True love in Vegas? The Wedding Queen sells it

LAS VEGAS - It is a busy day inside A Little White Wedding Chapel, an anything-but-little conglomerate of five wedding rooms, a wedding gazebo and the "World Famous Little White Wedding Chapel Drive Thru Tunnel of Love."

There is also a flower store, photography studio and a rental shop offering gowns, tuxedos and gold lame jackets in every size and style along with commemorative Little White Chapel baseball caps, T-shirts, pens, flashlights and stress squeeze balls in the shape of a heart.

At this particular moment on this particular day - 1:05 p.m. Friday, Feb. 3, 2006 - The Wedding Queen stands on the merlot-colored carpet inside her most popular room, The Original Little White Wedding Chapel. She is flanked by two plant stands - white plastic cherubs - overflowing with bouquets of white artificial roses.

The cherub to her right conceals a shelf that holds the DVD, VHS and European-format recording equipment. Tiny cameras mounted on the wall behind The Queen's head do the chronicling and also can feed live across the Internet onto computer screens anywhere.

Today that anywhere is England, home of bride and groom Anna Dacre and Rafael Afonso.

"Anybody have a cellular phone on?" The Queen asks the congregants before punching play on a Dream Machine boom box. And so begins "The Wedding March."

Who is the Wedding Queen?

The Wedding Queen, Charolette Richards, surveys her realm with a dimpled smile.

She is 70-something, with eyes as kind as a Sunday school teacher's, a great-grandma three times over. The Wedding Queen says she doesn't drink or smoke or partake in Vegas' many vices.

She bestows a "God bless you" on seemingly every soul she meets - even, a day earlier, the orange-haired television producer who wanted to film a woman (drunk, of course) marrying two men inside her establishment.

"It would just be a joke," the producer said.

"Oh, no, no, no, no," The Queen responded. "I couldn't do that."

Couldn't, she insists, because she takes marriage quite seriously. "We won't play games."

The Wedding Queen believes in love.

She has her own love story, retold again and again - to CNN, to newspaper reporters from Britain, Ireland and America, to anyone else who would listen. To me.

It seemed like the stuff of a Valentine's tale to warm the heart and make even the most cynical wonder: Could everlasting love exist? In, of all places, Las Vegas?

This is, after all, a city born of illusion.

Here, sincerity is the guy at the sportsbook counter who takes your money without bothering to mumble "good luck." Warmth is the cocktail waitress who flashes a one-second smirk if you fork over a tip at the craps table, then forgets to deliver that "free" Bloody Mary.

Romance? Try the gondolier belting out badly accented Italian love songs on a manmade canal inside a hotel.

And true love?

Could it really endure in the home of the assembly-line marriage industry, where wedding chapels eat up a good chunk of the yellow pages and more than 100,000 couples a year pay 55 bucks for a no-blood-test, no-waiting-period license?

I wanted to believe.

What I discovered instead is just how blurred the lines between fantasy and reality are. In business. In life. In love.

There is no cynicism for Anna and Rafael; they are on the fairy-tale precipice of marriage. She glides down the aisle, turns to her groom and takes his hands.

They're unfazed when a husky man stuffed into a red, fringy jumpsuit hits the power on his portable karaoke machine. He has thick sideburns, a mop of dark hair and a hip grind that makes the blushing bride blush a little bit more.

Yes, Elvis is in the house. His mouth opens and out comes:

"Wise men say ... only fools rush in ... oh but I ... but I ... I can't help ... falling in looooove with you."

Finding out the truth

First impression of Charolette Richards: Sweetest woman you'll ever meet. A devout Christian whose office bookshelf holds Modern Bride magazine but also a DVD of "The Passion of the Christ." A well-meaning good Samaritan who speaks in soft tones of reaching out to prostitutes and others who roam the seedy streets of Las Vegas, in the hope of somehow saving them.

Nearly every wedding ceremony she performs seems to move her - sometimes to tears. And she is devastated, utterly devastated, upon learning that the recording equipment failed for one couple whose vows she has just renewed. (She provides a partial refund and immediately offers to do another ceremony on the house if ever they return.) "I don't want anybody to ever leave here unhappy," she says later.

That's "just Charolette," longtime employees say.

"This is her life. This is what goes through her veins - weddings and love," says wedding coordinator Roseann Henry, who first met Charolette as a kid and has worked for her 18 years.

Pastor Bob Stone, one of nine ministers on call at the 24-7 Little White, says that with Charolette, "What you see is what you get. That's how she is. That's her. She's about love."

She's about love, Charolette herself says, because she had the real deal.

The way she tells it, she arrived in Vegas in the late 1950s with her three young sons in tow - looking for the gambler husband who told her to meet him there. Hubby never showed.

A Midwestern girl who'd grown up on a farm in Minnesota, Charolette checked into a motel and spent her days walking along Las Vegas Boulevard with her boys. One day a man wrapping up breakfast at the White Cross drugstore spotted her and asked:

"How come you walk up and down the sidewalk with your children?"

"I'm looking for my husband," Charolette told him.

They bumped into each other a few more times before finally the stranger bluntly remarked, "You know, your husband's not coming back."

The fellow was Merle Richards, an Air Force veteran and photographer who owned The Little Church of the West, one of Vegas' oldest wedding chapels. Charolette says he offered her a job answering phones and scheduling ceremonies, helped her find a house to rent, bought her a new dress.

On June 25, 1961, after Charolette says she got her first marriage annulled, she and Richards wed at a church in Reno. Though he was 21 years her senior, Charolette considered Merle her "knight in shining armor." He gave her love, protection and a new career to build on. They had a son together. In 1966, they opened another chapel. Charolette eventually became ordained as a minister and she has remained in the business, off and on, ever since.

Today, she is considered the grande dame of the Vegas wedding chapel industry. She figures she has performed between 200,000 and 300,000 ceremonies.

As for her own union with Merle? "We lived happily ever after," she says.

They were married for 20 years, she says, later recalculating: "Actually we were married longer than that." She says that although Merle died - "It'll be 22 years ago this coming June" - she never did remarry. There could never be another man for her.

CNN, in a piece last year, said, "No one was Merle. So Richards never remarried, even as she continues to officiate over the marriages of so many other couples."

Charolette told the correspondent: "I'm giving a part of my love and his love to these people."

It certainly makes for a beautiful, un-Vegas tale of devotion, a perfect, romantic backstory for a woman dubbed "The Wedding Queen."

Except for the parts she leaves out.

In truth, she and Merle divorced in 1971, according to the Clark County Family Court's records department. Forty-two days later, records show, she married a country musician named Jeremiah "Jerry" Ott.

"Oh, boy. Boy it is a blast from the past," Ott, now 65 and living in Oregon, says when contacted by The Associated Press. He and Charolette traveled to Oklahoma after they were married and lived there for some time, he says. The marriage ended about five years later. "It's been many, many years."

Merle, too, remarried - in 1972. He remained legally bound to Lucille Richards until his death, which came in March (not June) 1985. Lucille Richards still lives in Vegas and has heard the tale of Charolette and Merle's everlasting romance.

"It hasn't been written right," the 83-year-old widow says. "There's a lot more to her story than she wants to say, of course."

A search of county records that turned up the 1971 marriage to Ott reveals one other for "Charolette Richards" and "Georgeos Drakoules" on May 29, 1984. Another document, a Nevada divorce record dated April 4, 1989, names "Agnes Charolette Sturgeon" (she has used Agnes Charolette elsewhere) and "Charles Daniel Sturgeon." (In a 1994 interview with Geraldo Rivera, Charolette acknowledged that she had "tried marriage again and it didn't quite work.")

What, then, explains The Wedding Queen's love song?

Is it a way of jockeying for position in the not so lovey-dovey Las Vegas wedding business, where chapel solicitors accost any would-be bride or groom approaching the downtown marriage license bureau?

Greg Smith, whose family now owns The Little Church of the West, says Charolette has long been adept at garnering publicity.

He cites news stories after actress Joan Collins married at the Little White. Other celebrities followed: Michael Jordan and, most notably, Britney Spears, whose 55-hour marriage to Jason Allen Alexander commenced at the chapel.

"I've gotta hand it to her ... she's been able to market herself," Smith says. "She became 'The Wedding Queen."'

But maybe it's more complicated than that.

Maybe, for all of her omissions, she is telling a deeper truth when she proclaims her love story. Yes, she acknowledged in a follow-up interview, she and Merle had divorced. But she quickly added: "I'm still married to him as far as my life is concerned."

"He is the only one I ever dream of, and he is the only one that I ever want to spend my life with continuously in my heart. That's the way I feel," she went on. "There are all kinds of people that get married and get divorced, but as far as I'm concerned he is and was and will ever be the love of my life ..."

And then: "But you don't have to write the story ... because I don't want to ever, ever have anything that would be - not the truth."

All about cheese

Before all this talk about truth we were inside a chapel.

Anna and Rafael had long been planning their wedding - since before their second child was born, Rafael, a builder back in Cumbria, England, explains. The two have been together for six years. Their children - 11-year-old Gabriela and 3-year-old Adriana - flew across the Atlantic to see their parents finally marry. So did a half-dozen friends and relatives.

But why Vegas? Why a wedding chapel? And why, oh why, Elvis?

"Why not?" says Rafael with a grin. "It's Vegas, how can you not have Elvis? It's cheese, it's all about cheese, isn't it? That's the whole idea. Have a bit of a laugh."

They did laugh, this couple and their children and their friends and family, as Elvis finished singing, snarling and swaying. Then The Wedding Queen stepped forward.

"Well, what a joy," Charolette exulted. "What happiness has been brought to your hearts this very moment as you become husband and wife. And that's what life and marriage is all about. It's about being happy, isn't it? It's about being together and belonging to each other forever and ever."

Anna and Rafael exchanged rings and vows and, by the end, both were in tears.

They were still crying as The Queen pronounced them husband and wife, as they sealed their marriage with a kiss, and even as Elvis flipped his microphone back on and launched into - what else? - "Viva Las Vegas."

What is true love?

Maybe the truth is this is real love. Part fantasy, part reality. Laughter and tears. Things we want to remember the rest of our days, things we wish we could forever erase. Maybe the truth is that love, that life, is never a nice, neat story - no matter how much we wish it could be.