Lionel Richie on ‘love’ issues ‘in business of fame’: ‘distrust’

Lionel Richie is looking back on his rise to fame and how it changed the way he viewed love and relationships.

In his new memoir Truly, the 76-year-old Grammy winner and American Idol judge admits that navigating marriage while living in Hollywood was nothing like the life he once knew in Alabama. 

“When I was getting my start in LA, my first reaction was, ‘How stupid are these people? They get married and divorced every week,’” Richie wrote. 

“That’s not to say love wasn’t involved. It’s just that you’re a star and you have a long line of candidates wanting to be your next one and only.”

Richie, who married his college sweetheart Brenda Harvey in 1975 before his career took off, said the contrast between Tuskegee and Los Angeles was eye-opening. 

“In Tuskegee, if you met someone at a party, all you had to say was, ‘I’m married,’ and the woman would be, ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t know,’ and back away,” he recalled.

“Even before hit songs, I was out somewhere in LA and a girl was hitting on me, and I politely said, ‘I’m sorry, but I must let you know I’m married.’ She came back with a question I didn’t expect. ‘Is she with you?’” Richie said he turned her down, jokingly adding, “‘That’s flattering, but wait, wait, wait now!’”

The singer revealed that fame eventually changed the way he heard and trusted the words “I love you.” 

“In the business of fame and entertainment, ‘I love you’ loses its magic fast,” he explained. 

“The part that I hated most was that this word that I use as my religion could become a throwaway phrase. When I write, ‘I love you,’ and when somebody plays that record, that’s an emotional moment. When a man or a woman says, ‘I love you, still, after everything,’ that’s an emotional moment.” 

But over time, he said he began to question the sincerity of those words, even when writing love songs. 

“Naive as I was, it took me some time to see that everybody that says ‘I love you’ to you when you’re famous, that’s something they say, not something they feel,” Richie admitted.

His marriage to Harvey ended in 1993 after a highly publicized incident involving Diane Alexander, the woman who later became his second wife. 

That marriage ended in 2004, and Richie is now in a longtime relationship with Lisa Parigi. 

Looking back, he admits he was unprepared for the pressures of love in the spotlight. 

“They don’t teach you in Alabama how to tell the real one from the fake. My observations were through the lens of a perpetual college student. I imagined how others had to feel after falling for temptation but thought I was immune. Or wished that I was.”

Richie’s memoir Truly, where he opens up about fame, family, and love, is out now wherever books are sold.

<!–

–>

<!–

–>