The Governor and the Beauty

Tai Collins wants you to know this first off: Scandal is not her idea of fun. Headlines, sound bites, reporters dogging her trail--she could live happily ever after without all that. In fact, she tried to. Collins kept her peace--until those around her started lying. Then she decided to set the record straight. Yes, she says, she had had a love affair with Charles S. Robb, now a U.S. Senator from Virginia. He began the chase, she recalls, in the summer of 1983, when Tai (pronounced "Tay") was the newly crowned Miss Virginia-U.S.A. and Robb was Virginia's governor. How could she resist? Robb was a worldly wise 44 years old, tall, dark and powerful. Collins, then 20, had moved out of her parents' home in Roanoke and into her own apartment in Virginia Beach just one year earlier. "Here was the governor sending me letters, flowers, gifts, calling me at home and at work," she says. Tai was dazzled. Yes, she knew her beau was married to the daughter of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and that he and Lynda Bird had three children. But was that really her problem? She didn't expect the guy to leave his wife and marry her. He never promised, she never asked. All Tai Collins wanted from Chuck Robb was what most 20-year-olds want from a lover: a little adventure, lots of laughs, the freedom to grow and change. Only Robb knows why he was in the game--his public statements are dizzying examples of spin control. When The Washington Post interviewed him last December, Robb admitted he had invited Collins to his suite in New York's posh Pierre Hotel in 1984. They shared a bottle of wine, he said, then he went into the bathroom and changed into a robe, got into bed--and let Tai give him a massage. Period. He said they didn't have sex. "I know the whole thing looks bad," Robb told the Post, regarding his New York rubdown. "Clearly, some of the things that I have done are not appropriate for a middle-aged, happily married man." Clearly. Tai, who's wearing a similar white robe on our cover, has a slightly different account of that evening--but more on that later. She met the governor on June 1, 1983, when they shared ribbon-cutting duties at a new mall in Norfolk. Two weeks later--June 16, to be exact; Tai has the date marked in the Girl Scouts calendar she used to keep track of her appointments that year--their paths crossed again when Robb attended a fashion show at another Norfolk mall. Collins then was working part time as a salesgirl and model for a lingerie store. That day, on the runway, she modeled white satin and black lace. Robb was apparently dazzled. First, Tai remembers, he sent her a letter at the lingerie store. Then he had a friend call her and set up a date. The first night she spent at Robb's side, she says, they went to a birthday party at a hotel in Virginia Beach, then retreated to the home of Robb's friend Bruce Thompson in the ritzy Croatan section of town. It was Saturday, June 25--Tai has that, too, marked down on her calendar. The memory of that night still makes her smile. "I'm twenty years old, the governor is taking me out--that's exciting!" Tai says. "I was just like, wow!" Throughout the summer and fall of 1983, Robb wowed Collins at parties in the homes of his Virginia Beach (text concluded on page 164)Governor and the Beauty(continued from page 95) friends. He was "a perfect gentleman," she recalls--he didn't even try to kiss her. Which may explain why she didn't tell him before she abruptly moved to New York to pursue her modeling career. But, Tai says, Robb tracked her down through her former roommate and started calling her at her Manhattan digs. Then he turned up the heat.

In February 1984, they trysted in the Pierre Hotel--and, yes, she insists, they did make love, not just massage, that night. It was, she says, the first of many secret encounters in New York and Virginia. "I could have fallen in love with Chuck," Tai says, "but I really tried to keep it in perspective. I knew he was not going to leave his wife. On our very first date, he told me he wanted to be President someday. He had his plans all laid out, and I wasn't in his future. So I just decided to enjoy the relationship and enjoy him."

As the months rolled by, the glamour of dating a governor waned. Collins was in the big city now--socializing with actors, musicians, celebrities. Robb's dazzle had dimmed considerably. Late in 1984, she recalls, they spent their last evening together, at New York's Park Lane Hotel. Two months later, Tai married East Coast retailing executive Stuart Lucas. End of story? Not even close.

More than three years passed before Robb's long-rumored affair with Collins was unearthed in a media treasure hunt. Reporters looking for goodies on the governor as he campaigned for the U.S. Senate in 1988 were thrilled to find a beautiful blonde in his past. (They also found a bunch of his Virginia Beach buddies--the house-party crew--who have since been indicted on drug charges. But that's a whole other story.) Journalists descended en masse. "And I protected Chuck," Tai remembers. "I still cared about him." It was painful, she says, to be misrepresented in the press--to see her picture in the paper next to photos of alleged drug dealers, to have her mother phone from Roanoke with the local headlines: "Chuck and Tai, Sex and Drugs!" But she stonewalled the press throughout 1988, then traveled to Japan in early 1989 for a four-month modeling job.

Separated from her husband, she moved into a condo in Virginia Beach and opened her own modeling agency when she returned to the States. She thought the Robb affair was finally over. In fact, the craziest days of the Chuck and Tai Show were still to come.

Late in 1989, Collins remembers, she and her Virginia Beach neighbors noticed a man spying on her condo. The same man showed up at her health club, asking questions, and slunk around the movie set of Navy Seals, in which she had a small part. One night, she arrived home to find her front door wide open. Another night, her phone line was cut. Last fall, she received two death threats. Then the newspaper stories flared up again.

With all the clamoring around Senator Charles Robb--a local detective wrote a scathing book about him; The Washington Post sent two reporters to investigate his ties to Virginia Beach; the drug indictments were coming down--Collins decided to get a word in edgewise. "If I had just had an affair with Chuck Robb, maybe it wouldn't have been the public's right to know," she reasons. "But when people start toying with my life, making threats, spying on me--then it's time to say something. I was getting scared."

She spent hours talking with a Post writer, who'd been begging her for an interview--but the in-depth story she expected never appeared. By the time her lengthy interview for NBC's Exposé program aired this past April, it had been whittled down to a few choice quotes for prime time. Meanwhile, media pressures were mounting for Robb--who sank deeper in the muck last summer when he and the present Virginia governor, L. Douglas Wilder, got into a public mudslinging contest. At each opportunity--and there were plenty--Robb denied his affair with Collins.

"I'm really sick of it," Tai says, sighing. "But, you know, if there weren't a story here, it wouldn't keep coming out. If there were nothing here, it wouldn't still be news."

Common sense comes easy for Tanquil Collins--nicknamed Tai--who survived a childhood fraught with tragedy. The youngest of four children, Tai was only eight when her father suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed. During the next several years, one of her brothers would be temporarily paralyzed in a car wreck and the other would die in prison. Through it all, the baby of the family--a high school cheerleader, member of the homecoming court and track star--comforted her sister and her mother, as well as her grandmother, who lived next door.

When she entered the Miss Virginia-U.S.A. Pageant in 1983--a move that led to her fateful meeting with Governor Robb and all that followed--Collins was just trying to please her grandmother. "Nanny always wanted me to be in a pageant," she says. "I didn't really want to--I'd never been in a beauty contest before. But Nanny was so good to us. I wanted her to be happy." The thought makes Collins laugh. "Then I won--and look what happened!"

Dazzling Playboy readers with words and pictures is part of Tai's campaign to put the past behind her and move on. She'd like to marry again and start a family soon--the same things most 29-year-olds want. "I know people are going to say, 'Why did you pose for Playboy?' Well, the answer is, I think the body is a beautiful thing. I know I was not supposed to have an affair with a married man," she muses, "but I'm human, too. I take responsibility for what I did. I'm a Christian, I go to church on Sunday. Whether God forgives me or I forgive myself--it's not for the public to judge me."

" 'I could have fallen in love with Chuck,' Tai says, 'but I knew he was not going to leave his wife.' "