Love Can Hurt

“Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart,” Nelson Eddy sang.

Suddenly from the rear of the theater came the voice of a woman, joining him in duet.  The packed audience turned in amazement.  She was walking down the aisle, singing back to him.  By the end of the song, she was on stage looking into his eyes and the audience was standing and cheering.

She was his co-star in eight films, Jeanette MacDonald.  Their love was plain for all to see, recalls Frank Laric, who was sitting in the third row.  Nelson hadn't even known she was in town.  “Where'd you come from?”  he asked as the audience wildly applauded.

“I got in last night,” she said.  He asked her to dinner and then they sang “Indian Love Call” together.

In these magic moments between Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald and in those replayed in their movies across the nation, America discovered twin flames. It was the summer of 1941.  Theirs was the perfect match and more, twin flames to a T—two hearts in three-quarter time. Although their romance blossomed in May, it never came to fruition.

Seeing their love on screen, hearing it in their duets, seeing it as their eyes told one another and the whole world the pain of a forbidden love, more than one generation of Americans have  been introduced to that special love of twin flames.

Although not many people today sit down and listen to Jeanette and Nelson sing arias, their music and especially their films have a timeless appeal which transcends a bland corniness in plot and dialogue. That appeal, that mysterious ingredient, is the love that everyone seeks, but few find, in the union of twin flames.

Yet they were forced to hide that real-life romance from the world.  Official studio history and fan magazines billed them as casual friends who sometimes argued and who were blissfully married to other people.

And that story might have stood forever had it not been for the efforts of Sharon Rich and Diane Goodrich who released their book,  Farewell to Dreams,  in 1979.  They compiled it not from the papier-mâché newspaper accounts of the day, but from Nelson's and Jeanette's friends, neighbors, and relatives who finally agreed to tell the truth—and from doormen, maids, and extras who filled in details and corroborated evidence.  “Every line in there,” Sharon says, “is verbatim from what somebody told us, as closely as possible.”

Twin Flames: Karmic Separation

Sharon and Diane discovered a massive cover-up by the studio and by Nelson and Jeanette, who swore their friends to secrecy.  They found that they were in fact wildly in love, more deeply than any of their characters, in a romance that spanned 30 years.

But Jeanette's ambition, their occasionally violent tempers, and a strange combination of people and circumstances kept them apart for their entire lives.  Their life story is a tragedy of twin flames.

Yet their story still has great worth in its implicit warning to us in our quest for our perfect love:  if we do not overcome our karma, we can never enjoy complete happiness whether or not we find our twin flame.

Their undying love, another sign of twin flames, extended beyond that one life, or so they believed.

Authors Sharon and Diane discovered that Jeanette and Nelson believed in reincarnation.  In the 1930s, a psychic told Jeanette that she had known Nelson before when they lived as brother and sister in the 1830s in England.  On the trail of the MacDonald/Eddy story, Diane Goodrich went to another psychic, saying nothing of what Jeanette had learned, and this psychic gave exactly the same reading.

Although it is easy to expect that twin flames would always be lovers, that is not necessarily the case.  A brother/sister relationship does not preclude a soul mate or twin flame bond, as the love of twin flames stretches beyond one or two lifetimes back to the point of creation.

In the brother/sister mode, it can establish a bond of commitment and pristine love, a mutual adoration and achievement.  It is a very real part of the spiral that builds, lifetime after lifetime, between twin flames preparing for that ultimate union wherein the fruit of their love becomes a unique contribution upon the altar of humanity.  A love so powerful as to elevate and ennoble all it touches and to purify and renew the stream of mankind's awareness of what true love can be and conquer.

Jeanette and Nelson also believed in karma—that they were responsible for the current circumstances of their lives, which were the result of their past actions.  They must have had a fair amount of karma between them, as twin flames often do, for, as it turns out, the course of their love did not run smooth.

In octaves of light they would await their next entrance on the stage of life, a chance to build their lives anew, this time to make the choice to conquer pride and ambition…for Love.

Back in embodiment, wise to the forces that assail real Love and—above all, protective of their marriage made in heaven—they would realize on earth their most sacred secret hope: to be one forevermore.

And nothing and no one would come between them–for without Love, life is “as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal…For now we see through a glass darkly but then face to face.”  And the decree of the Lord God upon the twin flames he had made would not be denied:  “What therefore God hath joined together let no man put asunder.”

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This article excerpt, published by The Summit Lighthouse, was mentioned in Teaching on Twin Flames by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, San Francisco,  February 13, 1988.