Lita Ford was untouchable in the ’80s. The former Runaway had a string of solo albums that went gold, and in an era of hair metal dominated by men, Ford stood out. Her forthcoming book, Living Like a Runaway, seems like it’ll be a must-read based on the excerpts that leaked to the New York Post over the weekend. It seems very much like a kiss and tell, as the article starts off talking about her having group sex with Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and Aldo Nova. It also details trysts with Eddie Van Halen, Dee Dee Ramone, and Judas Priest’s Glenn Tipton, among others. However, when it goes into detail about her brief engagement to Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, that’s when things get dark.
Like many, her introduction to metal was Black Sabbath, when she first heard them as a 13 year-old. But when she started dating Tony Iommi, she talks about when he first invited her to England to meet his mom:
The couple were on the plane, and as soon as it started moving, Iommi, “out of nowhere . . . hauled off and punched me in the eye.”
She was now stranded on a 10-hour flight with a man who had just mysteriously transitioned from lover to abuser, and spent the entire 10 hours in the flight attendants’ station. She planned to fly right back to LA when they landed, but Iommi acted like nothing had happened, and she decided to stay, she writes, “like a moron.”
Iommi’s mother saw her black eye, and Ford learned that abuse ran in the family, as the guitarist’s father used to do the same.
It says that he apparently abused her several more times throughout their relationship:
“After snorting tons of blow, he got angry and choked me unconscious,” she writes. “When I woke up, I saw him holding a chair above my head. It was a big, heavy leather chair with studs around the arms, and he was about to smash it over my face. I rolled over, and luckily I moved fast enough that he missed me and the chair smashed into the ground.”
She ran outside and thought of the safest place she could go. Eliminating her parents’ house, since her father would have “murdered” Iommi, she drove to the home of ex-boyfriend Nikki Sixx from Mötley Crüe.
Sixx told her, “I’ll be right back. I have something that will help make you feel better.” He drove, Ford writes, to the home of Ratt guitarist Robbin Crosby, and returned with heroin. While not her drug, Sixx told her it would take the pain away. She snorted some and fell asleep.
Jesus. And that isn’t even getting into her marriage to Nitro’s Jim Gillette, who she was married to for 18 years. She hasn’t been able to see her two children in years, and as she told us when we spoke to her a few years ago, it seems like it was a really controlling marriage.
Ford will be appearing next Monday, 2/22, at Word Bookstore at St. Vitus Bar in Brooklyn and the following day at Barnes & Noble in Tribeca.
