Style

Jon Bon Jovi is more complicated than you think

He's a rock-star mogul and family man, political activist and philanthropist, with a number one album...but he's still spooked by elevators.

Sometimes Jon Bon Jovi can't quite figure out how he got to be known as such a family man. He loves his wife and four kids and wouldn't trade them for anything. But he's a rock 'n' roll star. He has been around rock 'n' roll for 25 years. He has seen some stuff and done some stuff and said some stuff that maybe he's not too proud of. And yet that family-man thing seems to stick to him like glue.

"I mean, family man, what a concept," he said not long ago, somewhat dazedly. "I mean, how'd I end up the poster boy for that?"

Basically how it happened is that there was an opening and he seemed to fit the bill. In his favor, he had his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Dorothea, which has now lasted 18 years. He had his blue-collar everyman New Jersey roots, never abandoned. He had his looks—strong chin, brilliant smile, gorgeous teeth, perfectly feathered hair. He had that butt, often commented upon but never in a gross way. Plus, he has always stood in contrast to bandmate, writing partner, and notional alter ego Richie Sambora, who in the last year alone divorced Heather Locklear, hooked up with Denise Richards, became a gossip-press regular, and then spent a few days in rehab. Bon Jovi has never been in rehab. He has never been a favorite of the gossip press. He just doesn't get into that kind of trouble. Also, he has always seemed like the most easygoing of rock stars, mostly untroubled, and a genuinely good guy.

As it happens, it was exactly that Bon Jovi who showed up at ABC's studios in Manhattan the other morning to hang out with Barbara Walters and the other girls on The View. He was wearing tight, crowd-pleasing jeans and a kind of ratty black T-shirt emblazoned with instructions to TELL YOUR MOM I SAID HI. He semiswaggered onto the stage, one hand hooked onto his belt buckle, and took a seat between prim Barbara Walters and frumpy Joy Behar, crossing his arms but leaving his legs spread confidently wide. The girls yawped and fawned, as is their custom, but quickly moved on to palaver about the Nashville influences running through the new Bon Jovi album, Lost Highway, and how glad they were that he didn't go too twangy overboard. Then they brought up the band's new top-10 hit single, "(You Want to) Make a Memory," and craftily used that reference to raise some memories of their own of Bon Jovi's looks in his early rock years, circa the late 1980s, when he arrived on the scene as a glam-rock pretty boy, shrink-wrapped in spandex, wearing flapping black maxicoats, with his mopsy-topsy hair teased almost to Marge Simpson heights. The girls showed pictures from the era, amidst lots of delirious hooting, and asked Bon Jovi what he thought.

He didn't miss a beat. "The truth of the matter is, those were my baby pictures," he said. "My baby pictures were public. And most people's weren't."

"Well, I think you look great," said Barbara Walters, with such heartfelt, head-shaking, lip-smacking (phony) sincerity that the audience began clapping and cheering.

As for Bon Jovi, he just sat there, waiting for the interview to end, so the band could come out and they could play a few tunes. He was nothing if not pleasant and completely true to the idea of Bon Jovi as a swell, easygoing guy, because to a large degree, that's who he is. But afterward, backstage and away from the cameras, a curious change took place. When someone complimented him on his performance, he rolled his liquid-blue eyes around in their sockets and halfway snarled, "Oh, please," as if to say, "How much more (phony) sincerity can one man take in a day?" (Plenty, it turns out.) And when a member of his crew wanted to know if he was going to be playing electric at an upcoming show, he just shrugged. "I don't care," he said. "If there's an electric there, I'll play it."