Stevie Nicks: Her Many Loves & the Tragic Story of Marrying Her Best Friend’s Husband
For a woman once deemed the Reigning Queen of Rock and Roll by Rolling Stone, Stevie Nicks certainly has a sensitive side. You can hear it in her voice, sense it through the library of hit songs she’s recorded and sung throughout her iconic career (both as part of Fleetwood Mac and her own solo projects), and — most of all — you can see it simply by reliving her long and winding series of red-hot relationships that she’s spoken about with honest transparency over the years. Much like her music, the story of Nicks’ love life is a roller coaster of emotion, full of peaks and valleys like these:
Lindsey Buckingham
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
First meeting while still in high school, Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s tumultuous relationship was the stuff of legends. From moving to LA and releasing a low-performing folk album (Buckingham Nicks) to eventually joining Fleetwood Mac, the two navigated young love with the stress of career struggles for over a decade before finally calling it quits. Their relationship even inspired two of Fleetwood Mac’s most popular hits: “Dreams,” written by Nicks, and “Go Your Own Way,” written by Buckingham. When they broke up Nicks told Rolling Stone in 1997: “I very, very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do. He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Every time those words would come out … I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that.” Band members John and Christine McVie, who had been married since 1968, also broke up a year later in 1978.
>> Mick Fleetwood Hopes to Help Stevie Nicks & Lindsey Buckingham Reunite
Mick Fleetwood
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
In between (and, in some instances, during) Mick Fleetwood’s two marriages to Jenny Boyd, and Nicks’ tapering-off relationship with Buckingham, the two bandmates began an on-again, off-again affair of their own, mutually parting ways (at least romantically) in 1979. Fleetwood once described all their relationships as an “unusual” situation for a band to stay together after so many splits among its members.
Don Henley
Robert Mora/Getty Images
Nicks not only dated the Eagles’ frontman Don Henley in the late ’70s, but she also became pregnant by him, ultimately electing to have an abortion. “If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac. There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away,” she told The Guardian. “And I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy. And I thought: you know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission.”
While she originally wrote the song “Leather And Lace” for Waylon Jennings and his wife Jesse Colter, she would go on to do it with Don Henley. “When I was going out with Don… I was much less busy; Fleetwood Mac was much less popular, we were just beginning,” she told High Times Magazine in 1982. “When I was with Lindsey, we lived together and were famous. It was the opposite extreme. I’ll never forget the day I was up at Don’s house having dinner with him and his manager, Irving Azoff, who is now my manager five years later, and Glenn Frey of the Eagles walked in and looked at me and said, ‘Spoiled yet.’ Like no mention of Fleetwood Mac. I was not even in the league of a singer. I was nothing more than a girl. My claws went out and I wanted to get out of there.”
>> The Eagles Are Coming to the Trippy Las Vegas Sphere
J.D Souther
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Stagecoach
Continuing her pattern of dating various members of bands she grew close with, Nicks hooked up with Eagles’ songwriter J.D. Souther, who had previously been married to Alexandra Sliwin from the group Honey Ltd. “I went out with John David Souther for a while, who is very, very, very male chauvinistic and very sweet and cute and wonderful but very Texas, and I found when I was with him, I didn’t mention Fleetwood Mac ever,” Nicks said in an interview with High Times Magazine. “It didn’t help my status with the man to bring up anything I did, so I didn’t. And then you start saying, ‘But I work too. I’m happening. I write songs, but you aren’t giving me a break.’”
>> Stevie Nicks Shares Heartbreaking Reason She Will Never Perform as Fleetwood Mac Ever Again
Kim Anderson
Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Three months after Stevie’s best friend Robin Anderson died of Leukemia in 1983, she and widower Kim got married as a mutual way to grieve and take care of Robin’s young baby together. “Robin was one of the few women who ever got leukemia and then got pregnant,” Nicks shared in 1990 with Us Magazine (as reported by Far Out Magazine). Robin had to deliver the baby early at six-and-a-half months, and then she died two days later. “I just went insane. And so did her husband. And we were the only two that could really understand the depth of the grief that we were going through. And I was determined to take care of that baby, so I said to Kim, ‘I don’t know, I guess we should just get married.’ And so we got married three months after she died, and it was a terrible, terrible mistake. We didn’t get married because we were in love, we got married because we were grieving, and it was the only way that we could feel like we were doing anything.” They divorced three months later, but Stevie reconnected with her stepson in his teens, helped put him through college, and maintained a relationship with his family ever since.
Jimmy Iovine
Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Sony Music Entertainment
Years before Jimmy Iovine became best known for working alongside hip-hop heavyweights Dr. Dre and Eminem and becoming chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M, he not only dated Nicks — he also produced her solo Bella Donna album in 1981.
Joe Walsh
Rick Diamond/Getty Images
Nicks has named Eagles Guitarist Joe Walsh one of her greatest loves, and their four-year relationship, which started in 1983, was certainly a romantic highlight — albeit one that was fueled by rampant drug use. In fact, both blame their addictions as the cause of their eventual breakup.
Remind
Where Are They Now - The Seventies
June 2022
Who can forget all the great TV shows, movies and music of the ‘70s?
Buy This Issue