Runaway Bride

I didn't want to marry a multimillionaire," says Darva Conger, shaking her head at the thought of it "I didn't want to marry anybody. I was happily not married all my life, you know?"

Imagine her surprise, then, when Rick Rockwell--a standup comic and real estate baron--slipped a $35,000 wedding ring on her finger in front of 22 million viewers of Fox' Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? The ensuing honeymoon cruise was no love boat. According to Conger it wasn't a sex boat, either: The marriage was never consummated. In the time it took to say "annulment," there began a slew of revelations about Rick that included the imposition of a restraining order filed by a former girlfriend.

The tabloids had a field day. Fox vowed to clean up its act and drop the sensational reality TV. Rick took his act back on the road, to the comedy clubs where he'd once tried to make a living. And Darva--well, Darva didn't have an act. She was an emergency room nurse. Only now, the tabloid press followed her everywhere and made her job impossible. So she did some interviews, weighed her options, tried to figure out how to fashion a new life after her old one had been snatched away. "I had already leaped into one thing in my life, and look what happened," she says. "So I took my time before making what I hope is a wise choice for me." She shrugs. "Besides, isn't there a blueprint for this? One gets involved in a scandal of one sort or another, does the book of the week, the movie of the week and then poses nude."

Sitting in a Sunset Strip restaurant, dressed down in jeans, T-shirt and black leather jacket, Conger laughs; these days she'd rather find the lighter side of her situation than be as defensive and hurt as she once was. "I've tried to maintain a sense of humor throughout this," she says matter-of-factly. "At first I was touchy, because I felt violated. But as time goes by, I have to let that go and accept that I did do it, and I'm going to learn from it, and in the big picture it's a blip."

But for a while, it was a big blip for Darva, an avowed tomboy and outdoorswoman who grew up in southern California and joined the Air Force when she was 21. The military led her to a nursing career, which she was pursuing when an emergency room doctor she knew gave her name to one of the producers of a show designed to capitalize on the success of ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? "The producer called me at home and said I could go to Vegas for a week and they'd put me up at the Las Vegas Hilton. She said, 'There are 50 girls, it's going to be a lot of fun, there's an annulment clause,' all this stuff. So I said OK. I expected I'd be there for a week, take a little break and do something I'd never done before. Then I'd go home and go back to work."

And she never wondered, What if he chooses me? "I'm sure subconsciously it was there," she says. "But I just blew it off. I thought, It's not going to happen, and if for some reason it did, he'd have to be somebody with a sense of humor. We'd have it annulled right away, and maybe we'd be friends. Maybe we'd even date. But nobody would take it seriously. They couldn't. It was the silliest thing I'd ever heard of."

At rehearsals, she adds, the other girls didn't seem any more serious about the marriage than she was. And even during the show, when she kept making the cut as the group of 50 brides-to-be was narrowed down, the mystery millionaire--Rockwell was hidden behind a screen--was not foremost in her mind. "I was getting more and more nervous," she says. "But I was thinking, Gosh, I don't want to screw up on national TV-- not, Gosh, I really want to impress Rick Rockwell. I wasn't focused on him at all. My focus was to not sound like an idiot and to do well on national TV. Unfortunately, that was perceived well by him. It's amazing what little tricks of denial the mind can play. If I had been thinking, I would have screwed up intentionally. But I just wasn't thinking."

So Darva was chosen. "For the first time in my life I was caught completely flat-footed. I did not know what to do. Consequently, I did nothing," she says. She thought about (text concluded on page 164) Darva (continued from page 144) calling off the wedding; after all, nobody was holding a gun to her head. But she felt a strange sense of responsibility: Millions of dollars had been spent on the show, the audience was waiting, she'd agreed to be on the show knowing it could come to this. "Obviously," she concedes, "I got a little carried away. I think everybody in the world would have been just fine if I had said no. And I certainly wish that I had. But I didn't. And that's something I had to deal with."

She dealt with it immediately, when she realized she and Rockwell had nothing in common. "We never would have met--and if we had, we wouldn't have gotten along," she says. "So why pretend?" After their awkward, platonic honeymoon cruise, she left him at the dock, went home and filed for an annulment--and the press descended upon both her and Rockwell. "It would have bummed me out to have a sex scandal," she jokes. "Mine was a no-sex scandal, thank goodness." The restraining order filed against Rockwell made the no-sex scandal juicier; no such dirt turned up on Darva, but that didn't prevent reporters from camping in front of her house, hiding in trees with telephoto lenses and offering to pay her big money for interviews.

At first, Darva simply wanted her privacy back. "I just wanted them all to go away," she says. "But they stalk you, they hound you, they threaten you, they say, 'We won't leave until you talk.' So, naively thinking it would be settled, I tried to go on the most reputable morning shows to get my story out. But reporters were still outside my door when I got home." She lost her job because of the publicity. She was hired by another hospital, but when the tabloids followed her there, she couldn't continue.

"I tried to go back to my life, but my life was gone," she says. "So I began to court publicity to try to get something going, because I had to make money. It's like you get caught in a web, and you can't get out of it. And then you become the very thing they said you were to begin with--which you didn't want to be. The accusations fly left and right: 'She said that she just wanted to go back to her life, but look, she's on TV again!' Well, damn it, they're stalking me with cameras most of the time, and they're the ones who have created such public intoxication."

Now Darva is trying to take advantage of new opportunities. Posing for Playboy is one of those opportunities. She had other offers to pose, for more money, but says she has always found Playboy to be respectable and well done. "I've never had any problem with Playboy," she says, "and neither has my family. So nobody had to talk me into it. I just had to decide: Is this going to be good for me in the long run? And I'm comfortable that it will be."

She knows her critics will say she's seeking public attention even though she once said she wanted privacy. But this time the criticism won't bother her. "It's OK," she says. "I am courting the publicity now. I need to, to make a living--being a professional celebrity doesn't pay very well."

Darva laughs, then gets serious. "And all I have to say to the media is, if you want to talk to me, I'll talk to you. But don't come to my home, don't harass my friends and don't harass my family. Stay out of my trash. Let's set some boundaries here."

Eventually, Darva figures, her notoriety will fade and she will be able to get back to a structured career, presumably nursing. In the meantime, she's pleased to once again be calling a few of the shots, to show the world a little more of the woman behind the media madness. "I feel comfortable with these photographs, and that's nice," she says. "It's bad enough when your most embarrassing moment has been watched by 22 million people, and it's constantly replayed." Darva grins. "I've certainly got enough regrets--I don't need any more."

"We never would have met--and if we had, we wouldn't have gotten along," she says.