What Really Happened Peggy Lipton and her Daughters with Quincy Jones – HT
May 11th, 2019, Los Angeles. A woman dies quietly, surrounded by her daughters and her nieces, with nobody outside her family in the room, no cameras, no press, just the people who loved her, and the end of a 15-year fight with colon cancer. She was 72 years old. She had once been the most recognizable woman on American television, a Golden Globe winner, a fashion icon, the girl with the ash blonde hair and the serious eyes who walked into America’s living rooms in 1968 and made an entire generation believe the counterculture was worth something.
Her name was Peggy Lipton. But here is what nobody ever asks. Why did the woman who won the Golden Globe in 1971 spend the next 15 years invisible, not cancelled, not disgraced, simply gone? Why did the most powerful music producer in the world ask her to disappear? And why did she say yes? What really happened inside that marriage, inside that divorce, and inside the years nobody photographed? And what happened to the two daughters she raised in that silence? One of whom held a dying man’s hand in a Las Vegas hospital and one of
whom built a career so bright it nearly erased her mother’s name entirely. This is Peggy Lipton. Welcome to her story. Chapter 1, Long Island, 1946. The girl who couldn’t say her own name. Margaret Anne Lipton was born on the 30th of August 1946 in New York City. She was raised in Lawrence Nassau County on Long Island, the upper middleclass Jewish household of Harold Lipton, a corporate lawyer who had graduated from Harvard Law School and Rita Benson, an artist born in Dublin, Ireland to Jewish parents of Latvian origin. Her paternal
grandparents, surnamed Lipshits, were Jewish immigrants from Russia. It is a complicated family history. Jewish on multiple sides but different branches. Irish by geography on her mother’s side. American by aspiration on every side. And into that complexity, Peggy Lipton arrived as the only daughter among three children with two brothers, Robert and Kenneth, and the particular sensitivity that only children tend to develop when they absorb.
Early that the world expects certain things from them, and the world’s expectations don’t always match who they actually are. Around the age of seven, Peggy developed a stutter. Not a mild one. a stutter severe enough that at 13 at summer camp, she could not give her own name. She would write in her 2005 memoir, Breathing Out, I’d fret and stay awake all night worrying about how to ask the director if I could change or rearrange a sentence just so I wouldn’t have to say a certain consonant.
She was so intimately shaped by the stutter, by the anxiety of not being able to say what she meant, by the terror of other people’s impatience with her pauses, that it became the invisible architecture of her psychology, withdrawn, hyper sensitive, deeply interior. In her memoir, Lipton disclosed something else about her childhood, something that connected in her understanding to the stutter and to the anxiety that followed her throughout her adult life.
She had been sexually abused by a relative around the age of seven. The disclosure made carefully and with the deliberateness of someone who had spent decades processing it was not sensationalized in the book. She named it, connected it to the stutter’s timing, and moved forward. That is characteristic of how Peggy Lipton wrote about pain. She did not weaponize it.
She did not perform it. She placed it in the record, acknowledged its weight, and kept walking. She transferred to the Professional Children’s School in New York, a school built for young people already working in the entertainment industry. And at 15, she signed with the Eileen Ford Modeling Agency.
At 15, still in high school, already one of the most strikinglooking young women in a city full of strikinglooking young women, she began using drugs in her late teens, cocaine and peyote, she wrote, in an attempt to manage the depression and anxiety that had been her constant companions since childhood. She was not the last young woman to self-medicate her way through early Hollywood, but this is worth naming early in her story because it was the beginning of a pattern of coping that would surface and recede throughout her life. The instinct
to reach for something external to quiet what was screaming internally. At 19, she moved with her family to California. She signed with Universal Studios and the work of becoming Peggy Lipton. The public version, the one America would fall in love with, began in earnest. Chapter 2, The Mod Squad, 1968. The ITG girl who hated the attention.
In 1968, ABC launched a television drama called The Mod Squad. The premise was deceptively simple. Three young people, each in trouble with the law, are recruited by the Los Angeles Police Department to work undercover, using their counterculture connections to infiltrate criminal networks. Pete Cochran, played by Michael Cole, Link Hayes, played by Clarence Williams III, and Julie Barnes, played by Peggy Lipton.
What The Mod Squad actually was in 1968 was revolutionary. It was one of the first American network dramas to feature an interracial main cast. It addressed the Vietnam War. It addressed domestic violence, drug addiction, racism, abortion, topics that television in that era typically treated as too dangerous for prime time.
And it did all of this through the voices of young people, which is not a small thing in a country that was watching its young people in the streets. Peggy Lipton as Julie Barnes became its face. The long ash blonde hair worn straight and simple in an era of elaborate styling. The bell bottoms and beads.
The serious eyes in a face that somehow managed to be both beautiful and approachable. Both the girl everyone wanted to look at and the girl everyone thought they could talk to. She became a fashion icon and a cultural touchstone simultaneously. And she did it with a stutter that her co-stars Michael Cole and Clarence Williams III protected her from at least one director’s abuse over.
She wrote about that moment in Breathing Out with genuine gratitude. The director had verbally abused her on set for insisting on changing a line she couldn’t physically say, and Michael and Clarence had demanded an apology on her behalf and gotten it. It is a detail that tells you something important about the particular kindness that can exist in working relationships and something equally important about the specific cruelty that people with power can direct at anyone perceived as vulnerable. The show ran from 1968
to 1973, five seasons. In 1971, Lipton won the Golden Globe for best actress in a television series drama. She earned four Emmy nominations across the run. She was at 24 years old one of the most celebrated women on American television and she was miserable. Fame really drove me into my house,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1993.
“I was very paranoid. I didn’t like going out. I had no idea how to be comfortable with the press. I was very young. It was really hard for me. There is something worth pausing on here because it is the psychological core of Peggy Lipton’s story. She was not simply introverted. She was a woman whose entire interior architecture had been built around the experience of not being heard, the stutter, the abuse, the anxiety, the depression, and who was now being asked to perform extraversion for the entire country on Q with a smile.
The gap between the public Peggy Lipton and the private Margaret Anne Liptton was enormous, and the energy it took to maintain that gap was energy she did not have to spare. She tried a singing career alongside the acting. She released a self-titled album in 1968. Three of her singles landed on the Billboard charts.
Stony End written by Laura Nero, later a top 10 hit for Barbara Strayand in 1970 and Lou in 1970. The music was real and it was good and it was another expression of the artistic instinct that lived inside someone who was simultaneously incapable of performing the celebrity that came with it. By 1973, the mod squad had run its course.
The counterculture had been absorbed and commodified and drained of its urgency. The show was cancelled and Peggy Lipton, 26 years old, Golden Globe winner, fashion icon, the face of a generation, walked off stage and tried to figure out what came next. Chapter 3. Quincy Jones. The love that changed everything. The man who came next was 14 years her senior and one of the most consequential musical figures of the 20th century.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. born on the 14th of March 1933 in Chicago had already lived several extraordinary professional lives by the time he met Peggy Lipton. He had arranged for Count Dy, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and Ray Charles. He had composed film scores. He had been the first black vice president of a major American record label at Mercury Records.
He was in the lexicon of the music industry untouchable. They met in the early 1970s after the mod squad ended. The connection between them was real and immediate. Two people from very different worlds who found in each other something they had not found elsewhere. He was established, brilliant, and steady in the way that someone who has survived industry level turbulence tends to develop steadiness.
She was raw, talented, and searching for something that her fame had not provided. They married in 1974. Peggy Lipton was 27 years old. The marriage was from its first day a headline because in 1974 an interracial marriage between a black man and a white woman was not merely a personal choice. It was a public statement that a significant portion of American culture was not ready to accept.
The racist backlash was immediate and sustained. It came from strangers. It came devastatingly from Lipton’s own mother. She wrote about this in breathing out without flinching. Her mother’s resistance to the marriage, rooted in the racism that even well-meaning families in mid-century America had absorbed without examining, was a wound that Lipton carried in the complicated space between love for her mother and refusal to apologize for her choices.
She did not apologize. She did not capitulate. She married Quincy Jones and built a life with him. and the daughter of the woman who objected became the grandmother of two extraordinary mixed race women who would prove in their careers and their lives that the objection had been nonsense. Quincy Jones, meanwhile, was producing at a scale that few people in music have ever operated at.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, he produced Michael Jackson’s Off-the-Wall 1979, Thriller, 1982, and Bad 1987. Three albums that collectively redefined what popular music could be commercially and artistically. He was during Peggy’s years out of the spotlight, one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry. And Peggy stayed home.
This was not a simple arrangement. Quincy by multiple accounts wanted his wife present, wanted her to step away from the career she had built and focus on the family they were building together. Peggy, who had complicated feelings about her own career, even at its height, agreed. She stepped back. She raised their daughters.
She became for the better part of 15 years Margaret Anne Jones in Bair, a mother, a wife, a private person. Whether that was the right choice, whether it was genuinely her choice is something only she could have answered. What she wrote in breathing out is that the marriage was passionate and complicated, that there were periods of confusion and difficulty, that keeping moving forward in the world while maintaining a rich inner life was a struggle.
She loved him. She did not regret her daughters. And whatever the marriage was or wasn’t, it produced two human beings who became remarkable. Chapter 4. Two daughters, two worlds, and Rashida. Katada and Jones was born in Los Angeles in 1974, the year of her parents’ wedding, and Rashida Leah Jones arrived two years later in 1976.
They were raised in Bair in the particular insulated luxury of a household where one parent was a music industry titan and the other was a retired it girl. They were biracial, beautiful and growing up in a world that had strong opinions about both of those facts. When their parents divorced, they separated in 1986 and the divorce was finalized in 1990.
The girls split. Kidada, 12 years old, went to live with her father. Rashida, 10, went to live with her mother. That division is worth noting. Two sisters, two parents, two different households, two different experiences of the aftermath of the same marriage ending. They remained close, but they navigated the divorce from different vantage points with different primary sources of stability.
Keda grew up to work with Tommy Hilfiger at 19, leaving the Los Angeles Fashion Institute for Design and Merchandising to take the opportunity. She became a model, a stylist, a fashion designer, eventually building a line called Kidada for Disney Couture. She moved through the creative world with her father’s sense of industry and her mother’s eye for beauty.
Rashida went to Harvard. She studied philosophy and religion. She graduated in 1997 and she went into acting, eventually landing the role of Anne Perkins in Parks and Recreation, which ran from 2009 to 2015 and made her one of the most recognizable comic actors of her generation. She co-wrote and co-starred in Celeste and Jesse Forever in 2012.
She appeared in The Social Network in 2010. She had by her mid30s built a career that stood entirely on its own. Both daughters carried the weight of their parents’ story, the interracial marriage, the fame, the complications with a public grace that reflected both of their parents at their best. Rashida was particularly direct about the complexity.
In interviews, she discussed the experience of being biracial in an industry that was not always sure what to do with her, of being not black enough for some rooms and not white enough for others, of navigating an identity that was genuinely her own, even when the world kept trying to assign her to a category. Cadeta’s path was shaped by something darker, and it is worth its own chapter.
Chapter 5. Kadada Tupac and the Night in Las Vegas. In the early 1990s, Tupac Shakur gave an interview to The Source magazine in which he criticized Quincy Jones for having children with white women. The comment was directed at a family, at children who had not chosen their parents or their racial composition, and it landed accordingly.
Rashida Jones, then a teenager, wrote an open letter to Tupac that the source published, asking him pointedly where he thought he would be without black people like her father paving the way. The Jones family was furious. What happened next is the kind of story that only becomes possible when two people are willing to be more complicated than the positions they have staked out in public. Tupac reached out.
He apologized first to Cadeta Jones whom he encountered at a club after mistaking her for Rashida, then to Rashida herself directly, and then to Quincy Jones personally. Rashida later told the New Yorker he immediately apologized to me, immediately apologized to my dad. We sat down and had a really good conversation about it. And then he was family.
The apology was real. The connection that followed was real. And what followed between Tupac Shakur and Cadeta Jones was a love story that lasted four months and ended in the worst possible way. They met at a club after his apology. Kada later described the early stages of the relationship with characteristic directness.
He had been trying to get a play, she said, but she liked him. They fell into something genuine. By the summer of 1996, they were living together. On the 7th of September 1996, Tupac Shakur went to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas to watch the Mike Tyson versus Bruce Seldon boxing match. Kedada had a horrible feeling about the trip. She said so afterward in terms that carry the particular anguish of premonition proven right.
Tupac told her the situation wasn’t safe and left her at the Luxer Hotel. She was waiting in their suite when the phone rang. He had been shot four times in the chest, arm, and leg in his car on Flamingo Road in a drive by shooting. He was taken to the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. He was still conscious.
Kada got to the hospital. She leaned in and she said, “Do you know I love you? Do you know we all love you?” Tupac nodded. He convulsed. He fell into a coma from which he did not wake. On the 13th of September 1996, six days after the shooting, Tupac Shakur died. He was 25 years old. Hidata Jones was 22.
She later said, “It was the most horrible thing that ever happened to me.” Tupac had designed a ring for himself in 1996 engraved with the words Pakandada 1996, a reference to Kada. He wore it to the VMAs on September 4th, 1996. 3 days later, he was shot. Drake bought that ring at a Surby’s auction in 2023 for 1,16,000. Katada did not speak publicly about the relationship for years.
She got a tattoo of his face on her arm 3 days after his death. She carried the loss the way people carry losses that come before they have fully developed the capacity to absorb them incompletely permanently. She kept working. She became a designer. She built something of her own. But the shadow of that September in Las Vegas, the waiting in the hotel room, the phone call, the hospital corridor does not simply go away.
It becomes part of the structure of a person, visible in certain lights. Chapter 6. The divorce, the silence, and the comeback nobody expected. In 1986, Quincy and Peggy separated. The official reason was irreconcilable differences. The divorce was finalized in 1990. They remained by every account deeply fond of each other.
The kind of amicable post-deorce relationship that is genuinely rare and that speaks to something fundamental about the respect between them even as the marriage itself had run its course. What the divorce meant for Peggy practically was the end of the protected space that Quincy’s world had provided. She was 40 years old.
She had been out of acting for 15 years with the single exception of the 1979 TV movie The Return of the Mod Squad. She had two daughters, a divorce settlement, and a career that existed primarily in the past tense. She wrote in Breathing Out about how terrifying the return to work actually was.
I had become so insulated in my world as a mother that I didn’t know how to pick up the phone and call anybody to put myself out there. That sentence deserves to be read carefully. This was not a woman who had never worked. This was a Golden Globe winner who had been a household name and she didn’t know how to make a phone call. That is what 15 years of structural withdrawal does to a person’s sense of their own professional agency.
In March 1988, she appeared in an ABC TV movie called Addicted to His Love. A year later, she co-starred opposite Charles Bronson in Kite: Forbidden Subjects. Neither was a cultural moment. Both were proof that she could still work, still perform, still occupy a role with the focused presence that had always been her particular gift.
And then David Lynch cast her in Twin Peaks. The show premiered in April 1990 on ABC, and it was unlike anything American television had produced before or since. A murder mystery wrapped in surrealism, logging town mythology, and dream logic that only David Lynch could generate. Peggy Lipton played Norma Jennings, the owner of the DoubleR Diner, warm and grounded and anchoring every scene she was in.
Lynch famously cast her on the spot after her audition. Twin Peaks ran for two seasons, 1990 and 1991, before being cancelled. It developed a cult following of extraordinary intensity and durability. And for Peggy Lipton, it was exactly what the return to work needed to be. A role that valued her specific qualities, a director who believed in her, and an audience that received her without the baggage of her previous cultural moment.
She was nominated for a soap opera digest award for the role. She said later that Norma Jennings was the most fun she had ever had acting. She listed it as her favorite role. Not Julie Barnes who had made her famous. Norma Jennings who had helped her remember what she was. Chapter 7.
The cancer years 2004 to the end. In 2004, Peggy Lipton was diagnosed with colon cancer. She was 57 years old. She was in the middle of a career that had found its second rhythm. Television appearances, stage work, an off Broadway production of the vagina monologues. She was, by accounts from people who knew her in this period, more at peace with herself than she had been at any other point in her adult life.
The anxiety and depression that had chased her since childhood had not disappeared. But she had built a relationship with them, a practice of yoga and meditation, a spirituality she had developed during her years as what she called a Tanga Canyon hippie, a way of moving through the world that did not require her to perform invulnerability.
And then the diagnosis arrived. She wrote about it in breathing out which was published in 2005 a year after the diagnosis and became a New York Times bestseller. She wrote about the cancer with the same directness she brought to everything else in the book. Here it is. Here is what it means.
Here is how I am moving through it. She became an advocate for cancer screening publicly encouraging people to get colonoscopies. She had beaten it for a time. The treatment worked. It came back. The colon cancer returned. And this time it did not leave. For 15 years from 2004 to 2019, Peggy Lipton lived with the knowledge of it, fighting it, managing it, continuing to work when she could.
In 2017, she reprised the role of Norma Jennings in Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch’s long- aaited revival of the series, which aired on Showtime 26 years after the original. The fact that she was there in that role in 2017, having fought cancer for 13 years, is not a small thing. It is an act of determination that deserves to be named for what it is.
Also in 2017, she appeared in an episode of Angie Tribeca, the TBS comedy series created by and starring her daughter Rashida Jones. She played a character called Peggy Tribeca, the mother of Rashida’s lead character. The episode was a deliberate and loving joke about the reality of their relationship.
And the fact that they could share a screen, could make something together after everything after the childhood shaped by divorce and cancer and loss is its own quiet kind of triumph. Quincy Jones, who had spent decades after their divorce building further monuments to his own legacy, producing Michael Jackson, composing, mentoring, collaborating, remained in Peggy’s life as a friend.
When she died in 2019, he posted on social media, “Love is eternal.” He called her his beloved former wife. The relationship between them, whatever its complications in real time, had clearly resolved into something genuine and lasting. Chapter 8, May 11th, 2019. The goodbye she deserved. On the 11th of May, 2019, Margaret Anne Lipton died in Los Angeles. She was 72 years old.
She had lived with colon cancer for 15 years. She died with her daughters at her side and her nieces and nobody else. No cameras, no press, no apparatus of celebrity. The way she had always wanted to live. The way the anxiety and the stutter and the hypervigilant interior life of a woman who had been overwhelmed by public attention since the age of 21 had always pointed toward Ceda and Rashida released a statement that same day.
It read in part, “She made her journey peacefully with her daughters and nieces by her side. We feel so lucky for every moment we spent with her. We can’t put all of our feelings into words right now, but we will say Peggy was and will always be our beacon of light, both in this world and beyond. She will always be a part of us. Quincy Jones posted shortly after, “Love is eternal.
” The tributes came from people who had known her and people who had simply watched her. The long ago fans of the mod squad who had grown up alongside Julie Barnes, the Twin Peaks devotees who had found her again in the double our diner. the people who had read Breathing Out and found in its pages a woman more complicated and more real than any character she had ever played.
Bryce Stalis Howard wrote, “Her generosity, wild sense of humor and style, and deeply sensitive wisdom inspired all who had the joy of meeting her.” She was not remembered at the end as the ITG girl. She was not remembered primarily as Quincy Jones’s ex-wife or as the woman with the long blonde hair and the bell bottoms or as the Golden Globe winner or as the cancer patient.
She was remembered as Peggy, difficult and tender and funny and searching. A woman who had survived a childhood of hidden pain and an adulthood of public exposure and a long illness and who had emerged from all of it with her daughters intact and her sense of herself still fundamentally her own. That is not nothing.
That is in fact everything. Chapter nine. What they built after her. Quincy Jones died on the 3rd of November, 2024. He was 91 years old. His cause of death was confirmed by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health as pancreatic cancer. He was survived by seven children, including Katada and Rashida and three grandchildren.
Rashida Jones continues to work with a consistency and quality that has made her one of the most respected actors of her generation. She writes, she produces. She has spoken with rare thoughtfulness about the experience of growing up biracial in an industry that kept trying to categorize her, about the relationship with her mother, about what it was like to have parents whose names were both larger than most people’s entire careers.
Jones has continued her design work. She has spoken publicly over the years about Tupac, always with the same quiet directness her mother brought to difficult truths. She has never sensationalized what happened in September 1996. She has never cashed in on it. She has simply carried it. The way people carry things that cannot be put down and kept building.
What Peggy Lipton left behind is not a simple legacy. It is not the story of a woman who had a hit show and married a legend and lived happily ever after. It is the story of a woman who was shaped by childhood trauma and found a way to transmute it into art. Who walked into the most visible cultural moment of her generation already drowning in anxiety and performed confidence so convincingly that the whole country fell in love with her.
who gave up her career for a marriage that taught her things she could not have learned anywhere else and who found in her 40s the courage to start again. Who wrote honestly about all of it. The abuse, the stutter, the drugs, the interracial marriage, the racism, the cancer in a book that became a bestseller not because it was scandalous but because it was true.
who raised two daughters who learned from watching her what it looks like to keep going when the world has stopped paying attention. What it looks like to build something that belongs to you. What it looks like to be a beacon, not by being flawless, but by being present consistently for the people you love. Peggy was and will always be our beacon of light.
That is the version of Peggy Lipton that lasts. Not the it girl, not the fallen star, not the ex-wife, the beacon, the woman who kept burning even when the flame was low. And that in the end is more than most of us manage.