By BILL MEDLEY
Bill Medley toured with The
Beatles and performed in Vegas during the Rat Pack era, but tragically in 1976,
his ex-wife was murdered
'Our relationship was very
complicated,' said Bill Medley of his relationship with Bobby Hatfield
Everything seemed normal on
January 30, 1976 as my ex-wife Karen returned from dropping her younger son
Damien off at school.
She entered her Hermosa Beach
house [in California] through the back door she always left open.
Her two closest girlfriends had
plans to go for breakfast with her that morning.
They saw her pull into her drive,
and thought she’d be ready in a minute.
There had been a strange-looking
man around the neighbourhood the past couple of days, and they wanted to tell
her about that. Why they didn’t just call the police, I’ll never know.
When they rang a little while
later and nobody answered, they went over.
Karen’s crutches were on the
floor – she had broken her leg trying to ride our ten-year-old son Darrin’s
skateboard.
Her friend shouted her name and
got no response.
They could hear whimpering. As
they went into the hall, a man stepped out.
‘Hi girls,’ he said, then walked
out of the front door.
The pair ran to find Karen on the
floor of her bedroom. The man had tried to rape her and strangled her with her
own bra. She hadn’t had oxygen to her brain for 15 minutes. She was barely
alive.
That morning, Darrin and I were
on our way to the Californian resort of Lake Arrowhead, and had stopped off to
see relatives.
When we arrived, they told us
they had heard Karen had been beaten up, there was an attempted rape, but they
didn’t know how bad it was.
We shot back to Hermosa and went
straight to the hospital. I hate to remember the sight of this beautiful young
girl with that horrified look on her face.
They told me to sit there, hold
her hand and talk to her because they didn’t know what she could hear or
understand. It was the hardest thing in the world for me to do. Karen and I
were still so close.
I told her, ‘You’re gonna be
fine. We’re going to get through this. The kids are going to be great. I love
you.’
But doctors soon realised that if
by any chance she lived, she was going to be brain-damaged.
Finally, they closed her eyes.
And four days after the attack, they took her off life-support.
Darrin was inconsolable, with
deep wailing sobs. ‘No! No, I need her!’
I’ll never forget the first
Mother’s Day after Karen passed. All the children in school had to write a
Mother’s Day card for their moms.
Darrin wrote me a Father’s Day
card. I can still see Darrin and his five-year-old brother Damien standing in
the bathroom at my beach house, brushing their teeth getting ready for bed.
These two beautiful little boys – it just broke my heart.
I was sad and incredibly angry at
the same time; I wanted to find the son-of-a-bitch who killed their mom.
The police have never solved the
crime, and the case remains open to this day. But every few years it pops up
again, like a kick in the gut.
In the early days of the
Righteous Brothers, it was only Karen who got me through.
I first noticed her at church,
and then, when Bobby Hatfield and I unveiled our first single, Little Latin
Lupe Lu, at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach, California in 1963, I saw
her in the middle of a thousand beautiful young girls. When we got off stage, I got her phone number and we started
dating.
The Righteous Brothers started
out in Orange County, California. It was about the whitest place in the
country, but the black marines from the nearby base heard there were two guys
singing rhythm and blues, so they came down to hear us.
At the end of our songs they’d
yell out, ‘That’s righteous, brother!’ and that’s how we got our name.
When our first single took off,
all of a sudden it was packed wherever we performed; I mean, you couldn’t get
in. Even Elvis and his guys came to see us at a little bowling alley. We were
like kids in a candy store.
The Beatles asked us to be on
their first American tour, because we were white guys who sounded black, which
they loved. We got to know them pretty well.
They were as knocked out with
what was happening as everybody else. John and Paul especially were goofy,
Ringo was funny but a little more serious, and George was very serious, a real
musical guy.
We did 50 dates, many in outdoor
stadiums.
It was scary – they’d put up a
fence in front of the stage and all these kids were being crushed against it.
I thought they turned the lights
on as soon as The Beatles went on stage, but it was camera bulbs, lighting the
place up.
Karen and I married when she
became pregnant and our little world started to explode. I was on tour with The
Beatles when she miscarried.
By the time Darrin arrived, the
Righteous Brothers had recorded and released You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, a
number one.
When you have the biggest record
in the country everybody wants you, everybody needs you, and they need you now.
I went to the hospital to have a
minor ailment checked, and the doctor diagnosed mental and physical exhaustion.
I was such a wreck Karen had to
tell them my name – I couldn’t get it out. She took such good care of me. I’d
get home from the studio at 2 or 3 in the morning and she would get up and make
me tacos – what a great wife.
Just as Lovin’ Feelin’ was
cresting, we were offered a shot playing the lounge at the Sands Casino in Las
Vegas. We were the first rock act ever to play there, but we had to get the OK
from Frank Sinatra, who was in the main room.
I’m sure Sinatra didn’t have a
clue who the Righteous Brothers were – rock ’n’ roll was a million miles away
from swing music and the Rat Pack – but his daughter Nancy was a friend, and I
can only think she swung it for us.
Frank would bring huge parties of
his friends to the lounge after his show. We always knew when he was coming
because, despite the long lines waiting to get in, there was a long row of
empty chairs from the stage to the back of the room with a bottle of Jack
Daniel’s at every other chair.
They were the heaviest hitters in
Hollywood – Burt Lancaster, the Rat Pack, you name it.
One night I had to sing Georgia
On My Mind with my musical hero Ray Charles, that song’s greatest interpreter,
sitting four feet away.
My voice suffered in the Vegas
heat, and Sinatra would give me advice on looking after it. Why he took a
liking to us, I don’t know – maybe we reminded him of when he was coming up.
He invited us to the hotel’s
steam room every day at five o’clock, where he’d hold court and ask for a
status report.
‘How’s the reed doin’ kid – any
better?’
One time he started to talk while
he was putting on his hairpiece. It was the greatest rug in the world; it was
short and looked so real, not like the helmets some guys wore. I told him how
cool it looked and he said, ‘Thanks kid.’
Bobby and I became very aware of
the Italian mob guys and we knew the Jewish mob too, because they took care of
the casinos.
They were great to us; they loved
us. We never feared them, although I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of
them. After a while they started calling us ‘the Golden Boys’ because we did
such good business.
Vegas in those days was so
exciting and we were just 25; we ate it up. Almost every lounge had a topless
revue with the most gorgeous women you can imagine.
I had sex with a girl in Frank
Sinatra’s suite while he was on stage. Am I proud of that? No, I’m just proud
I’m still alive. I’m not sure Frank would have appreciated it.
I had another girlfriend who
worked in the hotel’s ladies room.
Bobby Hatfield and our bandleader
Mike Patterson would run all over town looking for chicks after our last show
of the night and all I had to do was call the women’s restroom. I’m not too
proud of it now, but that was the life of a young performer in Vegas in the
Sixties.
The mob guys, Dean Martin, Sammy
Davis Jr, and Frank Sinatra – it was
their world and we were just living in it.
Throughout our career, people thought
Bobby and I disliked each other. That’s not true, but our relationship was very
complicated.
We were like brothers – and
brothers don’t always see eye to eye.
A few months after our run in Las
Vegas, The Sands called to say they wanted to put us in the main room, which
represented the pinnacle of the show business world at that time.
I drove to Bobby’s house with a
dozen roses for his wife, my heart going 100 miles an hour, to tell him the
news. His response was, ‘I don’t want to do it’.
That’s when it became crystal
clear to me that Bobby and I were just in two different comfort zones.
It’s not a right or wrong thing.
It’s like a young married couple who grow older and one gains 100 pounds or one
starts drinking or gambling. The other one thinks: ‘I didn’t sign up for that.’
When people lined up across the
casino to get into our lounge show at the Sands, Bobby loved it.
But the pressure of having to
pack the main room and have our name in huge letters on the Vegas Strip as
headliners, that didn’t work for Bobby. He wasn’t wired that way.
Not long after that, things
started falling apart. Bobby’s people were telling him he was the cute one and
the smart one and he shouldn’t listen to me. I’d had enough.
He and I were very different
characters. He loved the parties and the Hollywood events like the Grammys, but
I focused my energy on the music. We were just cut from different cloth.
My marriage fell apart at the
same time.
On our final tour, I started an
affair with the singer Darlene Love. I decided to get a divorce because I
thought I was in love and it wasn’t fair to Karen.
Later, when Karen was with the
man who became her second husband, I wanted to get back together but she
didn’t.
Mind you, I dated some of the
greatest women in the world. Mary Wilson and the Supremes would come to my solo
Vegas shows and sit at the front.
After a while Mary and I became
more than friends and had an on-off-thing. I had another of those with singer
Connie Stevens. She was a spectacular woman who loved to help people, but I was
one of those schmucks, scared to death of commitment.
When Karen was killed, she even
offered to raise Darrin. I think he’s still annoyed I didn’t let her. I’m sure
it still annoys her that I never would commit.
Once she proposed to me, not
necessarily to marry me, but maybe so we could get married and then she could leave
me to get it out of her system.
Another girl who really got my
attention in the Seventies was Goldie Hawn. I had known her from the Sixties
and we started hanging out. I think she wanted me to ask her out, but I was
afraid. I was in awe of her; she was one of the cutest, funniest girls I’d ever
met.
I married twice more in the
Seventies, and neither lasted very long. Not long before Karen was murdered, my
solo career was going fine, but my voice was failing, so I reformed the
Righteous Brothers, thinking I would make a couple of million and retire.
I was shocked when we found
Bobby. He was broke and living alone in a small apartment, which he was going
to be evicted from in a week.
He had a chair, a black-and-white
TV, and a bed… that’s it. He looked like a bum. I knocked on the door and said,
‘Let’s go and be Righteous Brothers again.’
And we did, for a while. We had a
big new hit with Rock & Roll Heaven, and then went out on a tour of
20,000-seat venues. The promoter must have lost a fortune, because every night
only about 2,000 people showed up. But we kept working steadily until 1976,
when Karen was murdered.
After her death, my world was a
blur. When I told Bobby I needed time off to raise Darrin, he was angry. But
this was the time for me to keep a promise I’d made to Karen long ago and not
always kept – that I would be there when it was important for the family.
In spite of our divorce, Karen
was my best friend. Over 35 years later, I’m still looking for the man who
killed her. I’ve got a private eye on the case.
And even now, it’s like a bad
movie; it stops my heart just to talk about it.
'Elvis said, "Bill, it's
going to be all right." But it wasn't...'
'Everything you've heard about
Graceland during Elvis's glory days is true and then some,' said Bill
The friendship I had with Elvis
began to take shape in 1968, when I was recording in Memphis.
I’d record during the day and
Elvis would send one of his guys over to bring me to Graceland at night. There
was always something fun going on, but Elvis always had his guys, his
bodyguards or ‘The Memphis Mafia’ as they were known, to cater to his every
need and laugh loudly at his every joke.
About this time, toward the end
of his movie career, Elvis was like the Howard Hughes of rock ’n’ roll.
Outside of those of us who got
inside the walls of Graceland few people ever saw him in public.
But when I was performing solo at
the Sands in Las Vegas in 1968, there was a sighting to remember.
I had a little comedic Elvis bit
in my show, where I talked about our friendship, mimicked his awkward speech
patterns, and said I never understood what he was saying… all in good-natured
fun. One night, the house maître d’ handed me a note that simply read,
‘He’s here.’ I read the note out
loud to the crowd and said, ‘Who’s here?’ Just then at the back of the room a
guy stands up and starts singing All Shook Up. It was Elvis. The house lights
came on and the crowd went bananas. It took me about 20 minutes just to get them
back.
What happened to Elvis in the
following years is one of my saddest memories. I knew he’d been using pills for
a long time – in fact he offered me some once.
We were in his room one time and
he opened a suitcase with this huge stash of all different kinds of pills.
I declined but he assured me,
‘Bill, I really know what I’m doing.’
I suppose all addicts feel that
they have a handle on their struggle. The very last time I saw Elvis was when I
took my son Darrin backstage to meet him.
He was sitting in the hotel
stairwell talking with one of his singers. He was wrecked, hardly coherent.
I didn’t want to embarrass him,
so I quickly introduced him to Darrin and we said our goodbyes.
As I walked away he turned to me
and said, ‘Bill, it’s going to be all right, man.’
It wasn’t. But Elvis Presley was
a good guy, and he was my friend.