Excerpt: 'The Other Man'

March 30 -- In his new book, The Other Man: A Love Story, former Baywatch actor Michael Bergin tells of his long-term relationship with the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, both before and after she married John F. Kennedy Jr.

In the excerpt below, he describes his early days in New York, before his modeling and acting career took off.

Chapter One

Crazy In Love

In the summer of 1992, at the age of twenty-three, I moved to New York City and went to work as a hotel doorman. This wasn't exactly the culmination of a lifelong dream. I'd gone to Manhattan to become a model, and, in fact, I'd been signed two years earlier by Click, one of the more reputable agencies. But other than occasional low-paying gigs, I wasn't making much progress, and I was beginning to wonder why I'd ever left Naugatuck, Connecticut. You'd be hard-pressed to find it on a map, but I'd been born and raised there, and my family still calls it home.

I missed them. And I missed small-town life. I barely knew a soul in New York. I was renting a room on the Upper East Side from a girl I'd met at the hotel, but that was already becoming something of a problem. She was lonely too, and she had managed to convince herself, misguidedly, that I was the answer.

New York is very tough on lonely people. When my shift ended at the Paramount Hotel, I'd walk forty blocks from West Forty-sixth Street to the apartment in the East Eighties, and see all these happy couples on the street, arm in arm or hand in hand, smiling and cooing at each other, and I wondered when it was going to be my turn. I wanted to be happy too.

At night, I'd look at all the lit-up windows in the surrounding high-rises — millions of them — and I'd imagine all the happy people sitting down to dinner, watching a romantic movie on TV, then crawling into bed to make love for hours on end. When you're lonely, you tend to think you're the last lonely person in the world. You can't even imagine that there are there people out there — single people, couples, even married people — who are just as lonely as you are.