LA Reporter

August 4, 1996

Stevie Nicks looks at her life through her own eyes.......

The French doors leading from Stevie Nicks’ six-story manse to her pool are open to catch an evening breeze. The beautiful sounds of waterfalls drift in the wind.

Dinner this evening is buffet style, chicken or steak. "Where’s mine?" Nicks asks the five women - ever present friends and aides - already at the rough-hewn dining table. "Get up and get it yourself," teases Wendy, the cook, and Nicks does.

The many pictures that adorn her castle walls are portraits, paintings, family snapshots, album covers, and awards. On one wall of her white-on-white living room is a six foot print of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album cover.

After dinner, Nicks opens up another living area that looks like a huge mid-evil castle. "Will this be okay?" She asks as she sits down and her aids bring her some hot tea. She talks softly as she curls on the couch. "Where would you like to start?" she asks. "You know my life is a crack! It’s much more fun to tell than it is to live."

Life has changed for Stevie over the last few years. Not only does she now get along without endless Fleetwood Mac tours but, without drugs as well. For Nicks, cocaine was not only the real thing, but also the only thing. She spends much of her time talking about it now hoping that maybe it will help some troubled life somewhere.

"I’d get up in the morning in a panic," she said. "How can I possibly make it to a photo session, two rehearsals, a show and interview. And I’d be reaching for the coke. I was obsessive and addicted. And one day I just woke up and knew I didn’t want to die."

When rich Americans die they go to Paris, Oscar Wilde maintained. These days, they’re likely to postpone that visit by visiting the Betty Ford clinic first, which is where Stevie ended up in 1986. It was, she says, $7,000 and six weeks of her life well spent, sharing a cubicle with a 55-year old woman, spending her days swabbing floors, dusting, cleaning and drinking endless cups of coffee. It worked.

"I knew if I didn’t go soon, I would be dead." I was existing on false hopes and substances. Drink, drugs - much more than the drinking, it was the drugs. Cocaine got the best of me."

"Success has brought its problems," admitted Nicks, as she sips on her tea. "It’s so intense and there are a lot of people involved. There didn’t used to be the entourage of people who have come on board over the years." The four aides that live and travel with Nicks, include her two assistants, a cook and a security person.

[Heading on Page 2] Stevie Nicks is more captivating than ever.....

"I don’t need a jillion more dollars, I have enough wonderful clothes and money to last me forever. I keep doing it to make people happy, including myself. I just need to have some fun and enjoy my life. I love to get dressed up and go out to the ballet and museums and meet other kinds of people."

Nicks has been offered up to 2.5 million dollars to put her life on paper. Still, Nicks isn’t likely to swap her cape for a pen anytime soon. "Well, I’d write mine more like a novel. Because my life, the reading of it - maybe not the living of it - would be every little girl’s dream. I mean, I’ve gone out with all the big rock & roll stars; I’ve flown on Learjets; I’ve had a fleet of nine limousines; I have rented 727 airplanes that cost $25,000 a day...and that is glamorous. There’s no getting around it. Just that part of it alone would blow people’s minds." As Stevie explains, she points to a photo on the wall.

"Once somebody sent a tiny little four seater Learjet once to pick me up -- I was on the road, and he was on the road. It picked me up after my show, flew me into Atlanta. I stayed there for that next day and his show, and then right after the show, that little cranberry red Learjet sat on the ground and waited for me....I can’t give a name. Not that there was anything wrong with it, because there wasn’t. It was wonderful. It was one of the most romantic things that ever happened to me in my whole life. I mean, that’s something that when I’m on my deathbed, the few things that pass before you, that will pass before me. Those are the things I’d like to tell people about. I’d write about the really neat stuff and lace it with parts that were difficult."

One chapter in Nicks’ book would have to tell the story of a funeral and a wedding celebrated in tears. The story of Nicks’ best friend since childhood [Robin] dying and two months later Nicks marrying her widower. "I don’t consider it a marriage. I married Robin’s husband [Kim Anderson] because," she takes a long pause as she looks out the window at the full moon, "Robin was one of the few women who ever got leukemia and then got pregnant. And they had to take the baby, [Matthew], at six and a half months, and then she died two days later. And when she dies, I went crazy. I just went insane. And so did her husband. And we were the only two that could really understand the depth of the grief that we were going through. I was determined to take care of that baby, so I said to Kim, "I don’t know, I guess we should just get married." And so we got married and no one, no one understood. It was a terrible, terrible mistake. We didn’t get married because we were in love, we got married because we were grieving and it was the only way that we could feel like we were doing the right thing. And we got divorced three months later, and I haven’t seen Kim, nor Matthew, since that day. I suppose that Matthew will find me when he’s ready. But Kim and I can’t deal with each other at all. So, when Matthew is old enough, I have all of his mother’s things, and fifteen years of her life on film. I have us on tape singing, I have a beautiful book that I wrote the year that she died. I have a roomful of stuff for him. I have memories of his mother to give him when he is ready."

[heading on page 3] "You cannot tell a gypsy...she’s no longer a member..."

Matthew is fifteen now and lives in St. Louis with his father, Kim. Kim contacted Stevie last year when she was in town for a concert. However, she did not see him. Perhaps the time still was not right.

"Kim called and had lunch with my security guy. He sent me up a picture of Matthew and called my room for the lobby." As Nicks explained, she picked up a golden framed photo of Robin.

Her home is full of photos, crystals and many traces of the 15 years she spent with Fleetwood Mac. "There will never be anything like those years in Fleetwood Mac - fabulous hotels, fabulous airplanes, always first class, and always limousines. I remember walking into a fur salon in 1980 and buying two floor-length fur coats. Of course everybody said, ‘You’re really not going to do that, are you?’ And of course I said, ‘Oh, yes, I really am.’"

"Off of my bedroom I have two mirrored rooms that are full of clothes. Then there are three empty bedrooms in this house, and all those closets are full. I have a dance room that has about ten racks in it, stage clothes and everything. I also have about 40 wardrobe trunks that I have not unpacked. I might make half of the dance room a walk-in closet. I might build an addition to the house."

Before the night was over Nicks told of one more Rock and Roll encounter, this one with a superstar formerly known as Prince.

"He once picked me up at the Minneapolis airport at 9:30 in the morning, and we went to his purple house and recorded a song. He was driving about 120 miles an hour in his purple car, with me in my black chiffon stage clothes, him in his purple suit. We were going so over the speed limit that I said, ‘If we get pulled over, we’re dead. Because you and I don’t look like we’re from this planet.’"

Nicks has definitely conquered the ups and downs that have come with her place in Rock and Roll history. "It seems like my life was pretty mapped out. It seems almost like there was somebody up there moving the chess players. And I am the white queen, and I just go where I am moved. You give up a lot to have a kingdom, but, you get an awful lot back."