Babyface shows off his new home and opens up about his bride and his split with L.A

Ebony, July, 1994 by Laura B. Randolph

FROM the beginning, Kenneth (Babyface) Edmonds knew the woman sitting next to him on the sofa in the living room of their 1.2-acre Beverly Hills estate, the woman he flew to Paris three years ago and asked to be his wife, could be The One. "Very early in the relationship we went to Boca Raton and after that weekend together I felt like it was headed that way," he says, referring to his storybook romance-cum-marriage in 1992 to the former Tracey McQuarn. We met at a good time in my life."

"A good time? Glorious may not be too strong a word for it. After all, when Tracey, then a 22-year-old real-estate broker with a psycho-biology degree from Stanford, met Edmonds in 1990, he had left his former R&B group, The Deele, and was one half of what would soon become one of the most successful music production teams in the country, L.A. and Babyface. His first big solo album, Tender Lover, was not only spawning bit after hit, it was about to go double platinum.

More significantly, Edmonds, a multi-instrumentalist plays keyboards and guitar, was the talk of the music industry. And that was before he penned some of the hottest music on the charts (e.g., Tevin Campbell's "Can We Talk" Toni Braxton's "Love Shoulda Brought You Home," and Bobby Brown's "Don't Be Cruel." It was before he won three Grammy Awards (producer of the year and best R&B song in 1992 and album of the year/producer for The Body Guard in 1994). And it was well before his current album, For The Cool In You, was certified platinum.

But even then, the buzz among insiders had been loud and clear: at any moment, with a velocity resembling the speed of light, this brother was going to be Major. Large. The Next Big Thing.

The early buzz was right. As the records show. Today, at 36, Edmonds has written, produced and/or performed 66 Top-10 hits, including the Boys II Men single, "End of the Road," which surpassed Elvis Presley's "Heart Break Hotel" for length of stay at No.1 on the charts.

But the success, the fame, the money, they're not what Edmonds is talking about now. It's one of those perfect California afternoons and he is sitting with Tracey in front of the antique marble fireplace in the living room of their five-bedroom French Regency style home remembering the first time he laid eyes on her.

"She came in wearing this linen business suit," he says, smiling at her. That was the day she came to audition for his "Whip Appeal" video at the suggestion of an assistant who'd spotted her shopping in Beverly Hills. "She looked like she was going on a job interview," he remembers. Apparently, she also looked the part because that's exactly what she got--the part. In the video. A week before the shoot, however, she came down with chicken pox. "My mother called and asked if they could postpone it," Tracey recalls. "They said, |Lady, get real. This is a $300,000 shoot."'

Three months later, fate intervened to bring them together. While trying to elude traffic on Santa Monica Blvd., Tracey and her mother took a side street and they spotted Babyface coming out of a rehearsal studio. Having spent the day scrubbing floors in a new real estate office she was about to open, Tracey begged her mother to keep driving. Instead, she pulled the car over and handed Edmonds her daughter's business card. "The very next morning," Tracey remembers, "he called."

From the beggining, Edmonds says, there were fireworks. As he puts it, "It was sparks at first date." After months of struggling to maintain a long-distance relationship ("On weekends, I would fly to Atlanta to see Kenny and the night before I had to come back to L.A., we would stay up the whole night holding each other"), Edmonds asked Tracey to marry him during a trip to Paris.

"I felt like she was good for me," Edmonds says, explaining their whirl-wind courtship and their decision to live together less than a year after they met. "She pushed me in ways I needed to be pushed. She encouraged me to try new things, things I'd never done before. And the timing was right because I was ready to try living a different way."

The way Edmonds had been living before Tracey ("I was all about work, all about getting a hit"), he now understands, was a major factor in the breakup of his first marriage, a marriage which lasted only 3 1/2 years.

"I wasn't ready for it," he admits. "It wasn't age. I was 26, 27 [the first time I got married]. But I wasn't ready for that lifetime commitment. Neither of us was."

With Tracey, however, he felt confident it would be different. After all, he was different. "I've grown and I'm more mature," he says, explaining that, in his 20s, he used his work to hide from his problems and let his professional ambition dominate his life.

"I never took vacations," he says. "I was all about getting a hit. But I've learned the importance of balance--that you can't get so caught p in your career that you let your life pass you by. Now, I will deal with problems head-on, whereas before I would just play creative and let things happen."