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Not-So-Average Joe
Love drew California fireman Joe Martinez to a hardscrabble Mexican city.
A tragic fire inspired him to return-and teach local firefighters how to survive on the job
Ciudad Obregon, Mexico, is a tough place to be a firefighter. With a population of500,000, the sprawling factory and farming town employs just 80 men and boys-10 per shift-to battle 50 blazes a week. Thanks to a long drought, hydrants often run dry. And the firehouse itself-with its peeling paint, crumbling concrete awning and sun-bleached emergency vehicles-looks like a fire hazard. But the Obregon fire department has a secret weapon: an American firefighter named Joe Martinez. On a recent Sunday morning, the beefy 39-years-old patrols the halls of an abandoned school building as 20 bomberos practice rope-rescue techniques. He checks a novice's harness, then watches with a proud grin as the young man's colleagues lower him three stories to the street. For the past five years Martinez has traveled to Obregon every few months from his home in Santa Maria, Calif., 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles, bringing advanced training and equipment to a department that once possessed little of either. He has delivered 5,000 ft. of hose; 100 turnout jackets, helmets and pairs of boots; 15 sets of breathing apparatus; and smoke alarms for Obregon's schools-all, like today's lessons, free of charge. ''Since Joe arrived," says Oscar Coronel, 48, a firefighter from age 10, ''this has become a better, safer place to work.'' Martinez's mission was launched by love-and tragedy. He was expecting neither in December 1997, when a pal invited him to a New Year's Eve party in Obregon. The friend thought Martinezmight like to meet his wife's cousin, engineering student Ana Luisa Barreras. One look at her picture convinced Martinez: This was a fiesta he couldn't miss. A third-generation Mexican-American (one of five children of John, 79, a homemaker), he spoke no Spanish, and Ana's English was little better. Still, aided by a dictionary, they struck up a flirtation. Sonn the pair were flying back and forth for visits and talking marriage. ''My friends all said, 'You won the Lotto with this guy,' '' recalls Ana, now 28 and a full-time mom to Alec, 3. On one trip, in February 1999, Martinez dropped by the main firehouse, where he heade a horrific story: Two firemen in there 20s-one the father of a new baby-had recently perished in a warehouse blaze. The pair had run out of oxygen because their tanks lacked low-air alarms. They might have been saved had worn perconal alarm locators (PALs), which beep when a firefighter stops moving for too long. But such devices, standard in the U.S., are rare in Mexico. "Firemen everywhere are one big family,'' says ex-chief Juan Ernesto de Acha. "Joe took our loss personally.'' Recalls Martinez, who followed older brother John Jr. into the in 1987: "I couldn't believe these guys had died. They didn't have some simple, basic equipment that we take for granted up here.'' He decided to help them catch up. Back in the States, Martinez persuaded his department to part with five PALs and flew them to Obregon. Then, in April 1999, he set out for his wedding in a pickup piled high with gear he had gathered from several California department. When he arrived in Obregon, grateful firefighters drove him and Ana to the church in one of their engines. After the ceremony, the couple were whisked off to the reception at a hotel-where lodgers, hearing the sirens, fled in their pajamas. In December 2001, after taking time off for fatherhood, Martinez loaded up his truck again. But he was stymied at customs and wound up leaving the equipment at a firehouse in Arizona, to be retrieved by a teem from Obregon. Resolving to change tactics, he persuaded the Woodland Hills, Calif., Rotary Club-which had donated fire vehicles to Obregon through the club's sister-cities program-to pay his airfare for training missions. He has been back three times since. ''We feel a deep sense of brotherhood with Joe,'' says firefighter Carlos Amin Medrano, 25, whose own older brother Jesus was one of the pair whose deaths moved Martinez to action. ''Words can't express our thankfulness.'' On his most recent visit, Martinez brings along two California roperescue instructors, Phil Hanon and Mark Cameron, to show the bomberos how to climb the grain elevators and industrial plants that dot the city. ''They're quick learners,'' says Honon of his students, who hoist a metal stretcher up the side of city's baseball stadium and lower a volunteer "victim''- a glamorous local TV reporter-from a light tower, cheering lustily when she lands. On the last evening the group repairs to the firehouse courtyard for barbecued pork tacos and a graduation ceremony. There is wild applause as the firefighters grab their certificates from chief Sergio Martinez. But the biggest noise comes when the chief thanks the fireman from Santa Maria for his "valuable help and the promise of more.'' As the crowd chants, ''Joe! Joe! Joe!'' their hero blushes crimson. ''Kind of makes you want to cry,'' he says, and despite his smile, he looks like he might mean it.
Rock Bottom
After a downward spiral marked by odd behavior, domestic violence and run-ins with police, Whitney Houston checks into rehab for drug abuse
As he jogged by a gas station in Alpharetta, Ga., on March 12, personal trainer Bervin Jackson heard a familiar ''Hey!'' Sitting in a pickup truck with friends, Whitney Houston, a former client, called, him over. In sunglasses and looking upbeat, "she told me she was doing some touring, and that once she got back she wanted to do some training with me,'' says Jackson. ''She was looking pretty cool. I told her, "I want to bring you back.' And she said, 'I want to come back.' '' Apparently, in both body and soul. Three days later, word came that Houston, 40, had entered rehab for substance abuse problems. "This is a fiercely private women,'' says a sourch close to the six-time Grammy winner. ''The fact that she voluntarily went into a facility for rehabilitation is an act of courage. She in going to be struggling.'' Especially since her family is already in turmoil. Last month her husband of 12 years, R&B singer Bobby Brown, 37, began serving a 60-day jail term in Georgia for parole violation, including a December charge for allegedly striking Huston. With both parents absent, the couple's 11-year-old daughter Bobbi Kristina "is with family,'' says Brown's mother, Carole. ''She's fine.'' For years now, the same could not be said of Houston. In 2002, asked by Diane Sawyer on Primetime Live if she had abused marijuana, cocaine, alcohol or pills, Houston replied, ''Yeah, I'll grant you I partied.'' In fact, in 1999 her mother, gospel singer Cissy Houston, 71, staged an intervention, but Whitney refused treatment. "I said, 'Mommy, you've raised me with the love, and with god. Now if can't make it with you and with the love of God, I'm not putting my life in someone else's hands,' '' Houston told Sawyer, adding that she had worked through her problems with prayer. But before long Houston was misbehaving again (see box). In 2000 she was arrested in Hawaii for marijuana possession; the charges were later dropped. Arriving at her 40th-birthday party at an Atlanta nightclub last August, ''She was stressed out,'' says Rakaia Jackson, a fan "She was attempting to get her jacket off, and she could barely do that.'' Two weeks later, when police officers arrested Brown at a restaurant near the couple's Alpharetta home for a parole violation, Houston ''was ranting and raving that we need to lock up real criminals, and 'F---that' and F--- this,' '' says Commander Kevin Phillips. ''Because you are a star, people think you don't have a problem,'' says her longtime friend Perri Reid, who herself experienced fame in the '80s as the pop star Pebbles. "The pressures of succeeding and satisfying people's expectations, that's very difficult.'' Since the heights of selling 34 million copies of the soundtrack to The Bodyguard in 1992, Houston's record sales have steadily declined-to 1 million for 2002's Just Whitney. Still, says Tracks magazine editor Alan Light, ''the American public is eager to forgive when people ask for forgiveness.'' That affection will no doubt play a part in Houston's chances for recovery. ''The outpouring of love and support from all over the world has been staggering,'' says a friend, ''I want her to feel that, because what she's going to go through is not easy.''
Free at Last
Mende Nazer's harrowing memoir details the six years she spent as a slave
One night when she was 14, Mende Nazer awoke to screams. From the mud hut she shared with her parents in Sudan's Nuba mountains she saw gangs of men torching her Muslim village's thatched roofs, murdering the adults and rounding up the children. Choked with fear, Mende ran with her family to hide in the hills. But she became separated from them in the smoky night and was abducted by one of the marauders, who stopped en route to try to rape her. "They took my childhood away from me,'' says Nazer, now 24. "That is the thing that hurts the most.'' What replaced her idyllic youth was a hell few people imaging still exists. In Slave, a new memoir written with British documentarian Damien Lewis, Nazer-now a student living in London-describes being sold into servitude in Khartoum, a fate shared by more then 11,000 people each year in Sudan alone (see box). Forced to work virtually around the clock for her mistress, a wife and mother of four who called her "yebit,'' meaning "girl worthy of no name,'' Nazer says she was routinely beaten, spent each night locked in a shed and subsisted on table scraps. "I was physically and emotionally abused,'' says Nazer, who considers herself lucky to have escaped the sexual abuse some other slaves suffered. She didn't try to escape during her six years in Khartoum, she says, because she didn't know if anyone in her village had survived. "Without my family to go back to,'' Nazer writes, "what point was there in being free?'' Yet it was the memory of her old life that kept her sane. Though decades of civil war had scarred her country, Nazer's village was peaceful when she was young. Her father, a farmer who owned 50 cows, was not rich but not poor either. The youngest of five, Mende excelled in school and dreamed of becoming a doctor. "It was a good place to grow up,'' she says. In 1999, her sixth year of servitude, a chance meeting with a newly captured Nuban slave let her know her family was alive. "I got very enthusiastic about seeing them,'' she says. Soon after, she began working for her mistress's sister, the wife of Abdul Al Koronky, a Sudanese embassy official in London. Nazer says they threatened to kill her if she told anyone she was not getting paid. But when another embassy official inquired innocently about her salary, Nazer says she told him she didn't earn a penny. After the man explained that this was illegal, writes Nazer, "I knew I had to escape.'' She eventually found a stranger she identified as a fellow Sudanese; he offered to have a friend pick her up and deliver her to safety the following week when she took out the Koronky trash.On Sept. 11, 2000, her heart pounding, Nazer did just that. She spent her first night of freedom at the home of her rescuer, before moving to a hostel. ''It was a relief,'' she says, "but I kept worrying [Koronky] would find me and I would be in great trouble.'' Her new friends introduced her to Lewis, who had covered Sudan's slave trade. "I told her the police would arrest anyone who tried to recapture or punish her,'' Lewis says. "But it was impossible to reassure this hunched, trembling woman.'' Nazer agreed to share her whole story with Lewis ("It was hard to talk about-I was in tears,'' she says), and the publicity their book project generated in Europe helped win her political asylum in December '02. Today Nazer lives in a flat owned by a Swiss couple who read about her and wanted to help. she's studying English and covers her minimal expenses with her book royalties. "I lead a very quiet life,'' she says-one that doesn't include TV (''We didn't have TV in the mountains'') or violent movies. "They remind me too much of the day the raiders arrived in our village,'' she says. According to the terms of her asylum, Nazer cannot return to Sudan for at least 15 months. But she has located her family. During their first phone call, she says, "my mom was crying and crying and my dad kept repeating, 'Mende, is it you?' '' She hopes to see them outside sudan later this year. Another hope: to realize her childhood goal. "My dream,'' Nazer says, ''is to be a doctor in the Nuba mountains.''
A Tug of War Over Anna Mae He
"I just want to hold her," says Casey He (in Memphis with husband Jack, kids Avita and Andy and a portrait of daughter Anna Mae).
In the suburban Memphis home of her guardians Jerry and Louise Baker, Anna Mae He is a typically energetic 5-year-old: When she's not romping with Aimee, 4, the youngest of the Bakers' four children, she's drawing, reading, doing puzzles and singing favorite songs like "Jesus Loves Me." Ten miles away in the one-bedroom apartment of Anna Mae's biological parents, Jack and Casey He, the only traces of their little girl are photos on tables and taped to the walls. They have been barred by a judge form even contacting their eldest child while awaiting the outcome of a furious battle with the Bakers, who agreed to take in their child while the Hes battled financial and legal problems in the first days of Anna Mae's life. "They told us, 'It is God's will for us to help you. We are Christian families,'' That statement is just one of many being hotly disputed in a case filled with claims of deception and abandonment now before circuit court judge Robert Childers in Memphis. At the crux of the matter: whether the custody arrangement reached by the families was temporary, as the Hes insist, or valid until Anna Mae becomes an adult, as claimed by the Bakers. "We agreed to raise Anna Mae for her entire life,'' says Louise Baker, 42, a homemaker who, with her husband, Jerry, 45, a banker, is seeking to adopt Anna Mae permanently. "We weren't just going to babysit her till they decided they'd take her back.'' Initially, relations between the warring families were quite affectionate. Soon before they met in 1999, Jack, a graduate economics student from China and the then-pregnant Casey, 36, experienced what he calls ''the most terrible nightmare in my life,'' A fellow student at the University of Memphis accused him of sexually assaulting her. Although a jury would acquit him five years later, the accusation alone prompted the university to revoke his scholarship and fire him from his job as a computer assistant. Without a steady income and with their first child due any day, the Hes ''were in very deep troubly and with no money to support a family,'' says a friend, Jing Huang. That's when a pastor at their Presbyterian church suggested the Hes contact Mid-South Christian Services, a private adoption agency. There, they met the Bakers, who had acted as foster parents in the past. After Anna Mae's birth, an agreement was reached: The Bakers would keep Anna Mae for 90 days while the Hes straightened out their affairs. But things only got worse for the struggling couple. In April 1999, a month before their custody was to end, He was arrested in the sexual assault case. The Bakers agreed to continue caring for Anna Mae-but only if they were named the child's guardians, which would give them full parental rights. The Hes agreed, they say, but without realizing the agreement could only be reversed by court order. ''If we had known that by signing custody to the Bakers we would end up in court, facing termination of parental rights, we never would have signed it,'' says Jack, who now works at a Chinese restaurant. The before tensions flared. "The more Jack and Casey wanted to visit their daughter,'' says one of their pro bono attorneys, David Siegel, ''the greater resistance they received form the Bakers.'' (As evidence, Siegel points to a journal that Louise kept.) In April 2000 and April 2001 the Hes petitioned to regain custody of Anna Mae but were turned down because of their unresolved legal problem. Then, on Jan. 28, 2001, Anna Mae's second birthday, the Bakers denied the Hes' request to take their daughter for a family portrait, saying she was ill. The Hes refused to leave without her, prompting the Bakers to call the police. Intimidated, the Hes, who say they feared they would be arrested, didn't try to visit for a period of four months-which may constitute legal abandonment in Tennessee-and the Bakers went to court seeking to terminate the Hes' parental right and formally adopt Anna Mae. Once, while shopping last December, the Hes happened to spot Anna Mae, who was with two of the Bakers' daughter, Hope and Aimee. According to Hope, 18, Casey put her hands on Anna Mae and screamed, ''That's my baby!'' Such incidents fuel the Bakers' contention that the Hes are emotionally unstable. Judge Childers in scheduled to deliver a decision about Anna Mae's fate in early spring. The Hes, who have two younger children,Andy,3,and Avita, 18 month, say they just want to reunite their family and return to China. The Bakers, meanwhile, are praying that day will never arrive. ''This is not about America vs. China,'' says Jerry. ''It's about a little girl who's been in our home since she was 3 weeks old.''
One Tragedy, Two Lives
Witnesses to genocides 55 years apart, two survivors forge a special bond
Jacqueline Murekatete listened closely when David Gewirtzman, a visitor to her 10th-grade class, told how he and his Jewish family had survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Polish countryside. "I really felt a bond with David,'' shy says. ''I felt that I understood him.'' Soon after that 2001 talk, she wrote Gewirtzman to tell him why: Murekatete, now 19, had survived the bloody 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which the ruling Hutus murdered more than 500,000 ethnic Tutsis, including all of her immediate family. ''I too, like you, had a feeling of [guilt] for being alive,'' she wrote. The letter so moved Gewirtzman, 75, a retired pharmacist in Great Neck, N.Y,. that he told himself, "I have to meet that girl.'' Three years on. the pair have forged a friendship that leaps generations and cultures. Gewirtzman phones regularly to check on Murekatete's grades and urges her to socialize more at Stony Brook University in New York, where she is a freshman. Shy calls weekly for advice and to chat and has spend time with Gewirtzman and his wife, Lillian, at their vacation home in the Hamptons. Most important, they get together about 10 times a year to give talks at schools and colleges, drawing strength from each other as they have witnessed. "shy feels that this is the one person who understands her without words,'' says Lillian, 69. ''And he feels very tenderly toward her.'' Born in a small Polish town, Gewirtzman was 11 when Nazis invaded in 1939,seized his father's grain company and began persecuting Jews. At first the family hid in an attic, where Gewirtzman watched as German soldiers shot many on the spot and herded hundreds of others toward trains bound for the Treblinka death camp. They fled to a farm, where Gewirtzman and seven others hid for two years in a muddy pit under a pigsty, surviving on bread and potatoes left by the farmer they paid to hide them. "I believed I was going to survive,'' he says. ''I wanted to live.'' In the end Gewirtzman says, only 16 of his town's 8,000 Jews survived. Afterward, he emigrated to New York and got a job at a carpet-padding factory. In 1954 he married fellow survivor Lillian and raised two children. In 1996 he began speaking to group like the one at Murekatete's Queens school. Hearing him, she was reminded of how her own happy youth-as one of seven children of farmers in Rwanda-ended in 1994,when the slaughter of Tutsis began. Murekatete left her parents' farm to live with a grandmother; when the violence reached their village, they hid in a government building, listening as Hutus came each night, using machetes to murder men, women and children. The pair escaped the violence but later separated when Murekatete went into an orphanage. There she learned of her family's fate. ''Everyone was dead-even my little infant brother,'' she says. In 1995 she went to live with an uncle then in Roanoke, Va., and learned that the world had largely ignored the massacre. "I became very angry,'' she says. ''I lost faith in man.'' Her optimism was restored in part by her friendship with the Gewirtzmans. ''From every point of view we are completely different,'' Gewirtzman says, ''yet when we talk, my feeling for her is, we came from the same family.'' And then there is the mission they share. As difficult as it can be to retell her story, says Murekatete, "it helps to know that I'm doing my part in preventing what happened to me from happening to someone else.''
Queen of Clubs
With a new dance hit, Kylie Minogue best on love with Olivier Martinez
With five years to go before 40, Kylie Minogue is not just a grown-up pop star.She's realist. Though her figure remains sensational-otherwise she wouldn't call her new dance-pop CD Body Language-she says she no longer flaunts it like Britney (''Flash is just everywhere, it's kind of boring'') or risks reprising Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction. ''Now I know why I get those extra stitches before I do a performance,'' she says. ''If anything's a bit loose, 'Stitch this.' '' She has got celebrity sewn up too. Already a superstar in Europe and her native Australia, she introduced herself to the U.S. with the 1988 singer ''Loco-Motion'' but hardly caused a commotion costarring in '96's Bi-Dome with then beau Pauly Shore. ''I came here for vacations, which was great-no one really knew me.'' That ended with her aptly titled 2002 hit ''Can't Get You Out of My Head.'' And this year brought a Grammy award and a No. I dance hit, ''Slow.'' Plus, she upgraded in the boyfriend department. When she met sexy Unfaithful star Olivier Martinez, 38, in Los Angeles last winter, ''I'd only seen him on a 2-in. screen on a flight-he was good,'' Minogue says, giggling. ''It's nice to know there's something solid when the craziness stops.'' And the wild nights begin? Not quite. On free evenings, "I just sit quiet, like an insect,'' she says.''When you're content, you don't need much.''
The Marrying Man
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom grants marriage licenses to gay couples-and sparks a national movement
In his office at San Francisco City Hall, Mayor Gavin Newsom is talking about the moment that launched a thousand weddings. On Jan. 20 he was in Washington, D.C., to attend the State of the Union address when President Bush praised the Defense of Marriage Act, a law that defines marriage as an act between a man and a women. Says Newsom: ''At that point in my mind I realized the President was going to use this as a wedge issue to divide this country. I felt offended by it.'' Newsom's wife, Court TV host Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom, who has been listening quietly, suddenly perks up: ''If the people in that room only had a clue what you were going to do!'' By now, almost everyone knows what Newsom, 36, decided to do. After huddling with his advisers back in San Francisco, some of whom warned he was about to commit political suicide, Newsom jump-started the national debate over gay marriage on Feb. 12 by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. ''I thought I had an obligation, '' says Newsom. ''I'd just taken an oath as mayor of the most diverse city, where people are living together and prospering together across every conceivable difference. And for the President to try to deny millions of Americans the same rights that he and I have just didn't seem right.'' Mayors in towns and cities across the country were soon following Newsom's lead (see box), heartening supporters of gay marriage-and calling to arms those who oppose it. ''Newsom acted like a dictator, trampling on the people's vote with his ultra liberal agenda,'' says Randy Thomasson, executive director of the Campaign for California Families. Indeed, on March 11, after 4,161 couples had tied the knot, California's supreme court ordered San Francisco to cease and desist. Newsom vows to keep up his crusade, although the matter is now in the hands of the courts. In the meantime, with his matinee-star good looks and an obvious flair for political theater, he has already emerged a winner. "He's got an extraordinary future. A lot of people are talking about Gavin the way they talked about Clinton 30 years ago,'' says Simon Rosenberg, director of the New Democrat Network, a Washington, D.C., organization that scouts future Democratic talent. A fourth-generation San Franciscan, Newsom was raised by his mother, who worked as a waitress, a book-keeper and a real estate agent after his parents divorced in 1971. After attending college on a partial baseball scholarship, Newsom returned home and opened a wine store with backing form billionaire Gordon Getty, a family friend. In 10 years the business had grown to include restaurants, a hotel and a winery. Newsom won his first election for a seat on the city's board of supervisors in 1998. By then he was already dating Guilfoyle Newsom, now 35,a former lingerie model and prosecutor, who would go on to help win a murder conviction in a lethal dog-mauling case that made national headlines in 2002. The case propelled Guilfoyle Newsom into a career as a TV legal commentator. Three years after the couple's 2001 wedding, she went to work for Court TV in New York City, where she still lives today, except for weekend visits home. When not courting controversy, Newsom has been knee-deep in city affairs: He just drafted a bill to cut his own salary and require staffers to pay for their own parking. "We haven't been to a movie in six months,'' says Guilfoyle Newsom. But for both of them, the benefits of keeping in the thick of things are obvious. ''The other day a 7-years-old girl was crying and tugging on my jacket at City Hall, saying, 'Mr. Mayor, come meet my parents, ' '' says Newsom of a recent gay union. ''The sky hasn't fallen in and thousands of couples have been affirmed. History will judge that what we've done is right.''
THE SINGLE GUY
With Bennifer behind him, Ben Affleck gets back to work-and returns to his roots in jersey Girl
It was just too inviting a target. When she learned that Ben Affleck would be hosting Saturday Night Live on March 13, "Weekend Update" anchor (and head writer) Tina Fey was inspired to write a sketch skewering Affleck's flop Gigli. "At the read-through, he was surprised that we were doing it," recalls Fey. "He said, 'I didn't see this one before!' [But] he just went along with it,'' The sketch, in which a mentally challenged extra on the Gigli set predicts doom for the film and Affleck insists it will "be a big, big hit,'' had the audience-and Affleck himself-howling. Says Few: "He has a very good sense of humor about himself,'' He,s needed it. Soon after Gigli, the film on which he met girlfriend jennifer Lopez, Became last year's biggest box office bomb, the couple known as Bennifer began to derail-splitting for good in January, four months after famously canceling their elaborate Santa Barbara wedding. While they are trying to carve out a friendship, keeping in touch with notes and phone calls, Affleck now faces another challenge: pulling his work out form the shadow of his private life. "There is a real downside to having a barrage of personal publicity out there," says the 31-year-old actor. "It just makes it that much harder for people to forget all that when they're watching a movie." The star-who's weathered recent box office duds Dare-devil and paycheck-is hoping that the comedy-drama Jersey Girl (opening March 26, 04) will remind audiences that the tabloid ataple is also a pretty good actor. "After the year he's had," says Jersey Girl writer-director Kevin Smith, who launched Affleck's career in indie flicks such as 1997's Chasing Amy and produced 1997's Good Will Hunting, "he deserves a break." Jersey Girl centers on Affleck as a slick Manhattan publicist who must raise his 7-year-old daughter (Raquel Castro) in a suburban New jersey town after he's widowed by Lopez, who dies 15 minutes into the movie. Affleck today jokes about his defunct relationship, but admits, "There's a lot of sadness. I go through feelings, thinking about stuff, what could have been different and so on and so forth." Adds Smith: " He's just doing what most people do when relationships end. He's taking stock and shifting priorities." That also extends to his action-hero roles. he's now yearning for smaller films. "I've come to a crossroads," says Affleck. "For a long time, I wanted to prove some success to somebody, or I was afraid everything would go away." Though Lopez has already been linked to singer Marc Anthony, Affleck remains unattached. "You meet somebody and there's a customary period where you go, 'So, what do you do? Who did you go out with"' observes Affleck. "Not only do they already know everything about you, they already have an opinion. So it's, like, an uphill battle." The one passion Affleck is indulging is gambling (see Box), appearing regularly in celebrity poker tournaments and California casinos, and he's eager to get back to screenwriting. Soon he'll head to Europe to work on a new script with Good Will Hunting partner Matt Damon, and he plans to start directing movie as well. Despite the upheaval in his life, one thing has remained constant: his 7 million, 50-acre estate on Georgia's Hampton Island. While he has been househunting in L.A. (where he had been living with Lopez), he has spent much of his post-Bennifer time in southern solitude. "I'ts quiet and meditative for me," says Affleck. "People there have a very strong sense about people's privacy-which I like.''
The Daddy Two-Step
Juggling his first album in five years with nursery duty, Clint Black saves the last dance for his favorite ladies:Lisa Hartman Black and their daughter Lily Pearl
In the kitchen of their five-bedroom Nashville colonial, country crooner Clint Black and his wife of 12 years, actress Lisa Hartman Black, are bantering like, well, an old married couple. The topic of conversation: the August night four years ago when they discovered Lisa was pregnant. The Blacks were performing at the Greek Theatre in L.A. ''And we're up there signing [their duet 'When I Said I Do'],'' says Clint, ''and we know we've got this wonderful secret.'' ''No, I didn't know then, '' Lisa, 47, corrects him. ''Yes you did,'' Clint, 42, insists. ''No, I told you that I thought I was pregnant, and I was pretty sure,'' Lisa says. ''Thing about it, 'cause I couldn't wait to get home and take a pregnancy test.'' After a moment's reflection, her husband agrees: ''That's what it was.'' Small details aside, it's not like Black to miss a thing when it comes to daughter Lily Pearl, who will celebrate her third birthday May 8, or to his wife. "He's very sweet toward Lisa, very thoughtful,'' says Kenny Loggins, Black's friend and occasional song-writing partner. ''We'll be writing for about three hours, and in the middle of it he'll pick up the phone and check in on her, see how she's doing. That's one of the thing most impressive about him: how he can be so focused on his career and at the same time so awake to the people around him.'' In fact, fact, Black, who has charted 9 platinum albums and 13 No. I singles since his 1989 debut album, Killin' Time, put his recording plans on hold after Lisa got pregnant. "I really wanted to focus on being a dad,'' says Black. Not that he was keeping a completely low profile: In addition to helping start a new label, Equity Records, Black served as a mentor to the contestants on the TV talent show Nashville Star last year, and produced winner Buddy Jewell's chart-topping album. He returned to the studio shortly after Lily's birth in '01 and finally released Spend My Time earlier this month. Even before Lily was born, family always came first. When he was home form the road, Clint attended every doctor's appointment with his wife. But ''the hardest part for me was that he was traveling,'' says Lisa, then living in L.A. with Clint. ''Not a whole lot, but when he would travel, I couldn't. We wanted to be smart and safe.'' Six weeks before her due date, the couple had a scare when Lisa went into couple had a scare when Lisa went into preterm labor. Her doctor prescribed bed rest along with a labor-inhibiting drug that Clint had to inject in Lisa's leg every three days. ''I remember he started to do it and I go, 'No, wait, wait!' '' she says with a laugh. ''But he did great. Every time.'' Though the rest of the pregnancy went smoothly, Lily Pearl was delivered by emergency C-section after 11 hours of labor-and Clint recorded every moment on three cameras. There was even a soundtrack. Just as his daughter emerged, Clint's song ''Little Pearl'' began playing on a special CD in the background. A typical day for the Blacks (who moved to Nashville in 2002) starts with mother and daughter heading off to Lily's music or gym classes. ''But Clint goes every now and then,'' says Lisa. "They have Lily and Daddy days. He'll take her to lunch. We all like to go out to dinner. Then it's her bedtime at 10. She sleeps until 9 in the morning.'' The former Knots Landing vixen, who last starred in a 1989 TV movie, has postponed her return to acting. Lily Pearl ''is going to be our only one, and I just really don't want to miss stuff,'' says her mom. Neither does her dad. ''She'll get on the phone and talk to me and she'll say, 'Are you in Baltimore, Daddy?' And I'll say, 'Yes. Remember I'm going to be signing for some people here?' She says, 'Yes. Are you coming home?' I say, 'I'm coming home tomorrow.' And she'll say, 'Okay.' So it's getting easier now, her being able to understand,'' he says, ''that I didn't just go off somewhere in the woods.''
House of Horrors
Neighbors thought marcus wesson was weird but harmless. Then police nine bodies in his home
What came first was not horrific but merely disturbing: Police were called in on a custody dispute, and after standoff, a man barricaded in a bedroom surrendered. it's what happened after Marcus Wesson,57, stepped out of his run-down dwelling on March 12 that had hardened cops fighting tears. Police found nine bodies piled like dirty laundry in a bedroom of Wesson's Fresno, Calif., home; the oldest victim was 24, and seven of them were under 9. "There was no 911, nobody tried to escape," says Latasha Carter, a neighbor. "They just seemed to line up and get killed." Police quickly identified Wesson as the man behind an unfathomable evil-the shooting deaths of nine people believed to be his children. Determining exactly what happened in his home- and what led to the worst mass murder in Fresno history-should take considerably longer, given the tangled circumstances of Wesson's large family. Unemployed and unkempt, he live with six daughters and three sons he apparently fathered with several women-two of whom also lived with him-and apparently exerted a cult like control over his brood. two of the victims may have been the product of incestuous relationships he had with two of his daughters, It also appears the children rarely if ever left their home, The women, usually outfitted in long black dresses, " came and went at all hours of the night," says Brian Caskey, who lived across the street. "But we never saw any children." The biggest mystery, though,is what snapped in the troubled mind of Marcus Wesson, long considered strange but not violent. Even his purchase of 12 antique mahogany coffins struck most neighbors as simply peculiar."We thought, 'Eww, bizarro,'" says attorney Frank Muna, who in 1999 sold the Wesson clan a home. "He was incoherent at times, despondent, but he wasn't violent.I never thought for one second he would hurt anybody.'' During the past two decades Wesson bounced form one cramped dwelling to another, living on a boat, in a squatter's camp and in a toolshed and picking up debts and children along the way. Born in Kansas and once a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Wesson "kept a real tight rein on his children,'' says Santa Cruz harbormaster Larry White, who says Wesson rented a boat slip in the mid '80s and lived on a 26-ft. sloop with his wife, Elizabeth, and as many as six children. In 1999 Wesson arranged to purchase Frank Muna's fire-gutted historic home in Fresno, agreeing to make payments towards its price of $57,500 and promising to restore it. But Wesson made few repairs and lived with his family in a 500-sq.-ft. toolshed behind the house. He barked commands at the four women he lived with "as if he was speaking to a dog,'' says Muna, who remembers visiting and seeing the women "immediately get behind Wesson and not look at you. They just looked down, almost bowing their heads.'' Wesson eventually lost the property and moved illegally into empty office space in a working-class part of central Fresno. Neighbors often saw him repairing an old bus late at night alongside two or three women. Three weeks before the murders, Wesson had a screaming match with Elizabeth, who fled to her neighbor Linda Morales's apartment. "I was scared he was going to break down my door," says Morales. Then, on Feb. 27, Fresno officials threatened to boot the Wessons unless they got a permit to live on the commercial property by March 12-the day of the murders. Around 2 p.m. on that day, two women called police, claiming Wesson had refused to return their children. "Elizabeth said that [Wesson] told her, 'I'd rather kill the kids then give them back to you,'' says Morales. When police arrived, Wesson calmly spoke with them at his door for 45 minutes. "He said he would relinquish the children but not under the present circumstances," says Fresno Police Sgt. Gregg Sanders. But when an adult in the house said Wesson might have a gun, he ran into a bedroom and locked the door. Police evacuated the adults form the building and called in a SWAT team. Two hours later Wesson emerged with bloodstains on his clothing. Elizabeth and two other women "were fainting on my lawn and saying, 'My baby's in there, my baby, my baby,' '' says Morales. Neighbors recall hearing gunshots, though it is not clear if it was before or after police arrived. As of now, investigators are not sure when the nine victims were killed. While authorities sort through DNA evidence, Wesson's neighbors grapple with having had such a monster in their midst. On the street outside the crime scene mourners place flowers and stuffed animals and cluster in quiet vigils. Angelina Ivey brought her two young daughters to the makeshift memorial. "We wanted to apologize to the kids," she says, "because no one helped them.''