In 1987, hair-metal had reached its zenith, David Coverdale was the closest thing MTV had to Robert Plant —who had been busy making ‘50s-style pop with The Honeydrippers earlier in the decade— and Tawny Kitaen was The Girl.
She did it kind of backwards. You were supposed to be a video-slut, get noticed, and then explode on the scene as a model or actress… but Tawny had already had her big break. She was in Bachelor Party, which in retrospect was like a peek into an alternate universe where Tom Hanks briefly flirted with being the star of trashy, manic sex comedies instead of America’s most down-to-earth prestige actor, and she had tried her hand at being the screaming girl in a horror movie with Witchboard.
A few years down the road, she even managed to be one of Jerry’s girlfriends on Seinfeld, which is a bigger deal than it sounds, if you pause to look at the ’90s and 2000s acting royalty who landed that much sought-after, purposefully short-term gig over nine seasons.
But as one-hit-wonder Bowling For Soup made clear in its song 1985, it was being the girl “on the hood of Whitesnake’s car” that had the biggest cultural impact. It wasn’t even a particularly good video for its era —as you can see in the remaster above— but something about its aggressive fetishization of Tawny captured our imagination. And Coverdale’s, apparently, since he briefly married her.
She was way too young to go. Farewell to her, and the piece of 1987 she takes with her.