It was the middle of 1980 and Robin Gibb’s grasp on reality was slipping fast.
In the grip of a drugs battle that started in his teens, he was desperately addicted to the amphetamine methedrine.
The Bee Gees star barely slept or ate, preferring to dose himself on ‘speed’ to stay up all night writing hits. Little rest was from found in a cosh of potent ‘downers’ to put him into a sleep-like state.
In his altered frame of mind, he convinced himself that his estranged wife Molly Hullis was in a convoluted plot to fleece him of £5 million.
And became the explanation for why Gibb turned burglar at her Weybridge home in search of evidence with a private detective he hired as an accomplice and getaway driver.
In retrospect, the episode is comical but the reality of the singer’s horribly messy divorce was anything but.
The couple’s two young children were caught in the crossfire, and marked the emotional nadir of Gibb, who died in May aged of 62.
More than 30 years on, his and Molly’s divorce remains one of the bloodiest and dirtiest in the inglorious annals of showbusiness break-ups. A tale of jealousy, deceit, money and dark sexual mores of a global star known for his high-trousered, high-voiced, wholesome Bee Gees’ image.
When the legal battle was over, Robin was a broken man. The extent of the acrimony is revealed in files released last week by the FBI, under Freedom of Information laws.
They reveal that Gibb was investigated by U.S. authorities following allegations of numerous death threats.
In a telegram to his wife's solicitors Haymon & Walters in March 1981, he claimed to have hired a hitman. ‘I warned and warned you,’ he cabled. ‘The situation is now very serious.
'Know [sic] one walks all over me . . . I have had enough. I have taken out a contract. It is now a question of time.’
Happy: The couple on their wedding day. When Robin became successful, they lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic
The threatening missives were sent from his ocean-front home in Miami Beach, the case was dropped when Molly and the legal firm decided not to press charges.
The break-in, which Robin himself reported to Scotland Yard coincided with the Bee Gees massive comeback with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, which sold over 40 million records.
Robin was about to have one of the biggest hits of his career with Woman In Love, the song he and Barry penned for Barbra Streisand.
Success and a vast fortune meant Robin had barely seen Molly in the three years before their split.
They met when Robin was 17 and Molly 20. She was a typist at the management company run by mercurial Australian Robert Stigwood, The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein.
In late 1967, within weeks of falling for each other, Robin and Molly were on a train that crashed at Hither Green, south-east London, killing 49 people. Robin pulled Molly out of their derailed carriage through a smashed window.
The couple's two young children Spencer and Melissa were caught in the crossfire and it also marked the emotional nadir of Gibb, who died in May this year at the age of 62
They married weeks later but Robin's success meant they lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic. As a tax exile in Florida with his brothers and mother Barbara, Molly refused to uproot their children, Spencer and Melissa, from their home in Surrey.
The couple made do with snatched weekends in Paris or working holidays on Stigwood’s yacht in the Greek Islands.
They became more and more estranged not helped in the least by Gibb’s relentless womanising. The relationship imploded in May 1980, when Molly tracked him to a New York hotel room and told him it was over.
In his drugged state, Gibb, then in his early 30s, became convinced that Molly had been having an affair.
He became obsessed with the idea that she and her lawyer, a New York-based showbiz attorney, were conspiring to pull off a complicated and highly improbable sting. He believed they planned to trick him into going public with his suspicions about Molly’s supposed affair, the two would then sue him for libel and win a £5 million payout. So consumed was he with the idea that he was a patsy, he ‘masterminded’ the plan to break into Molly’s home and steal papers that would contain evidence of their scheme.
He handed a cache of stolen documents to the British police and FBI then hastily arranged a Press call on a Concorde flight to Miami, in which he went public with his suspicions.
Molly furiously denied the claims and police powerless to act over a burglary technically done in the marital home — found the his ‘bombshell evidence’ contained no proof of his allegations of being set up.
Gibb’s irrational behaviour was fuelled by predatory whims and drugs. During his 12-year marriage, a taste for uppers heightened his sexual urges and fantasies of watching two women make love.
By his own admission, it led to more than 100 affairs.
His one-time manager Chris Hutchins said this week: ‘I remember being asleep and getting a call from Robin at 1am. He was saying, “It’s an emergency!” and asking me to drive over to his house in Knightsbridge.’
When Chris got there an hour later, there was already a woman in the star’s bed but Robin told him: ‘We have to go out and get a woman.’ Chris recalls: ‘His thing was to watch two women together. In his drugged-up state he thought I would help him.
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