‘Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?’ 25 Years Later: What Happened to the Not-So-Happy Couple?

After the smash-hit success of ABC’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire the year before, Fox raised the ante on February 15, 2000, with a live special titled Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?

Mike Darnell, Fox’s head of reality programming at the time, told Entertainment Weekly in 2024 that he thought of the idea while attending a family wedding and feeling jealous of the ABC game show’s success.

“I’m very competitive, so it’s making me crazy. I am literally thinking to myself, ‘What else do people want? They want to be millionaires.’ And I’m watching the wedding, and I’m thinking about the show, and I’m watching the wedding, and I’m like, ‘Who wants to marry a millionaire!’ And then I had to one-up it, so I called it Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?”

In the resulting two-hour special, 50 women competed to win the heart of one Rick Rockwell, who was presented as the wealthy bachelor of the title. Darva Conger, then a 35-year-old emergency room nurse, won the competition and married Rockwell on the spot while 23 million viewers watched from home.

The special dominated headlines at the time and seemed poised to launch a franchise. “We were thrilled,” Darnell said. “We were going to shoot a [follow-up] ‘How are they doing?’ special. That was planned and everything.”

But then came revelations about Rockwell. As The New York Times reported after the special, the man purported to be a real estate developer and a motivational speaker was actually a comedian known for stunts like telling jokes for 30 hours in a bid for a Guinness world record.

Fox/Courtesy: Everett Collection

Plus, the New York Post cast doubts that Rockwell was actually a millionaire. A Fox rep told the Post that Rockwell had $750,000 in liquid assets and a total net worth of $2 million, but the rep was unable to say whether producers checked his property ownership or mortgage status.

Worse yet, a years-old restraining order against Rockwell resurfaced during all the hype. A former fiancée obtained the order in 1991, alleging that Rockwell had hit and threatened her, per CBS News.

“I called [executive producer Mike Fleiss], who happened to be with Rick Rockwell riding back from whatever shoot they had just done for the special,” Darnell told EW. “I could hear Mike say something about a restraining order, and Rick said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll tell you about that later.’ And I knew we were screwed.”

Rockwell denied the allegations in the restraining order, but Fox nevertheless canceled a rebroadcast of the special. And in April of that year, a judge annulled Rockwell and Conger’s marriage.

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Meanwhile, then-chairman Sandy Grushow had vowed to steer Fox away from “shockumentary” specials, telling reporters he’d rather “fail with quality than succeed with garbage.”

“That’s my boss,” Darnell said, recalling his feelings at the time. “It was a very, very dark week.”

As it turns out, the Mikes weren’t “screwed”: Fleiss went on to create the Bachelor franchise at ABC, and Darnell worked alongside him as president of unscripted television at Warner Bros. And Fox wasn’t done with guilty-pleasure TV: Temptation Island premiered on the network less than a year later.

But it seems Rockwell and Conger didn’t escape the Multi-Millionaire snafu so easily. Rockwell, for his part, appears to have dropped out of the public eye and left his comedy career behind.

Conger, meanwhile, has popped up in the media now and then to discuss the hardships of her Multi-Millionaire experience.

“It was fun at the time,” Conger told People in 2010, reflecting on the 15 seconds of fame that led to a Playboy shoot and a bout on Fox’s reality show Celebrity Boxing. “I wasn’t working, and it was ridiculously easy money for what seemed like very little.”

At the time of that interview, Conger was a single mom living in Northern California, where she was working as a nurse and raising a then-5-year-old son.

“Reality television is so common now,” she told the magazine. “People are like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re the grandmother of reality! You did that show a long time ago, didn’t you?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ But everyone around me knows me as a mom and an anesthetist.”

Fading into obscurity probably came as a relief to Conger, however. She explained on Oprah: Where Are They Now in 2014 that she was unprepared for the publicity that came with her big moment on reality TV — and the negative publicity in particular.

“If I had known that, I would never have went on the show,” she said. “And I also didn’t realize how mean and how nasty people would be, being called a gold digger and a whore and ugly and all these things. … One of the hardest parts of this whole episode was that I thought I’d get back to real life and go back to work and find some solace there and get back to my normal way of life. Unfortunately, I lost my job.”

Conger said she didn’t go on the show with a goal of getting married and wanted to get out of her and Rockwell’s union as soon as possible. “I guess I was … thinking, ‘We don’t know each other. This is a television show. What we did was really crazy. We need to undo it.’ I did get the sense that maybe he thought this was serious, so as soon as I possibly could, I did tell him as gently and as kindly as I could, and he was upset.”

Of Rockwell, she said, “We did not really get along too well, and that’s unfortunate. I don’t wish him harm … It was tough. I think neither one of us [was] at our best at that point.”

Neither, it could be argued, was the reality TV genre.