In Malibu, Tony himself greets us at the door of his tavern. "No belly dancers tonight," the Corfu-born restaurateur tells us. And not much business, either. Still, even in Malibu, where you can toss an olive and hit a star, the Spin City comedienne turns heads. Several women give her the once-over as she strides through the room in designer jeans and perilously high heels. Throughout the evening, men jockey for position at the bar nearby, hoping to get a gander.
     But turning heads is something she's been doing since college. Born september 25, 1961, in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Canoga Park, she quickly blossomed into...a skinny, gawky teenager. When the cheerleading squad rejected her, she started performing with her high school's drama group. By the time she enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1979, Heather was a looker. She started to work almost immediately as a model—which led to bit parts on TV—and soon abandoned college for a career as an actress. "From the moment she came out of the gate," says Spin City costar Barry Bostwick, "she had a popularity and charisma that were supernatural."

LONG DISTANCE DOESN'T CUT IT
Heather's breakout role was the conniving Sammy Jo on ABC's super-soap, Dynasty. She stayed with the durable evening trashfest from 1981 to 1989. By the time she arrived as the equally venal Amanda Woodward to breathe life into Fox's Melrose Place in January 1993, she owned the image of the nice girl with the heart of a hooker—right down to the dark roots of her peroxide-blond hair.
     Tony and his waiters start to ply us with appetizers—olives, fresh-baked pita bread, humus—and I get down to business. Heather's voice has a husky, Lauren Bacall quality ("Richie thinks it's sexy," she says slyly), a leftover from her laryngitis. I ask her how she balances her career—she has just signed to star opposite Charlie Sheen in Spin City for another year—and her life as a rock star's wife and the mother of their 4-year-old daughter, Ava.
     "Now that I have a hiatus for a couple of months, it's great," she says. "I feel like I'm really raising her." But when she's working, the guilt of leaving Ava every morning for what is usually a very long day is difficult. The Spin City week starts slowly, with Monday a relatively leisurely eight hours, and culminates in a 12-hour frenzy on Friday, when the show is shot and cast members get home around midnight. "My husband says, 'Let's have another child.' And that would be great—if I didn't work on a series. Because its not fair. I feel like, if I'm not taking time away from Ava, I'm taking it away from Richie."
     Fried cheese arrives (the closest we'll come to fast food at this meal), and after confessing to a jones for the dish, Heather says that with Sambora on tour, she feels like a single mother. (Albeit a single mother with a full-time nanny.) "I'll have help tomorrow," she tells me, "but then there's the full day with Ava. I can only play Barbie, then puzzles, then painting, then flash cards, for about two hours. Then it's, What am I gonna do with the rest of the day?" She smiles knowingly, a pearly-white flash across her deeply tanned face. "Go visit friends with children!"
     Fortunately for Heather who turned, 40 last month (it's OK to hate her), she has a lot of friends with children. Lisa Ashley has known the actress for more than 15 years; the two gave birth to their children at around the same time. "All her friends are not actors and actresses," says Ashley. "She's had the same group of girlfriends for as long as I've known her."
     Then there are Heather's parents, who live five minutes away from her; and her two sisters and one brother and their broods, who also live in the L.A. area. All that extended family helps, but Heather knows that, in the end, a little girl—in this case, Ava—needs her daddy. And vice versa. Long distance just doesn't cut it.
     "The longer he stays away, the more she's like, 'I love you, bye,'" Heather says of Ava's phone conversations with Sambora. "Sometimes she'll talk longer if she's not distracted." The brief exchanges have left Sambora, who's now been on the road a year, inconsolable. "He'll just break down: 'I need to be home with my family!'"
     The procession of food continues: calamari, dolmas, spanakopita. "I'm a little scared," Heather confesses, her blue eyes widening, as the plates start crowding the table. I ask her how she stays close to her husband when he travels for such long periods; I mean, it's hard enough for your average working couple to remain connected. She says that when their schedules allow, she visits him sometimes with Ava, sometimes by herself.
     "We had the best time when I was out there," she says of her Paris-London jaunt. "But that was on the road; it's not reality. There's no child, no house, no responsibility at all. Of course it's going to be great. Then you think, I sure hope he doesn't think it's going to be like that when he gets home!"
     But with their seventh wedding anniversary approaching (an eternity in showbiz years), surely Richie Sambora and Heather Locklear have discovered some special secret for keeping the home fires burning. I tell her I'd heard that he writes her a love lettter every single day.
     "He does it a lot, but he doesn't do it every day," she says rather matter-of-factly. She's still going for the cheese. "I'll wake up in the morning and there will be a long, long-winded—" she says, laughing, "—but very nice!—letter, full of love." She keeps the letters in a box he gave her that was handmade from the same sort of wood used to make guitars. "I can't shove any more in there," she says. "I don't know what I'm going to do—put them into a mailbag? He doesn't mind showing his feelings. It's really great. Me, on the other hand—it's like, 'Love, Heather.'"
     I press her: There must be something you do in return, I argue. Some ongoing, regular expression of your love.
     Heather Locklear doesn't miss a beat. "Sexual favors," she says. "That's my expression."
     Most poets would trade their sonnets for sex, I tell her. She assures me that the sexual-favors street runs both ways. Just don't ask her to write a poem. "He's a songwriter, he can do all that," she says.

POST-BABY BLUES
As difficult as it is having her husband out on the road for so long (New Jersey pop-metal rockers Bon Jovi resurfaced last year after a six-year absence, with the comeback album Crush, and have been touring the world since), she feels that Sambora has made more than his share of sacrifices for her. He has been her constant companion since they started dating.
     The stress of taping a sitcom before a live audience every week—new experience for me former queen of prime-time soaps—is something Heather admits to bringing home. "When I have a week off, it's like, See? I'm a really nice, normal person! Look at how fun and relaxed I am!" she says. Shooting a scripted melodrama, like Melrose, was more relaxing, she says, "and Richie wasn't working on anything, so he was more able to be there, which was nice. Then we had a child and it was like, What's this new thing?"
     While most first-time parents ask the same question, Heather admits that her first year after childbirth was very difficult. "I just didn't feel myself," she says. "I love my child; I would do all that [mommy] stuff. But I didn't feel myself. I kept saying, OK, it will get better and easier." Eventually it did. "I wasn't depressed," she insists. "It was just like, Who am I? Where am I?"
     As Tony sets down Greek-style lobster tails, Heather tries to put her finger on the source of her postpartum angst. Part of it was control: As a woman who had been working steadily for 20 years (she appeared on Dynasty and on the cop drama T.J. Hooker simultaneously in the mid-'80s, racing from set to set), Heather was alarmed to find that a baby was now her boss. "It's not in my hands, to a certain extent," she says, adding that she feels that at 36, she had Ava late in life. "I can't control when the baby wakes up, and there's so much to take care of. But I think it was also my age and not knowing what to expect."
     Was she worried that having a baby would have a negative impact on her acting career? "Only if I didn't snap out of it," she says now. "Or maybe I was worried that my husband was going to leave me because I was such a kook."
     In truth, Heather doesn't think her husband was even aware of what she was going through. "It wasn't like I behaved a whole lot differently," she says. "It was inside—the way I felt." She still marvels that they've managed to pull off nearly seven years of marriage, let alone raise a child. "So many people know each other, and they discuss what they want out of a marriage: 'This is what I want and what you should do,'" she says. "And we kind of just got married and had no idea at all what to expect."
     "I think people need a class in how to be married," she continues, warming to the subject, "so that you're not getting divorced or whatever. And the same thing with having a baby. We just thought, This is the way it's supposed to be, because we never really discussed anything." She says she and her husband do share basic beliefs: Ava was baptized in the Methodist Church. "But I don't talk about that," Heather demurs.

"NO ONE WOULD DATE ME"
Her marriage to Sambora is Heather's second; her first, to Motley Crüe drummer and amateur-video star Tommy Lee, was tabloid fodder, as was their 1994 divorce. Having been with that kind of bad boy (by his own accounting, Lee did more drugs and alcohol than your entire average metal band and had hundreds of groupies at his disposal), why did she choose another rock musician? Why didn't she marry a nice accountant this time around.
     "Actually, when I got divorced, I was really devastated," she says. "And no one would date me. I couldn't get a date."
     Yes, I know. I didn't believe her either. But as remarkable as that sounds, Lisa Ashley—who was desperately trying to set her old pal up with someone—concurs with that statement. "I used to say, 'Is there anybody you like?' She didn't like anybody and thought nobody liked her."
     Heather claims that she did, indeed, consider the accountants of the world but found them wanting. "Then one of my girlfriends' husbands said, 'Heather, you don't have to marry on the other side of what you know. There's an in-between, there's a middle of the road.' I actually think Richie is middle-of-the-road. He's got this serious wild side, but he's also old-fashioned and moral."
     At this point Tony interrupts to tell us there's lamb coming, adding sternly, "You can't leave without the lamb." Heather points to the fried cheese we're still noshing on. "This cheese is so wrong for my butt," she pleads. Tony isn't having any of it.
     "Nobody looks like you; you have nothing to worry about." To me he says, "I've known her for 18 years. She looks as good as ever."
     "I love your lighting," she says as he leaves. I tell Heather I just finished reading The Dirt, the jaw-dropping oral history of Motley Crüe's life of wretched excess. Was she exposed to much of the band's hard-partying ways? After all, she and Lee were married for seven years.
     "I was exposed to a lot of it," she says. "The first nine months that we were married, there was a lot of stuff that was happening." (She may have seen a warning sign at their Santa Barbara wedding, where according to the account in The Dirt, best man and Motley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx was shooting heroin in the bathroom.) "And I said, Hey, what have I done? I tried to salvage it. For the next six years."

A LOVE WITH MAJOR MOJO
Given Lee's incorrigible ways, why didn't she dump him sooner? Ashley says Heather's friends wondered the same thing. But Heather insists that her good-girl tendencies win out, no matter how bad the boy. During their time together, she talked Lee into going to Alcoholics Anonymous and, concerned about his past needle use, even took an HIV test with him. "I've got to follow the rules!" is how she recalls her mindset. "I have to stay married! I gave it my best shot. But when it was hurting more to be in than out, I had to do something. I was losing myself. I had to stop. I had to find myself again."
     In early 1994, as Heather's role on Melrose was reviving both her stalled career and the show itself, Ashley introduced her to Sambora.
     "I finally got a little bit out of her when we went to see a Bon Jovi concert," the matchmaker told me. "'He's kind of beautiful,' she said." Sambora was recovering from his own high-profile celebrity relationship (he and Cher had romped through the tabloids together for two years), and at first he played hard to get, not bothering to call Heather for a full week after their first date. "After that," says Ashley, "they were inseparable."
     The relationship was confirmed during a legendary Howard Stern radio show. In a phone interview, the Heather-obsessed disc jockey was pressing the actress, who was in her hotel room, on the subject of Sambora. "Here, ask him yourself," she finally said, giving the phone to her new boyfriend. "If this isn't the best advertisement for guitar lessons," Stern told his listeners.
     In December 1994, almost a year after her divorce from Lee was final, Heather and Sambora tied the knot. "Maybe [Heather] was too young or not at the right point in her life," Lee wrote in The Dirt, "or maybe she didn't want to have kids with someone like me (a theory that really nagged at me when she got pregnant right after hooking up with Richie Sambora)."
     By all accounts, the Richie Sambora-Heather Locklear union has major mojo. "Richie is a great guy," says Ashley. "He is nice to everybody, and he worships her. Loves her to death. They always say that you should find a man who loves you more, because women love more by nature. Then you're equal."
     The couple spent a few years in New Jersey and New York, a first for the dyed-in-the-mane Californian. It was there that Heather began her stint on Spin City, opposite the ailing Michael J. Fox. His first line to her in the 1999 season opener—"Let's not get so dramatic; this is not some cheesy soap opera"—was a real icebreaker for Heather, who'd never done a sitcom before, as well as a nod to her most enduring character, Amanda Woodward of Melrose. (It was for Amanda that Fox TV created that show's now immortal sell line, "Mondays Are a Bitch.")