Lita Ford has a new tell-all memoir coming out at the end of this month. It's called Living Like a Runaway: A Memoir, and can be pre-ordered here. The book covers her career from being discovered as a teen and asked to join the Runaways, to her crazy life in the 80s and beyond. In the run up to the book release, she is in the midst of a full-on publicity assault.
Today, the NY Post ran a long preview piece for the book and it included many gems from Lita's life. And what a life she led. For example, she was a part of an orgy consisting of Jon Bon Jovi and guitarist Richie Sambora:
“Holy s–t,” Ford writes in her new memoir, “Living Like a Runaway” (Dey Street). “Richie Sambora is the king of swing, I must say. Jon [Bon Jovi] recovered from puking and Aldo finally made his way into the action, and it turned into girl-on-guy fun at the Broadway Plaza Hotel.”
…or the time she was approached by Jimmy Page to join Led Zeppelin (or perhaps it was just an excuse to get in her pants):
The [Runaways'] first headlining show, at an LA club, found boldface names in attendance, including Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Plant posed with the band in a Runaways T-shirt, then took Ford aside. “[He] asked me if I could play bass,” she writes. “‘For who?’ I asked. ‘Led Zep.’ “He might have been drinking or pulling my leg, but he seemed to be dead serious in the moment,” she writes
Ford held nothing back in the book, noting she contracted crabs from Dee Dee Ramone, and had trysts with Who bassist John Entwistle, Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore, Judas Priest guitarist Glenn Tipton and Eddie Van Halen, who she prefered to call Edward:
But the real meat of the story came when discussing her ex-husband, legendary Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi. Ford wrote that she had a crush on the guitar god since she was 13 (Iommi is 10 years her senior) and eventually, after The Runaways opened for Sabbath, the two started dating.
Iommi has noted in his autobiography that the early 80s were the peak of his coked-out excess and Ford corroborates by saying the first night they hooked up, they didn't get very far:
“He was impotent from his constant drug use, and he was very embarrassed. I felt bad for him and didn’t really know what to do. Eventually, I got him off.”
Ford then claimed that after Iommi invited Ford to meet his mother, on the flight over, he punched her in the eye:
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.
Ford said that Iommi got abusive with her four or five times during the relationship and details what, in her mind, was the worst case of abuse, shortly after they were engaged:
“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.”
Ford concluded that she ran away that night to former boyfriend Nikki Sixx, who prescribed her some heroin to snort to make the pain go away. What a guy!
Obviously, these are very serious allegations made against Iommi. At the time of publishing this story, Iommi has yet to respond to the allegations.
You can read more insanity in the full New York Post piece.
The last time we spoke of Lita Ford's relationship, it was her crumbling marriage of 18 years to Nitro's Jim Gilette. The two got nasty in public, with their kids getting involved detailing alleged abuse Ford made them suffer through and divorce papers stated their children feared Ford would kill her. In the aftermath, Ford launched an organization titled Lita Ford's Parental-Alienation Awareness, claiming this was all the doing of her ex-husband brainwashing her children.
