In a wildly anticipated new memoir, rocker Bruce Springsteen reveals that it took marrying a beautiful young blonde to make him realize the woman he truly loved shared the stage with him every night.
Soon, she shared his bed as well.
Springsteen and his fierce, redheaded rocker, Patti Scialfa, ignited while his wife, Julianne Phillips, was away filming on location. Understandably, she thought it was the affair that ended their marriage.
What Phillips didn’t know is that she’d done the unforgivable. She loved Springsteen and that was the one thing he couldn’t stand.
Blonde bride: Springsteen married Julianne Phillips. ‘She was twenty-four, tall, blond, educated, talented, a beautiful and charming young woman,’ he writes
Affair: Bruce Springsteen sings with Patti Scialfa in June,1988 in Paris. The first rumors of their passionate affair were emerging – and they were to shatter his marriage
Swept off her feet: Julianne Phillips was a young actress – but also, Springsteen writes, an innocent. Their marriage was not to last – as he realized the other woman on stage was who he needed
Still making music: Springsteen and his wife were on stage together in June. The marriage has proved enduring
‘Born to Run,’ under wraps until Tuesday, is 510 pages of Springsteen’s raw honesty. The rock star took a risk in accepting the astonishing $10 million advance from the publisher.
If this book doesn’t earn out, Springsteen’s not so iconic he can’t suffer profound humiliation. The Boss has something to prove here. So he brings it.
Among other things, the 67-year-old opens up about his sometimes dark and twisted relationships with women.
There were good times, of course, including the ‘merry psychosexual carnage’ of wild nights of a rock star on the road.
But Springsteen freely admits he hurt a lot of women along the way even if doesn’t name names or make specific apologies.
International fame and acclaim came easier to him than true love.
The sad fact was intimacy could open up a chasm of rage in him.
‘There was a part of me, a significant part, that was capable of great carelessness and emotional cruelty,’ he writes. ‘That wanted to wound and hurt and make sure those who loved me paid for it.’
Jersey born: Baby-boomer Springsteen was born to a frequently-out-of work bus driver, Doug, and Pamela, in Freehold, New Jersey
Family time: Springsteen and his sister Pamela. The times were mean and so was their father, planting himself at the kitchen table nightly with the ‘sacred’ six-pack at hand.
Springsteen grew up in Freehold, N.J., the son of a frequently unemployed bus driver, Doug Springsteen. The times were mean and so was his father, planting himself at the kitchen table nightly with the ‘sacred’ six-pack at hand.
His father radiated rage, sometimes terrifying his family. He always had a snarl to spare for his only son.
‘He loved me but he couldn’t stand me,’ Springsteen writes.
As a result, Springsteen grew up ‘broken’ and admits he had no business marrying the young, innocent, Julianne Phillips, who became his first wife at the stroke of midnight on May 13, 1985.
It’s striking how stilted Springsteen’s language becomes when he describes Phillips as she was when he first met her. It’s as if the brilliant lyricist seizes up.
‘In Los Angeles, I met Julianne Phillips, an actress out of the Pacific Northwest,’ he writes, not sounding like himself at all.
‘She was twenty-four, tall, blond, educated, talented, a beautiful and charming young woman.’
The one where she dances in the dark: The video for the hit song saw an unknown Courtney Cox pulled on stage by Springsteen
Fond memory: Springsteen says the sight of dad doing his ‘white-man boogaloo and daddy-shuffle’ in the 1984 video always sends his kids into ‘righteous, rolling’ laughter
Does that sound like a young man swept off his feet?
Right after the wedding, he was struck by a series of severe anxiety attacks. Springsteen was suffering the pangs of commitment.
He hadn’t told Phillips how, like clockwork, he’d end every relationship somewhere around the two to three-year-mark. But sometimes late at night his sleep would be disturbed by the ‘dreaded ticking.’
At 35, Springsteen was deeply unsettled by what was going on inside him, the swing from ‘hypersexual, then non-sexual . . . all the while trying to keep a lid on it.
‘I was scared, but I did not want to scare the wits out of my young bride.’
Instead, he humiliated her. He and Scialfa had been band mates for two years when he suddenly saw her with new eyes.
Shortly after his hastily arranged separation, a photographer caught Springsteen in his tighty-whities with Scialfa on a balcony in Rome.
‘I dealt with Julie’s and my separation abysmally,’ he admits now. ‘I made a tough thing more heartbreaking than necessary.’
Meanwhile, he and Patti were fighting all the time. Springsteen confesses he was kind of ‘rebelliously’ proud of his emotionally violent behavior, ‘always cowardly and aimed at the women in my life.’
He rarely let that side show in public, and doesn’t bring this incident up in the book, but in 1978 he got ugly with an ex-girlfriend, Lynn Goldsmith, in front of a stadium of fans.
Goldsmith was on paid assignment to photograph Springsteen in concert. She warned him in advance.
But when he saw her pointing her lens from Row 10, Springsteen leapt down to drag her onstage shouting ‘This is my ex-girlfriend.’ Then he tossed her aside to be hustled out by security.
Family: SPringsteen was honored in February 2013 as MusiCares Person of the year, and brought son Evan James (left), daughter Jessica Rae, wife Patti Scialfa, mom Adele Springsteen, and sister Pamela
Still, Springsteen wasn’t just simmering rage and suppressed violence. He was a gorgeous young guy and a good time for more than lucky woman.
‘Rosalita,’ was inspired by the ‘sweet blonde’ who may have been the first ‘gal’ he had ‘fumbling’ intercourse with as a teenager. But he can’t quite remember if that’s how it happened ‘due to the fog of war.’)
In the years since, she has surfaced as Diane Lozito, a photographer’s assistant.
Springsteen also brings to mind the wild surfer girl he fell in lust with back when he still playing bars on the Jersey Shore.
Sadly, he discovered she was running a game on him by luring ‘grade-B-level rock stars’ down to discover his band, then sleep with them.
Spurned because he hadn’t yet found middling fame as a rock star, Springsteen made a move on her girlfriend. He crashed at her place, giving the one thing he’d save from childhood to her little girl. It was a carved wooden rocking horse that he loved.
At 22, Springsteen loosened up even more and had his first drink. He’d been scared straight by his father’s alcoholism, but found drinking was good for him. It ‘unleashed certain amount of happiness.
‘Once high, I couldn’t do something to embarrass myself quick enough,’ he laughs. ‘I’d be the life of the party, groping and flirting with women.’
He loved the ‘merry psychosexual carnage’ of the road and the many one-night stands. Or as he puts it, ‘lightening strikes, leaves a scar and this is gone, baby, gone.’
But a redheaded ‘revolution’ came along and made a changed man out of Springsteen.
From the first he felt Scialfa was a ‘formidable partner.’ She was certainly one of his own kind, a musician who ‘did not live to make you feel safe.’
He also lusted after her. ‘Patti had a part that carried a charged sexuality; she could seduce and she could stir you to jealousy.’
Over the decades, the foundation of his mature has freed Springsteen to mature into an improbably sexy guy at 67.
Not that his grown children, Jessica, Sam and Evan, would agree.
He delightedly evokes their reaction to the 1984 video ‘Dancing in the Dark,’ where he pulls a then unknown Courtney Cox out of the audience to dance with her.
The sight of dad doing his Jersey James Brown, or as he puts it, his ‘white-man boogaloo and daddy-shuffle’ always sends his kids into ‘righteous, rolling’ laughter.
Yet that was the video that reintroduced Springsteen as a lust object before Scialfa came along and ruined it for his female fans everywhere.
