The tragic story of how Stevie Nicks married her best friend’s husband
The early 1980s were a turbulent time for Stevie Nicks. After achieving monumental success with Fleetwood Mac in the latter half of the 1970s and making her name as a solo artist in the early part of the ‘80s, Nicks was a star who seemingly had everything. But behind the scenes, Nicks had to suffer an immense tragedy: the death of her best friend, Robin Anderson.
“My very best friend Robin called me and told me she had terminal leukaemia and that they thought that maybe she might last three months,” Nicks recalled hearing about Anderson’s illness during an episode of Behind the Music in 1998. “So, without a doubt, it was the absolute high and low of success. I never got to enjoy Bella Donna at all because my friend was dying; something went out that day, something left.”
“She had just been in my life since I was 14. She was the one person that knew me for the person I really was and not for the famous Stevie, and it was good to have someone who knew the real you besides just your mom and dad,” Nicks added. To make matters worse, Anderson was pregnant at the time. “Robin was one of the few women who ever got leukaemia and then got pregnant,” Nicks told Us Magazine in 1990. “And they had to take the baby [named Matthew] at six-and-a-half months, and then she died two days later.”
“She died, and they took the baby, and it was like he was three months premature, and it was horrible, it was such an upsetting situation, you know, everyone was just so devastated, and there was this little premature baby, and I just went crazy,” Nicks added on Behind the Music.
Nicks was now in a position that no one ever thought they would find themselves in. She felt a sudden responsibility to Anderson’s husband Kim and their baby Matthew. In a state of shared shock, Nicks decided to marry Kim Anderson and attempt to be a surrogate mother to Matthew.
“I just went insane. And so did her husband. And we were the only two that could really understand the depth of the grief that we were going through,” Nicks told Us. “And I was determined to take care of that baby, so I said to Kim, ‘I don’t know, I guess we should just get married.’ And so we got married three months after she died, and it was a terrible, terrible mistake. We didn’t get married because we were in love, we got married because we were grieving, and it was the only way that we could feel like we were doing anything. And we got divorced three months later.”
The relationship would be Nicks’ sole marriage so far in her lifetime. Just a few months after getting married, Nicks and Anderson divorced, recognising it as a mistake. When Nicks exited the relationship, she ceased contact with Matthew, although she was ready to reconnect with a series of gifts.
“I haven’t seen Kim, nor have I seen Matthew, since that day. I suppose that Matthew will find me when he’s ready. I mean, I am, really, next to Robin, his mommy,” Nicks told Us. “But Kim and I can’t deal with each other at all. So when the baby’s old enough, I have all of his mother’s things, and I have her life on film for 14, 15 years. I have us on tape singing, I have a beautiful book that I wrote the year that she died, I have a roomful of stuff for him. I have his mother to give back to him when he’s ready.”
That day eventually came, as Nicks confirmed to The Telegraph in 2015. Nicks proceeded to help put Matthew through college and remained close to him. After divorcing Anderson, Nicks entered another doomed relationship, this time with former Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh. The trials and tribulations of Robin’s death would eventually find their way into Fleetwood Mac’s 1982 single ‘Gypsy’.
