On March 15, 1987, my forty-sixth birthday, I was invited to be a celebrity judge for a bikini contest in Waikiki, where they take their bikini contests seriously. Television crews and photographers from Australia, Japan, and beyond were on hand, and about eighty contestants gave them plenty to shoot. We had a chance to interview the young ladies, and I was impressed by a striking dark-haired woman who was not only beautiful but exceptionally articulate. Her name was Jacquelyne, from Chicago, where she was a registered nurse, currently working for an immunologist. She was in Waikiki on vacation and was a bit embarrassed by the contest: she was just taking it easy on the beach, and the organizers approached her and persuaded her to enter, though she didn’t realize it’d be such a media circus. She didn’t know who I was or what I did. I was just another judge.
I couldn’t blame the organizers for their interest in Jacquelyne, who turned plenty of heads and was clearly the smartest. The contest, however, was rigged so a local girl would win, and Jacquelyne was knocked out at No. 4. Afterward, I had my picture taken with the winner, but it was Jacquelyne I wanted to see. When I caught her attention (she was now dressed), she came over. With her fiancé. They were on this trip attempting to rekindle their relationship after canceling their wedding. Her boyfriend, Gary, knew who I was, and he said the next time I was in Chicago, they’d be glad to show me around.
He seemed like a nice guy, but, truth be told, I really didn’t want to hang out with Gary. When he left to use the restroom, I told Jacquelyne, “I’d love to connect with you when I come to Chicago.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “Give Gary and me a call.”
“I was kind of hoping it’d just be you.”
Jacquelyne said that she was flattered but she was still “technically” engaged and didn’t know where the relationship was going.
Gary returned and told Jacquelyne to give me their phone number. Jacquelyne had recently moved out of their place, and the only number she had was her work phone, so she gave me her office number. Excellent!
Just a few weeks later, I had to go to Chicago for a promotional event, so I called Jacquelyne before I got on my flight. She told me that her relationship had ended with Gary, but she was working twelve hours that day and couldn’t commit to seeing me. I told her that I’d call her later in the day, and when I did, I asked her if she wanted to come by my hotel for a drink.
“If your intentions are to get me into your hotel room,” she said, “save me the trip, because it’s not going to happen. But if you want to have a pleasant conversation in the lobby, then maybe I can come by and have a glass of wine.”
“I can live with that,” I said.
So we had that drink, and then I walked her to her car and asked her to call me when she got home so I knew she was safe. She did, and we talked until four A.M.
I had spent time with plenty of women, but I knew Jacquelyne was different—a combination of intelligence and spirituality as well as beauty, and a life story that made her sensitive to those around her. The product of a biracial marriage, she had experienced racism while never quite fitting in with any particular group. Her Italian father was a good man but a heavy drinker, and when Jacquelyne was young and attending a Catholic elementary school, her mother had some health issues. So Jacquelyne lived with two nuns at a convent, sleeping on a thin mattress and covered by a wool blanket, but feeling safe and protected. In the summer the family would go to Mississippi, where her mother was from, and attend a Baptist church. That was a different type of religiosity, but also quite powerful. Jacquelyne recognized her spiritual core at a young age: she was the first altar girl in Chicago, she considered becoming a nun, and she knew that her love of God was part of her nature.
For someone like myself, who found Eastern spirituality as an anchor, I found her devotion inspiring. I also believe she understood my own unorthodox life because hers followed no convention as well. She helped pay her own way through college with various management jobs and pursued a career in health care and administration but was equally skilled in design and choreography. Over the years, she had held positions in retail sales and management, as a fashion consultant, and as a Chicago Bears cheerleader for one season.
She was also sassy. When we were vacationing in Maui, a friend who came to visit asked her, “What island are you from?”
“Chicago,” she said.
We carried on a long-distance relationship for a number of months, in which Jacquelyne would leave work at noon on Saturday, rush to the airport, fly to whatever city we were in, then fly back Monday for her job at noon. Between my previous wives and girlfriends, she was hardly the first woman to join me on the road, and because of that, most everyone in the group kept their distance from Jacquelyne—except for one person, Aunt Audree, who was traveling with us. She made Jacquelyne feel part of the family immediately, asking about her background, telling her about the history of the Beach Boys, and swapping stories about friends and travel.
Jacquelyne had been on tour with us for several weekends and had observed the rather itinerant and lonely experience of a traveling rock band when she said to me, “Everyone’s unhappy.” I asked her why she thought so. “They’re all away from their family,” she said.
I knew, from the earliest days, that I was happy with Jacquelyne and that the connection, both spiritual and intellectual, would be lasting. Whether it was with friends, girlfriends, or even wives, I had encouraged others to try to meditate. Many did, but few stuck with it. So I decided I would stop asking and just let others do their own thing while I did my thing. That meant, for me, meditating twice a day for one hour at a time, but Jacquelyne came to resent that I would not share this part of my life with her. So I talked about meditation from a scientific perspective—what the research had told us about the positive impact on the brain—and that immediately appealed to someone whose career was in the sciences. She said she wanted to learn TM, not as a way to connect with me but to understand the phenomenon. I offered to pay for it, but she refused—this was going to be hers, not mine.
We were together for about six months when Jacquelyne was initiated. She was in her twenties, and TM did not contradict her own faith but reinforced it. She had less time for church. She didn’t visit the nuns anymore. She realized that the demands of adulthood had distanced herself from her spiritual core, but TM allowed her to reconnect to it.
It was a strong foundation for our relationship, and it has grown over time, as Jacquelyne has embraced Catholic and Hindu traditions equally. “I don’t think there has to be some sort of title to your particular form of spirituality,” she later said. “There is a unity of consciousness, and I find there is something in most religions to embrace, respect, and love.”
In September of 1987, I asked Jacquelyne to live with me in Los Angeles, which would mean leaving her family, friends, and job in Chicago. I knew that Jacquelyne liked to organize and manage and was not a sit-at-home type of person. I had started a nonprofit foundation and asked if she would manage it. She said she knew nothing about nonprofits but was willing to learn, so she quit her job, packed up, and moved west.
By now, I was living in a four-bedroom house in Pacific Palisades while still owning the Santa Barbara compound, the home in Incline Village, and properties in Maui and Kauai. I owned a lot of houses, but they were more like expensive shelters than actual homes. I was single and nomadic and didn’t give my living quarters much attention. In Pacific Palisades, I didn’t have a refrigerator or a bedroom set and was basically living out of suitcases. One of the first things Jacquelyne did was drive my Jaguar to a home supply store, fill it with pots and pans, and start equipping my kitchen.
Getting my houses in running order wasn’t my biggest problem. My finances were still in shambles. I was always about the big picture, not the details, and just as I let others handle the business side of the Beach Boys, I did the same with my own finances, entrusting lawyers, accountants, and others to take care of things. I was responsible for the homes and cars, but my biggest sin had more to do with neglect than profligacy. I couldn’t tell you what I had in assets, liabilities, or income, didn’t know what interest rates I was paying, and was unaware of how much I owed the IRS. Jacquelyne, on the other hand, loved numbers and had managed medical offices, so she knew her way around a balance sheet. She began inspecting mine, started asking questions, and realized I had no system for paying bills, monitoring my loans, or tracking my investments and income. Far worse, over time she discovered that I had representatives who were skimming money off my earnings from the Beach Boys. It’s the same story you hear all the time about artists, athletes, and celebrities. We live in our little bubbles, easy targets, blissfully unaware of the world around us. Most of us don’t like confrontation until we have no other choice. In my case, I fired those who were stealing from me, but I was as angry at myself as with them. I got a new team of lawyers, accountants, and advisors and set up automatic payment and savings plans and set up my first retirement account. I emerged from bankruptcy proceedings in 1988, but in truth I was still not receiving what I was owed. That would take a few more years.
—
What I wanted in my personal life was what I had as a child—the family experience, the togetherness of the holidays. The Loves were an imperfect family, but the emotions were perfect. Now in my forties, I had a family that was fragmented. I had six children from four different wives who didn’t know each other, and while I tried to spend quality time with each of my kids and supported them financially, I was not a significant figure in any of their lives. I wasn’t good at birthday cards or Christmas gifts or phone calls. Summer later said that when she was growing up, it was tough walking through the mall and hearing a Beach Boy song. She heard me more there than in person.
Jacquelyne was very close to her family, and I knew that family—her family, my family, whatever family she was part of—was always going to be her first priority. That meant bringing my kids together, and I saw this in our first year, in December, when we were on tour in Asia. Jacquelyne came with us, and by then she had met my kids, and as Christmas neared and we were winding down the tour in Japan, Jacquelyne started asking me when we were going to get them gifts. We’d have to do it here, and now, because there wouldn’t be enough time when we got back home.
One morning in our hotel room, frustrated by my procrastination, Jacquelyne flung a pillow at me. “This is our last day!” she scolded. “We won’t have time to shop when we get home.” So off we went to the stores, which were well stocked for most of our needs, except for Christian’s gift. He had become an avid surfer, so we had to order him a surfboard by phone.
I don’t think he was expecting anything. “Whoa, Dad,” he said when he received it. “What’s wrong with you? Have you lost your mind?”
I assured him I hadn’t.
—
Around the same time, a very different family matter, something far more traumatic, brought Jacquelyne and me closer together.
After Jacquelyne had moved to Los Angeles, her younger brother Christopher, just twenty-one years old, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Jacquelyne flew home to visit and found him in his childhood bedroom, sleeping peacefully. Christopher loved soft fur—when he was a kid, his mom had given him a pelt, which he slept with—so Jacquelyne took off a fur coat I had given her and draped it over her brother and kissed him. He awoke. “Sissy, I was just having a dream about you,” he whispered. “You were pregnant and were going to have this golden-haired baby, and you were going to nickname him Lovey.”
Jacquelyne assumed he was taking some really good meds, because she was not trying to get pregnant.
Jacquelyne had two other younger siblings, and the house was under great stress. Their father had lost his job, their mother was getting laid off, and creditors were calling. But Christopher assured Jacquelyne that he would be okay.
Shortly thereafter, we went to Asia, and when we returned in December, we flew to Chicago and saw Christopher in the hospital a couple days before his surgery. He was in remarkable spirits. He had a cherubic face, with brown curly hair and long eyelashes, and when he smiled, his large amber eyes smiled also.
He told me he wanted to be a pilot and had applied to aviation school. Then he said, “I always wanted to play the saxophone. Do you play?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know if you’d call it playing, but I play it.”
“When do you think I should start?”
“Start now,” I told him. “I’ll buy you a saxophone for Christmas.”
I left before the surgery, but Jacquelyne stayed and was with her brother when he awoke from the operation. He was alert and funny, and a full recovery was expected. Jacquelyne had to return home but assured him she’d be back soon.
“Go on, Sissy, you have to live your life,” he said.
Back in Pacific Palisades, we were hosting friends who had come in for a Ravi Shankar performance. The morning after and with a houseful of guests, Jacquelyne received a call from her family. Christopher had gone into a coma.
While I tended to our visitors, Jacquelyne stayed in the bedroom and called Deepak Chopra, whom she had met through me when she moved to Los Angeles. Deepak, trained as a medical doctor, is now one of the world’s most famous spiritual advisors and an advocate of alternative medicine as a path toward personal transformation. When Jacquelyne met him, he was relatively unknown but was a leading spokesman for TM and, at the time, was working closely with Maharishi to expand Ayurvedic health practices in America. Deepak and Jacquelyne became friends quickly—she appeared in one of his promotional videos—and he was, for her, a source of strength and wisdom.
Deepak told her that Christopher’s first seventy-two hours in a coma would be his most important, but, he said, “You have to prepare for the fact that this might be the time that your brother makes his transition, and perhaps his job here is done.”
Jacquelyne flew to Chicago and saw Christopher in the hospital, but he was almost another person, pale and greenish. She called Deepak, who reminded her that we are all here in a dance with one another. “One dance might end and another one might begin,” he said, “but we’re all here, and once our dance card is full, we go on to a different kind of dance.”
Jacquelyne asked him if she could tell Christopher her mantra, and Deepak said yes. “Whisper it to him and hold his hand,” he said, “and he can hear you. He’s very aware that you are there. He’s more concerned for you than you are for him.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It is possible,” he said. “The spirit cares for those that it leaves behind.”
After about a week, Jacquelyne flew to Washington to meet me at a meditation course with Deepak. This was our first Christmas together, and I knew how much she loved the season, so I had someone bring a Christmas tree to our hotel room. She had a sleepless night on December 23, and then the following morning, the morning of Christmas Eve, her dad called and said that Christopher’s heart had given out an hour ago.
“I already knew that,” Jacquelyne told him.
Christopher had been in a coma for twelve days, and during that time, his prophecy came true: Jacquelyne learned that she was pregnant.
—
With so much trauma, we were worried about Jacquelyne’s two other siblings, Steven, eighteen, and Raven, nine. Their mother was so distraught that she continued washing Christopher’s clothes and laying them out on his bed. Raven was calling Jacquelyne every day, shaken and desperate. Finally I said, “Send them out here.”
“Here” was in New York, where on January 20, 1988, the Beach Boys were going to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria. Jacquelyne’s aunt took the kids to the airport and put them on a plane, and they stayed with us in New York in the days leading up to the event. They didn’t have enough winter clothes, so we took them shopping, showed them the sights, and invited them to a special dinner with a living legend.
I had first met Muhammad Ali back in the 1960s when he was still Cassius Clay, and I had always admired him, particularly his stance against the Vietnam War. I was friends with Ali’s business manager, Gene Kilroy, who told me a story about Ali that I never forgot. Back in the sixties, Gene was with Ali when they were to meet Martin Luther King Jr., but King’s entourage told Gene he couldn’t enter the room because he’s white.
Ali told them, “Then I’m leaving too.”
Gene was admitted.
Through Gene I was able to reconnect with Ali, and I asked him to sit at our table for the Hall of Fame ceremony. A few nights before, Jacquelyne and I, with Steven and Raven, met Ali at an Indian restaurant with his wife, Yolanda, and Muhammad’s children.
The former heavyweight champion, now forty-six, sat with Raven on his lap, pulling quarters out of her ear. Steven took a shine to one of his daughters. He wanted to ask her out but, raised in a traditional household, knew he had to ask her father’s permission. He approached Ali cautiously.
“Sir, may I ask a question?”
Ali growled at him.
Steven tried again. “I don’t want to disturb your dinner, sir, but I just have one question.”
Ali pushed back from the table and barked, “What you got to ask me!”
Steven seemed to shrink in front of us. “I was just hoping to take your daughter to the movies tomorrow night.”
Ali sneered, then relaxed, smiled, and replied sweetly, “Okay, what time you gettin’ her and what time you comin’ back?”
The next night, I met Ali with a couple friends at a sports bar. We were just hanging out when I looked up at a TV screen and saw, incredibly, a replay of one of the classic Ali-Frazier fights from the 1970s.
“Hey,” I said. “What do you think of that?”
Ali looked at the screen for a long moment.
“Well, Mike, look at that guy dancing. I wonder what it’s like to be him.”
I smiled and gave him a tap on the arm. “You’re still the greatest, champ.”
I thought it made perfect sense to have Ali sit with us at the Hall of Fame ceremony, which in my view was a tribute to the era in which we were all young and making our mark. That Ali was a Black Muslim also gave the crowd some much-needed diversity. His presence was one of the highlights of a night that didn’t go as I expected.
Elton John introduced Brian, Carl, Al, and me to receive the award. Brian, reading off a sheet of paper, spoke of our early days and our love of music, and Carl thanked everyone on behalf of Dennis. Then I spoke. I had something specific in mind. I thought that the music industry, instead of coming together at a spiffy hotel to give its members prestigious awards, would do better if it had a concert for a charity. There were plenty of examples—Live Aid for the Ethiopian famine, Farm Aid, the Concert for Bangladesh. If the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame meant anything, I thought, it should mean pooling our abilities and doing something positive.
I got off on the right foot. “You heard from my cousin Brian the reason we started making music, and the reason that keeps us going. And it sounds corny, but you can hear it in the harmonies . . . and the reason that people like the Beach Boys is that we love harmony . . . and we love all people too.”
I tried to challenge the audience. “What I want to see is that this one room recognizes that there is one earth here, and I want us to do something fantastic with all this talent, and all this wonderful spirit and soul . . .”
But I got offtrack and began to ramble, and sounded angry, which I probably was. (I didn’t have time to meditate that day, so I was even more on edge.) I had been in the business for twenty-seven years, and in that room, I knew, were any number of agents, lawyers, and record company executives who were more intent on dividing artists than supporting them. A united music industry could accomplish a great deal, but we couldn’t even be united on our Hall of Fame night. The Beatles were inducted as well, but Paul McCartney didn’t attend because of his conflicts with his former bandmates and with Yoko as well. I called them out by name. I also mentioned Diana Ross as a star who didn’t show up. I had also wanted to challenge the Rolling Stones to a Battle of the Bands competition by satellite on two different continents. I thought it would be a great fund raiser. But I admit, I too closely associated the Stones with the drugs and all that represents, and sometimes I have a hard time keeping my emotions in check. I botched my line and said Mick Jagger “has always been chickenshit to get onstage with the Beach Boys.”
The switchblade . . . and the butterfly.
The ballroom band started to play, and I was escorted offstage as reporters raced for the exits to call in my remarks. You don’t take a shot at the rock and roll aristocracy with impunity. My comments were reckless, but my biggest regret was that my appeal for collective action was poorly expressed and then buried under an avalanche of criticism.
Nonetheless, I kept the evening in perspective. Steven and Raven were with us, and they traveled with Jacquelyne and me to Los Angeles and then to Hawaii and stayed with us for another month, and in light of the pain that they had been through, and because I knew that there is life and there is death and there was a Christmas saxophone that I was never able to deliver, it was easy enough for me to dismiss my misguided remarks.
I actually saw Mick Jagger backstage at the Hall of Fame ceremony, and I told him the reason I said what I said was that I thought a fund-raising competition between the two bands via satellite would raise a helluva lot of money.
He thought about it for a moment. “That’s good,” he said.
—
Several months after the Hall of Fame dinner, Terry Melcher asked me to come to his studio in Santa Monica and help him on a song that would be used for a movie. I always thought Terry was one of the industry’s better producers, and at the studio, he played me a verse that had been written by John Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas, and Scott McKenzie, who wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” I thought the verse had a nice melody but lacked a groove. Terry told me the movie was about a bartender who quits his job in New York and moves to Jamaica, where he meets his love interest. It didn’t sound like Gone with the Wind, but there was enough story for a good pop song.
I wrote the lyrics at the studio. To complement the breezy melody, I thought the chorus needed a good hook and the same R&B feel that was in “Smokey Joe’s Café,” and Jamaica allowed me to use the same travelogue approach that I employed for “Surfin’ Safari,” “Surfin’ USA,” and “California Girls.”
Aruba, Jamaica, oh I want to take ya.
Bermuda, Bahama, come on, pretty mama.
Key Largo, Montego, baby why don’t we go, Jamaica
Al Jardine hated “pretty mama,” but lyrics work best, in my view, when they resonate with the largest number of people, and that was more likely when the words had several meanings. “Come on, pretty mama,” could be a child tugging at his mom or an old geezer with his wife getting into their Winnebago for the winter. I liked the first verse by Phillips and McKenzie, but one of their lines was:
Off the Florida Keys, there’s a place called Kokomo.
That’s where you used to go, to get away from it all.
I thought the past tense (used to go) sounded like a guy lamenting his misspent youth, so I changed it to:
That’s where ya want to go.
The second verse was Chuck Berry–esque in its rhyme and alliteration.
We’ll put out to sea, and we’ll perfect our chemistry.
And by and by we’ll defy a little bit of gravity.
Afternoon delight, cocktails and moonlit nights.
That dreamy look in your eye, give me a tropical contact high.
Way down in Kokomo.
“Contact high” was slang that described someone who inhaled marijuana smoke passively, but it could also mean making contact romantically—another double entendre. When the Muppets covered the song in 1993, Kermit sang “tropical island sky,” puppet frogs being averse to suggestive lyrics.
Some days after I wrote the words, I got a message that Terry needed to speak with me, so I called him from a pay phone. He was recording the demo, but he didn’t have the paper on which I wrote the lyrics. So there on the phone, with cars passing by, I started singing, “Aruba, Jamaica, oh I want to take ya . . .”
For the actual recording, Van Dyke Parks, the lyricist from the Smile era, played the accordion, and Carl’s voice—Ooh, I wanna take you down to Kokomo!—evoked the lush tone he used in “Good Vibrations.” I never had a booming voice, but in recent years, it had become thinner, noticeable toward the end of long concerts. But in “Kokomo,” Terry used a wide-open mic and an ambient reverb to give my voice a breathy effect that fit the romantic mood of the track.
We did a video, performed outside the Grand Floridian Resort at Walt Disney World in Florida, with John Stamos on congas and me “playing” the saxophone. (It was actually my friend Joel Peskin who played the part, nailing it in one or two takes.) The song was written for the movie Cocktail, starring Tom Cruise and Elisabeth Shue, and when the director, Roger Donaldson, first heard “Kokomo,” he told us, “This is your best song since ‘Good Vibrations.’”
Really?
“Kokomo” would be on the album Cocktail, an eclectic group of numbers that included Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and Little Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti.” But Elektra Records released “Kokomo” two weeks before the album. The label didn’t do much to promote it, so we hired our own promoters and tried to get it airplay, first on adult contemporary stations and then contemporary hit radio. And it caught on. It was just one of those catchy songs that when people heard it, they wanted to hear it again, and it got exposure from some unlikely places. Some of our fans recall that we performed it on Full House, at the halftime in a college football game at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Less well remembered, but still raising the song’s visibility, was a performance on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live, in which we played “Kokomo” as part of a story line about a high school reunion. Then there was the movie Cocktail, which became an unexpected hit.
We thought Brian would be joining us on the vocals, but when Terry made the request through Landy, Landy said that Brian would come down to the studio only if he, Landy, were an executive producer on the song. Terry said no. Landy was supposed to be Brian’s therapist, not his producer; and the last thing Terry needed was some cloying musical wannabe coproducing our song. Landy later told Brian that the Beach Boys had maneuvered to keep him off the song. Brian believed this fabrication for years and said, in a 1998 deposition, how badly “hurt” he was by our snub.
We hadn’t snubbed anyone—Brian was victimized by his own therapist turned producer—but I’m sure that part of his “hurt” stemmed from what happened with the song.
“Kokomo” climbed the charts to No. 1, twenty-two years after “Good Vibrations,” the longest interim between two No. 1 songs by the same group. “Kokomo” became the most successful song in the history of the Beach Boys, selling a remarkable 7 million records at a time when 45s had already begun their slide into oblivion. The “Kokomo” video was also No. 1 on VH1. But it was the other stuff that got to me. We started receiving bags of mail from schoolchildren and teachers describing how the song spurred their interest in geography, with some students even poring over maps in search of this enchanted island.
Far be it from me to tell them it didn’t exist. I was invited to Newark to speak to the Boys and Girls Club, and the kids sang an absolutely beautiful version of the song.
If they believed in a place called Kokomo, then so did I.