Love and Mariel

VALENTINES

Steve Crisman & Mariel Hemingway

The first time Mariel Hemingway laid eyes on Steve Crisman she was sitting at a corner table on the balcony of New York's Hard Rock Cafe. "That's really somebody I'd like to meet," she told herself, but it didn't happen until she came back the next night. "He threw the 'darlin' ' line at me [in his Virginia drawl] and I was finished," she recalls. "I must have been in love, because the next thing I know it's four in the morning and we're at the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park." The next thing they knew it was December 9 and they were getting married, to the strains of Pachelbel and Bach. (Crisman seems to favor women with a literary pedigree—his first wife was the daughter of novelist James Clavell.) After a honeymoon in London, Paris, and Burgundy, they're now settled in (with dogs B.T. and B.C.) in Alpine, New Jersey. The twenty-three-year-old Hemingway has two new movies out this month— Creator, a comedy with Peter O'Toole as a scientist hoping to reanimate his dead wife, and The Mean Season, a murder mystery co-starring Kurt Russell. Crisman, thirty-five, still works as manager of the Hard Rock, a job full of loud noise and hard knocks, but not as many as one might assume from the black eye and the cast on his hand. While moving into their house, a trunk fell on him, temporarily requiring metal pins through his pinkie and ring finger. "She had to do all the moving after that," he says sheepishly. Then he decided to give Hemingway boxing lessons, and during one sparring session the well-toned star of Personal Best accidentally pulverized her beloved's left eye. "It was the hardest punch I ever took," he marvels.

Cyndi Stivers