Femme fatale Tai Collins

Perhaps the best-looking of all recent femmes fatales, Roanoke, Va., native Tanquil (Tai) Collins is the blonde who tarnished the good-guy image of her state’s senator Chuck Robb, who, at the time of their encounter at New York’s Hotel Pierre, was married to Lynda Byrd Johnson, younger daughter of former president Lyndon Johnson.

Collins, the 1983 Miss Virginia USA, revealed that she had an almost year-long affair with Robb beginning that same year, when he was Virginia’s governor. Robb never admitted to the affair but verified that she had been in his hotel room at the Pierre—but only to give him a massage and share a bottle of wine.

Anyone who actually believed his account should have later invested with Mr. Madoff or in Georgia swampland. There are plenty such people, however, and Robb won reelection in 1994, not long after the spicy story had appeared. The story was not the only thing that had appeared. Collins capitalized on her temporary celebrity by doing a spectacular and presumably profitable spread in Playboy. In the 2000 race, however, Robb lost his Senate seat, his credibility damaged.

Robb aides had threatened Collins if she testified against the senator, but she had cleverly taped them doing it.

Robb’s wife forgave him, and he later became a law professor.
Collins did some acting—some of it on Baywatch, for which she also has done writing. In addition, she has helped set up and run a foundation-sponsored camp to benefit needy inner-city children on the West Coast.