, Susie (a former Playmate of the Year). I’ve seen her out with my parents and some of their friends, a lot of the old crowd. They all knew that she and I were separated, and they all knew she had gone off to Hawaii to get the house in the divorce.” He and Cindy’s marriage had ended in a drawn-out split and bitter divorce. “I remember it,” says Cindy. “I was out of town on location when it was finally finalized, but I remember everyone was saying, ‘Oh my God. Randy’s having a breakdown!’ And they would say it again and again and again…I was going to call them on it, because that’s when we were really arguing and really fighting.” And she says she got the same thing all the time…she was being portrayed as “The Homewrecker!” “Everybody knew that we had an amazing marriage,” she adds. “We’d been married 12 years, and we lived together for 15. I was in the process of trying to get to an audition, and my car wouldn’t start, and I was at the dealership with the man I was living with, and he was trying to talk me into going to the audition to support me because he knew I was trying to get into this particular film. He never asked me for a divorce. He never showed up at my door and said he wanted out of the marriage. He never came home late, so it didn’t matter if I didn’t find him there when I got home. We didn’t talk much because we were going through a hard time.” In fact, it was Randy who was working on moving out. They hadn’t lived together in almost three months, she says. “He told me to get a good lawyer because he was going to file for divorce. I didn’t know what to think, but I told him, ‘I don’t know what to do. Should I stay here?’ He replied, ‘Yeah, well, I think it would be better if you stayed here.’ And I said, ‘Well, OK, if that’s what you want, but please don’t think badly of me.’ But of course, that didn’t keep us from arguing. We’re not the best communicators, and when we were good at it, we were extremely good at it.” But Cindy says their fighting wasn’t just about the fight to get out of their marriage. It was also about the fight that had been going on between Randy and the IRS since he’d been accused of not paying his taxes. They were still trying to come to grips with the fact that the IRS was seizing the deed to their former home. “It was a bit of a shock when the IRS showed up at our house and took everything – my clothes, my furniture, my dog, everything, except the dog was out at my parents’ house,” Randy says. “The only thing they left was the mattress on the floor. It was crazy. We never had a big fight about it, but Cindy and I were both so upset because they took our property. They took our furniture. We felt like they weren’t thinking about our safety as a family. “They didn’t care. They took everything except the dog, which I think is the first time the IRS did something like that, but it wasn’t the first time they did something like that to Randy. They sent him a letter that said they were about to sell off his personal property, and he was like, ‘I haven’t done anything! What are they going to think about that?’ and they said, ‘Well, how else are you going to pay your bills?’ He said, ‘Well, they’re wrong,’ and that’s when they started doing a lot of different stuff.” Randy knew that the IRS was going to try to come after him for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid income taxes. “The people at MGM (which released Midnight Express in 1978) had been after him to pay them $5,000, and the people at Universal had been after him to pay them $6,000, but because of the problems he’s had with the IRS, he didn’t pay either of those – and neither of those were the tax bills,” Randy recalls. “He did pay every penny that was asked by every other studio that had been making a movie with him and ever since. “They didn’t care, though,” he adds. “They just took what they wanted. I don’t know why they had a problem with him.” One day while Cindy was away, Randy received a call from her lawyer. She was being served with divorce papers. “She was served with a divorce paper in Hawaii while I was on location,” Randy says. “She was at a rehearsal for a TV show, so she just kind of called me and said, ‘I got a call from a lawyer, and they say it’s divorce papers.’ She called me, and I said, ‘OK, great.’ She said, ‘Don’t you love me? Don’t you love me?’ I said, ‘Of course I love you.’ ‘Well, don’t you want to take care of me?’ I said, ‘Well, of course I do. We’ll work it out.’ And she said, ‘Well, I don’t want anything from you anymore,’ and I said, ‘Cindy, that’s all that matters to me. I want nothing from you.’ “I told her we’d work it out, and I said, ‘I’m going to have to move out of the house,’ and she said, ‘I know,’ and she said she would go to the beach when she came home,” he adds. “But I was on location, so I couldn’t go to the beach, so I went home. And that was our last conversation.” The marriage was over. Randy had filed for divorce in L.A. He and Cindy never saw each other again. They didn’t speak again for over 30 years. “I called her about two or three years ago and asked her, ‘What have you been doing?’” Randy says. “She said, ‘Oh, I don’t do anything, I just keep busy.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m busy doing the same thing.’ And we got off the phone with nothing but mutual respect.” Randy had just started working in the entertainment business. He was working on getting his career back on track, even though he admits, “It took me three years of struggling to get back to even being the same as I was before the divorce.” But Cindy had moved on. “I wasn’t looking for anybody,” she says. “And by the time I got to the point of putting myself out there, I’d been with other people, and it hadn’t worked out.” Cindy and Randy had decided to leave their marital home together. Randy recalls a morning they woke up in a hotel suite. “I got home from work,” Randy says. “She got home from work, and we got into the room, and we got out of the car, and it was that close. There’s a few days where there was a point where it was getting to that point, but there was too much hurt. We were both just kind of still raw. “I don’t think I realized what it was doing to her, but the guilt of not helping me helped her,” Randy continues. “The truth is, I think she put herself through this by herself. And I think she really loved me. She just never really got over it. I think she really did love me, but she also really loved herself. “She came from a family where we had nothing and we worked our butts off for everything we had, and so she always felt like she never got anything,” Randy continues. “I don’t think she ever got the fact that the whole time she was growing up she didn’t have anything, and the only reason was that her parents just had so much going on in their own lives and they were so self-centered, they were the complete opposite of what it took to raise a family. They were selfish people who just cared about their own happiness, not theirs and their family’s happiness. “So to have a husband like Randy – you know, he’s a very