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Heavy Metal Genealogy: Tawny Kitaen — From Uzbekistan to Stardom
If there’s one thing that all kinds of metal fans can agree with it’s that Tawny Kitaen was a the supreme metal babe. And actually, she was more than that, she was an equal of David Coverdale in terms of hair and sex presence. (Is that a term? If it is, it definitely applies to them.) Tawny nailed an interpretive dance accompaniment to a glam rock song, with her acrobatic and balletic moves on the hood of a Jaguar in “Here I Go Again,” illustrating the freedom that her then-beau Coverdale sang about in lyrics such as, “Like a drifter I was born to walk alone.” I also loved her in two other Whitesnake videos, “Is This Love?” and “Still of the Night,” where she gets arrested by the Sex Police. A brilliant stroke for a band whose albums include the subtly-titled “Slide It In.”
Perhaps it’s my own shallowness surfacing when I say it was hard for me to believe that someone who looked like Tawny Kitaen — and didn’t she really look like a “Tawny Kitaen”? — could ever have had a bad day, but apparently, she had quite a few, as scrapes with the law over drugs and booze and domestic violence have proven. Tawny did marry her hirsute equal in David Coverdale, a match that seemed as perfect as Heather and Tommy or Pamela and Tommy, and also ended the same way, except even quicker. A subsequent marriage to former Angels pitcher Chuck Finley produced two daughters, Wynter and Raine, and a second divorce that was worse than the first. As of this writing there’s been no official word as to the cause of Tawny’s death, but since it was at age 59, and because her father just died last month, it does lead people to presuppose that if substances weren’t involved, a hard lifestyle was.
So who was Tawny Kitaen? I’d guess a lot of people think they know but very few do. I was certainly way off the mark making assumptions about a woman whose heyday was about 35 years ago. I can only find out where she came from, and even then, much of that is just documents rather than stories.
What’s interesting is that such a random group of people eventually converged on San Diego, California at the right time for Linda Lee Taylor and Terry Kitaen to meet, marry, and have Tawny (born Julie) and her brother, Jordan. And when I say random, I mean Tawny’s roots extend to Uzebkistan, Russia, Austria…
