The Best Love Story

Jeanne Conway and Douglas O’Connor
By LOIS SMITH BRADY
WHEN Gen. Douglas John O’Connor, 76, talks about being 17 and meeting Jeanne O’Brien, he often exclaims, “I remember it vividly!”
They were introduced in 1949 at Manhattanville College, her alma mater, when he and some fellow students from St. Peter’s College in Jersey City arrived for a conference. “And who did I meet but Jeanne Louise O’Brien,” he recalled, slowly enunciating her name as if it were a favorite line in a poem. “She was stunning, obviously an athlete.”
He soon learned that she had grown up riding polo ponies in Loudonville, N.Y., played field hockey and drove a convertible that matched her camel’s hair coat.
They dated for years, though both say they were more like best friends. “There was no hanky-panky,” she, now also 76, reported in her very direct manner. “He was very intellectual and friendly and a gentleman. It made me happy to see him so happy in my company.” He transferred to West Point in 1950, hanging her picture in his locker. “I had plans to marry her at some time in the future,” he said.
Instead they parted in 1954, when her father died suddenly and she moved back to Loudonville, and he was sent to Georgia for training following his graduation from West Point. “A long-distance relationship was not in the cards in that era,” he said.
In 1955, she married someone else, becoming Jeanne Conway. “I remember it vividly,” he said. “I’m at Fort Bragg in the 82nd Airborne Division jumping out of airplanes and I pick up the Sunday New York Times and whose picture do I see but the girl of my dreams?”
He was disappointed, but not devastated. “I’m an engineer by training so you say, ‘Well, that didn’t work out. What’s the solution? What’s next?’” For the next 50-plus years, he shuttled between civilian and Army positions, marrying twice along the way, both times to women named Mary Alice.
In 1974, he was living in California and working for General Instrument when the first Mary Alice had an aneurysm and died suddenly. “I was completely traumatized,” he said. To his surprise, he received a condolence letter from Mrs. Conway, who was living in Manhattan and raising two daughters. She and her husband became part of his “recovery team,” he said, organizing East Coast parties for him. Six months later, still in mourning, he met his next wife on a street corner. “I’m standing in the sunlight in California and the tears are coming down my cheek and this woman stopped and said, ‘Are you all right?’” he recalled. “And I said, ‘No, I’m not all right.’”
In 1978, Mrs. Conway joined ITT in Manhattan, eventually directing its employee assistance program. “You can only clean out so many closets,” she said. Her former beau, meanwhile, returned to the Army, becoming a brigadier general. By 1995 he was retired from the service and a widower again. His second Mary Alice died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. A year and a half later, Mrs. Conway’s husband died of heart attack. The general swiftly wrote her a condolence letter. General O’Connor had kept photos of her in a drawer at home, but rarely looked at them. He didn’t need to. He vividly remembered her. “Love never fails,” he said. “I really believe that.”
Months later she and her sister, Helen Maher, invited General O’Connor to a family party in Florida. “It was like we never left off,” Mrs. Conway said. Her sister commented: “They have both weathered many storms and always had fidelity and faith and focus.”
He began flying east to see her. “We had done what we had to do with our lives,” she said. “Now, we had the chance to concentrate on each other again,” she said. She describes their relationship as much freer now, “a magic slate” upon which they can “write anything they want. They became inseparable. “If I’m not with Jeanne, I feel like I’m just waiting to be back together with her,” he said. “It’s that kind of relationship.”
On Nov. 24, in chilly-yet-sunny weather, the couple were married at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side. It was a ceremony much like one they might have had in the 1950s. Guests in flip hairdos and wingtip shoes sang “Amazing Grace.” The bridegroom wore his uniform out of nostalgia because that’s what he always wore when they first dated. When the church doors opened after the ceremony, it was strange to see 2007 Hummers and taxis roaring by.
“My philosophy is, this was always meant to be,” the bridegroom said a few days before. “This was the girl of my dreams, the girl I had on a pedestal when I was a young man.” He added, “It’s as if the greatest dream you ever had finally came true.”