Bridgewater met Moses when she originated the role of Glinda the Good Witch, in the first Off Broadway production of "The Wiz." He was the show's director. A producer on the show threatened DeeDee that if she didn't sleep with him, Moses would be fired. She refused, and Moses was indeed fired from the production. Moses became abusive towards her, and became very competitive regarding her career - always trying to hamper her success. Bridgewater discussed her experience in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1996: "As Bridgewater was discovering, success can be a double-edged sword, but that wasn't even the worst of it. Moses, says Bridgewater, was jealous of her triumph in a musical that had been taken away from him, and he became emotionally, verbally and, finally, physically abusive. The pressures she faced at home (she was living with Moses by then) and in the theater quickly proved too much to bear. "I don't want to blame Gilbert (Moses) for everything, because he's dead now and can't defend himself," says Bridgewater of the esteemed actor-director, who died last year, at age 52. Nevertheless, most of Bridgewater's memories of her years with Moses are bleak. "He had undermined my self-confidence to the point that I just didn't think that I had any talent; I didn't think I was worth much as a person, as a human being. "So I tried to commit suicide (via pills) and the only thing that saved it from getting into the papers was that when I went into the hospital it was with my maiden name. "They had to pump my stomach, which was horrible. "And I'll never forget this nurse who was pumping this (stuff) out of me just screaming: `You're not going to die. Wake up. Wake up." "And I was crying, `I want to die, I want to die.' " Somehow, even against her deepest wishes, she lived. Perhaps she was tougher than she realized, or perhaps the unnamed and long-forgotten nurse just wouldn't allow her to slip away. To this day, Bridgewater doesn't know or understand precisely why she survived, but when she got back on her feet, she was reborn, ready to fight anew. She quit "The Wiz," packed her bags, took her daughter and fled to Los Angeles, hoping to leave New York and its ghastly memories behind. Moses, however, pursued her. And like many battered women, Bridgewater found it difficult to escape his grip and, in fact, agreed to let him move in with her and Tulani in L.A. They were married in `76. "When we got back together, I started keeping a huge butcher knife under my pillow," she remembers, "and every night I went to sleep with this big thing under my head. "Gilbert was a macho guy; he would never make a bed, so he'd never know. He had no clue that I had a blade with me that was this thick. "But I told him, `If you ever raise a hand to me again, I'll kill you. And if you ever touch Tulani, I will definitely kill you,' and I meant it." At first, life with Moses among the L.A. show-business elite proved seductive, with "a lot of serious visitors, like Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte and all of these famous black celebrities coming to see me," when Bridgewater played in the L.A. cast of "The Wiz." "I was just totally awestruck by the film industry and the fact that you could go out to restaurants and see these celebrities. I'm from a small city in the Midwest, and this was exciting." The battles between Moses and his gifted wife, however, were far from over. Even before the birth of their daughter, China Moses, in 1978, Bridgewater had been looking for movie and TV work in Hollywood, and she thought she at last had hit the big time when she seemed to have won the role of Mathilda in the 1977 TV mini-series "Roots." Before shooting, however, Bridgewater had to have her tonsils out, and Moses, not surprisingly to his wife, leaped into action. "He went to the producer and the three directors that I was going to be working with (on `Roots') and told them all that I had just had my tonsils out, and that if I worked, I would ruin my voice," says Bridgewater, with a sigh. "And he did such a convincing job that even when my surgeon, my throat doctor, my speech therapist and everybody else said that it would be OK, that it wouldn't be a problem, they decided not to give me the role. "And then Gilbert turned up getting a job as the director-so we were doomed from the beginning. "Everything I got, he undid. "Later on, I had signed a contract to be a regular on `Hill Street Blues,' " adds Bridgewater, "and Gilbert said, `If you take this role, I'll leave.' "So there I was. My agent said: `Dee Dee, you've already signed the contract. They've got your costumes, you've got rehearsals in two days, you start shooting in a week. You're going to be blacklisted; you won't be able to work in Hollywood at all. He's not going to leave you. He's just jealous. I've seen it before. Don't do it.' "But Bridgewater did, she says, and thereafter she watched both her marriage and her acting career go down in flames. "Dee Dee suffered terrible things from Moses at that time," says Cecil Bridgewater, her first husband. "Because we have a daughter together, Tulani, I still was pretty aware of what was happening in Dee Dee's life. "Moses, probably because he was a director, wanted to be in on all of the things that Dee Dee was involved with, and he wanted to be a step ahead of her, too. It became a very competitive thing for him, unfortunately. "The beatings were so awful that at one point she was living in a hotel under some kind of guard." Bridewater found a new life and success after divorcing Moses and moving to Paris, where she became a huge star.