It was in Paris in the late 1950s that Chester met his second wife Lesley Packard, when she went to interview him. She was a journalist at the "Herald Tribune", where she wrote her own fashion column, "Monica". He described her as "Irish-English with blue-gray eyes and very good looking"; he also saw her courage and resilience, Chester said to Lesley, "You're the only true color-blind person I've ever met in my life." After he suffered a stroke, in 1959, Lesley quit her job and nursed him back to health. She cared for him for the rest of his life, and worked with him as his informal editor, proofreader, confidante and, as the director Van Peebles dubbed her, "his watchdog". After a long engagement, they were married in 1978, as Chester Himes was still legally married to his first wife, Jean, and only able to gain a divorce that year.