Lionel Richie paced a hallway in his gargantuan house in Beverly Hills, staring at a video on his manager’s phone. It showed copies of his memoir, “Truly,” zipping down a conveyor belt at a printing plant in Virginia.
Richie shook his head slowly, hand over mouth, as if beholding a newborn.
Behind him were two sitting rooms, each outfitted with a grand piano. One had shelves lined with awards climbing all the way to the ceiling. The other had a pedestal bearing a tooled leather guest book signed by Richie’s famous friends, including Pharrell Williams, Sidney Poitier, Jackie Chan and Gregory Peck.
Richie, 76, had just returned from a European tour and was about to embark on another in South America. Over the past 50 years, he has sold more than 100 million albums, been a voice of reason on “American Idol” and performed in sold-out stadiums before audiences so big they appear oceanic from the stage.
And yet, face to face with his own life story, Richie was speechless.
“This is not a book about who I met and who I knew,” he said, striding in jaunty orange sneakers into yet another room. “It was about fear. Can you overcome your worst fears and move forward?”
‘Twice as tough’
In person, Richie is exactly as he appears in videos and onstage: Kinetic and charming, with a septuagenarian’s proclivity for adages, idioms and life lessons. When he learned that I was rustling around in a newly empty nest, he grabbed a box of tissues and handed me the top one, folded into a rosette.
“Let me help you, darling,” Richie said. He touched the three rings he wears on a chain around his neck, one for each of his children. “From now on, you’ll know whether they got it.”
Meaning, an appreciation for the subjects Richie revels in: Family and connections, roots and wings, the herculean effort that goes into raising humans. He doesn’t shy away from earnestness — it’s his trademark — but he manages to embrace sincerity without being schmaltzy.
“Truly” is a satisfying 463-page brick crammed with childhood memories, music industry anecdotes and 25 pages of photos.
It follows Richie from his boyhood in Tuskegee, Ala. (he dreamed of becoming an Episcopal priest); to his years playing saxophone and singing for the Commodores (he slept under a table during the band’s first summer in Harlem); his breakout as a solo artist (with “Hello,” “Stuck On You” and the song that gives the book its title); and his current incarnation as a troubadour philosopher, renowned for his staying power.
Richie’s disappearance from the public eye for nearly a decade only gets two chapters in the book, but they’re its most vulnerable and powerful. This was the period when he started to stare down insecurities he’d carried from Tuskegee to Los Angeles.
He writes about his fear that, after the Commodores, he’d never have another hit. His fear of missing out; of letting his family down; of not having a backup plan. And his struggles with stage fright, A.D.H.D. and depression.
“Truly” isn’t a sad book, but it is a candid one. And Richie is refreshingly frank on the subject of race.
Back in the day, Tuskegee was, as Richie describes it, a haven for “the best doctors, the best lawyers, the best surgeons, who just happened to be Black.”
In the book, he recalls a 1986 interview with Barbara Walters, tentatively titled “Lionel Richie, Rags to Richie” until she visited the gracious college-adjacent home that was deeded to the Richie family by heirs of Booker T. Washington. (Richie’s grandparents were also friends with George Washington Carver.)
He writes, “We all understood that if you were Black, you had to be twice as good as the standard. You had to withstand doubt and overcome obstacles that were twice as tough.”
When Richie was 8, his father was reprimanded in the cruelest terms after his son drank from a “Whites Only” water fountain in Montgomery, Ala. Richie remembers the way his indomitable dad shrank from strangers’ wrath.
In 1963, Richie’s crush, Cynthia Diane Wesley, died at 14 in a church bombing, a hate crime that forever immortalized her as one of the “Birmingham Four.”
“I couldn’t make any sense of it,” he writes. “Not then. Not now.”
In our conversation, Richie kept coming back to the idea of fortitude: “My dad used to say, ‘Are you standing up? Or are you hiding behind the couch? What’s the similarity between a hero and a coward? They were both scared to death. One stepped forward, and one stepped back.’ ”
‘The little boy with glasses’
Richie’s mother was an English teacher. His grandmother was a classical pianist. “He grew up in a community that was oriented toward books and intellectual life and people who put words on the page,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, Richie’s editor at HarperOne.
Still, he had some trepidation about writing a memoir. When he committed to it, he considered taking a page from Cher — going with a two volumes — but his publisher and his collaborator, Mim Eichler Rivas, gently nixed the notion.
(“My publishers didn’t like the idea either,” Cher said in an interview, “but then they realized it couldn’t be one book. You wouldn’t be able to lift it.”)
At first Richie and Rivas worked together for a few hours each afternoon. Then their sessions migrated to Richie’s preferred time slot, beginning around one o’clock in the morning and ending near dawn.
“I have to be there when God is available,” Richie said. “No lawyers. No managers. No agents. No press. No nothing.”
Richie told stories, and Rivas asked questions and recorded.
There were minor disagreements, as when Rivas inserted a word like “flabbergasted,” Richie said. “I’d go, ‘Mim. I’m Black.’” This was not a word he’d use.
The hardest part, Richie joked, was “admitting to myself and to the rest of the world” that he was not a jock, a standout student or even especially popular during his school days.
“He was the little boy with glasses,” said Ronald LaPread, who grew up with Richie and played bass for the Commodores. “He was kind of skinny. Very insignificant.”
Richie recalled the moment when the tide started to turn, at a talent show at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University).
“The greatest line I ever heard, coming out of a girl’s mouth: ‘Sing it, baby!’” Richie said. “It was one of those things where, OK, I think I’m getting kind of cool. I had never been cool in my life.”
LaPread said, “Not only did we have a decent frontman, he was a hell of a songwriter. It all turned into sweet sugar.”
Tempted as Richie was to tread lightly on painful subjects, he knew he’d be wasting time if he didn’t dig into the hard stuff in his book.
He has an axiom for this too: “If you run from the lion, the lion will chase you. If you attack the lion, the lion will run away.”
‘God has your next move’
Reading “Truly,” one can sense Richie’s discomfort — and his determination to be fair — as he delves into the dissolution of two marriages and the Commodores. (“I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him and it wasn’t easy for us either,” LaPread said. “All we knew was each other.”)
Richie gets his lightness back when he describes “We Are the World,” which he wrote with Michael Jackson and recorded during an all-night marathon session with a bevy of luminaries in 1985.
“‘We Are the World’ changed my life,” Richie writes. “It made me ask, Well, if I’m in my championship season, what good can I do with it?”
The record sold 800,000 copies in three days, according to the book, and raised $80 million for famine relief in Africa.
In the aftermath, Richie felt like he was on the nose of a rocket. Everyone else in his orbit was safe inside — agents, manager, family, friends.
“This rocket was flying so fast, you didn’t know you passed through three years,” Richie said. “And you’re invincible.”
He went on, “If you walked into a room and swept everything off the table, everyone went, ‘Oh great, Lionel, we’ll clean that up.’ Are you into girls? All the girls. You into drugs? All the drugs. Ego? All the ego.”
Then Richie’s father died. His first marriage ended, publicly and painfully. His voice gave out.
“I didn’t know you can disintegrate with the rocket,” he said.
Richie had what he described as a “nervous breakdown.” In 1991, he spent five days alone in Jamaica, sitting in a beach chair and drinking Cristal as the tide crept up around him. Each night, he writes, “the hotel staff would come out, pick me up in the chair, and retrieve my empty champagne bottle, now full of saltwater, to bring me back up to dry land — waking me before I drowned.”
He went home to Tuskegee, where his 97-year-old grandmother gave him a pep talk and some no-nonsense advice: “Why don’t you get a good night’s sleep? God has your next move.”
Even for a reader who has never gone multiplatinum, embraced Nelson Mandela or performed in front of two billion people at the Olympics, these passages are, in many ways, relatable.
For Richie, that hiatus was a lifesaver.
“I will tell you that because it’s very important to know,” he said, kicking back in a white chair overlooking a verdant patio he tends himself. (Richie also gardens for his daughter Nicole Richie, whose neighbors are tickled to spot him in her yard, pruning and humming.)
Richie went to therapy. He remarried. He underwent a risky voice restoration surgery and learned to sing all over again.
He stepped back into the spotlight. He’s been there ever since, alongside endurance musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross, Billy Joel and Cher.
She had some advice for him on the eve of his publication day.
“You have to kind of steel yourself. You have to put a rod in your backbone,” she said. “And listen to people’s questions before you dive in to answer, to let them digest. Take your time.”
After all, Cher added, “It’s your life.”
Richie is ready.
“Every time you feel fear, step forward,” he said once again. “That’s what I keep in my mind now. Is today confusing? Yeah. Tomorrow may not be. Why? Because I faced today.”
Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years.
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