The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  For a time, it did seem to be a fairy tale relationship. Despite the age difference of anywhere from eight to 14 years, depending upon whom you choose to believe about the actress’s date of birth, they seemed to be well-suited. “People think I have been cradle-snatching since puberty. That’s not true,” Victoria protested. “I have dated men my own age and men older than me, but these relationships never made headlines … Some people seem to find it immoral that Andy and I should be together, with our age gap. So what?”

  “I’m tired of being a teen love object,” Andy insisted. “I’m 23 going on 45. I’ve had a lot of adventures and I’ve already travelled to most countries of the world. Sometimes I feel old because I’ve never mixed with kids my own age. I’ve always been around older people and been accepted as an adult equal. My feelings and my outlook on life are adult experiences.”

  “It’s not that I’m attracted to younger men but to a certain kind of spirit,” Victoria protested. “I love spontaneity, enthusiasm, courage and a positive, unjaded attitude.”

  Andy enthused, “Since I have met Victoria, she’s been a great source of inspiration and happiness to me. She’s a very special lady.”

  Andy and Victoria managed to keep their relationship a secret from the press for three months. “They were three of the most delicious, wonderfully happy months of my life,” Andy would later tell Neil Blinkow. “Victoria was just as much in love with me as I was with her. We could not bear to be apart for a single second. We were like two lovers shipwrecked on a desert island. There was no world outside our love.

  “She would come to my home by the Pacific Ocean. We would cook meals, and as the sun sank in those great glowing West Coast sunsets that reddened the entire sky, we would walk barefoot through the sand, heads down, locked in our own thoughts, talking about our careers, our future together.”

  Victoria agreed, “It’s been wonderful for both of us. I finally finished decorating the house. And professionally, it’s been great because we’re so supportive of each other work-wise. I’m wild to know all that he’s doing. And he’s been so successful in his own right, there’s no jealousy. He’s never said to me, ‘Oh, I haven’t seen enough of you. Don’t take that job or don’t do that talk show.’ It’s the first time ever that someone I’ve cared for hasn’t tried to suppress my work, and my work’s important to me.”

  “Victoria didn’t tell a soul about our love affair, nor did I,” Andy added. “We spent time at each other’s homes, sneaking in and out like criminals, although we were so profoundly happy it was ridiculous. Then I felt outraged; I wanted the world to know that I was in love with Victoria, that she felt the same way about me. Why should we hide our feelings for one another?”

  Victoria was still legally married to Skinner at the time, and she explained, “I had been separated from my husband for three months when I met Andy. At first it frightened me to love him, so I hid it from myself. After all, we both had broken marriages. I don’t want to do anything that reflects discredit on my relationship with Christopher. That wasn’t something undertaken lightly. I’m not exactly going out on the town. I anticipate that Andrew and I will enjoy each other’s company for a time.”

  While at the time, both painted an idyllic picture of true romance, Andy would later allege, “When I met Victoria she was in a depression over her broken marriage; she was depressed around the clock. I could never really deal with Victoria’s moods, but love is blind, so I stuck it out.

  “While she was worldly and sophisticated, she was actually an insecure, very mixed-up little girl. She would sit in bed at night reading the National Enquirer and getting so upset about publicity that other actresses were getting. There were nights when she just used to cry on me like a little baby because she was so scared — she didn’t know where she was going or what she was going to do …”

  “I’d not been seen for so long, I could have been in a convent,” Victoria added. “Then we decided to go public with it, to make the American Music Awards our first outside date. When we emerged from the limo, photographers were so startled, they forgot to take pictures and we ran right through them. Not one photograph of us going in. But they were waiting for us when we came out.” The resulting photographs appeared in the newspapers all over America, Australia and Britain.

  The following week, Andy and Victoria flew to New York, where persistent reporters and photographers soon tracked them to the Waldorf-Astoria. When the time came for Victoria to return to Los Angeles to resume filming for Dallas, Andy was supposed to remain in New York to discuss the possibility of taking on the role of Frederic in The Pirates Of Penzance, replacing singer/actor Rex Smith, and to stay on for an appearance at the Grammy Awards. On his own, he missed her so much that he flew back to Los Angeles, leaving his responsibilities behind in New York. A pattern would soon begin to emerge.

  On June 2, 1981, he opened with the Los Angeles production of The Pirates Of Penzance, starring opposite Pam Dawber, at that time best known for her role as Robin William’s sidekick in television’s Mork & Mindy. Andy loved the excitement and the brilliance of opening night, but the reality of appearing on stage night after night, and juggling the demands of the challenging Gilbert and Sullivan role with his relationship with Victoria soon proved too much for him.

  On July 7, as he was getting ready to leave for the theatre, he was suddenly doubled over in pain. Concerned and frightened, Victoria rushed him to the emergency room of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. From there, he was wheeled up to the VIP eighth floor of the hospital, where he remained for four days. It wasn’t the first time he had been rushed to hospital with mysterious pains, but once again, the doctors’ tests would prove inconclusive.

  August saw the release of Andy’s latest single, a saccharine duet with Victoria of ’All I Have To Do Is Dream, which he co-produced with Michael Barbeiro. The record sustains little in musical merit and reached only number 52 on Billboard’s Hot 100, in spite of the couple’s appearances on various American television shows promoting it. Andy revealed that there might be more records to come. “We have another one in the can,” he said. “We did two songs when we did this one. We did ‘Will You [Still] Love Me Tomorrow’, the Carole King song.”

  In addition to his recording with Victoria, he lent his vocals to one track on the Dutch recording artist Flower’s eponymous LP.

  Returning to the opening scene of their romance, the couple made another appearance on the John Davidson Show.

  On the Donahue show, Andy and Victoria spoke frankly about their relationship and their previous marriages, admitting to host Phil Donahue that they were living together and had discussed marriage, but Victoria was still waiting for her divorce from Christopher Skinner.

  “I was curious what my fans would think of me having a serious relationship, which I have not had before,” Andy confessed. “Well, I was married for 10 months once. I still consider myself an infant when I got married. I was married at 18 … and I don’t consider that a true marriage. I believe in the old expression, ‘You know when it’s real,’ and I know.

  “I believe that if you have dated for a long time there is a fear of parting. I think that is how it was for me. I dated Kim for two years in Australia, and I had to leave to come to America to do my first record here. And I felt deep down that if I came and was successful I may not come back. I stumbled into marriage that way. I was scared of splitting up at the time.”

  That same month, he made the transition from recording artist and star of the stage to star of the small screen, when he signed a 46-show contract as co-host with Marilyn McCoo for the hit syndicated television series, Solid Gold. It all began with such promise, as Andy’s charm and talent made him an ideal candidate for the show. The format for the show gave Andy the opportunity to sing the hits of the day, as well as his own material, and to establish himself as a personality rather than just a pop star. It was seen as yet another fresh start for the 23-year-old.

  In the late Seventies, when Andy
first came to fame, teenagers just wanted to dance and have a good time, and Andy’s brand of sweet pop music and his clean-cut good looks were ideal. By the Eighties, although traditional love songs still made the charts, the US music industry was moving towards the big-haired, heavy metal headbangers. Music by bands like Poison, Cinderella, Quiet Riot, Motley Crüe and Bon Jovi couldn’t have been further from the sweet innocence of ‘I Just Want To Be Your Everything’.

  The discos of the Seventies remained in business but resorted to theme nights to draw in the crowds. Wet t-shirt contests and male strippers came into vogue, and the Solid Gold dancers capitalised on this sexy image as they rolled and writhed to the hits every week.

  Andy remained a big star although he hadn’t released an album since 1980. Millions of teenagers tuned in each week to watch him present Solid Gold. But soon a pattern of dysfunction would become apparent once again.

  Despite their public protestations of an idyllic romance, behind the scenes, trouble was brewing. Victoria confided to an interviewer, “I was frightened he was only in love with my Pam Ewing character. That’s one of the dangers of being attracted to a character. There are elements of you that aren’t that character. The first time I did or said something that wasn’t Pam Ewing, it was a shock to him.”

  Andy later admitted, “Sometimes being with Victoria was like tiptoeing through a mine field. Put one foot wrong and everything is going to be blown sky-high. It was exciting, but of ten frightening. She had a terrible temper at times.”

  He alleged that the pressure to constantly prove himself to her was tearing away his self-esteem. Andy had always secretly worried that his success was firmly linked to having famous brothers, and she intensified these feelings of doubt. “I could feel this strong sense of competition between us,” he said. “I didn’t thrust my career success to the front all the time. She did, and she was quick to point out that she got it all for herself, that she didn’t come from a family that already included famous performers.”

  Andy would later claim that their relationship was stormy almost from the start, saying, “Within the first week I thought to myself, ‘I can’t live with her, she’s so crazy.’ I had heard a lot of stories about Victoria’s background and the men she had dated. She was a Hollywood socialite who had played around. Many people tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen to it.” Each new argument brought him close to despair. He would frequently disappear, travelling to Northern California and registering under a false name so neither his family nor his management could find him.

  Hugh Gibb observed, “Andy always seems to come out of these arguments the worst. He is always upset after them. He is an emotional boy and apparently gets more upset than she does.”

  Andy would subsequently admit that a contributory cause of their final break-up may have been the exclusive nature of their relationship. “We were so into each other that we gave up all our friends. We didn’t have any friends and I think that’s very important in a relationship. When she left, I had nobody, only my parents and my brothers. They pulled me right through it, all the worst of it.”

  A fiercely driven and ambitious woman, Victoria soon realised that a former teen idol with a drug problem didn’t fit into her plans for the future. Andy believed that if they were married, everything that was wrong in their relationship would magically disappear.

  “One night at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, we had both had a couple of drinks and were in bed watching TV,” he revealed. “I leaned across to Victoria and said, ‘Let’s get married.’ And she said, ‘All right.’ I said, ‘Right now.’ And she said, ‘Okay … right now.’ It was three in the morning. I called my manager, Mark Hulett, and told him he was going to be a witness. But then we decided, ‘No, we’ll do it in a church somewhere, like St. Patrick’s Cathedral.’ We were genuinely in love.

  “I just know that if we’d have married, I could have saved our relationship. I think that if I’d have got on with my career, proved to Victoria that I was a man she could really rely on, a man who would have allowed her to pursue her own career to the upper limits, she would have been happy. But by then I was freaking her out by using cocaine. I was freaking myself out because I couldn’t get off the stuff.”

  His family were already concerned over his behaviour. “I talked to him in the Solid Gold dressing room and said, ‘What are you taking this rubbish for?’ Hugh Gibb recalled. He said, ‘It’s the only way I can handle her.’ ”

  Victoria would later say, “It became very apparent to me that his behaviour was becoming erratic and that he was very, very thin. And Andy was a very kind person and a very gentle person and some of his behaviour seemed so the antithesis of who I knew him to be. And over a period of deduction, I finally realised that it had to be drugs.

  “I asked him either to choose me or to choose drugs and, though I know with all his heart he wanted to choose me, he chose drugs. It put me in an incredible position of a terrible dilemma because to speak out on my own behalf and to reveal that the problem had been ongoing, and that was the reason for the break-up, would have been to add to the already tremendous burden that Andy was carrying, and so I chose to remain silent.

  “Watching someone you care about destroyed because of drugs is a horrifying experience. I did everything I humanly could to stop him,” she insisted. “It broke my heart, the torment that he went through.”

  Andy was included in the American Music Awards salute to Australian music, with his elder brothers appearing live via a video link from London.

  But it was yet another awards ceremony which would mark the end of Andy and Victoria’s relationship. In March, 1982, the couple made their final public appearance together, attending the People’s Choice Awards. “We turned up arm in arm,” he said. “But we started arguing at the table … and muttering under our breath at each other.

  “Victoria got up to receive an award with the Dallas cast, and when she came back, it was like she didn’t know me. She was talking to her friends and I called out, ‘Victoria, I am here, you know.’ She looked at me and walked away. I felt like killing her.

  “Victoria and I went to pick up some Indian curry and went back to her house. We were fighting in the car and when we got back to the house we just 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.”

  The next day, he telephoned her, desperately pleading with her for forgiveness and offering to call again in a week when they had both had time to let things cool down. She told him that their relationship was finished.

  “I still loved her desperately,” he said. “It was as though my world was going to pieces. I didn’t believe her. I didn’t wait until the following week, I called her at home, I called her on the set … She was cold and angry. She just didn’t want to hear from me.”

  “They have been splitting up every other week since the middle of last year,” Barbara Gibb said. “Whenever they have a falling-out, it’s always a big fight and Andy moves back to his Malibu beach house. I’ve never known anyone who fights like these two. But this time, he was really rundown and at a very low ebb.”

  Andy suffered a complete collapse after the break-up. “I wasn’t eating,” he said. “I wasn’t sleeping. I was so devastated by the split-up I fell apart and just didn’t care about anything. I think subconsciously I wanted to commit suicide. I started to do cocaine around the clock — about a thousand dollars a day. I stayed awake for about two weeks, locked in my bedroom. I went down from 142 pounds to 110 pounds. It sounds awfully weak for a man to let a woman get to him in that way. But Victoria’s not just any woman.”

  “For about four months, he was devastated. We had a bad time with him, and he was crying for hours and hours,” Barbara recalled.

  His recording contract with RSO ended in March, and Robert Stigwood regretfully declined to renew it. It made little difference to Andy at the time, nor did
his commitment to Solid Gold.

  “Nothing existed for me except Victoria. I just stopped turning up for work,” he confessed. “I didn’t care. I forgot the show existed. The producers kept calling up, coming to the house, sending cars for me, but I refused to go. I locked myself in my room and nobody could get me out. I couldn’t have worked in front of a camera any way, I looked so bad — like a human skeleton.”

  In May, Brad Lachman had had enough. He fired the no-show co-host and ironically hired Rex Smith, Andy’s predecessor in The Pirates Of Penzance, to replace him.

  Andy ignored his other commitments as well. “The most embarrassing thing for me was the day Bob Hope called me up,” he recalled, “and I was spaced out on cocaine. I was supposed to do his TV special, and I didn’t turn up. He said, ‘Andy, I know what’s going on, but we need you down here. Everything’s been written around you.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, Bob, but I really can’t make it.’ I hung up on him. Consequently, I was blacklisted by NBC for a long time. I damaged my career and almost ruined my whole life.”

  Rumours circulated that Andy had attempted to commit suicide with a massive drug overdose. The Bee Gees’ manager, Dick Ashby, told reporters, “We heard rumours 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 very calm.”

  Andy would later say that the turning point came when he was at his lowest ebb. “I was sitting in my house with my mother and father about midnight, not wanting to feel this way anymore,” he said.