Gilby and Daniella Clarke in the ’80s; their daughter Frankie, right, remaking “Whatever Happened to Fun” four decades later with Kevin Preston. (photos: Instagram/YouTube)
When rocker Frankie Clarke (Frankie and the Studs, the Gourmandizers, Los Frankies) and her friend Kevin Preston (Prima Donna, Green Day) recently covered Candy’s “Whatever Happened to Fun,” they weren’t just unearthing a criminally underappreciated ‘80s L.A. powerpop gem. They weren’t even merely tipping their rakish hats to Frankie’s famous dad, Gilby, who played in Candy years before he got his big break with Guns N’ Roses.
Frankie’s remake was in fact a true full-circle, cross-generational moment… because if it weren’t for “Whatever Happened to Fun,” Frankie would literally not exist.
Gilby and Frankie’s mother, future fashion mogul Daniella Clarke, actually met on the set of the “Whatever Happened to Fun” music video, and what transpired was a storybook rock romance that has defied all odds and lasted more than four decades. It just might be the cutest rock ‘n’ roll cute-meet tale of all time. And it all started in front of that Hollywood Blvd. mural, right next to the infamous Playmates lingerie emporium.
Daniella and her two younger siblings were visiting from South Africa, spending the summer with their Los Angeles-based father, and were doing some Hollywood sight-seeing when they stumbled upon Candy’s video shoot on July 19, 1985. “I saw a crowd of people standing around and I asked, ‘What’s going on?’ And they said, ‘Oh, this is a band filming their video for MTV,’” Daniella recalls. “Then I saw the guitar player standing on top of a convertible. He had ripped jeans with fishnet stockings underneath, tons of black eyeliner, and hair sticking up in every direction. And for some reason, I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s my guy.’ Everybody else just kind of melted away, and I only saw him. And I stared at him. I think I stared at him so hard, with like, like piercing eyes, that he stared back.”
Gilby did indeed notice Daniella. “She was on my side of the stage, and I kept seeing this pretty girl smiling. She just caught my attention,” he says.
“We locked eyes. I saw him, and he saw me,” says Daniella.” And then my dad said, ‘OK, that’s enough. We’re going to go get ice cream.’ So, we left.”
It was then that Gilby sprang into action and dispatched Candy’s makeup artist to chase after the mysterious accidental video extra who’d caught his eye. “I said, ‘Go get that girl. Go find that girl. I want to say hi to her.’”
“The makeup artist from the set came up to me at the ice cream shop, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘Excuse me, but you were just at the video shoot, and the guitar player there wants to talk to you.’ Well, I ran as fast as my legs would take me! I left my dad and my brother and my sister and ran right back to the set,” Daniella laughs.
The pair’s first meeting that fateful afternoon was actually a tad awkward, because not only was that makeup artist Gilby’s ex-girlfriend, but Gilby had invited several love interests, past or present, to the shoot. (“Oh, there were so many girls there that were all saying they were his girlfriends,” Daniella chuckles.)
“Back then when you got to do your MTV video, it was a big deal, and you called all your friends. I called all my girlfriends — and they were all there!” Gilby chuckles. “Because it was a big event for us, there were a lot of other girls there. So, I was kind of hiding from those other girls, while meeting this new girl.”
And that wasn’t the only awkward aspect of Gilby and Daniella’s first encounter. There was also the matter of Daniella’s age. “The first thing Gilby said to me was, ‘What’s your name?’ And I said, ‘Daniella.’ And he goes, ‘Daniella, you’re very pretty. How old are you?’ And of course, I lied,” Daniella giggles. “I knew if I [answered honestly], he would never talk to me. The lie just flew out.”
“She right away said she was18. But she was not 18,” says Gilby. “She was 16!”
It would take several years before Gilby would learn the truth (“We started dating, and the lie just kept perpetuating itself,” says Daniella), but regardless, the two were instantly smitten and inseparable. And this would not be the only time that the infatuated Daniella’s impulsiveness and determination would keep the couple together.
“When it was time for me to go back to South Africa [at the end of the summer] and my dad dropped us off at the airport, I was already dating Gilby and I was in love, head over heels. I didn’t want to go back. But my mom was expecting us to come back,” Daniella recalls. “My dad dropped us off at the airport. I looked at my brother and my sister and was just like, ‘I’m not going with you. You guys are going to get on the plane without me. I’m going to stay here with Gilby.’ My brother and my sister were like, ‘Mom’s going to kill you!’ And I was like, “Well, yeah, she probably will. But I’m not going home.’ And I took off. Oh my God, my poor mom went to the airport to pick up three kids — and only got two! I swear I could hear my mom screaming all the way from South Africa. She was so mad.”
Daniella’s father wasn’t too thrilled either. “I called my dad and said, ‘Dad, I’m still in America.’ And he goes, ‘What do you mean, you’re still in America?’ And I go, ‘I’m still in California.’ And he goes, “What do you mean, you’re still in California?’” Daniella laughingly recalls. “And I said, ‘I didn’t leave. I’m staying with Gilby.’ And he said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’”
Eventually Daniella’s “furious” parents realized that their defiant daughter was never getting on that plane. “I told them, “Gilby and I are going to be together. If you make me go back, I’m going to run away. You’re not going to be able to keep me away from him. I will always run away, and I’ll always be with him. So, either you know where I am and I’m with him and I’ll enroll in school and I’ll get a job and I’ll take care of myself, or if you force me to go home, you’ll never see me again,’” Daniella recalls. “And they had no choice.”
And so, Daniella remained in L.A., but even though Gilby “would take [her] to school and pick [her] up,” he still hadn’t figured out her real age. “Meanwhile, I thought he was Elvis and I was Priscilla,” Daniella chuckles.
“I didn’t even find that out until we got married, when we went to do the marriage certificate. All those years, I had no idea,” Gilby insists.
“We went to the courthouse to go get our marriage license, and I figured, ‘Now is the time I better come clean. I better tell him.’ At this point, I was 21. We’d been together a long time already. He thought I was 23,” Daniella explains. “At first I said, ‘I have something to tell you…’ And oh, the poor guy’s face! I mean, he went white. He probably thought I was pregnant or who knows what. Then I said, ‘I’m not 23. I’m actually two years younger. I’ve been lying to you the whole time’. And he was like, ‘Oh my God, I had a feeling, because you always had some stupid story about why you didn’t have your I.D.’ But at that time, he was already a pretty well-established musician around town, and we never walked in through the front door [of clubs and bars]. We always went in through the back. So, I never had to show I.D.!”
The Clarkes’ young marriage faced another challenge very early on, when — right after their 1989 rock ‘n’ roll wedding took place at Madame Wong’s West, on the legendary punk club’s last day of operation — Gilby received a job offer that had the potential to take his career to a stratospheric new level, but might also tear the newlyweds apart.
“After our honeymoon, we got back and went into our apartment, checked our answering machine, and there was a message. It was Slash, asking Gilby to audition for Guns N’ Roses, saying that they needed a new guitar player,” says Daniella. “At the time I thought it was a joke! Next thing I knew, two weeks after I married him, Gilby was getting ready to go on this huge tour.”
The opportunity was obviously one that Gilby could not refuse. Candy had never really taken off. “We were trying to do something that nobody else was doing at the time, and it was really hard. I think we had three record deals before we put out a record — we were signed to an independent, we were signed to MCA, and then Polygram — and by the time we got a record deal, the whole scene had changed,” Gilby explains. His next band, Kill for Thrills, amassed a sizable local following and released one album on MCA… but Guns N’ Roses were literally the biggest band in the world at the time.
“I was like, ‘Oh, shit. What does this mean for me? Am I going to get left behind here? Is he going to run off with some supermodel?’ Because that’s what happens. I was pretty horrified,” Daniella admits, recalling her reaction to her groom’s new GNR gig. She also remembers wondering if her disapproving mom and dad, who’d always thought her relationship with Gilby was doomed, would be proven right. “My parents were like, ‘He’s a musician! He’s got a girl in every port! Are you crazy? You’re just one of a thousand girls. This is never going to work. He’s going to cheat on you!’ But luckily for me, Gilby is a meat-and-potatoes guy, a good ol’ boy from Ohio, and he was like, ‘The only way this works is if you come with me the whole time.’ And I was young enough, didn’t have that much going on at the time, that I was able to do that. That was a blessing.”
When Daniella joined her Gilby and GNR on the road, she learned to deal with the insecurities that any rock wife would understandably have. “There’s constantly chicks around, like a plethora of women. And that was tricky, especially at my young age. But as I got older and settled into who I was, and what our relationship was, and the trust that we have in each other, it didn’t bother me anymore,” she shrugs.
A decade later, the Clarkes’ lives drastically changed again, this time when Daniella’s career took off with her multi-million-dollar denim brand Frankie B., which set the trend for super-stretch, super-low-rise, super-sexy jeans in the Y2K era. “That was a very tricky time in our marriage, because I had spent most of my years together with Gilby on the side of the stage, watching him and cheering him on, and then all of a sudden I wasn’t able to go out on the road as much, because now we had a daughter and I had a career,” Daniella says of that new power imbalance. “But in a partnership, you’re there for each other when you need each other. So, when he was out on the road, I was there for him. And then when I was doing my work, he was at home helping me. And we worked it out somehow, some way, by hook or by crook. My career was going in one direction, his career was going in another direction, we met super-young, both high school dropouts, et cetera, et cetera. It shouldn’t have worked. But we always figured it out.”
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As for how they’ve stayed together in an industry where most rock marriages barely last as long as one album’s promotional cycle, Gilby says matter-of-factly, “Honestly, there is no secret. It’s just things change. Things that were important when we were first together aren’t important now. You just have to adapt, and I think more than anything, you need to put that person first. It’s about making her a priority. I mean, a gig’s a gig, but we just had to make our marriage a priority. And then we kept that throughout my whole career — and her career.”
“The ‘secret’ is we just love each other and want to be together, period. That’s it,” Daniella adds. “We just wanted to be together, and we knew that the most important thing was that we stayed together throughout it all and prioritized each other. I describe our relationships sometimes as a seesaw: We always balance each other out, because the ultimate goal is making sure our family works. So, he was always my strength and my supporter, and I was always his.”
“I mean, look, it hasn’t always been roses,” says Gilby (no pun intended). “There have been hard times. But we made it through somehow, and now this is the good stuff.” And as the Clarkes’ marital fun continues, he looks back on Candy’s memorable “Whatever Happened to Fun” video shoot and says, “It was a beautiful day. We’ve got a daughter, and we’ve had a life together. It’s been pretty good.”
Above, watch Frankie Clarke and Kevin Preston’s “Whatever Happened to Fun” remake — which includes video scenes shot in front of that iconic Hollywood Blvd. mural and at the San Fernando Valley’s equally iconic record store Licorice Pizza, as well as cameos by Gilby and his original Candy bandmates. Below, watch Daniella and fellow rock wife Barbaranne Wylde’s live “Honest AF” podcast taping at Licorice Pizza Records, during which Daniella shares more adorable details about her and Gilby’s Walk-of-Fame star-crossed first meeting.