“He was really cute and he was elegant,” Nicks has said of Henley. (Not to cast aspersions on her judgment, but did she look at his hair? Henley sported a ‘fro in the ’70s that seemed to make up 70% of his body weight.). So after Nicks and her Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham broke up, circa 1976, she and Henley began an affair. As Nicks remembered it, “This is not popular. Sure, Lindsey and I are totally broken up, I have every right in the world to go out with people, but I spend most of my time with the band, and it’s not real conducive to having a relationship.” So although Nicks and Henley would later pledge “lovers forever, face to face” on the 1981 hit duet “Leather and Lace,” the on-and-off affair only lasted about two years, and they did not found a California rock dynasty.

As for Henley, he’s said, “I believe, to the best of my knowledge, [that Nicks] became pregnant by me. And she named the [unborn] kid Sara, and she had an abortion–and then wrote the song of the same name [on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk] to the spirit of the aborted baby. I was building my house at the time, and there’s a line in the song that says, ‘And when you build your house, call me.”

(Excerpted from the 2006 book Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?: Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed, published by Three Rivers Press, written by Gavin Edwards.)