Soap Opera Weekly, June 2003

Romantic of the Year

David Andrew Macdonald (EDMUND, Guiding Light) pulled off a screen-worthy surprise for his wife, Nikki, using elaborate ruses to keep it from her despite the fact that their parents, friends and neighbors all knew, as did everyone at GL.

It began six months ago when the couple decided to take a trip to Paris in May and stay with David's sister Alison and her family. Unfortunately, after their plane tickets were bought, David found out he couldn't get time off from GL. Nikki "mulled it over" and finally elected to go on her own. Since David would spending his days at the studio, their baby, Ian, would stay with Nikki's parents in Pittsburgh.

Then, a few weeks before Nikki's departure, David was told that GL had managed to work out his schedule so he'd be free for one of the two weeks. He decided, however, not to share the good news with Nikki--rather, he would fly to Paris ahead of her and be at Alison's when she arrived. On a Friday night, David drove Nikki and Ian to Pittsburgh so that she could spend a couple of days with her parents before flying to Paris on Monday afternoon. He left on Saturday--ostensibly to make the seven-hour drive back to New Jersey, where he would study his script and prepare for work on Monday--only he drove to the Pittsburgh airport and took off for France.

"On the plane," David told me, "I was sitting next to a lovely woman named Maisie who was going over for a Christie's auction. At one point I turned to her and said, 'You're about to hear me lie through my teeth to my wife, and this is why...'"

David found the deceptive call so difficult, with its bad connection and Nikki so upset and convinced that something was amiss, that he whispered to Maisie that he felt he should confess. "Maisie said, 'Oh no, just keep lying. Girls love surprises. It'll pay off in the end.'"

Nikki, meanwhile, was "a wreck" as she told me, because she hadn't heard from him for eight and a half hours. "He always calls me along the way. It was a rainy, miserable night, and I kept trying to reach him, but his cell phone would just go to his voice mail. And it didn't seem normal that he wouldn't call me back. So I started thinking: Oh, God, he was in an accident!"

By the time she did hear from him, she blurted, according to David: "Where are you? I'm so nervous, you bum!" He claimed he was in their back yard, walking the dogs. He said he couldn't call from the road because his cell phone was broken and that their current connection was fuzzy because something was wrong with their home portable as well. Nikki wanted to call him right back to try for a better connection. He protested he was too tired to talk. "Which I thought was weird," Nikki says. "And you know what else I thought? I thought: He's lying to me! He probably isn't even at home. He went out in Red Bank."

"Or I was in some cathouse on the Jersey shore," David jokes.

She next heard from him Sunday night, which was actually early Monday in Paris. "I got up at 4:30 a.m.," David says, "and told her I was going to bed." He called her twice again before her Monday afternoon flight to Paris to further assuage any doubts she was nursing as to his whereabouts. Which made it that much more shocking when she arrived at Alison's apartment near the Eiffel Tower and found David in a chair in the living room. Her brain couldn't process it. "I thought: I've just flown seven and a half hours to New Jersey. I swear. I mean, it was David, in the exact same clothes he was in on Saturday. It was very surreal."

She finally came out of her shock while sitting in a nearby cafe. "Then I got pretty excited, because I was going to explore Paris with him after all." They spent days sightseeing, visiting museums, walking along the Seine. "Our favorite thing was going to Montmarte, because we found a little cafe off the beaten track and had a drink and took a little walking tour on our own."

Eventually, David had to return home to work, while Nikki stayed on an additional week. "I was pretty sad after he left, especially that first day because it rained a lot. I told him on the phone, 'Paris is crying because you left.' I also told him he's got to win Romantic of the Year for this one."