Lionel Richie - my wife's demands are crazy

Lionel Richie is nothing if not attentive. The man who puts all his passion into his songs, such as All Night Long, and Hello makes a woman feel very special as soon as she arrives.

In my case, as I sit down in the TV studio dressing room where we meet, he notices my very simple flat shoes.

'Oh, you're wearing Dorothy shoes,' he purrs, as if they are the sweetest thing he's seen since he saw Judy Garland in The Wizard Of Oz.

I tell him, unromantically, that I wear them because I recently had a bunion removed. He is strangely interested.

Lionel, it transpires, has bunions too, from years of wearing outrageously tight and pointed shoes.

He was recently offered the chance to have one done, but declined. 'When can I take six weeks off?' he asks plaintively.

'I get phone calls saying, "we want you in Australia - in Dubai - when is your next album - your next tour ?"'

Lionel Richie is one of the richest, most successful performers in the world. But he cannot allow himself to put his foot up on a cushion for even a few weeks. 'They say you get only three hit records in this business,' he says. 'Then it's goodbye.'

Lionel, of course, has had rather more than three. He was a hit for ten years with the Commodores, went solo in 1982 and has since sold nearly 100 million albums.

He has won five Grammys and an Oscar for Say You, Say Me, as well as a
Golden Globe, and had the honour of singing at the finale of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, for 2.6 billion people.

He can also command £1 million a night for private performances, has a fortune of around £200 million and lives in a £22 million mansion in Beverly Hills.

He began life as a geeky black boy in Alabama, America's poorest, most racially divided state, but at 53, his unceasing drive to be better than all the rest has made him one of the world's most rewarded performers.

It has also been his downfall. Last week, his second wife, Diane, 37, mother of his two young children, sued for divorce and is demanding £2 million a year from him.

This includes £550 a month for hair removal, £330 for massages, £2,700 for jewellery, and £900 for plastic surgery, as well as money for flying first-class to visit their nine-year-old son, Miles, at his boarding school, and for a therapist for their daughter, Sofie, five.

That is apart from the cost of five luxury holidays a year, a full-time staff of servants, including two nannies and someone to comb the dog.

Lionel partly blames himself for this second painful rupture in his life. 'I wish I could balance my personal life and my work, but I haven't managed it,' he says hopelessly.

But he is puzzled by the reports of Diana's demands. 'I've no idea where all this came from,' he says (in fact, they came from documents filed on Diane's behalf at the Los Angeles Superior Court).

'The story about plastic surgery is crazy. She's beautiful as she is,' he continues. 'If she goes to her face with a knife, I'll shoot her.

'Our home life is very simple - we only have three people on our staff and a nanny. Diane is the Mom of Moms, involved in lots of school activities.

'Sofie isn't having therapy. Oh my God! She likes soccer, singing and playing the piano. She's got good friends.

'I am not happy about these reports - no one wants a battle, and there won't be one.'

He has practical reasons for saying this. He claims he and Diane signed a pre-nuptial agreement before they wed in 1996.

'It is the second time for me and I am protected,' he says grimly. 'I was married in California, where they are very unforgiving about divorce, and I knew what I was doing.

'You have to have an agreement, although it leaves a terrible taste. It is like a business deal, more about the possibility of failure than success, and that trickles over into the marriage.'

The couple met when Diane was an 18-year old dancer at the LA Olympics and he was married to his first wife, Brenda, and had an adopted daughter, Nicole, for whom he wrote his hit Ballerina Girl.

Eventually, after 17 years, he and Brenda split up. He can only wonder what she makes of Diana's current demands.

'She's quiet about it,' says Lionel, smiling. 'But I can imagine what she is thinking.'

He admits that Nicole, 22, is worried. 'She wants to know that I am OK,' he says. 'It is unsettling for her and the other children. It has to be handled carefully.'

There are, of course, compensations for being such a wealthy and celebrated star.

'I will say that my lifestyle is amazing,' says Lionel. 'The planes, the boats, the travel, the people I meet. It is really something for a boy from Alabama.'

However, his itinerant, touring lifestyle has made both him and Diane lonely.

'We all go through periods of feeling we've got to find out who we are, and that is what she's doing,' he says.

I ask if that means Diane has found someone else to fill the void while her husband has been touring the world.

'I've no idea what she's doing,' he says. 'I've been away a lot. With relationships, you have to spend time. As a performer, you have to perfect your craft constantly, but as a husband you have to stay home.'

He talks excitedly about a new computer called 'I Sight', which allows him to make visual contact with his children wherever he is in the world.

'They are going to see me at breakfast time,' he says, but it is doubtful whether they or Diane are impressed. She has already called him 'dysfunctional'.

Perhaps she should have heeded that old female advice - never to marry a musician.

He agrees. 'As a musician, I am already in love with someone else - music is my mistress - there's no hiding it. I need someone to fly with me, or someone who has got something similar going on in their life, but that is not possible if you have kids. Now I am about to be single again.'

But it is not a prospect he relishes. 'That's very scary. I don't want to do it,' he says.

Lionel was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on June 20, 1949. His father was an army officer who went into community work. His mother was a primary school headmistress.

'I had a normal childhood,' he says. 'I didn't know anyone who was divorced. If you got a divorce, you moved out of town because of the disgrace.'

BOTH his parents believed passionately in education and wanted to protect their son from the realities of life for a black boy in the Deep South.

Despite the poverty and the racial tension around him, Lionel's problems were those of a middle-class boy anywhere. 'I hated school. To succeed, you had to be academic, but I was shy and liked tennis.

'Can you imagine that, in the middle of the black civil rights movement, when people like Martin Luther King were coming around the campus every day, I was this little odd guy who wanted to play tennis.'

But it changed when he won a tennis scholarship to Tuskegee Institute to study economics and accounting. In 1967, at a college talent show, he met five young black friends with a passion for music, who turned themselves into a group called the Commodores.

'I suddenly woke up and realised I could do something different and be a success.'

He began dating Brenda, only the second girl he'd been out with and the girl he called 'my first real cheerleader'.

Once he started touring with the band, Lionel discovered 'a whole world of people just as odd as me'.

The Commodores once travelled with the Jackson Five, and he has known Michael Jackson since he was a young boy.

'I worry about Michael, and I wonder if he can survive all this fame and fortune,' he says. 'Fame doesn't change what you are, it magnifies it.

'I want Michael to understand that there is a norm in life and he is a father and there are things that are not acceptable. But he doesn't understand family life; he was on the road at seven years old. I know what is real - he doesn't.'

Richie's problem is to accommodate the side of him that longs for a stable home with the side that still relishes the jet-setting.

'I know I have to change to do that,' he says. 'I want to be a great father and I know I have to sacrifice something along the way.'

In the meantime, he seems to seek an escape in music and has just recorded a duet on his new album with 24-year-old Brit award-winner Daniel Bedingfield.

'I love talking to Daniel,' he says, 'because it is like hearing myself when I was younger. He is not thinking anything about the sacrifices he will have to make. Success means sacrifice; you can't be in two places at the same time.'

Whereas one of his earliest hits, Three Times A Lady, was dedicated to his long-suffering first wife, Brenda, his latest record, Just For You, is dedicated purely to himself.

'It is an introverted perspective on myself,' he says. 'I am looking in a mirror and thinking, "what was it that once excited you?".

'I once thought God's love was special and romantic love was exciting, but where are those special moments now?'

He says he still hopes for a possible reconciliation with Diane. But if she is hoping he will be her full-time husband in the future, she may be disappointed.

LIONEL RICHIE'S new single, Just For You, is out today. His latest album follows on March 15.