After a series of increasingly physical rows in February of 1982, Victoria threw Andy out and ended things. “Victoria and I went to pick up some Indian curry and went back to her house,” Andy said. “We were fighting in the car and when we got back to the house we started ranting and screaming and pushing and shoving. In the end it got a little physical. I stormed out and drove back to my house at Malibu Beach. That was the last time I saw Victoria.”{535}
He called and called, begging to be taken back, but she was adamant. “Watching someone you care about to be destroyed because of drugs is a horrifying experience,” Victoria said. “I did everything I humanly could to stop him.”{536}
“I just fell apart and didn’t care about anything,” Andy recounted. “I started to take cocaine around the clock—about $1,000 a day. I stayed awake for two weeks locked in my bedroom. The producers kept calling up, sending cars for me, but I refused to go. . . . the major reason I fell from stardom was my affair with Victoria.”{537} Victoria’s position was simple: “Our breakup was preceded and precipitated by Andy’s use of drugs. I did everything I could to help him. But I told him he would have to choose between me and his problem.”{538}
Victoria had been suppressing her doubts, and when the dam burst she was ready to be over Andy. His immaturity and addiction left her feeling emotionally vulnerable and concerned about her image and career. If Andy got busted, or if his cocaine habit became public knowledge, she feared she would never escape the scandal. Between being the older woman and her Playboy past, Victoria knew she would catch the blame.
“I have been to hell and back,” Andy said. “I had a bad nervous breakdown. There was a lot of pressure on me and Victoria. There was a sweet dream of a relationship and also a nightmare at some point. She’s an ambitious girl and I think it was mutual. We both pressured each other. We couldn’t spend five minutes apart. We split up several times before the final split. It was inevitable. I turned to drugs for a month and did quite an awful lot of cocaine. I gave up everything. I started missing taping of Solid Gold and I was a very bad boy. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about people. I didn’t care about life.”{539}
The Solid Gold producers did their best to lure Andy back. Andy refused to leave his house and they gave up. “He really meant well,” said Lachman, the producer of Solid Gold. “He wasn’t being difficult. He was going through problems he couldn’t deal with. He wanted everyone to love him. He had so much going for him. After repeated warnings, he was fired.”
Shortly afterward, Andy got the not unexpected news that Stigwood would not renew his expiring contract with RSO. Nineteen eighty-two was a time of heightened tension between the Bee Gees and Stigwood, and Andy’s older brothers did not or could not prevent Stigwood from dropping Andy. Perhaps, they thought the additional shock of being cast off the label might help Andy see how serious his situation was. By his own hand, Andy had become a singer without a label and a personality without a platform.
“For about twelve months,” Barbara said, “he was devastated.”{540}
Andy later told reporter Robin Leach: “I had lots of money. Lotta hit records. I think [Victoria] took me in and calmed me down. She was good for me and in a lot of ways she was bad for me. I looked to her as a motherly figure. She looked to me as a son figure. She had my life totally organized and when we outgrew each other, or she outgrew me even though she was older, there was no one there.”{541}
Andy’s parents moved in with him, and, as Andy tells it, one night after weeping all day from the moment he awoke, Andy remembered that his nearby neighbor was a psychiatrist. Andy called him, and he guided Andy to St. Francis Hospital in Santa Barbara; Andy checked in under the name Roy Lipton.{542} He stayed for three days.
Rumors spread that Andy had attempted suicide. To quell them, Dick Ashby released a statement: “We heard rumors about Andy’s suicide attempt, and the family called to make sure he was okay. Barry Gibb’s wife spoke to him last night, and he sounded calm.”{543}
“I felt like a black-widow spider,” Victoria said later. “I know how it looks from the outside, especially as I didn’t come forward. Everybody assumed I split with Andy. But I didn’t want to go into it at the time and that is something I will have to live with. There is no point in defending or explaining what actually happened, but it would be unfair to say it was my choice to end the relationship.”{544}
“It put me on an incredible position, a terrible dilemma: To speak out on my own behalf, to reveal the fact that the problem had been ongoing and that was the reason for the break-up would have been to add to the tremendous burden Andy was carrying, and so I chose to remain silent.”{545}
When Andy went back home, Barbara came to stay and looked after him. Andy grew ready for the next phase of his career: confessing on national television. On July 23, 1982, he went on Good Morning America and told Joan Lunden about his coke habit. He wore a white sweatshirt and gold chains. He talked about checking into therapy, about missing the taping of a Bob Hope special and how he feared that might have gotten him blackballed from television.
Andy had attended the People’s Choice Awards in March 1982, and there promised Bob Hope he would appear on Hope’s special. As the day of taping drew nigh, Andy hid in his house and wouldn’t answer his phone, even when Hope made a personal call. Pat Boone replaced Andy. To spurn Bob Hope, for any reason, was pure self-undermining. Hope’s specials were, even then, pathetically retrograde. They were tailor made for Andy as he sought to leave teenybopper audiences behind and build a name in the mainstream. His failure to appear sent a powerful message to the television networks.{546}
Andy admitted selling off possessions to pay for cocaine. Speaking of his fans, Andy said: “They’ve never really quite known the truth of what I’ve been through or the things that I’ve done. I’m no longer a teenybopper idol.” Here, again, Andy was ahead of his time, using his addiction as a springboard for his hoped-for comeback. “I had everything I wanted and I blew it all apart,” Andy said. “I’ve been lucky. I’ve kept my fans. It’s rare and I’m grateful.” Joan Lunden appears genuinely moved. She wishes him good luck and Andy says: “I need it.”{547}
On December 1 of 1982, after working in preview performances out of town, Andy hit Broadway to star in the Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Price musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Andy appeared on Entertainment Tonight to promote the show, which presented him in costume wearing a midriff T-shirt, a pink feather boa and a white sweatband. Maurice said: “He always said that one day he was going to make it on Broadway.”{548} Andy’s early performances were auspicious and the sold-out houses cheered him madly. Within a month, Andy was skipping shows.
“When he started rehearsals his brothers were jumping up and down with excitement,’ said Zev Buffman, the show’s producer. “His mom and dad came from England. He was always talking about it as a new start. But we’d lose him over long weekends. He’d come back on Tuesday and he’d look beat. He was like a little puppy—so ashamed of something he did wrong. He was all heart, but he didn’t have the muscle to carry through.”{549}
“When he missed the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s, he heard that I was in the process of replacing him and came in to see me.”{550} “I told [Andy] ‘You may be a sick boy, with throat problems and chest problems and so on, but you may also be staying up too late and running around. I tried to stress the fact he had to stay in training and protect his voice. He promised me he wouldn’t miss another one. He said: ‘If I do, you won’t even have to call me, I’ll be gone.’”{551} When Andy missed two shows on February 12, 1983, Buffman replaced him.
In August, Andy worked the Resorts International Casino Hotel in Atlantic City followed by a brief stand at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Andy might have had a fulfilling career in an earlier time, kicking a microphone cord across the stage, driving ladies crazy singing standards in a tux at high-line clubs, casinos and hotels and becoming a junior, hard-partying member of the Rat P
ack: Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop and Andy Gibb . . . that life, with its lower standards of originality and more lax ideas about what comprised entertainment, might have suited him well.
In August 1984, Andy was found unconscious in his New York hotel room; he cancelled his tour dates and went back to Malibu. The week before, Andy had done shows in New Jersey, New Hampshire and Ohio. An aide said: “His schedule has been so difficult. Many of the places are not reachable by direct traveling. He’s doing a lot of one-nighters and he simply collapsed out of exhaustion.” Andy cancelled upcoming shows in Louisiana; he had been drinking heavily.{552}
People magazine recounted Andy’s troubles. “He knew how to spend, both on drugs and in countless other ways. He blew millions,” Stigwood said. “He got paranoid. He couldn’t fly on a public plane. He had to hire private planes.” “It was hard for him not having the royal treatment anymore,” says Marc Gurvits, who managed Andy from 1983 to 1985, after Stigwood left the music business. “Whenever he was depressed on tour, he wanted to cancel the engagement.”{553}
In April 1985, Andy checked into the Betty Ford Clinic at Rancho Mirage, California. His publicist, Michael Sterling, said: “He checked into the centre and is doing well. Andy is making extraordinary progress at the centre, has become ardently involved in its program and will continue an additional maintenance program after completing his treatment next month.”{554} Andy later told Lifetime TV, while sitting poolside in an open shirt and a choker chain of enormous, square gold links: “I checked myself into Betty Ford and did six weeks, which is the longest you can do.” Other sources said Andy fought to get out of the clinic, and that pressure from his family kept him in.
Andy closed the year touring in Asia and thought he might be on the verge of realizing his greatest aspiration: “I got a feeling that deep down in the pit of my stomach that ’86 is going to be good for me. Because I am clean now and I know what I’m doing and [that is] to work with my brothers—and joining my brothers at the end of the year as a Bee Gee. We’re going to be one group and we will start my new album in May with Barry again, now [that] we have confidence in me.”{555} Andy kept busy playing a relentless schedule of smaller venues in America. He went back into the studio in May of 1986 to record demos for a new album.
In the spring of 1987, Andy checked into rehab again. When he got out, he moved back to Miami. He worked with his brothers on demos for a new record. Andy seemed to have blown his fortune on drugs, private planes and other extravagances. He lived in a penthouse at the Venetia apartment complex rent free in exchange for the apartment using his name in their promotions. His brothers loaned him furniture and musical instruments and put him on a $200 a week cash allowance. Nobody was talking about him joining the Bee Gees anymore.
And why would they want him? That was Andy’s fantasy, with a small push from Barry, who later said, unconvincingly: “Six months before his death I campaigned to get him included. It was put to the vote and I’m afraid I was out-voted two to one.”{556} It seems unlikely that Maurice or Robin would want a younger, handsomer, more energetic, more out of control version of themselves joining them onstage. Barry had demonstrated for years how few lead vocals there were to be shared, and his brothers knew Barry favored Andy. Their harmony parts had always been for three and those parts created instinctively. Moreover, they had busted their asses to be the Bee Gees; why should they let their wasted little brother step in?
In early September 1987, Andy filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in Miami. He claimed to have earned only $24,727 in 1985, and $7,755 in 1986. Andy owed $187,041 and had assets of only $1,432.79. One of his largest debts, $23,353.59, was owed to an aviation company, Business Jet Airlines.{557} Andy had grown frightened of flying commercial, or too shy to be seen in public. He developed the habit of hiring private jets on a whim. The Miami Herald reported: “Other creditors included a New York accounting firm, a Los Angeles limousine service, a Los Angeles public relations firm, an instrument rental company in Hollywood, Calif., the Sun City Resort in South Africa, two medical doctors and a dentist. Unspecified amounts are owed the Internal Revenue Service and the Dade County Property Appraiser.”{558}
Andy took flying lessons, got his longed-for pilot’s license and played ferocious rounds of tennis with Barry. The two talked about an Andy comeback record. Barry brought Andy to London to meet with Island Records. After hearing his four demos, Island signed Andy in February of 1988. He stayed in England, moving into an outbuilding, the Chancery, on Robin’s medieval estate, Prebendal. Andy’s stated intention was to work on songs. He called Kim in Australia to make plans to see Peta. Kim did not want to come to LA, so they worked on the logistics of Kim flying to England with their daughter.
After the deal was signed and Andy had to sing, his old patterns resurfaced. He holed up in the Chancery for days, drinking and refusing to leave. According to Robin, the new recording deal terrified Andy. He would sit inside a window at the Chancery; from that perch he could spot anyone coming to see him, and hide. Barry said: “He didn’t need to be away from his family and we didn’t want him away from us and I think he went into a decline because of that.” Maurice called. Robin told him Andy was too drunk to talk to him. Maurice later said: “I said, ‘Oh, sod him, then,’ and I put the phone down. I never forgave myself for that for a long time.”{559}
Barbara, concerned that Andy would not come to the phone, asked Robin how her youngest boy was doing. Robin told her: “Don’t come, Mum. You’re babying him too much. He’s fine.” Barbara got on a plane the next day.{560}
On March 5, 1988, Andy spent a quiet, isolated birthday with his mother at the Chancery. On the seventh, he suffered “stabbing pains in his chest and abdomen” and was rushed to the local hospital. The doctors there did not delve into Andy’s history and so learned little of his cocaine and alcohol abuse. They did not contact his American doctors. If they’d known Andy’s history, and what sustained cocaine use does to the heart, they would have handled Andy differently. Barbara said: “When he died it had nothing to with drugs at all, but the damage that had been done by the drugs in the first place.”{561} Andy went back to Robin’s.
On the ninth Andy returned to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Barbara wanted to stay the night, but “they wouldn’t let me. In England you can’t stay in the ward. I had to go.”{562} Andy’s last words to his mother were: “You can’t die from this, can you?”
In the morning, his doctor said: “Do you mind if we draw blood from you one more time?” According to Barbara, Andy said no, “turned around, gave one big sigh, and was gone.”{563}{564} Andy was pronounced dead at 8:45 a.m. on March 10, 1988.
Barry said later: “The last time I spoke to him it was an argument, which is devastating to me. I have to live with that all my life. I was saying: ‘you’ve got to get your act together and this is no good.’ Because someone had said to me at some point: ‘tough love is the answer.’ For me, it wasn’t, because that was the last conversation we had.”{565} Victoria Principal said: “I had to live with the awareness for many years that it would not be if Andy would die, it would be when Andy would die.”{566} Robin said: “I don’t think he liked the world out there, so he constructed his own.”{567}
The tabloid reporters surrounded Robin’s estate and wrote one unfounded story after another about Andy’s purported “cocaine overdose.” The family issued a statement: “His passing was completely unexpected and occurred just as he was looking forward to resuming his career and working on a new recording contract.”{568} Hugh flew to London, met with Robin and delivered the sad news to Kim. She and Peta immediately flew to London. On March 13, she joined the Gibbs at Prebendal and they dined together. Peta had at last met her father’s family. The older brothers, finally showing concern for Andy’s child, later worked out financial arrangements for Peta’s education and gained significantly higher royalty rates on Andy’s album sales for her benefit. Peta was Andy’s sole heir to what remained of his estate and posthumous income
.
Andy’s body was flown to LA and buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery on March 21. As part of the service, Barry read a poem Andy had written in 1985.
“That was the saddest, most desperate moment of my life, when I heard he had gone,” Barry told the Sunday Mail. “Since then I’ve asked myself a thousand times, could I have done more or said more to help him? He always seemed to have a zest for life. But beneath all the 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.”{569}
Victoria Principal, demonstrating a certain level of self-regard, said: “Several years ago I had a dream and in that dream Andy came to me knowing I was haunted by this. He sat down and we had the talk that I certainly always wanted to have. And I thought it was so like Andy to find a way, even after his death, to bring me solace.”{570} She said this with a straight face and apparent heartfelt sincerity.
People reported: “When the final call came announcing Andy’s death, [Kim] Reeder wasn’t surprised. ‘I always knew that one day I’d get a call with news like this,’ she said. ‘It was only a matter of time. I think,’ she says of herself and her daughter, ‘that we were the only touch with reality he ever had.’”{571}
Kim always thought Andy might come back to her. “He never remarried, did he?” she said. “Neither did I. I wish that he’d never had anything to do with the music industry. He wanted to be a pilot. He was bright. He could have done anything. But his career was decided for him. I believe it killed him.”{572}
No matter how the magazines and tabloids screamed about drug overdoses, the postmortem on Andy Gibb was definitive: he was clean when he died. There were no drugs or alcohol in his system. Barbara said: “They showed me at the hospital that there wasn’t anything in his bloodstream at all.”109 The medical examiner’s report confirms what Barbara was told.
The Bee Gees Page 28
