THE BOSS & LOVE LOST
IN “BRUCE,” biographer Peter Ames Carlin delivers the book Springsteen fans have been waiting for. Everyone talked to Carlin — family, friends, members of the E Street Band and Bruce himself. Carlin follows The Boss from his beginnings in Freehold, N.J., to the pinnacle of fame. He captures all the passion, including Springsteen’s conflicted romantic life. He married actress Julianne Phillips in 1985, but by the end of the Tunnel of Love Express Tour, his passionate duets with bandmate Patti Scialfa were becoming a bit too realistic. Was Bruce really messing around with his backup singer?
THROUGHOUT the Born i n the U.S.A. tour, Bruce’s song introductions and midshow stories focused on a subject he had rarely mentioned in a specific way: sex and romance. Mostly sex, though. Almost entirely sex, now that you mention it. Introducing “Glory Days,” he reminisced about teenage encounters in the bedroom of his parents’ house, conducted under the aural cover of balls banging around his pool table. (The occasional sweep of an arm did the trick.) Various tales setting up “Pink Cadillac” made its horndog lyrics all the more vivid, while the introduction to “I’m Goin’ Down” traced the arc of a relationship in terms of a couple’s sexual patter ns. “(First) you’re making love to ’em all the time, three or four t i me s a day. Then you come back a little bit later, and uhoh … it’s like ‘Are you gonna make love to me tonight, or are we gonna wait for the full moon again,’ y’know?” The giggly sex talk got star ted a few weeks after the tour’s start in late Ju ne 1984 but took an abrupt leap in late October after a seven-night stand at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. It was not a coincidence.
“I knew people who knew a lot of actors, so I got to know Julianne,” says Bruce’s tour agent, Barry Bell. “I brought her to a show, introduced her to Bruce. I figured she’d be right for him because she was very down to earth. And the rest is history.” A shadowy sort of history, considering what the near future held in store. But given Bruce’s steep arc into the apex of global fame, his blossoming romance with an up-andcoming model-turned-actress from the Pacific Northwest inevitably became the subject of intense interest for the world’s media /celebr it y i ndu st r ia l complex.
Born in Chicago in 1960 and raised in the waterfront suburb of Lake Oswego, Oregon, about ten minutes up the Willamette River from Portland, Julianne grew up with the tree-shaded comfort the Springsteens never enjoyed when Bruce was young. The sixth and final child born to Bill, a prosperous insurance executive, and his homemaker wife, Ann, Julianne went through school with the casual grace of a young woman thoroughly comfortable in her own skin. Fair skinned and blue eyed, with a lissome figure and classic schoolgirl features, Julianne floated through Lake Oswego High School, waving the pom-poms with the cheerleaders on Saturday night and cutting a fine figure in her dad’s MG roadster on her way down Macadam Boulevard to downtown Portland. A quick run through the two-year Brooks College in Long Beach, California, prefaced an early-eighties move to New York, where she joined the Elite modeling agency, soon earning top rates as a vision of fresh-scrubbed sensuality. Back in L.A. in 1983, Julianne rose quickly through the actress ranks, starting with a featured role in a video by Southern rockers .38 Special, which led to roles in TV movies.
All of which proved entirely beguiling to Bruce, who could also sense Julianne’s warmth and lack of Hollywood pretense. That she also knew her way around his favorite rock ’n’ roll classics was another bonus. After chatting for a while backstage, Bruce asked to see Julianne again, and when that date went well, they grew closer, then inseparable. “I knew they liked each other, but I didn’t know how fast he was moving,” Bell says.
Very fast, as it turned out. Bruce took his new girlfriend home to meet his family and friends in New Jersey during his winter break, followed her back to Los Angeles and then went with her to meet the Phillipses when they visited Palm Springs, California, in February 1985. Bruce went to Australia alone in March, but Julianne met him in Japan when the tour got there three weeks later. It was true love and lollipops in the land of the rising sun, and the short holiday they spent in Hawaii on the way back to the United States seemed to seal the deal. “She was just tough,” he told Dave Marsh at the time. “She had confidence and resilience, and she wasn’t afraid to face facts or their implications.”
A day or two after they got home from Hawaii, Julianne
called her mother in Lake Oswego and told her they’d better plan a wedding, and soon. And secretly, too. Because if the word leaked to the Bruce-frenzied press, the deluge would be immediate, intense, and unyielding. The ceremony itself was miraculously untouched by the media’s fanatic attention, although that feat required a level of cloak-and-daggery (decoy cars, fake schedules, back alley escapes, and more) unseen outside of a James Bond movie.
When it was all over, Bruce had a ring on his finger, a wife by his side, and a commitment to the domestic life he had avoided so assiduously throughout his adult life. It had taken him a long time to get there, but now he was determined to make it work.
Temporarily relieved of the shifting burdens of art, fame, and commerce, Bruce turned his attention to the quieter challenges of domestic life. On one level, he and Julianne were a lot like any other pair of successful young professionals, juggling their relationship with the careers, and the inner lives that had propelled them to the point where they had made themselves family.
Juli was seemingly on board for whatever her husband wanted to do. A night at the Stone Pony? She was right there at the bar, checking out the band with Bruce and then edging away subtly when a crowd of fans enveloped him. When engineer Toby Scott came out to Rumson to help build a recording studio in the guest apartment, they seemed cheerfully settled as any pair of newlyweds.
“They were very domestic. She liked to stay in, make popcorn, watch TV and have some dinner. People kept asking if they had a problem, and I always said no. I thought Bruce and Juli were doing great.”
But when they went out for a pleasant dinner with Roy Bittan and his wife, the pianist went home with an uneasy feeling. “It just wasn’t like going out with the Julianne and Bruce that I knew,” he says. “Juli was a lovely girl, but he just seemed like he was trying to be a different person. I think he was trying to develop a way of being on a social level. And Julianne wasn’t anywhere on his train of thought.”
Both halves of the couple kept news of their breakup as quiet as possible. No press releases, no leaks to friendly reporters, no public heart-to-hearts with “People” or Barbara Walters. Some sharp-eyed observers might have figured out that Bruce had taken off his wedding ring. Backstage crew and visitors noticed that Julianne, a fixture at earlier shows on The Tunnel of Love Express Tour in 1988, was nowhere to be seen, even on the couple’s third anniversary on May 13. What could be seen, however, was that the duets he performed with the increasingly prominent Patti Scialfa had grown so steamy it seemed like their portrayal of romantic heat was, perhaps, something a bit too realistic to be limited to the stage. But what might have seemed shocking to outsiders — is Bruce really fooling around with his backup singer? — was no surprise to anyone who had seen the Born in the U.S.A. tour from the inside. “What was obvious on the Tunnel tour was also obvious at an early point in the Born in the U.S.A. tour, le t ’s just say that,” says Dave Marsh.
Even if the electricity bet ween Br uce and Patti seemed obvious in 1984, the in-house gossip didn’t travel beyond the touring party. But even when Julianne became a part of the scene in the fall of 1984, the crowd on the tour always figured her for an outlier candidate for Bruce’s real affections. So when the word broke that Bruce would be traveling with a serious girlfriend during the Far East swing in the spring of 1985, some tour members assumed they could book one less hotel room for the band. “I know I was surprised when he came to Japan with someone other than Patti,” says Marsh.
Still, when Bruce thought about settling into a serious romance, something pushed him in a different direction. Certainly Julianne’s beauty, warmth, and intelligence had magnetic properties all their own. And the prospect of taking up with his newest band member, weaving a romance into the always-complex chemistry of the E Street Band while also stirring up a tabloid frenzy couldn’t have seemed appealing. So then came Julianne, the wedding, and three years of marriage that hardly anyone had guessed might be less than the openly affectionate romance most observers believed they were witnessing. When Julianne accompanied Bruce to the early shows on the Tunnel tour in late February and early March, they had impressed some observers with how relaxed and happy they both looked together. But something else was going on too.
Both members of the couple were, and remain, tight lipped about the inner workings, and failure, of their marriage. When pressed now, Bruce has one question: “Did Juli speak to you at all?” Told that she basically hadn’t (save for one very brief quote), he speaks only about his ex-wife’s strengths and his own weaknesses. “The emotions of mine that were uncovered by trying to have adult life with a partner and make that work uncovered a lot of things I’d avoided and tried not to deal with previously,” he says, and more or less leaves it at that.
Julianne returns the favor. “I have always been incredibly private when it comes to my private life,” she says. “The one and only thing I will say is that the period was a time of incredible growth and introspection for me. And I will forever give that credit to Bruce.” Which
is remarkably gracious given how swiftly, and thoughtlessly, Bruce moved into the next stage of his life.
Once Bruce showed up backstage without his wedding ring, he and Patti stopped hiding their affections from the rest of the touring company. They cuddled backstage and shared seats on the jet from one show to the next. Given no official declaration about his separation from Julianne, it came as a shock to Garry Tallent and his girlfriend when they stumbled across the couple smooching on the airplane. “My girlfriend’s going, ‘What’s going on here?’ and I had no idea what to say.” But the news stayed hush-hush, more or less, through the end of the American tour on May 23 and through the first few dates on the European tour, until the company got to Rome in mid-June.
The sun was bright, the skies deep blue, and the hotel room’s balcony all but irresistible when Bruce and Patti woke up on the morning of June 15 and stepped outside to take in the view. With the sun on their shoulders and new love in the air, they held each other as they gazed across the rooftops — not suspecting an observant photographer, a professional in the land that invented the term paparazzi, was peering at them through his viewfinder. Click-click-click. Then they were lying together, drinks in hand, on a single patio recliner. Clickity-click. Those photos made headlines all across Europe and then in the United States, and on June 17 Jon Landau Management released a statement acknowledging that Bruce and Julianne had separated. A day after that, Bruce and Patti sealed the deal by strolling arm in arm through Paris, in full view of a procession of French reporters and photographers.
“I didn’t protect Juli,” Bruce says. “Some sort of public announcement would have been fair, but I felt overly concerned about my own privacy. I handled it badly, and I still feel badly about it. It was cruel for people to find out the way they did.”