How Sly Stone’s marriage became a huge Madison Square Garden event
Imagine you’re Sly Stone for a moment. You’ve got money, fame, and success. You’ve got a fiancé that you’re in love with. You’ve got the music industry at your feet. Why not turn your wedding day into a sold-out gig at Madison Square Garden?
There are certain people who just seem to know how to do fame well. They know exactly how to have fun with the money that’s been afforded to them. Prince spent it on Paisley Park, a playground of a mansion. Elton John once paid around $400k on flowers over a 20-month period of singleness to cheer himself up. Nicolas Cage bought himself a dinosaur skull just because he was interested in it and had the money to do so.
With unlimited funds and enough status to be able to sort out any wacky purchase or plan, some celebrities just know how to do it right and Sly Stone’s obscenely extravagant wedding is a perfect example of that.
It was 1972 when Stone met Kathy Silva, a model and actor. However, more so for being known for her limited résumé of movies, Silva became known for June 5th, 1974, the day when, after two years of dating, she and Stone married in front of a sold-out venue of 19,500 people.
“’This is Sly,’ I said, ‘and I need you to help me make this wedding the year’s biggest deal’”, Stone said to the photographer Steve Paley as the idea struck him. “He called me back later that day, and we grew the idea from a seed to a bud, from a bud to a flower. I could do a gig, get paid, and get married at the same time,” he added.
It doesn’t exactly sound romantic for his new wife, and the new mother of his child. But what it did sound like was a huge spectacle that Stone’s fans would be desperate to be a part of. So the plan was in motion, and a show was booked at the iconic New York venue.
“We’d have a ceremony just before the concert, right there on the stage. Then a concert, then a party afterward at the rooftop lounge of the Waldorf Astoria,” Stone laid out as the plan and tickets flew out.
The planning of the gig was more than just the planning of a gig, though. However, just like the majority of the shows Stone played, he had little to no input in it, tasking everything out to other people, like the designer Halston, to make all the shining gold outfits everyone would be wearing. He put in some requests – like wanting live doves released into the venue or a real ‘angel’ to fly across it on wires, all of which were rejected. So mostly, he just stuck to his calendar of commitments, and then the day arrived.
“Then it was show time. It had happened hundreds of times before, in little clubs in New York City, in front of a huge crowd at Woodstock. But it had never happened on a night when I was getting married,” Stone recalled in his memoir, adding, “We had twenty thousand guests at least, with some of the estimates as high as twenty-five. Years later I saw a picture of a ticket someone kept: $8.50 for a wedding and a concert both. A bargain.”
It was a wedding unlike anything else. Who else can boast that they earned a nice pay cheque while getting married, outside of some kind of illicit agreement?
But in the end, an extravagant wedding doesn’t equal a happy marriage. Less than two years later, Stone and Silva had split. “I didn’t want that world of drugs and weirdness,” Silva told People magazine after all was said and done, adding, “He’d write me a song or promise to change, and I’d try again. We were always fighting, then getting back together.”
