Lionel Richie Opens Up About Fame, Love, and the Lessons of Hollywood

Lionel Richie has written countless love songs, but his new memoir Truly, reveals that real life romance was not always as smooth as the melodies. With honesty and humor, Richie shares how fame changed the way he viewed marriage, temptation, and even the meaning of “I love you.”

“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 married his college sweetheart Brenda Harvey in 1975, back when life in Tuskegee felt a world away from the whirlwind of Hollywood. There, marriage was clear and respected. “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 described.

But in Los Angeles, the rules were very different. Richie remembered one encounter before he had even reached superstar status. “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,’” he recalled. “She came back with a question I didn’t expect. ‘Is she with you?’”

Richie did not take the bait, instead brushing it off with, “‘That’s flattering, but wait, wait, wait now!’”

For Richie, the hardest part of fame was how quickly love could turn into something disposable. “In the business of fame and entertainment, ‘I love you’ loses its magic fast,” he wrote. “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.”

Over time, though, Richie began to see the darker side of those words. “Naïve 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. Over time, even when writing emotional love songs, I began to distrust ‘I love you.’”

Richie and Harvey divorced in 1993, after a highly publicized incident involving Diane Alexander, whom Richie later married. That marriage ended in 2004, and today Richie is in a relationship with Lisa Parigi.

Looking back, the singer admitted he was out of his depth when it came to navigating marriage under 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 reflections are equal parts honest and tender, showing that behind the legendary ballads and platinum records is a man still learning how to love and be loved.

His memoir Truly is available now.