Heather Locklear: The Heather on the Hill

Say it isn't so. The babe who sexed up black roots and power suits, the doll who once jiggled and jogged through her own workout video, is actually insecure about her looks? "My looks?" she repeats, laughing at herself. "Now, to remind myself I can look good, I keep many flattering pictures of myself around the house. Come see."

She leads me down a hail for a private viewing of a couple of framed portraits. In them, she's wearing a bodysuit under a net skirt, sporting a chopped, Courtney Love-style wig and copping a fuck-all attitude. "Notice I keep these in a dark area near the bathroom," she points out, cracking up. Leaning in for a closer look, she comments, "Check out those lines around the eyes, would you? And these pictures were taken something like four years ago." She's laying it on a bit thick, of course; I'm standing up close and she looks aces.

Somehow this seems just the moment to bring up the twin subjects of her signature black roots and the persistent rumors that she's had plastic surgery. "I have to tell everybody," she replies, throwing up her arms to address the world. "I know I have roots. Don't you dare try and act like you think I don't know I have roots. I didn't mean to make it a style. They just sort of happened. It was not a plan. But I think that phase is going out now, so I'll just have to get less lazy and, though it's a drag to get them done, see my hairdresser more often. Happy now?"

Back in the living room, I ask exactly how much cosmetic surgery she has had or might be willing to undergo, whether out of vanity or out of desire to extend her career. "I certainly have no problem with it," she declares. "It seems 45 is when things really start to change; when it gets to the age where it starts looking not real good, it's time to do something. It does cross my mind every once in a while. Let's put it this way: I hope there's more depth to me by the time I'm older, but if I have to choose between Richie waking up one morning and saying to me, 'Gee, you're a fascinating woman' or 'Gee, you look sexy and fantastic,' I'll go for hearing him tell me I look sexy and fantastic. So, I hope I'm just lovely-to-look-at as I age. But just in case I'm not, I'll go there, believe me."

Locklear is so refreshingly loose, I ask if she's ever been in therapy. "Absolutely," she answers, straight up. "I go to a therapist every once in a while. My therapist's attitude is that when I need to feel grounded or something, I'll go to her. I don't need an appointment every week." Locklear heartily agrees with me when I say that it's often relationship trouble that sends people to a shrink. Knowing that she has been unusually resistant to talking about either of her marriages, I ask whether her marriage to Sambora has made therapy seem less crucial. "I'm like, the happiest girl now," she says, glowing. "In my old marriage, I didn't put myself first. I was always taking care of someone else first. It finally became like, 'Well, what about what / need?' My relationship with Richie is the best, best, best thing I've ever touched in my life. Richie gives me depth and emotional security, and I give him sunshine, the birds and the bees and the flowers."

Her sunniness is appealing, but I remind Locklear that this Doris Day bit doesn't jibe with her wedding two rockers back-to-back. She asserts, "People think that it was really quick that I got married to Richie after my divorce [from Tommy Lee], but I was divorced in the marriage years earlier. You know how it is when you're divorced in your head?" Sure I do, but what I want to know is whether her fondness for rock's bad boys is maybe an attraction to rough sex. "There's a side of me that's all about making people happy, doing the right thing," she answers. "But I think there's a rebellious side, too. I'm not saying I want to live in dangerous waters forever, but I think that's truly the whole idea of what attracts me: a little bit of danger. Whether [such] guys are actually dangerous or not, it's the perception that they are that is attractive. Richie isn't dangerous. Not like the other one. That was dangerous."

So dangerous that, as I've heard, before she finally dumped Lee, she might have had to dial 911? "No, no," she insists. "I never did. Never, never, never." After a moment, she says, quietly, "I just knew [the Tommy Lee relationship] was never going to work from the day I got married. I was calm at my wedding [but] all the time I was going, 'This is a mistake.' It wasn't the wisest choice. I stayed with it as much as I could, but from the day I got married, I began thinking, 'I'm getting out of this.'" If that's true, why did she take years getting out of it? "I've got to take the blame. There were two people involved. [That marriage] brought me many learning lessons about myself, of knowing what I will put up with and what I won't. I know much more about myself now, so that I can't put the blame on someone else. It was a strengthening period for me. Going through all that was a grounding, opening-my-eyes kind of experience."

Has she reacted to the public spectacle Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson Lee have often made of their private lives? "I definitely have a reaction to it," she says. "I went, 'Oh, my God, that's the person I used to care for.' I can't believe that that was someone I was with. But he really wasn't like that when I was with him." She goes quiet for a few moments, then concludes, "All that experience I went through for a reason. It brought me to Richie. I asked him to marry me. Sensitivity and understanding of women is what makes a man a man. I have that in him. I have the man. I love his intelligence, his talent, his guts, his gentleness. If I go on, I'm gonna get even more pathetic here. But, to me, monogamy and marriage are the sexiest things in the world."

Switching gears, Locklear confesses a fear she had been harboring about our chat. "I was really worried that all you wanted to talk to me about was The First Wives Club, because if you did, we'd have been here, like, five minutes." She's referring to the about-to-be-released, all-star comedy in which she plays the trophy wife for whom James Naughton dumps Stockard Channing. She says, "The first and only line I ever said on 'CHIPS' was 'Please make them stop!' and I think I have a little less than that in this movie. I mean, this interview is longer than my role in The First Wives Club." Before we talk about how she feels now that her teensy role has all but disappeared on the cutting room floor, I ask what her greatest joy was in making the film. "You've got to know, I've watched everything Goldie Hawn's ever done and I think she's soooo great," Locklear enthuses. "When she came up to me on the set, said hello and kissed me on the cheek, I swear to God, I was like, 'Can I have another one?' I tried not to be pathetic and slobbering on her, but if I was going to be in the movie longer than a scene or two, it's only because they caught me on camera gawking at Goldie Hawn. They were like, "Heather, lake your eyes off Goldie.'"

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