The new Bruce Springsteen biopic, “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” portrays The Boss as a tortured genius and unreliable lover — and while that may have been true in the early ’80s, the real-life Springsteen has been happily married for over three decades.
Springsteen and his wife, Patti Scialfa, both grew up in New Jersey. The pair first spoke on the phone when he was 21 and she was 17, according to Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography, “Born to Run.” She answered a newspaper ad seeking background singers for Springsteen’s band, but he told her there was too much traveling involved for a high schooler.
After a few more chance meetings over the years, in 1984, Springsteen saw Scialfa perform at the Stone Pony, a now-famous rock club in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She sang the Exciters’ hit “Tell Him,” and Springsteen said he “fell in love” with her voice.
“We found ourselves standing in a buzzing crowd at the back bar as I introduced myself to her,” he wrote, “and the rest was a long, winding semi-courtship.”
Scialfa joined Springsteen’s E Street Band in 1984
After hearing her sing, Springsteen and Scialfa continued to meet up semi-regularly at the Stone Pony “for a cocktail and a dance,” he wrote.
While preparing for the “Born in the USA” tour, Springsteen invited Scialfa to join his live ensemble as a backing vocalist, guitarist, and keyboardist.
Scialfa made her onstage debut with the E Street Band on June 29, 1984, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The tour’s namesake album, which quickly became a smash hit and was eventually certified diamond, had been released just a few weeks earlier.
“Through Patti’s addition, I wanted to accomplish two things. One, I wanted to improve our musicality,” Springsteen wrote in his autobiography. “I wanted dependable, well-sung harmony vocals.”
“Two, I wanted my band to reflect my evolving audience, an audience that was becoming increasingly grown-up and whose lives were about men and women,” he added.
Scialfa remains an active member of the E Street Band to this day.
Springsteen met his first wife, Julianne Phillips, that same year
Springsteen and Phillips were reportedly introduced by their agents in October 1984. He was 35, and she was 24. “We hit it off and began seeing each other regularly,” Springsteen wrote.
Springsteen and Phillips had a whirlwind romance and married in 1985, in Phillips’ hometown of Lake Oswego, Oregon.
At the time, Phillips was a working model and aspiring actor, mostly appearing in music videos and made-for-TV movies.
Despite what Springsteen called a “press feeding frenzy,” the couple kept the details of their relationship relatively private. In his autobiography, Springsteen said he was plagued with fear that he couldn’t make it past two or three years with a partner, since he’d never done it before.
“Following our wedding I was struck by a series of severe anxiety attacks,” he wrote. “I was scared, but I did not want to scare the wits out of my young bride. It was the wrong way to handle it and created a psychological distance at just the moment I was trying to let someone into my life.”
Springsteen and Scialfa fell in love while he was still married to Phillips
Springsteen’s bond with Scialfa grew stronger during the 1988 “Tunnel of Love Express” tour, performing songs he wrote about his ambivalent and fearful experience as a husband.
“Patti was a musician, was close to my age, had seen me on the road in all of my many guises and viewed me with a knowing eye,” Springsteen wrote in “Born to Run.” “She knew I was no white knight (perhaps a dark gray knight at best), and I never felt the need to pretend around her. Julie had never asked me to either; I just did.”
Their friendship turned into a romance when his wife was away filming on location, leaving him alone in New Jersey. He and Scialfa met up, as Springsteen said, “under my ostensible excuse of working on our ‘duets.'”
“There came a moment when I looked at Patti and saw something different, something new, something I’d missed and hadn’t experienced before,” he wrote. “In my life, Patti is a singularity. So, it started. At first, I told myself it was just ‘a thing.’ It wasn’t. It was the thing.”
Springsteen said he broke the news to Phillips as soon as he came to grips with the depth of his feelings for Scialfa, and they quietly separated. He added that he regretted how he handled their split.
“I placed her in a terribly difficult position for a young girl and I failed her as a husband and partner,” he wrote of Phillips.
Phillips filed for divorce in August 1988, citing irreconcilable differences.
Springsteen and Scialfa have been married since 1991 and share three children
Springsteen and Scialfa moved in together after finishing the “Tunnel of Love” tour in August 1988, eventually settling in California. At first, Springsteen struggled with avoidant habits and wrote that Scialfa was “patient… to a point.”
The couple fought often, and eventually, Scialfa “threw down the gauntlet and laid it out. Stay or go.”
Though he was tempted to retreat to solitude, Springsteen said he couldn’t bear to “throw away the best thing, the best woman, I’d ever known.”
“I stayed,” he wrote. “It was the sanest decision of my life.”
Springsteen and Scialfa welcomed their first child, Evan James, in 1990. They got married the following year at their estate in Beverly Hills.
Their only daughter, Jessica Rae, was born in December 1991. She would go on to become a professional equestrian, winning a silver medal in the team jumping competition at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in 2021.
The couple welcomed their youngest child, Samuel Ryan, in January 1994. He works as a firefighter in New Jersey.
In 2022, Springsteen and Scialfa became first-time grandparents when Samuel welcomed a daughter with his partner.
Springsteen has also credited Scialfa with teaching him to be a more present parent, instead of prioritizing work.
“We created a life and a love fit for a couple of emotional outlaws,” Springsteen wrote of his wife. “That similarity bound and binds us very close.”
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