In the late 1980s, Lionel Richie rode high.
He has a career that has been hugely successful with numerous hits, including the duet “Endless Love,” one of the biggest singles of all time, and includes the multi-platinum album “Can’t Slow Down.”
However, his marriage to Brenda Harvey was in a precarious land. They were separated, but few people knew.
In June 1988, Richie visited his girlfriend, Diane Alexander, when Harvey showed up at the entrance. What followed was “the worst scream of my life.” The 76-year-old singer remembers in his new memoir, “The True” (Tomorrow is Harper Lawn).
Richie believed Harvey would continue and thought leaving could ease the situation. She did, but she later went back and resumed the discussion. The police were called. The fee was brought and then deleted.
In addition to the romantic conflict, Richie had other concerns. He was told he needed a dangerous throat surgery and might not sing again. His father was almost dead too. The Grammy Award winners have decided to take a year off.
“It’ll soon be three years and then there will be some,” he recalls in the book.
During the hiatus, Richie found herself in fact suffering from a nervous breakdown and suffering from depression.
The “Hello” singer has long known that he has ADHD, and the therapist helped him understand how people with ADHD can struggle with slowing down.
“It’s time to meet yourself. “All of them.”
Richie reached out to several father figures, including Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier and Gregory Peck. He writes that Peck gave him the best advice on his marriage melodrama.
“We can’t stage the Hollywood scandal, the Lionel scandal,” Peck said. “The nasty divorce is another day in Hollywood.”
It helped me to put things in perspective. “The story has become a scandal of my century,” writes Richie. “It embraced its own life. Thankfully there was no social media.”
The “Say You, Say Me” singer also wrote inspiringly about his childhood, growing up on the Tuskegee Institute campus in Alabama, in Jim Crow’s law.
He remembers trying to drink from a water fountain reserved for “whites only” just to hear a white man approach his father and call him the word “n.”
“They’re going to ‘steer your n-er boy away from the fountain. Can’t you read?” Richie recalled that a racist thug was trying to lay an egg on his father.
A few years later, Richie asked her father about the incident. He told him:
Richie eventually divorced Harvey and married Alexander, and they had two children, Sofia, now 27, and now 31 miles.
While married to Harvey, he also hired Nicole, now 44.
The “Stuck on You” singer first realised that Nicole was her own toddler as a toddler dancing on stage at a Prince concert. He knew her parents, both musicians, had problems and struggled to maintain stability in their toddlers.
Harvey suggests that they intervene and become parents, and Richie quickly realizes they are connected.
“In a short order, this little girl became the light of my life,” he wrote inspirationally, saying that in the end they made it legal and adopted “the cutest, most adorable girl.”
His marriage to Alexander eventually fell apart. He writes that she doesn’t want to spy on show business and her husband to go on tours or talk about business from home. They divorced in 2004.
The Oscar winner once again found love in 2014 when he interviewed a woman for her job as a French tutor for his children. After walking her into her car, she saw her friend Lisa Parigi in the back seat.
“That’s it,” exclaims Richie. “Thunder rolled. Lightning hit.” The two have never married, but they are still together today.
Naturally, there are plenty of friendships with a variety of celebrities, including Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson was 12 when he first met when the Commodore was held at Jackson 5.
Richie attributes Jackson’s death in 2009, “pain” at the age of 50. It’s physical pain related to Pepsi commercials, “nose and surgery issues,” and burns that I suffer while filming existential pain.
“The pain of having too many successes,” he writes. “The pain of not learning adult lessons due to the loss of childhood… he couldn’t put together fragments of normal life, so he resigned to a life of fantasy and makeup.
Today, Richie is happy, touring, acclaimed and has appeared on “American Idol,” a judge since 2018.
He is also an avid gardener. His children called him “Lionel Thesausans” because he constantly trimmed the hedges.
Not only does he have a tendency to his own garden, he also shows up saying, “I keep things on track, once or twice a week at my kids’ house.”
Richie admits to his extraordinary career, pride himself on his children and three grandchildren, and ends the book with a sweet note.
“The trials of life come at the end,” he writes.
