Usually fairly affable, Jack gets pretty mad when someone starts a rumor that he's getting a divorce.

"Yesterday some hick reporter from the Mainland caught up with me here jogging on the beach and he said 'Mr. Lord, I hear you and your wife are fussing into a divorce? I want the scoop. I've got it from reliable sources!'

"I was flabbergasted for a second. By instinct I grabbed the guy by the shoulder to pound him, but as quickly it faded, for years ago I had promised Marie to control my temper; no more fights with guys. I used to use my fists in a flash. I paid a few hospital bills for guys who'd shoved me into a fight, and who'd got the worst of it. But this, to start some insane rumor that Marie and I...We've never had cross word between us!

"Marie and me? You've got to be crazy!' I roared. Releasing the guy, I walked off. They pop that rumor lingo in Hollywood for the gossips, but here on the Islands it's unheard of. It has never touched Marie and me. No reasons. And no one had better start it.

"I wouldn't disappoint Marie for anything in the world," Jack Lord said solemnly. "She's the motor in our car of one, and without her, I wouldn't be half - or even a tenth - of the things I am. My little woman believes I can do anything, and I find myself actually doing things I never dreamed I could do. Like right now, my new book! Who would ever have thought of me being an author?

"Hawaii is sheer paradise, beautiful every hour of the twenty-four, and if you have a camera of any kind, you feel compelled to capture some of it on film. I did.  Marie thought they were good, different. She suggested I capture them and write about them, and here it is - 'Jack Lord's Hawaii."

More important to the six-foot-two, 180-pound ex-football star, Cadillac salesman, rodeo rider, is the fact that he has been and will be married to his first love for twenty-one years come January 13th. She gave up everything to back me in the one thing I wanted to do with my life - become an actor," he disclosed quietly. "I promised myself that one day I'd make us millionaires. By all calculations, three years hence, we'll have made it. But that really isn't important anymore; it's just another goal.  We have everything we have ever wanted in life - and more.    Having each other is the most."

Jack Lord is Mr. Hawaii in Honolulu, besides being the star of CBS TV's Hawaii Five-0. I'm a pilot and my run is Hawaii-San Francisco. I spend my few off hours layover in Hawaii on the beach were I stay at the Kahala Hilton. A year ago I discovered the reason I kept bumping into Jack Lord on the surf, was due to the fact that this was also his home.  He owns a $126,000 condominium here. Once in a while we yak in the sun. He doesn't make the beach scene too often, since he says he works twelve hours a day, six days a week, eight months of the year, filming the series.

When Jack and I coincide on the beach, he is one frank, honest, open, likeable hombre. No put-on of being the great star. Rather in many conversations he attributes his success all to his little woman!

"I hit the alarm every morning at four," he's told me. "I jog along here on the Kahala beach for a  couple of miles. By six A.M. I hit the studio ready for work, my lines rehearsed and everything worked out in my mind during my jog. Quitting time is seven."

In Hawaii the sun doesn't slip down to China until real late. The other eve I found Jack relaxing on the beach with a soft drink. He doesn't hard drink and he quit smoking.

"I quit a year ago." Was it difficult? "I had tried to quit a few times, but I didn't break the habit for good until Marie asked me to do it, as an anniversary present. She just asked me, and I haven't hankered for a cigarette since.

"I think if Marie asked me to do anything, it would be easy because she asked me. She is part of me and I am of her. Our maid often exclaims, 'Mr. Lord, you and Mrs. Lord are just one. You think and talk and react alike all of the time. You both give me the same answers when I ask!'

"Twenty-one years, the best years a man could ask for on this great big beautiful world of ours," he reminisced, "we've been together. There's never been a thought of any other woman."

As we lay there on the white sands of Hawaii, watching the ever-changing surf, the huge breakers rushing in and their foam turning to mist against the blue sky, Jack talked about many things. A couple of real cool chicks in the briefest of bikinis  walked by, and stopped, silhouetted against the sunset. They were waiting for the reaction of two lone males. There was none. "How can you pass up such obvious stuff?" I asked him.

Jack smiled. "You've got to meet Marie. You'll readily understand!"

The Lord's don't get back to Hollywood often since they moved to Hawaii to make Hawaii Five-0.

The next a.m. of my layover, I rose very early,  even though my call was eight A.M. I wanted to see if Jack was really out there  jogging on the beach. It was five-thirty A.M., a beautiful dawn. Sure enough here came this big, lean rugged figure jogging back from Diamond Head. I waited, and there he was. He sat down to rest briefly. I asked, "Does Marie ever jog too? But then it's too early for her."

"Marie hits it at three A.M., an hour before me," he replied. "She cooks a whale of a breakfast. I wake up with he smell of homemade hot muffins or rolls, sausages, eggs, ham, potatoes, the whole works; one a regular sailor enjoys. My father was in the steamship line. I went to sea as a youngster. My big meal is

Speaking of Marie, suddenly there she was. She's a petite brunette, French, with a tiny waist, and well-rounded figure which was revealed in her bathing suit. She's slim and trim and what women call chic!  She'd come to take a morning dip before the tourists take up the beach. "This way it's our own private beach," she laughed.

"It's funny how the right woman can make a wonderful life for a man. I shudder to think what might have been my life, if I hadn't been lucky and met Marie," Jack mused. "When I see all of the guys hung up with the wrong dames or the debris of wrecked marriages and wrecked lives!  If everyone could have it as good as we have it."

"Before Marie?" I asked. Jack laughed. "I was selling cars in New York City daytime, and I had this acting urge. I moonlighted in acting school at night. Sandy Meisner of the  Neighborhood Playhouse told me I had the talent, if I had the guts to work at it for the next twenty years.  I told him I had and would. Marie made it possible by her faith and willingness to sacrifice. With any other woman, I doubt if I would have made it.

"The way I met Marie is better than a script," Jack disclosed, watching her tiny figure enjoying the surf in front of us. "It was at the end of World War II. A sailor, I was home on leave. Even though I was born in Brooklyn, I had spent much of my boyhood on my grandfather's farm, with big pears and apple orchards in the upper Hudson River Valley. I loved hunting and now I was hunting in the woods, when I saw the house of my dreams, a charming stone cottage.

"I'm a salesman. I wanted that house. I fell in love with it. I d decided I'd get it. I've always had that kind of push - something I wanted I'd go after it, and keep trying until I'd get it. That is, if I had the real incentive about something. I discovered by inquiry that a designer in Mid-Manhattan owned  it. She used it for vacation and weekends. I went to her apartment day after day, and I never found her in. When I finally did, she told the switchboard operator to put me on the house telephone. She wouldn't see me. She was constantly pestered by real estate men. She said she had designed and build the house herself. It was a permanent home - no sale!

"I explained that I was not a real estate man. I was a sailor home on leave. I told her I was shipping out in the morning. In fact, I was at my parents home ready to shove off. I made the pitch that I had spent my entire three weeks leave trying to contact her.

"This embarrassed her, her putting me down so hard, she finally agreed that I could at least come and see her and discuss the house, but there would be no sale. That was a challenge to any salesman who'd been off his selling, while being at sea.

"We sat up most of the night talking about almost everything else; I fell in love with her on the spot. She was unique. She was interested in everything that interested me, including theater. Three years later after a long courtship of letters and little presents from every port, we were married.

"The date was January, 13, 1949.  By that time I was out of the service and was making good money selling cars in New York.

"One day," Jack recalled, "one of my favorite  actors, Gary Cooper, walked in our place, He was at the time driving a big custom-build Duesenberg with all special gadgets, including a second windshield in the back. We got to talking cars and we got into the fascinating subject of old cars, which he took quite a fancy to. He came in to see the automobile show of old cars. Later on in Hollywood, I ran into him at a party. I was about to introduce myself , when Coop grinned, 'Yup, you're the kid who likes Duesenbergs. Remember, we met in New York.' Remember? Wow!"

Jack built his own studio near Diamond Head in the Islands. "That upset a lot of people who thought a studio might nosedive a lot of property values in this exclusive neighborhood. In fact," Jack said, "Richard Boone was the more upset, because he had planned to launch a similar series in the Island based on the Honolulu Police Department. I guess he wished the ocean would swallow us, but we're still here. And the neighbors have taken a real liking to us."

No need to ask Jack but he is very active in civic work and politics. He heads various organizations and charities. And he makes many appearances for "Direction Sports" which helps underprivileged youngsters to learn through sports. Groups of ghetto kids are flown over from the Mainland for a week of fun and stay at one of the various hotels. The first man they ask to meet is "Mr. Hawaii - Jack Lord." Jack is always on hand to help entertain them.

"I'm excited about my new book," he confessed, "but my real love is acting. And next is painting. I've been painting for a number of years.  I have a great art studio in our home. I turn out two or three paintings a month in spare hours." Jack didn't need to mention that his paintings are owned by private collectors. It is also said that they hang in many of the world's most famous museums, including the Metropolitan in New York. "What gives me a thrill," he said modestly, "is when I paint some to auction off for charity, and they all sell in an hour. That's real satisfaction," he added reflectively.

Marie now coming out of the surf, stepped into her beach robe, and called that she was going in. Jack, a bit lazed in the relaxation of the early morning softness and lull of quiet, called back that he'd be along in minutes.

"What makes your wife so important in your career?" I asked naively. She seemed ultra feminine to be a dominant business woman, to run his career.

"She is very soft, very feminine," Jack agreed. "I'll tell you what she did. I was making $18,000 a year selling Caddies in New York, when I told Marie that I wanted to quit and take the gamble and go to Hollywood and starve if need be, and try acting full time - she was willing! Even if we went flat broke, she was willing to make the struggle to see if I could make it in acing. It might take the twenty years as Sandy Meisner said, I told her. That was okay with Marie. She believed in me. More important, she wanted me to do what made me happy, I was stagnating selling cars. We made the move. And I learned to live up to her belief and her ideals, those that she saw in me.

"She gave up her own career as a successful designer when we married. I was selfish enough to ask her to do this, to become my full-time wife.

"It didn't all happen overnight. It took a lot of those twenty long years, Sandy Meisner had warned me. We had our love and each other, and that was what was important."

That stone house cottage she built and you wanted to buy? What happened to that?

"Oh," Jack laughed, "we enjoyed it, but it had to go to make our dreams of acting in Hollywood come true. It was rough at times but Marie never complained. My first real luck was Stoney Burke, the TV series. Now we have everything we want right here in Hawaii.

"Right now," he disclosed, "I'm deeply interested in ecology. What better place in the world than here, to study racial relations relative to environment? We have the white, the black, the  yellow, the brown, and almost every race all living peacefully and getting along well together here on the Islands."

For the next few minutes, Jack began selling me on Hawaii. What a paradise it is - what a perfect place in the world to live; its beauty, its climate, its people. "Marie and I want to spend the rest of our lives here in this paradise," he said.

"Always the salesman," I laughed at him. He grimaced. "You're right."

Oh yes, one parting thought. Jack says he never goes anywhere without his Marie. It's in his contract, that where ever he goes, so does Marie, and first class at the expense of CBS-TV.

"We went to the Mainland this past spring on our own," he said. "We keep an apartment in Hollywood the year round." What did they do? Go to a lot of Hollywood parties to catch up with the razz-ma-tazz glamour of Movieland?

"Not at all.  We don't waste a minute. We have so many business deals going when we hit the Mainland," he laughed. "We really work. We come back here to the Islands to relax, and to work," he added.

"My big thrill however," he concluded, rising and shaking off the flecks of sand, "is taking Marie to France, to Paris to be exact. I love to take her to the big fashion houses and let her buy all the clothes she wants. For many years she was making her own. Now she can have any and everything she wants. That is the best part of our success - the sharing of it. That's the only way to survive success - it's the sharing!"

The next week back in Waikiki I ran into a friend of the Jack Lords. He told me, "If you want to get along with Jack, don't pry. He's very secretive. You've got to take him as he is. Don't argue with him. Best to let the whole thing drop."

And here I thought Jack was real communicative.