The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  “But most of all, he was desperate to see Peta. I think he had at last realised he had a daughter, and he could cope with that,” she added. It was the acceptance she had longed for. “Quite simply, Peta and I were outcasts from the Gibbs. I longed to write to Andy sometimes, but I wasn’t allowed to. I once sent him some pictures of Peta, but I had to do it through the fan club.”

  Kim was especially pleased that Andy had returned to England. “America was the ruin of him. I think that’s why he finally returned to Britain. He thought he’d be safe there,” she explained.

  Andy settled into the Chancery, a cottage at Robin’s Oxfordshire home, to write more songs for his comeback album. “It was a relief that he chose to live with Robin and his family,” said Maurice. “We all knew he’d be well looked after, and that there would always be members of the family around just in case there were any problems.”

  At first, it seemed to be working out well. “He was great fun and we shared our sense of humour,” Robin said. “We were forever watching Tony Hancock tapes and listening to The Goons.”

  Soon it became clear to Robin that all was not well. Andy had begun taking elaborate measures to avoid contact with anyone. He tried to encourage Andy, but to little avail. “I had to keep reassuring him, you know, of his talent and to build up his confidence. It actually affected his mind, that he had to really start again … And he wouldn’t come out of his cottage for days. He’d miss appointments, he wouldn’t take phone calls. There was something going on, and I couldn’t figure out was going on in his head.

  “Andy had developed a fear of life, and what he did to himself — almost driving himself to oblivion — was born out of that fear. It was an extremely destructive emotion.

  “There were obviously bad times … and because he was living with me up until the end, I experienced them with him. He was going to make a new album and get his feet back on the ground. Unfortunately, his confidence was shot, and he was afraid of the world and not succeeding. He had the talent to succeed, but he was frightened that people wouldn’t like him. He was terribly insecure.”

  Barry explained, “He always seemed to have a zest for life. But beneath all that fun was an incredible sadness that only a few of us could see. He was the most insecure man in the world, and even when he had hit records, he felt it was still not good enough. Whatever I’d say to reassure him, he would still go away and hide in the depths of depression.

  “I was either on the phone or seeing him, giving him encouragement. I would say to him, ‘Just get up and sing. Do what you do best. No one does it better.’ I would tell him this everyday.”

  Robin believed that Andy’s problems began anew when he arrived in Britain. “He had just signed a recording contract and was about to start with two new songwriters,” he said. “But it terrified him because he was scared stiff that he would not be able to prove a success again. He became scared of everything, including me and his own family. He locked himself in the Chancery … and refused to see anyone.

  “He kept a watch at the window for hours because he was petrified of anyone coming up to see him. He did not want to have contact with anyone. It was very strange. He went to elaborate lengths to avoid everyone.

  “He would watch all the cars coming down the road, and when he spotted mine turning into the drive, he would disappear and start dashing around turning all the lights off. He pretended the whole time that he was not there.”

  Robin and his family were forced into the uncomfortable position of being shut out while watching someone they loved spiral out of control. “We saw him sliding downhill again and tried to help, but he would not take help from anyone. It was dreadful being so close to him and yet being unable to do anything. He did not want to see any of us,” he explained.

  For Barry, Andy’s problems seemed at least partially due to homesickness. “He was missing Miami, and he felt he just could not go out. Perhaps I did not realise the extent to which he was folding up inside,” he added. “He didn’t really need to be away from his family and we didn’t want him away from us. I think he went into a decline because of that.”

  Barbara Gibb was concerned about her youngest son and made plans to join him in England. “I got on to Robin and Robin said, ‘Don’t come, Mum, you’re babying him too much, he’s fine.’ But I was on the plane that next day because I knew something was wrong.”

  She arrived to find that Andy had turned back to alcohol in his depression. “He was drinking again, he was drinking, definitely,” she admitted. “He was getting those little tiny bottles. He was ringing the little liquor store in Thame at two o’clock in the morning. They close at 10 o’clock, everybody goes to sleep. Andy thought this was terrible, he was going back to America, he couldn’t stand it.”

  Barry said that David English, with whom he was working on the Hawks project, had suggested that they go over to visit Andy. “We had heard stories he was not behaving himself.” But neither of them realised just how serious Andy’s depression had become.

  Barry revealed, “I’d always be telling him, ‘Andy, you look great. You look incredible. Let’s go out’. He’d say ‘Okay’. Then five minutes later, he’d ask, ‘Are you sure that I look all right?’ He never knew how much talent he had, and the more I told him, the less he seemed to believe it.”

  “He was to the point where he couldn’t even stand up, he kept falling down. He smashed his face against the wall and lost all his teeth. Oh, it was just a mess, I could go on and on,” Robin said grimly. “And my mother had to be there to see it, which was a nightmare for her. He wasn’t even aware of his existence anymore.”

  Andrew Roy Gibb, the person, seemed to have disappeared in the struggle to recapture Andy Gibb, the star. He lost his sense of self. He was afraid of failing to make a comeback in the music business, yet terrified that he couldn’t do anything else. “The biggest thing on his mind was, ‘Can I make it back to the top?’ That’s what he really wanted to do, and under all the pressure, his mind and heart gave way,” Barry said.

  Maurice recalled a missed opportunity to connect with Andy. “I called him up and Robin said he couldn’t come to the phone ’cause he was drunk, and I said, ‘Oh, sod him then,’ and I put the phone down … I never spoke to him so I never forgave myself for that for a long time, I thought I should have spoken to him.”

  Barbara remembered, “He kept walking in and out and saying, ‘I might as well be dead, there’s nothing going on.’ Because there was nobody there, you see.”

  Even at the height of his success, Andy had always admitted that his moods played a major role in his songwriting, explaining he could only write, “when I’m most relaxed.” He added, “I don’t seem to be too good at writing songs when I’m troubled for some reason. I don’t know what it is.” Now he was depressed and afraid of failure, with the fear compounding the depression in a vicious cycle. He needed six more songs for his album, but it might as well have been 600. He couldn’t write.

  “You can’t just make yourself write, you know,” Barbara explained. “It’s not something you can just sit down and do. He got a block and he couldn’t write and that upset him, it upset him very much.”

  “Andy went downhill in the last three weeks of his life,” Barry explained. “Maybe it was the idea that he was going back in the studio. To me, Andy’s problems were not drugs and booze — to me, they were a massive insecurity, psychological problems compounded by the drink and cocaine. Maybe they also caused it, but at the end of the day, you were dealing with a person who was tremendously insecure and had no confidence in himself at all, yet had a lot of talent … He seemed to have lost the will or desire to use it.

  “Andy had so many problems … You see it everywhere. Lots of success to young people, I believe, is very dangerous. They have to grow into it, and they either do or they don’t. I’m afraid Andy didn’t. We would tell him over and over again that he could compete with anybody, and that he should get up and get going and be counted again rather than worr
y about what people think. But those feelings, that lack of confidence in him, perhaps what drugs had done in the past to him … I don’t know. I’ve never seen anybody cope well with phenomenal success. I’ve spoken with Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers about this, and a lot of people, and with respect to them, they’re very insecure. With most major artists you’ll find a cupboard of insecurity. Everybody wants reassurance from somebody else, even if they’re gigantic superstars.”

  Towards the end of February, Andy had been rushed to hospital, but he checked himself out again before the doctors could ascertain the cause. Unbeknownst to his English physicians, this was not the first time that Andy had suffered such symptoms. He mentioned to no one the previous seizures for which he had been treated in Los Angeles.

  “Andy didn’t die of drugs, although drugs had done a lot of damage to his heart in previous years,” Robin said. “He’d had four seizures and things like that, so he was not in good nick. A week and a half before he died, in fact, he had gone into hospital suffering from severe chest pains but checked himself out before doctors could do tests. If he hadn’t left, his condition might have been diagnosed, the right treatment prescribed for him and who knows … he might have stood a fighting chance.”

  * * *

  “Superstars usually have a tough hide from having doors slammed in their face and hustling,” said Freddie Gershon, the former president of RSO Records. “Andy never built up those layers, because he never had to. Andy grew older, but he didn’t grow up. He froze in time at about age 17.”

  It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by Barbara Gibb, who said of her youngest child, “He was just like Peter Pan. He was just like a little boy all his life.”

  Success had come so easily to Andy; but his career, which had shown such bright promise at the start, declined just as rapidly as he fell victim to the temptations of the condition his brothers describe as “first fame”. Although his income at the height of his career had averaged nearly $2 million a year, selling more than 20 million albums, the money had disappeared; most of it on cocaine. Through stints in Californian drugs rehabilitation centres, he did manage to beat his cocaine addiction, but giving up drink had proven more difficult, despite confiding in his long time friend, Marie Osmond, how proud he was to be a recovering member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Just days after celebrating his thirtieth birthday on March 5, 1988, with his mother Barbara at brother Robin’s Oxfordshire estate, he checked into John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, complaining of stomach and chest pains.

  Robin recalled, “When he was on his way to hospital the day before he died, I said to him, ‘You’ve got to start getting yourself together. You are the master of your own destiny.’ He said, ‘Yes, I know I am. I keep telling myself this.’ Those were the last words we spoke to each other.”

  Although tests revealed no signs of drugs or alcohol in his system, the years of abuse had taken their toll. His American cardiologist, Dr William Shell, said, “I thought that the physicians in London would have been well served by talking to some of us, because some of these events were pretty frightening. They probably could have aborted one of these events if they had known what the treatment was.”

  Barbara had been reluctant to leave her son. “I said I’d stay with him, I thought, give me the paper, I’ll stay here all night, but they don’t let you in England, you can’t stay in the ward all night so I had to go, so I said, ‘I’ll be back in the morning.’ … [The nurse] said, ‘Well, you better go because he’ll sleep all night now, we’ve given him something to sleep.’ And he was … fast asleep.”

  The following morning, March 10, his doctor told him he needed more tests. Andy agreed, then slumped into unconsciousness. Moments later, at 8.45 a.m., he was pronounced dead. Poignantly, his last words to his mother, uttered the night before, were, “You can’t die from this, can you?”

  Robin broke the news to his brothers back in Miami. “That has to be the saddest, most desperate moment of my life, when I heard he had gone,” Barry said. “Since then, I’ve asked myself a thousand times, could I have done more or said more to help him?”

  Maurice’s reaction was stunned disbelief and prompted his own break in his recovery from alcoholism, as he admitted later. “Andy was in Miami doing great, getting his pilot’s licence … He’s in England for about a month — and he’s dead,” he said incredulously. “It took me three years to cry over that — three years. When it happened, I just drank and drank to numb my mind.

  “The death of Andy was just one of those things that I refused to recognise for a while … You’d think I would have learned directly from Andy’s tragedy, but when you’re not ready, you’re just not ready. Of course, somewhere in my subconscious, it helped me learn that the time had come for me to do something about my problem.”

  The media were quick to leap to conclusions when the news leaked. Andy’s death was called a massive cocaine overdose, or a drink and drug binge. One article in an Australian women’s magazine even claimed, “After his death, his mother Dorothy [sic], found a huge hoard of more than 20 vodka bottles under his bed.” It seemed to typify how little importance they placed on printing the truth about Andy’s death.

  Barbara Gibb angrily denied the rumours. “I was with him in England when he died and they assured me at the hospital that there was not anything in his bloodstream at all. He was clean.”

  It was even suggested that he had died from a broken heart over the end of his relationship with Victoria Principal. Barbara insisted that he had completely recovered years earlier. “All this stuff in the papers about him breaking his heart for Victoria Principal, four years after it was all over, was just a myth. I don’t know who dreamed that one up.”

  Hugh put it more succinctly. “Garbage,” he termed it.

  The official cause of death was viral myocarditis, an inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart. The condition is more common in those with weakened immune systems, which in turn can be caused by long-term drug or alcohol abuse. As with any virus, antibiotics are useless in treating viral myocarditis; doctors can only prescribe massive doses of steroids and painkillers, and hope that it clears up.

  For Maurice, the pain was only intensified by the fact that the press seemed disappointed by the lack of a hot story. Setting themselves up in a pub called Thatcher’s down the road from Robin’s estate, the journalists seemed to wait like vultures. “What upsets us more is what certain sections of the media did,” Maurice explained. “One national newspaper declared Andy had taken a massive cocaine overdose before we’d even got him to hospital, because he’d done it before. We were also accused of taking drugs at the funeral ourselves. When our mum used to give money to Andy when he was going through bad patches, we’d see headlines like, ‘Mum gives drug money to Andy’. It’s okay for us because we are used to pressures of that kind, but we ask why the press takes it out on the families of the people involved because they are devastated enough as it is. The bit that got me was a reporter from one paper who phoned his editor and said, ‘I’ve got bad news for you, chief, it was natural causes.’ … That, to me, put the whole thing in a nutshell.”

  Robin Gibb’s personal assistant, Ken Graydon, described the family as “devastated by grief”.

  The Gibb family closed ranks, issuing a statement to the press. “His passing was completely unexpected and occurred just as he was looking forward to resuming his career and working on a new recording contract.”

  Dick Ashby commented, “It looks as if Andy went off the straight and narrow after he arrived back in England. It’s a terrible shame.”

  Hugh Gibb flew to London from his home in Los Angeles and was met by Robin at Heathrow Airport. Hugh was responsible for getting the news of Andy’s death to his former wife and daughter, who also immediately headed for London. “He said he didn’t think it would have been right for me to read about it in the paper,” Kim said. “I’ll always be grateful to him for that.”

  She cla
imed that she wasn’t surprised when the news came. “I always knew that one day I would get a call like this,” she said. “It was only a matter of time.”

  But even the knowledge that the lifestyle Andy had led could lead to an untimely death didn’t prepare her for her own reaction to the news. “It’s really only now that he has gone that I have stopped hoping he’d come back,” she admitted. “I always thought we would eventually get back together. But now, he’s dead. And the story will never be resolved. I will never know what might have happened.”

  She added, “It’s so bloody sad, Andy died when he was clear of drugs, he was free and it seemed to me that he had finally grown up. Since I heard the news about his death, I have been crying solidly. I keep thinking how our daughter will never see him, never know him. Peta is the one good thing that came out of our marriage, and she is all there is left of Andy.”

  On March 13, Kim and Peta went to The Prebendal for Sunday lunch with the whole Gibb family, with the hopes of putting the past behind them. “I want once and for all to end the rift between us for Peta’s sake,” Kim said. “She should know who her grandparents are — she will never know her dad. This meeting should have happened years ago. Andy would be happy to know we are here. All there is left to do is pray that Andy is all right now, that the pain and the suffering are over for him.”

  A memorial service for Andy was held in the private chapel on Robin’s estate, but Andy’s funeral was held on March 21 in his adopted home city of Los Angeles. He was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Cemetery, with the simple epitaph provided by one of his hit singles, ‘An Everlasting Love’. The entire Gibb clan were present, but Kim and Peta still didn’t feel as if they were part of the family. Of all Andy’s famous friends, Olivia Newton-John was the only celebrity to attend his funeral. During the service, Barry read a poem written by Andy in Las Vegas three years earlier.