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…
