The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  Blue Weaver, Alan Kendall and Dennis Bryon were listed among the musicians playing on the album, but Blue explained, “ ‘Desire’ actually started out as a Bee Gees track, so that’s why we’re credited on that. It was only really for the one song. We’d already done that with Barry singing lead — we’d worked on it for weeks, actually … Then we thought, ‘Well, it’s all right, but it’s not really happening,’ so it was set aside. The same thing happened with the track that I got onto the Ruffin album, ‘Where Do I Go’. That started off as a Bee Gees song and ‘Nobody’ as well.” Barry’s lead vocals were simply removed from the mix and replaced by Andy’s. The song would reach number four on the American charts but failed to place in the UK.

  Albhy observed that one of the difficulties that Barry had when writing for Andy was that he would rely on his falsetto. “Andy’s falsetto was nowhere near Barry’s,” he added. “Andy’s natural voice was much more his strength, so that … sometimes he had to do more work because his facility with falsetto made it naturally easier for him to write for female singers.”

  Olivia Newton-John appeared on the album to reprise her duet of ‘Rest Your Love On Me’ from the UNICEF concert — yet another recording of the song after its recent appearances on a Bee Gees B-side, The Osmonds’ Steppin’ Out album (which Maurice produced) and the country hit by Conway Twitty. She also lent her voice to a new Barry Gibb composition, ‘I Can’t Help It’.

  “It was so sad, the duet with Olivia,” Albhy said. “When we had done the first demo vocals with Olivia and Barry, it was magical. But it was supposed to be an Andy record, it was kind of like you feel guilty, like, ‘Oh gee, we did this thing, and now we had to try to get Andy to do the same things Barry had done.’ Originally, we were in the studio in Miami, and it was Barry and Olivia singing together. I think Andy was not showing up. Barry had sung the demo, and Olivia sang to that. I think Andy showed up late. It was a problematic period for Andy. He sang some with her, [but] he was not making the notes … Andy’s voice was horrible in those days; he was in really bad shape. It was wispy, there was no character to it … It’s one thing to fix somebody’s pitch or meter, but you can’t fix the timbre of their voice or the emotion of their singing. So it was a lost opportunity.”

  Although publicly Olivia raved that the Gibb brothers “never cease to amaze me,” privately, she was said to have complained that the album took so long to be completed that the two duets were stale by the time they were finally released. Her appearance on the LP led to more rumours of romance, but once again, these were denied. “Olivia was total publicity, and there was nothing into that at all. Any guy would love to have her,” Andy sighed. “I’d like the rumours to be true, but it takes two to tango.”

  While he admitted that he had taken full advantage of all that life as a pop star had to offer, he said, “I went through a period where it was always right in front of me … just so much sex, girls, and dates who were around me because I was ‘Andy Gibb’, and I just started to back away from it. I didn’t like to date so much; I started looking for that special girl. I think, I’m like my brothers, I’m a romantic, and I don’t like ‘one night stands’. I’m really not into that. I’m a guy like anybody else and I’ve had my fun, but I think I was looking for that nice lady to live with or settle down with …”

  He admitted that he still had feelings for Marie Osmond, but added, “There’s no love affair going on with Marie. She’s a great person, always smiling. Very bubbly, she lives life every minute. Marie spends most of her time with her family. They’re all very close. I just can’t wheedle her away. I fancy her like mad. She knows I do. I’ve liked her for a long time, but there’s no love affair. We haven’t progressed any further than that. We have talked about it and we’ve got to the point where we both understand each other.

  “She’s a smashing girl, and although we’ve had roughly the same upbringing — the show business family, the fame the money — she’s very different from me. I’ve been spoiled — she hasn’t. She doesn’t take anything for granted. She’s very level-headed. So she’s very special to me. She’s the only one who is.”

  The following year, he admitted, “There was only one, and I have never said it in any interviews — as a matter of fact, I denied it in most interviews — there was only one girl I was really crazy about and that was Marie. And I think, even though nothing really happened, once I met her I just totally relaxed, calmed down and I stopped dating so much. I think it was a ‘saving myself’ thing, and it was stupid because now we are just good friends. There is nothing there now. We both felt something at the time and she is just a really unique lady. That was the one that was not just publicity, for my part it was pretty true.”

  For a brief time, Andy was linked with Olympic ice skater, Tai Babilonia, whom he met when both appeared on Bob Hope’s 77th Birthday Special on NBC. “We hit it off right away and started dating,” Tai recalled. “But we were never alone. He was always with a bodyguard. You might say I was in love with him from afar.”

  In January, family business gave Kim Gibb the opportunity to fly to Los Angeles. She had had no contact at all with Andy since before the birth of their daughter, claiming that “The record moguls and the family had moved in to put a brick wall between us.” Despite all this, she decided that it was time that Andy met his two-year-old daughter.

  When she arrived in Los Angeles, she called the RSO offices to find out if he was in town. “I put on an American accent so they wouldn’t know it was me,” she said, “and they assured me he was there. Then I told them who I was, and that I’d brought Peta to see her father, as it was her second birthday tomorrow.

  “I was referred to his lawyers, who told me in no uncertain terms, ‘Andy doesn’t want to see you.’ They then asked me how much money I wanted. God, I didn’t want money — all I wanted was his recognition and his love. Finally, after some persuading, they agreed that they would get him to call me.”

  Kim waited nervously for the phone in her hotel room to ring. When Andy finally did call her, she said his first words to her were, “Hello, Kim, how much money do you want?”

  She continued, “When I explained that I only wanted him to see his child, he replied typically, ‘I don’t know if I can cope with that.’ I was devastated, but at least I was hearing it from his lips.”

  Clearly, the temptation to see his only child must have been too much for him, and he relented. He asked Kim if she could drive to the Beverley Hills Hilton Hotel, where he had a suite. She arrived to find a man she could hardly recognise. “He was clearly not well,” she recalled, “but he was gentle with Peta and bought her a bracelet engraved with the words ‘All my love, A.G.’ ”

  Peta’s sole memory of her only meeting with her father was of him handing her a glass of Coca-Cola. Kim and Peta returned to their own hotel. “I didn’t know it then,” said Kim, “but that was the last time I would ever see Andy alive. The next day I called the hotel, but he had gone.”

  When the After Dark LP arrived in the shops in the following month, it was seen as something of a comeback for Andy. Andy himself said, “I was kind of on ice for a year, but now I feel I’ve got a new start. It took me over a year to record [the] album. I finished it just before Christmas. I thought I was never going to see the outside of the studio. It was too long to be away,” he admitted.

  Andy flew to Britain to promote the release of the After Dark album. An interviewer described the young Gibb as “not what you would expect from someone who will be just 22 next month”. Andy seemed to have aged more than the two years which had passed since his last album. His hair was dull, his skin pallid, there were wrinkles under his eyes; all the tell-tale signs of the dangerous lifestyle he had adopted.

  Still, Andy tried to downplay his dependency by confessing just a little. “My first success went to my head,” he admitted. “I did some very silly things. Life was just a big party. I don’t say I got into heavy drugs, but it was definitely silly. Just not worth it. Not co
nducive to creativity and certainly not good for my health. But I’ve grown out of it now and I’m glad I have.

  “I guess I got a little cocky, a little big-headed. I became a bit of a bad boy and tried to get out of doing things. I became a bit of a recluse. What got to me was that anything and everything was connected with what I was, not who I was. It got to the stage where I didn’t know who I was anymore. So last year was spent getting back to me again. Now I am 100 per cent better than I was. I’m much more confident. I have a purpose and have big plans.”

  Andy claimed, “I just want to settle down. I want to be very mellow, very secure, like my brother Barry. That’s the way it used to be. And that’s the way I’m determined it’s going to be in the future.

  “I’m really just getting over my divorce,” he added. “I saw my ex-wife Kim and my daughter Peta, who is two … for the first time just a couple of weeks ago in Los Angeles. They live in Australia. It’s the only fair way for them to live.”

  While he said that the meeting “went real well,” he admitted that, “In a way I wish I had not seen Peta. I can’t not see her again. She’s absolutely gorgeous, a little doll. I’ve just lost my heart to her. And in looks, she’s a real Gibb. I couldn’t stop taking pictures of her.”

  Andy and Olivia’s duet, ‘I Can’t Help It’, was the second single released from the album. It too made no impact on the British charts but reached number 12 in the United States. Andy was also said to have sung lead on the first verse of an unreleased take of ‘Play The Game’, a Freddie Mercury composition included on Queen’s 1980 LP, The Game.

  Once again mirroring his eldest brother’s career, rumours abounded that Andy would soon make the transition to film. He was touted for the role of Olivia Newton-John’s younger brother in Grease II and even went so far as a screen test. There was also talk of a role in a science fiction movie, Nebula’s Run. “There are plans again for a movie this year, so things are happening,” he declared. “I’m very into acting, and I want to make a film badly … I of ten worry if my Australian character would not work in the movies, but that is something I feel I can do. It would have to be the right type of script, it has to be the right concept, everything.”

  Ostensibly to make himself more available to the film world, he moved away from the family compound in Florida and back to Los Angeles. Barry believes it was for another reason. “Once he realised that everyone in Miami was trying to stop him doing [drugs], then he moved to LA.”

  Hugh, Barbara and Beri also made the move to Los Angeles in June, but the closeness of his family did little to deter Andy from falling back into his old ways.

  Just as his brother Maurice had done, Andy bought a private jet in partnership with a famous friend; in this instance, Robert Redford. While it may seem an unlikely friendship, Andy explained, “Robert Redford and I both love the country. He’s heavily into ecology, and he’s also working in politics in Utah where he owns this big ski resort and I snow-ski heavily. I go up there every Christmas time and ski on his resort.”

  In September, Andy Gibb’s Greatest was released, a compilation of his hits with three new tracks, which marked Andy’s career wrap-up.

  The house band really let loose on ‘Time Is Time’ by Andy and Barry and turn it into a great record, with the chugging rhythm section, a super synthesizer break, organ backing as it raves up, and wonderful offhand complete finish that was inexplicably faded off the song on the posthumous Andy Gibb CD. “I wrote [‘Time Is Time’] out here in Los Angeles on my own,” Andy said. “ ‘Without You’ I wrote out [in Miami]. It took me about two weeks to write that song. It is not a personal experience or anything like that, it is just a song I sat down and I had a deadline to write and I sat down and I wrote it. A lot of people that have heard it think it is one of the prettiest I have ever written; but then again I am very critical, I don’t know.”

  ‘Time Is Time’, was released as the first single from the Greatest LP. It reached number 15 in the US but was a no show in the British charts. Andy was becoming slightly defensive about the amount of input that Barry had on his albums by this time. “ ‘Time Is Time’ is very interesting,” he said. “It was written about the same period out here in LA. When we went out to record them in Florida, Barry heard ‘Time Is Time’, and he altered one little thing in the song and for that reason you will see A. & B. Gibb, but it is mostly my record.”

  The third new track was a duet with Pat Arnold of the Carole King classic, ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’, a US chart topper for The Shirelles in 1960. By coincidence Arnold, an American-born soul singer who had some success in the UK in the late Sixties, had previously recorded with The Bee Gees as a back-up singer on the Cucumber Castle album and recorded several Bee Gees’ songs under the name P.P. Arnold.

  Andy’s second American single from the LP was his own composition, ‘Me (Without You)’, released in February. It peaked at number 40.

  While he tried to convince himself that it wasn’t his problem, his old feelings of unworthiness and the insecurity that came from feeling that he hadn’t really made it on his own merit still haunted him. “I read reviews and everything about, they always relate to The Bee Gees sound, how Gibb is … helped, and ‘sounds like The Bee Gees’ and everything,” he said. “I always thought that people were buying my records as an extension to The Bee Gees. I was automatically getting The Bee Gee fans who liked that sound, and I never thought there was any individual thing in there that they liked … I just felt that anything I would say would not be as valuable as the ideas that they were working on, and that it would not matter that much. You know, that it really wasn’t good enough, and so I used to hold back and they would say, ‘Well, it’s Andy’s baby, we want Andy to give us an idea about how he feels about it.’ And I never really did until the last two albums. I felt that I really wasn’t good enough, they had just brought me up from Australia. I didn’t have any confidence.”

  Admittedly, having a greatest hits album at such an early age was uncommon, but Andy was resolute that it didn’t mark the end of his career. “There’s a lot to do yet, and I can’t imagine retiring at 23,” he said. “I’d hate to think that everything that’s happened so far is the high point of my life.”

  * * *

  Rarely can a television chat show be credited — or blamed — with changing a guest’s life, but in the case of Andy’s appearance on the John Davidson Show on January 6, 1981, it did just that.

  Researchers for the show found an interview which he had done for People magazine in which he claimed to have two dream girls. The first was Bo Derek, “the most beautiful thing on two legs”. The other was “that girl on Dallas. Every time I see her I kind of tingle all over,” he said. “She’s so beautiful, there’s a kind of haunted look about her that really turns me on.”

  As it happened, January 6 was also the night that Victoria Principal was scheduled to appear on The Tonight Show, which was taped in the studio next door. The John Davidson Show staff plotted to sneak Victoria onto the show during Andy’s segment as a surprise. In the course of the interview, John Davidson casually mentioned Victoria Principal, and Andy eagerly admitted his infatuation.

  “People magazine asked me my favourite show,” Andy would explain later. “I said, ‘Dallas but only because of Victoria Principal.’ Victoria wrote a thank you note because of that … John started bringing up Victoria. I thought, ‘What’s this to me?’ and Victoria suddenly appeared behind me and came and sat next to me.”

  Andy’s response was to blush like a schoolboy and stammer a few words. “He was acting like a 16-year-old,” recalled a Davidson spokesman.

  “I thought his reaction was so natural that I just sat and talked to him,” Victoria said. She explained that she had read the story and had written Andy a note of thanks, put it in her purse and forgotten to post it. Newly separated from her husband of 20 months, 24-year-old actor Christopher Skinner, Victoria had spent the past few years trying to live down her “party girl” imag
e after highly publicised relationships with Frank Sinatra, Desi Arnaz Jr., football player Lance Rentzel and financier Bernie Cornfeld, among others.

  Andy managed to regain his composure enough to ask for her phone number. “Our rapport was immediate,” he recalled. “Two days later, I called her. She was sick in bed with a heavy case of flu. I made some chicken soup and brought her some beautiful red roses with just one white rose in the centre, but when I got to the house, I was too scared to ring the bell. I just left the soup and the roses on the doorstep, got about halfway home to Malibu, and stopped in Westwood to call her and tell her to look on the doorstep.”

  “I said, ‘Why didn’t you ring the bell?’ But I loved his shyness and his thoughtfulness,” Victoria added. “Even now, when he sends me flowers, he always includes that one white rose.”

  The couple spent the next three days on the telephone, learning each other’s life history, and soon became inseparable. “I moved in with her a couple of days later,” Andy recalled. “I was head over heels in love. I wanted to spend my life with this woman. Nobody else existed.”

  Although he would insist that for him, it was love at first sight, he added, “By the time we broke up 13 months later, I still loved her, but in the same breath, I also hated her.”

  Despite evidence to the contrary, his parents would later cite the relationship as the beginning of Andy’s drug abuse, but Maurice Gibb said years later, “I think his relationship with Victoria Principal was absolutely beautiful, it was everything he dreamed of. And that’s the only important thing here, it’s not what I think or what anybody else thinks. Andy thought the world of her.”

  It was rumoured that Andy’s brothers tried to discourage him from the relationship, but Maurice denied that this was ever the case. “We hardly ever met Victoria, but they seemed happy living together. Andy always found it hard to shrug off the baby brother image — it was widely assumed that we three always took it upon ourselves to approve his girlfriends, but that was never the case. He was into his twenties when he was with Victoria and a big enough boy to handle himself. Who really knows what goes on behind closed doors in a relationship? None of us is blameless in that department.”