RIP Tawny Kitaen
This website was created as a safe, supportive and career-sustaining home for me to write about random, stupid-ass bullshit that nobody cares about.
That’s not entirely true, however, in that if I write about something that’s because I care about it on some level, OR one of you kind folks cared enough about it to pay me to cover it for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0.
I’ve happily covered a lot of random weirdness for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 but nothing has been quite as weird or as random as my patron-funded exploration of the films and television projects of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen.
A number of Kitaen’s early films are so obscure and unpopular that they never made the leap to DVD, Blu-Ray or legal streaming services so in order to fulfill my sacred obligation to watch and write about pretty much the entirety of Kitaen’s film career I had to purchase a primitive TV/VCR combo.
That seems fitting, since I will always associate Kitaen with the decade VCRs became popular. The problem with embodying an era the way Kitaen did the hair metal 1980s is that once that era ends you become a man or woman out of time, a human relic of a bygone era.
With the possible exception of Pamela Des Barres, no one embodied the concept of the rock and roll chick as perfectly as Kitaen did. She appeared on the cover of RATT’s 1983 self-titled EP, or rather her legs did, a pair of impossibly gorgeous gams in pantyhose and red high heels covered in white rats, a striking tableau even if it did not highlight Kitaen’s many other wonderful features.
The gig was personal as well as professional. Kitaen was dating RATT guitarist Robbin Crosby when she appeared on the cover of RATT’s debut EP and 1984 full-length debut Out of the Cellar.
But it was with another titan of hair metal that Kitaen made her true mark on pop culture: David Coverdale of Whitesnake. Kitaen married, then divorced the popular hair metal frontman Coverdale and appeared in four Whitesnake videos, most notably “Here I Go Again”, where she put her extensive gymnastic training to use gyrating erotically in a way that kick-started puberty for countless boys, myself included.
Coverdale is a handsome, charismatic rock and roll superstar with a terrific voice and amazing presence but casting his then-girlfriend in his videos ensured that no one would pay attention to him, that he would be borderline invisible in clips specifically designed to show him off at his rock star best. That’s how charismatic Kitaen was: next to her even the most beautiful men and women seemed colorless and dull by comparison.
Kitaen was too goddamn beautiful and charismatic not to be a movie star but after a few cult triumphs like Bachelor Party and Witchboard the movies and the parts got small and sleazy and unmistakably second-rate.
Kitaen dabbled in television with a major role in the 1990s WKRP in Cincinnati reboot, a hosting gig on America’s Funniest People and the Hercules television movies and scored a memorable guest spot on Seinfeld but her most memorable role was always destined to be as a figure of fantasy, the ultimate rock and roll dream girl.
attractive couple with VERY big hair!
Kitaen was the preeminent video vixen of her age, an all-American beauty better known for contorting sensually on the hood of an expensive car than for any of the roles she played as an actress in a career that spanned eras and mediums.
Even by the exceedingly high standards of models, actresses and video vixens Kitaen was extraordinarily beautiful. But she was more than beautiful. She was luminescent. The camera loved her. She had that ineffable X factor that makes someone a star. She had swagger. She radiated sex and life.
But with extraordinary natural gifts came demons and a predilection for making poor choices personally and professionally. The woman dated O.J Simpson for a good stretch during the 1980s, so her judgment, needless to say, was not impeccable, personally or professionally. In many ways, she was her own worst enemy.
Kitaen was arrested, at various times in her life, for domestic violence against her professional baseball player ex-husband Chuck Finley, cocaine possession and driving under the influence.
As Kitaen got older, the TV appearances got less dignified and more depressing. She was a cast member on seasons of Surreal Life and Celebrity Rehab and appeared on a show called Botched to have breast implants removed.
So when I saw that Kitaen had died at 59 for reasons that are unknown at the moment, I was sad but I must confess that I was also not terribly surprised, as an early death is an unfortunately ubiquitous, at times seemingly unavoidable component of the rock and roll lifestyle that Kitaen embodied in its purest form.
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