Secret Love

More than 20,000 couples will do something furtive in California this year--they will marry. State law allows confidential marriages with a minimum of fuss: no marriage license, no blood test, no three-day waiting period and, best of all, no public record that the marriage ever took place.

The century-old statute was intended to allow common-law couples to legitimize their marriages quietly and without embarrassment. Now growing numbers of couples are using the law to avoid red tape and keep word of the marriages from parents and friends. In 1972, only 532 such weddings were performed in Los Angeles County and adjacent Orange County. Last year it was 12,212.

"It's one of the greatest laws," says Edie Steinmetz, owner of the Doves of Happiness Wedding Chapel in Inglewood, a leader in the state's $700,000-a-year secret-marriage industry. "It allows a lot of people to get married who otherwise would not be able to"--including the already married.

Couples fill in a confidential marriage form, which is filed with the county clerk and is then unavailable for inspection by anyone. That makes it easy for applicants intent on bigamy. Says William St. John, Orange County clerk: "There is nothing on the form that requires a couple to say how long they have been living together, if they had a previous marriage or divorce, and if the divorce is finalized."

Dr. A.W. Morey, owner of the Lafayette Wedding Chapel in Long Beach, shrugs off the bigamy problem and insists: "This is a very moral enterprise. We're trying to get the largest number of people living together to come in and get married legally." Chapel owners are legally authorized to preside at weddings as long as they have some sort of ministerial certificate, which in California is almost as easy to get as a secret wedding. Last year Dr. Morey, who says he is a minister, got 1,500 couples to come in and marry, at $20 per ceremony.

Blood Test. Since the confidential weddings do not require proof of a blood test, some state officials are concerned about increases in the incidence of venereal disease and rubella during pregnancies. State Assemblyman Robert Burke of Huntington Beach introduced a bill last spring that would require a blood test and a three-day waiting period for all marriages, but the wedding chapels lobbied hard against the bill and killed it in committee. "Some of our customers may be frightened to death of needles," explains Steinmetz. Then, too, the tests would add to the cost of secret weddings, which usually run from $20 to $50 for a simple ceremony. Chapel operators also feared that a three-day wait would send customers scurrying for quickie Las Vegas weddings.

Meanwhile, business is growing, partly because the chapels try so hard to please. Steinmetz has a stable of ministers who carry paging devices so that he can beep them in for quickie weddings. Some chapels will perform the ceremony wherever the customers want it--on mountaintops or beaches, in stables or even on rubber rafts. One couple told Steinmetz's husband Joe, who helps operate the Doves of Happiness, that they wanted to be married in the nude. "I asked them if they also wanted the pastor nude," he says. "They said they had to discuss it. So far I haven't heard from them but I guess we could do it." He promptly beeped for the pastor, who called in and gamely said that he too was willing to perform in the buff.

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