On March 24, 1977, Rolling Stone put Fleetwood Mac on its cover in a single bed, all five members tangled together in what was meant as a joke about their chaotic private lives. Annie Leibovitz shot it. Christine McVie rested her head on Lindsey Buckingham’s shoulder. Stevie Nicks curled into the crook of Mick Fleetwood’s arm, and John McVie lay off to the side reading a magazine.
Mick later called it a spoof, and that is how the world read it, a band laughing at its own mess. The joke, however, was already running behind reality. Before the year ended, the woman in Mick’s arm would be in a secret affair with him, while she was dating Don Henley and Mick was married to Jenny Boyd, the mother of his two daughters. The two kept the affair from the rest of the band.
Mick himself would later write that it ran for years, longer than anyone really remembered. The photograph showed a band with nothing left to hide. In truth, the one thing they hid most carefully was sitting in the frame all along. Long before Fleetwood Mac existed, Mick Fleetwood learned what it meant to be watched.
Born on June 24, 1947, in Redruth, Cornwall, to an RAF fighter pilot, he spent his childhood moving through Egypt and Norway before being sent to English boarding schools. There, undiagnosed dyslexia turned every trip to the blackboard into a public failure. He froze when teachers called him up, a fear he later named Blackboard Syndrome, the terror not of failing but of being seen failing. At fifteen he left school with his parents’ support and went to London to become a drummer.
In 1967 he and John McVie became the rhythm section of a band built around guitarist Peter Green, called Fleetwood Mac. Then the band began losing people. Green left in 1970. Guitarists quit, burned out, or disappeared into religion.
By 1973 only Mick and John McVie remained from the lineup that had made its name. Profiles described Mick the same way again and again: referee, peacekeeper, the man who holds a room together when everything else falls apart. He had built a career out of staying steady while everyone around him wavered, a skill learned from a terrified boy who needed to control the room he could not perform in. Stevie Nicks came from the opposite direction.
Born in Phoenix on May 26, 1948, she had a country-singing grandfather, A. J. Nicks, who lifted her onto barroom stages in a homemade cowgirl outfit to sing duets before she turned five. Drinkers applauded, and she learned that performing was not a personality trait but a skill with hours and responses.
You were only as good as the next room. In 1966 she met a guitarist named Lindsey Buckingham at a Bay Area gathering, joined him in harmony on California Dreaming, and the two became partners in music first and in life after. They played in a band called Fritz, then as a duo. Their 1973 album Buckingham Nicks failed commercially.
She waited tables. He scraped by. Late in 1974 Mick Fleetwood walked into Sound City Studios in California, where producer Keith Olsen played him a track from that failed album to show off the studio’s sound. The track was Frozen Love.
Mick was struck by the guitar. When Bob Welch left Fleetwood Mac, Mick called Lindsey, who said he would not come without Stevie. Mick agreed, and by most accounts skipped the audition. On New Year’s Eve 1974, the five members who would make Rumours were together.
Mick had already been wounded by the life he was inviting them into. Jenny Boyd had met him in London when she was sixteen, moved in the rock world’s orbit as the sister of Pattie Boyd, and married him in 1970. She was the inspiration for Donovan’s Jennifer Juniper, but the marriage was built on absence. She raised two daughters while the band toured, living inside the cocaine and alcohol weather of the road.
In 1973, on a US tour, she had a short affair with the band’s new guitarist, Bob Weston. Mick found out mid-tour. He tried to carry on because canceling meant legal and financial penalties, but after a show in Lincoln, Nebraska, in October, he told the band he could no longer work with Weston. The tour collapsed, the manager tried to assemble a fake Fleetwood Mac, and the real band fled to Los Angeles while Jenny followed with the children, hoping to repair things.
When Lindsey and Stevie walked in a year later, Mick was a man who had already been betrayed on the road and had chosen to stay. Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 album, the first with Stevie and Lindsey, reached number one on the Billboard 200, carrying Rhiannon, Landslide, Over My Head, and Say You Love Me. The band finally became the thing Mick had spent eight years trying to keep alive. Underneath the success, the relationships were quietly collapsing.
Stevie has said the band made a silent vow to fix things for now because breaking up would mean no Fleetwood Mac. In 1976 they broke up anyway. John and Christine McVie divorced. Stevie and Lindsey split.
Mick’s first marriage to Jenny ended that year as well. The five of them went into a studio together to make a record about it. Rumours came out on February 4, 1977, sold in enormous numbers, and turned their private wreckage into public confession, one song at a time. Then came the photograph.
After the Rolling Stone shoot, everyone got off the mattress except Lindsey and Stevie, who stayed wrapped around each other. Buckingham remembers at least five minutes passed before Mick came back and whispered that they were freaking everyone out. Stevie remembers it differently, saying they lay there for two hours talking and kissing until Leibovitz had to ask them to leave because the room was rented. Five minutes or two hours, the one point of agreement is who moved first to break the spell.
It was Mick, the peacekeeper, stepping in to end the moment. A few months later, on the other side of the world, the man who held everyone else’s relationships together was about to start one of his own. On November 6, 1977, Fleetwood Mac played Western Springs Stadium in Oakland, the first night of the Oceania leg of their tour. A sold-out crowd watched five musicians on stage while a secret ran through them.
Band chronologies place the start of the affair in Los Angeles during a break in touring. Stevie told the story herself on Oprah’s Master Class in 2013. It never would have happened, she said, if she and Mick had not been at a party, completely drunk and coked out, and ended up the last two people there. She was dating Don Henley.
Mick was married to Jenny Boyd. Then the plane took off, and the secret went with them. In New Zealand they began slipping away between shows. It carried through Australia, through Japan, and all the way to the final show in Lahaina, Hawaii, on December 10.
Five people traveled together, played the same songs, and ate at the same tables while two of them lied about where they had been. A second hidden tour ran inside the first, inside the band that had just turned its private life into the biggest album in the world, inside the cover story that told the audience they already knew everything. The affair did not end with a scene. Mick’s account differs from Stevie’s.
In his 2014 memoir Play On, he wrote that he fell in love with her and that it ran longer than any of them really remembered, probably several years. Reference sources date it from 1977 to 1979. Nobody kept a diary, and the two people who lived it do not describe the same affair. When the tour ended, Mick told Lindsey.
According to Mick, Lindsey’s reply was almost courteous: “Nice of you to tell me. I appreciate it. ” Mick later described what Lindsey went through as being in hell, a wound that took years to heal and that Lindsey still talked about as if it happened yesterday. The only account of that moment comes from the man who delivered the news, with the other two out of the room.
Then Mick sat Jenny down and told her he had been having an affair with Stevie for a few months. She wrote in her 2020 memoir Jennifer Juniper: A Journey Beyond the Muse that it felt like being kicked in the stomach and that she remembered the Rolling Stone cover shoot, realizing what had been sitting in plain sight. Then Mick told her the rest. He could not decide between her and Stevie.
That was not a confession. That was a man asking the person he had just wounded to wait while he made up his mind. Stevie wrote the affair into a song. Storms was the first song she brought to the band for the double album that became Tusk in 1979.
She has said the song was about the affair with Mick and that she believed the affair contributed to the end of his marriage. In her liner notes she boiled it down to one line: don’t break up other people’s marriages. The affair finally ended over an infidelity of its own. When Stevie found out Mick had also become involved with her closest friend, Sara Recor, something in her closed.
Mick said that discovery effectively ended things between them. Stevie turned that wound into a song as well. Sara began as a sixteen-minute demo recorded with Sara Recor beside her, feeding cassettes into the machine while Stevie worked take after take into the night. By 1978 Mick and Jenny Boyd had divorced for the second time.
By most tellings, Stevie and Mick’s romantic relationship had run its course by 1979, around the time Tusk was finished. The band did not break up. They finished Tusk, toured it, and kept working together for another decade through more lineup changes, more relapses, more reunions. Mick has said the years of cocaine and hedonism were how everyone coped with a situation none of them had a name for.
Jenny Boyd left the rock and roll life, went back to school in her forties, earned a doctorate in psychology at UCLA, and ran an addiction treatment center in England. She has said she forgave Stevie, describing it decades later as something closer to peace. And Mick, when he finally read Jenny’s memoir in 2020, told her he had not understood what she had actually been going through during those years. A man who spent his whole career being the one who held the room together was, by his own admission, the last person to see what his silence had cost his own wife.
Stevie never pretended the affair was something to be proud of, calling it doomed, painful for everybody, leading to nothing. Mick has called it more than once a very bright, very real thing. For over forty years the record was one-sided by default, because the wronged party had not yet published.
What outlasted the affair itself was not who slept with whom on a tour of New Zealand in 1977, but who got to narrate it, and for how long, before anyone heard the other side.
