Bobbie Brown - 13 Aug

This is a Genuine Barnacle Book

A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com

Copyright 2019 by Bobbie Brown and Caroline Ryder

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic.

For more information, address:
A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Set in Dante
epub isbn : 9781644280867

Photographs Courtesy of Bobbie Brown

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brown, Bobbie, 1969, author. | Ryder, Caroline, author.
Title: Cherry on Top: Flirty, Forty-Something, and Funny as F**k / by Bobbie Jean Brown, with Caroline Ryder.
Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Barnacle Book |
New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2019.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781644280157
Subjects: LCSH Brown, Bobbie, 1969 | ActorsUnited States
Biography. | Rock musicians spousesUnited StatesBiography. | Models (Persons)United StatesBiography. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Rich & Famous. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts.
Classification: LCC PN2287.B6965 C44 2019 | DDC 791.4302/8092dc23

Dedicated to my supportive loving family, friends, and fans. Thank you for loving me even when I dont love myself.
Im blessed to have you all. XO.

Contents

Lifes a Gas

I t was around midnight on a Tuesday and moonlight crept over Arleta, the quiet LA suburb I call home. These days, I sleep alone in my four-poster bedunless you count Nupa, my ten-year-old Chihuahua. After years of sharing me with various male interlopers, Nupa was pleased to finally have me to herself. She lay on the bed, watching me as I gathered clothes from around my bedroom, a little snaggletooth protruding from her lower jaw. During quiet days at home like this one, Id catch myself thinking about Josh, the musician sixteen years younger than myself with whom Id spent the last five years of my life.

An ex-Mormon who worked in construction, Josh had a band whose goals, according to their social media pages, included waking up in the van covered in glitter in front of a church on Easter morning after a long night of swimming in Jack Daniels and getting some strange. Marriage material, if youre me. My daughter, Taylar, who is an excellent judge of character, loathed Josh so much she sent him a bag of dirt for Christmas one year. Yes, Josh had more red flags than a Communist parade, but I was blinded by his long brown hair, lazy smile, and slender body, which took me back to a different time in my life. A time when the Sunset Strip still had a pulse. A time when life was a beautiful mess of music, love, and hairspray.

I stuffed my dirty laundry in the basket and stomped down the beige-carpeted stairs, scolding myself for missing Josh and swearing I would never again date anyone who is a fan of Mtley Cre. In a Mtley fans mind, you see, sleeping with me takes them one step closer to being Tommy Lee, to whom I was engaged many moons ago. Well, guess what, youll never be Tommy Lee , I fumed. And if you were, I sure as hell wouldnt date you.

Distracted by my thoughts, I misjudged a step. My slipper flew off my foot and I tumbled down the stairs, headfirst into the corner of a marble side table. Laundry went flying and there was a thud as I hit the floor, and for one terrifying moment, the whole world turned black. Slowly, I opened my eyes. Psychedelic globes bounced lazily about my field of vision like an old screensaver. Whimpering, I felt for my cell phone in the back pocket of my jeans and dialed my younger brother, Adam, who lived a few blocks away with his wife, Laura, and their baby, Ollie.

Adam, help, I whispered, as Nupa hopped down the stairs and gave me a look of concern.

When Adam arrived at my condo, he gasped; I looked like Rocky Balboa after twelve rounds with a meat grinder. He helped me into his car and drove me to the emergency room, urging me to stay awake, promising me that everything was going to be okay. Adam was my lifeline, my only family in Los Angeles, though I worried that he and his wife were growing weary of Lonely Aunt Bobbie visiting every day, clinging to their newborn infant with tears in her eyes for reasons no one quite understood.

At the hospital, the neurologist told me that fifty percent of people who hit their heads as hard as I did wind up in the morgue. Had the marble side table impacted my head just three millimeters to the left, it would have ruptured some vital vein whose name escapes me, resulting in instant death. I was lucky to be alive, even though my skull ached with indescribable pain and a bump the size of a softball began taking shape on my forehead.

Off topic, said the doctor, butare you the Cherry Pie girl?

I nodded, trying not to rattle my tenderized brain.

I thought so! he exclaimed. Wow, you really were an It Girl back then. I had the biggest crush on you!

I was an It Girl, once. Miss Bobbie Jean Brown, Southern pageant queen, runner-up in Miss Teen USA 1987, and for a minute, the hottest girl on the Sunset Strip. Helter skelter in a summer swelter, I was built for stonewashed jeans and stadium rock, with my long legs, sun-kissed hair, and a smile that lit up rooms. Secretly, I always wished I looked like one of those waifish brunettes, the kind you see on the Paris runway, but the reflection in the mirror confirmed that, in the words of Raymond Chandler, it was a blonde. And in LA, people want blondes. Casting agents want them. Bands want them. Men want them.

For fifteen years, during the peak of my good fortune, I had my pick of rich and famous lovers. When I met Rod Stewart at the Roxbury, he asked me what I wantedI told him a cranberry vodka, and he laughed, No, I meant Ferrari, Porsche, or Jaguar? Strangers would approach me in clubs, offer me $100,000 to spend the night with themand if only I hadnt been so principled, I might have moved up the property ladder by now.

Romance came thick and fast. I spent several coked-up months with Rob from Milli Vanilli, enjoyed dance-floor flirtations with Prince, shared intimate moments with a Chippendale in a broom closet, brushed off overtures from O. J. Simpson, spent dreamy nights on ecstasy with Dave Navarro, shared kisses at the Chateau Marmont with Ethan Hawke, and experienced a titanic roll in the hay with Leonardo DiCaprio. We mustnt forget the night I set Kevin Costners bedroom on fire. Literally. Nor the strange, chaotic year I spent engaged to my teen idol, Tommy Lee, drummer of the most notorious rock band on the Strip: Mtley Cre.

But it was my marriage to blond, blue-eyed singer Jani Lane of the hair band Warrant that caused middle-aged neurologists to recognize me in hospitals. You see, in 1990, Jani handpicked me to star in the video for one of the biggest songs of the decade, Cherry Pie, which placed my all-American body on heavy rotation on MTV, VH1, and television screens all over the world.

Overnight, Jani and I became sweetheart darlings of rock n roll, on- and off-screen. We were the perfect matchI was the fun-loving, bubblegum-chewing girl of his melancholic dreams, the bombshell who could shock him into laughter. Thats the thing: beautiful blondes are everywhere in Hollywood, but try finding one who can make you laugh.

On The Howard Stern Show , Jani announced to the world that he was going to marry me. His public devotion and chivalry won me over, and after making love on the bullet train in Tokyo, I became pregnant with our baby girl, Taylar Jayne Lane. Four months later, on July 15, 1991, we married on the rooftop of the Wyndham Bel Age Hotel, the air heavy with the scent of five hundred pink roses and several dozen cans of Elnett. All our friends came to the weddingGuns n Rosess Duff McKagan, Def Leppards Rick Allen, and my dance-floor buddy, R&B singer Bobby Brown. Our wedding was a fitting climax to the perfect Sunset Strip fairytaleeven though behind the scenes, the cracks in my relationship with Jani were already starting to show, and the Sunset Strip was inching closer and closer to implosion. It didnt matter what the future held, though, because from that day on, my fate was sealed.