For Valentine’s Day: A True Big Love and a Big Planet
 
Seth Arenstein
On the Circuit
CableFAX - Rockville, MD
 
The cover story of this month’s National Geographic Magazine appears to poke some fun at Valentine’s Day. The cover shot shows a thin, elderly man in a cowboy hat, surrounded by what appear to be roughly 50 people. The headline: Polygamy in America. The subhead: One Man, Five Wives, 46 Children.

Yet in terms of sheer numbers, National Geographic Channel will best its parent’s magazine cover subject with a special Valentine’s Day edition of its investigative series Inside (6pm; Wed, Feb 17, 5pm). This week’s focus on Inside is the polygamy of Winston Blackmore, who lives just over the U.S. border in Bountiful, British Columbia, with his 25 or so wives and some 100 children. Yes, old Winnie estimates when it comes to his wives and offspring. "It’s a best guess, as he won’t confirm the exact number," Nat Geo’s narrator tells us.

For fans of HBO’s series about a polygamist family, Big Love, this special will be especially important viewing. The parallels between the lives of the Blackmores and the Henricksons, the fictional polygamists on Big Love, are fascinating. This special will be interesting viewing for others, too. That’s because beyond the obfuscation about exact numbers of wives and kids, Blackmore might be the perfect polygamist for the media. He’s photogenic, articulate, approachable, seemingly honest and, most important, very willing to allow his lifestyle to be recorded by National Geographic’s cameras.

Indeed the access Nat Geo gained during its 4-month stint in bucolic southern Canada, where chez Blackmore is located (well, there’s not one Blackmore home; it actually takes 10 abodes to house Winston’s wives and children), is fantastic. To its credit Nat Geo plays it down the middle, reporting how Blackmore and his family live, but not judging them.

In addition to Winston’s hefty immediate family, there are another 400 or so people living in Bountiful; most are either directly related to him or are followers who may or may not practice polygamy. Not only is Winston the family patriarch, he’s the community’s spiritual leader.

Winston even allowed Nat Geo to show viewers an evening of song and mirth he staged for the community. And Winston was the target of one of the jokes told on stage that night. He also allowed a slew of polygamy jokes to be told. A slim 30-something woman named Elise, who’s one of Winston’s wives, had the crowd rolling. ‘You know you come from a big family when a man walks into the school and half the kids say ‘hi, Dad’ and the other half say, ‘hi, Grandpa.’

Perhaps the biggest difference between the Blackmores and the Henricksons (besides the size of their immediate family) is the way the two clans live. Unlike HBO’s fictitious group, Winston and the Blackmore family live openly on a gorgeous tract of land in Canada. The Henricksons exist covertly as polygamists in a Utah suburb. While polygamy is unlawful in Canada, the Canadian government for years had turned a blind eye, unwilling to prosecute people for their religious practices. That changed last year when Winston was charged with practicing polygamy.

Winston, a bespectacled, avuncular man who seems to be in his mid to late 50s, isn’t done practicing. At the outset of the special we meet a woman who appears to be in her 30s named Zelpha. She, like one of her sisters, married Winston on the same day. Unlike her sister (wife #10), Zelpha is expecting. "Eight. For some reason I’ve always wanted 8 children," Zelpha tells us with a laugh as she prepares lunch in what appears to be a school cafeteria. It’s actually a kitchen in the home she shares with 3 other of Winston’s wives and their 23 children. Later we see Zelpha holding her newborn. The narrator mentions that Winston was there for the birth, but now an hour later, he’s gone, leaving Zelpha and the baby to the care of his other wives.

"The compound" of HBO’s series, where nearly all the polygamists involved in the story live, was ruled by an autocratic "prophet." It features dirty-looking children and only mildly cleaner rank and file adults living in old, broken-down houses in a dust bowl environment. By contrast, Winston laughs at suggestions that he’s a prophet. The Blackmore kids appear clean, healthy and happy; the physical plant they live in seems clean and new. While there is financial pressure on Winston (several of his wives are subsidized by Canada and Zelpha is shown harvesting crops just 2 months before she gives birth), the Blackmores businesses, including lumber and transportation, brought in revenue of $2 million during the past 5 years. Many facets of Big Love’s plot involve Bill Henrickson’s business dealings, which include owning a large home improvement store.

Like their father, the Blackmore kids seem honest. Mary, a gorgeous girl with piercing blue eyes who appears to be in her late 20s, admits she might not have had "a ton of time with" her father Winston, but when he did spend time "with us it was very special."

While the modesty of their upbringing forbids Winston’s wives from discussing how they share Winston as a sexual partner. Some polygamist men sleep with their wives based on the ovulation cycle, figuring it’s the best time to produce children, a key goal in their lives and a cornerstone of what’s called "the principle." While a few of Winston’s wives tell Nat Geo’s cameras that sharing a husband and other household chores is the best way to live, at least one admits there’s sometimes an element of jealousy between wives. Yet as Zelpha says, "in a plural [marriage] situation, you have to work together [with the other wives] as a team...you can’t do the bitching..." Anyone who’s seen Big Love should be very knowledgeable about issues of sexual sharing and jealousy.

There’s still another parallel with HBO’s Big Love. In the series, the Henricksons have broken away from the compound and its tyrannical leader, the self-professed prophet Roman Grant. As we said, the Henricksons live in the middle of a Utah suburb, keeping their polygamist existence a secret from neighbors. Winston’s family, too, has left the establishment, splitting from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) in 2002. Until not too long ago, FLDS, a "highly secretive organization," the narrator says, was led by a dictatorial prophet, Warren Jeffs. From its main temple in Texas, it once controlled "scores of FLDS enclaves in the US and Canada, including the satellite community in Bountiful," the narrator tells us.

Winston admits he was a bishop in FLDS. He’s less up front about the number of underage wives Jeffs appropriated to him. Nat Geo says an investigation revealed "4 girls were younger than 16 and 6 were younger than 18 when they married Winston." In his defense, Winston says Jeffs forced him to marry these women. "He was as much a victim of FLDS control as anyone," according to his family, the narrator says. In fact, refusing a wife could have meant excommunication by the prophet Jeffs. Worse, the prophet could have condemned Winston to hell for eternity and reassigned Winston’s family to other men.

Winston claims he left FLDS when he refused to join Jeffs in killing an underage girl who refused an arranged marriage. Although there are several versions of the girl’s story told in the special, it appears Winston gave the girl, a Utah native, refuge in Bountiful. In Big Love, the Henricksons, too, have been involved in sheltering a young girl from the compound.

Jeffs, who also predicted the world would end in April 2001 (Nat Geo could have made an entire show about how the Blackmore clan, who were with FLDS at the time, prepared for this), is serving several life sentences in the U.S. for an array of offenses, including marrying underage girls. He’s also under 24/7 suicide watch.

Once Winston split with Jeffs and the FLDS, he sat down with his wives in his office and asked them to either stay with him "in peace" or leave "in peace." While Winston’s community now numbers about 500, some of his siblings and other Bountiful folk refused to leave the FLDS. Winston hasn’t seen these people since as the FLDS refuses to allow its members to fraternize with the breakaway Blackmores. Ironically, Winston and his followers still live alongside the FLDS properties he used to control. And Winston’s flock openly comments on the terror of life under Jeffs. They are some of the most outspoken parts of this documentary.

Similar to the Henrickson’s dilemma with their children, at least 2 of Winston’s married children aren’t practicing polygamy. Mary, the pretty daughter of Winston mentioned above, has been married for several years to a man who came from a polygamist family. They’ve got children but are not polygamists. Unusually, they’ve also been living outside of Bountiful, although they’re shown returning, to build a house with a fabulous view of the mountains. Mary’s husband, somewhat sloppily dressed, says you never say never, but "at this time, I’d say I’ll never" have multiple wives. Winston goes on the record during this segment and says he won’t force his offspring to accept his faith. Interestingly earlier in the film one of his wives hints that Winston usually gets what he wants.

Nat Geo was permitted to film what looks to be a traditional wedding ceremony, with ushers, bridesmaids, flowers and a large crowd. The occasion is that one of Winston’s sons, aged 24, is marrying a woman whom he met outside Bountiful, which is unusual, since most Blackmores don’t leave Bountiful for extended periods. The couple dated for a while, also unusual when arranged marriages are the norm. The bride, from Utah, also comes from a polygamist family. She seems nice, Winston says, although he admits he doesn’t know her well. The couple isn’t certain they’ll be polygamists. In fact, the narrator says, since the couple is signing a marriage certificate, chances are they won’t be polygamists. Such a certificate could be held against them in court of law, the narrator says.

There’s something else unusual about this wedding. Often polygamist marriages are small, attended by a few witnesses and presided over by the prophet or spiritual leader; thus, they are illegal by standard definition. Unusually, the wedding shown in Nat Geo’s documentary is run by a justice of the peace and Winston is nowhere to be found. After being charged with practicing polygamy, Winston ultimately was released. But there were conditions. He’s no longer allowed to preside over or even attend weddings. Even his son’s.
 
Cable360.net
Originally published February 12, 2010
 
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