Stevie Nicks’ biography, released February 5 in the U.S., reveals intimate details of the rock icon’s time with Fleetwood Mac, including a $1 million cocaine habit, her affairs, and the one man she wanted to marry.
Excerpts of the new book, Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams & Rumours , obtained by Daily Mail, reveal Nicks’ cocaine addiction was so bad, she burned a hole in her nose the size of a dime. Addicted to alcohol and quaaludes, as well as cocaine, the Fleetwood Mac singer started to suffer from nosebleeds, blackouts, falls on stage, and near overdoses. Stevie tells biographer Zoe Howe, “There was no way to get off the white horse and I didn’t want to.”
Once her doctor warned her she was risking permanent damage or death from her drug use, band members staged an intervention and Nicks entered the Betty Ford Center to clean up. However, after kicking the coke addiction, she developed an addiction to the Klonopin that she was taking for anxiety, which plunged her into nine years of depression and weight gain.
In her biography, Stevie Nicks also talks about her two-year affair with bandmate Mick Fleetwood , who was married at the time. She also speaks to her on again/off again relationship with Don Henley . Nicks became pregnant with Henley’s child and chose to have an abortion. She later wrote the song “Sara” for the couple’s unborn girl.
Nicks says the feelings she had for Fleetwood and Henley pale in comparison to what she felt for the one man who was, and still is, the greatest love of her life: Joe Walsh of the Eagles.
“There was no other man in the world for me. And it’s the same today.”
Of all the men she had been with, she says, Joe was the one she wanted to marry. Walsh, however, thought if the two stayed together, one of them would die from an overdose, so he walked.
“There was nothing more important than Joe Walsh, not my music, not my songs, not anything. I remember days of misery waiting by the phone. Me in my house, with him saying ‘I’m going to visit you.’ I would kick everyone out because I just wanted to be with him, and not a phone call. [I put up with it because] I was in love with him. With all the drugs, we were a couple on the way to hell. It took me a long, long time to get over it.”
Although Stevie Nicks has enjoyed mega success with both Fleetwood Mac and in her solo career, her success has not come without sacrifice. Her biggest regret, she says, was not the drugs, not the affairs, but not stopping to have a baby.
[Image courtesy of Eva Rinaldi ]
