After France, Furlaud had to attend summer school classes to graduate with her class. And in 1951, she graduated planning to continue acting as a career.

But marriage interfered, when she met Max Furlaud at an audition for a Broadway play.

"I got married and went to sleep for 150 years," Furlaud says.

Max was a movie writer, who ignored a producer's advice to avoid romantic involvement with "the talent" and married Alice Furlaud in 1952.

Furlaud's love of France was present even in her taste in men, and twenty years after the marriage, Furlaud accompanied her half-French husband to Paris.

But after their marriage, the couple lived in New York City for the next 16 years, with Alice working various odd jobs--including as a movie theater cashier and running an animal model agency--to keep up the family's income while Max worked in the fickle movie and drama industries.

The Furlauds left the movies behind in 1968 when they moved to Big Sur, California to join the Esalen Institute for the practice of Gestalt therapy. In this Institute, which Furlaud describes as a "have-a-heart trap" where leaving is almost impossible, Max Furlaud received training in therapy based on the entire set of feelings a person experiences at any one moment.

Three years later, the Furlauds left Big Sur for Switzerland and then Paris, where Furlaud became NPR's first Paris correspondent.

On The Air

In Paris, Furlaud would rarely report breaking news stories for NPR or the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), which also aired her pieces. Instead she mainly reported feature-type stories--a staple of NPR in what Furlaud calls its former "eccentric days".

One of Furlaud's first stories was an interview with an author of a book about a red-light district of Paris. Furlaud taped the author describing the sights and highlights of the district as they drove through the neighborhood.

The piece disgusted some listeners enough to send letters refusing to ever contribute to NPR again--a source of pride for Furlaud.

However, Furlaud had one favorite day to report for NPR: April Fools Day. She was a regular contributor to All Things Considered's April 1 feature of running an invented story. One year she suggested apiece about how Sadam Hussein's son was vacationing on Cape Cod, while on spring break from his New England boarding school--an idea rejected for even being over the top for an April Fool's story.

She also contributed piece of a similar genre to the BBC program "The Unreliable Narrator." For that show she did a series of stories with her husband on that show where he pretended to be the French Minister of Love--who supposedly hired people to fill the streets of Paris kissing and pretending to be lovers.

Plympton and Bow Street