The Face Of The 60s
Peggy Lipton floated through the late 1960s as television’s ultimate flower child; The Mod Squad’s Julie Barnes. A fashion icon with a Golden Globe on her shelf and half the music world at her feet, beneath her cool, breezy-blonde exterior, Lipton hid wounds that ran all the way back to her childhood.
1. She Started Life On Easy Street
On paper, Margaret Ann Lipton had it made. She arrived on August 30, 1946, in New York City, and grew up in the well-heeled Long Island enclave of Lawrence—her father Harold a corporate lawyer, her mother Rita an artist. Her brother Robert would go on to act; her brother Kenneth chose business. Her own path would have far more twists and dark turns.
2. She Was The Quiet One
Long before the cameras found her, Peggy Lipton was the girl at the edge of the room. Her father saw it plainly, calling her “always shy, more of an introvert than the others”. As he figured, “She and her mother were both reserved, and in that case, the same apple fell from the tree”. But her shyness and introversion were hiding something sinister.
3. She Carried A Dark Secret
Lipton’s childhood held a heartbreaking secret—one that she wouldn’t reveal until she wrote her memoir, Breathing Out, in 2005. As a little girl, she was terribly mistreated by her own uncle—and the wounds cut deep. She turned inward, grew anxious, and a stutter took hold, one so crippling that she sometimes couldn’t get her own name out.
For years, she kept the pain locked away.
4. She Built A Wall
Peggy Lipton later found the words her younger self never could. But even then, the pain of her experience still haunted her words. “I didn’t come from a background where I was hurt, but I felt hurt inside,” she confessed. “I was very guarded. I had a wall around me and a lot of fantasy locked inside”. But before too long before the outside world came knocking so loud she couldn't ignore it.
5. She Gave Herself A Makeover
Lipton’s father thought he might cure his daughter’s shyness…by putting her in front of the camera and lining up her first modeling gigs in New York. Then, at 15, a family friend sent her to see the legendary Eileen Ford—whose verdict was blunt: “Cut your hair, lose 10 lbs, get rid of your pimples and come back to me”. Three months later, Ford signed her.
Not that Lipton was thrilled about it.
6. She Hated Her Life
Modeling might have helped Peggy Lipton come out of her shell, but it did nothing to help her insecurity. She told the New York Times she “hated modeling” and her posh “upper middle-class Jewish” upbringing. For Lipton, the suburban life had all of the excitement of a fading magazine cover. But all of that was about to change.
7. She Took A Class That Changed Her Life
If Lipton’s father had wanted to capture her in a picture, then her mother wanted to set her free on the stage. It was her mother who pushed her into drama lessons. Then a friend brought her along to a class taught by acting guru Herbert Berghof—and everything changed. “That was it,” she said. One class, and the road ran straight “from nowhere to Regular Star of an Established Series”.
8. She Found Her Voice
On stage, something miraculous happened: Peggy Lipton emerged from her shell. The moment she read from a script, her debilitating stutter disappeared. “I didn’t stutter when I was reading lines in a script,” she explained. “When I got away from myself, I didn’t have that problem”. Becoming somebody else set her free.
Soon, she’d have a whole new world to disappear into.
9. She Went Full Hippie
In 1964, the Liptons packed up for California—and their daughter promptly bolted. Out on her own, she dove headfirst into the counterculture: “I lived as a Topanga Canyon hippie for a year. I don’t know, maybe it was just a reaction to all the rich guys who’d been taking me out back East”. Her parents were mortified.
Lipton just called it “useful character research”—and it would be.
10. She Broke Into The Business
The acting work came fast—if not the fame. Lipton’s first credit was a secretary on Bewitched in 1965, and from there she bounced through the era’s TV staples: The John Forsythe Show, Mr Novak, The Virginian, The Invaders, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour amongst others. Then, in 1967, she broke onto the big screen in Mosby’s Marauders.
11. She Made The Charts
The girl who once couldn’t say her own name, it turned out, could sing. In 1968, Peggy Lipton released a self-titled album and her voice put her on the Billboard charts three times: “Stoney End” and “Lu”—both written by Laura Nyro—and Donovan’s “Wear Your Love Like Heaven”. Even if she never topped the charts, her songs made an impact.
12. Her Love Songs Weren’t Fiction
Lipton had real musical talent. She could play the piano by ear and had, as she described it, released a “fairly successful record” featuring several of her own compositions. You might say, she had a muse. “They were love songs,” Lipton confessed. “I was sort of emotionally involved with someone at the time”. She never said who it was.
Something bigger caught her attention.
13. She Landed The Big One
One audition changed Lipton’s life. At 18, she read for The Mod Squad—and walked away as Julie Barnes. When the show hit ABC on September 24, 1968, she joined Michael Cole, Clarence Williams III, and Tige Andrews as “the hippest and first young undercover [coppers] on TV”, and turned into a symbol “for better or worse—of what TV and America were about in the waning ‘60s”.
Still, her dark secret followed her.
14. She Fought A Private Battle
Despite her sudden and meteoric success, behind the flower-child image, Lipton was struggling. Depression had trailed her since childhood—since those terrible experiences she couldn’t write about for decades—and at 18, she started leaning on substances to numb it. The pain she’d locked away all those years earlier hadn’t gone anywhere.
At least she had someone to distract from it.
15. She Charmed A Beatle
At the tender age of 17, Peggy Lipton crossed paths with the Beatles’ Paul McCartney, then aged 22. The pair may have had a brief relationship before McCartney married his wife, Linda Eastman in 1969. All that Lipton has ever said on the matter appears to be that McCartney was “very savvy”.
He wasn’t the only legend who came calling.
16. She Kept Company With The King
Lipton’s romantic credits kept pace with her on-screen credits. After the press tried to tie her to McCartney, Lipton briefly dated Elvis Presley—whom she called “very sweet”—and then shared a home with super-producer Lou Adler. Rock royalty, it seemed, couldn’t resist television’s blossoming flower child. Her role was painfully close to reality.
17. She Played A Broken Bird
Mainstream America had nightmares about its youth—and The Mod Squad cast all three of them. Lipton’s Julie Barnes, the show’s “canary with a broken wing”, was a flower child who ran from her mother—a San Francisco woman of the night—got picked up for vagrancy, and dodged time behind bars by signing on as an undercover detective.
That bird with the broken wing was about to take flight.
18. She Became The “It Girl”
Julie Barnes wasn’t just a character that Peggy Lipton portrayed—she was an icon that everyone wanted to become. With her long ash-blonde hair, love beads, bell bottoms, and mini-skirts, Lipton turned her character into a style bible and herself into the “it girl” of the era. Magazines would later point out that Lipton was “producer Aaron Spelling’s very first blond”.
Lipton, though, was starting to squirm in the spotlight.
19. She Grew Restless And Into A Woman
By 1972, Lipton was refreshingly honest about the gig. She acknowledged that The Mod Squad wasn’t prestige TV. “Creatively I’m bored, yes,” she told The New York Times, “but I’m certainly not bored with the success of it”. She admitted that it was “exciting to be famous” and spoke with gratitude, saying, “I’ve grown up on this show, from a sort of child-woman to, well, a woman”.
Hollywood, for its part, thought she was doing just fine.
20. She Collected The Hardware
Despite her own thoughts on the quality of the show, The Mod Squad did wonders for Lipton’s career. She earned four Emmy nominations for her turn as Julie Barnes and took home the 1971 Golden Globe for Best TV Actress in a Drama. The show itself became a cultural phenomenon, lasting for five seasons.
Lipton, however, wasn't so sure she deserved any of the accolades that came with it.
21. She Doubted Herself
All the trophies in the world couldn’t quiet Lipton’s inner critic. Reflecting on her time on The Mod Squad, she said, “I don't know what it means, to really act, or what I can really be and do. My technique’s gone, I know, after playing the same thing for so long. And mainly I wonder whether I have the ambition to go back and work at acting, now that I’ve made it on TV”.
Her career wasn’t the only thing she had doubts about.
22. She Kept Love At Arm’s Length
The spotlight, Peggy Lipton found, was not as warm as she had hoped. “I live alone now…And I manage. I don’t date,” she shrugged. “There are very few men that interest me…and those that do, I don’t want to date me”. Marriage? Maybe—but strictly on her terms: “The idea of a marriage contract appeals to me; you know, with renewable options?”
But the man who’d make her rethink all of it was already out there.
23. Her Future Had A Soundtrack
The next man in Lipton’s life deserves a proper introduction. Raised near Seattle, Quincy Jones was a musical prodigy, having formed his own gospel quartet by 13 and cutting his teeth on trumpet beside Ray Charles. He studied at Berklee on a scholarship, trained in Paris under the great Nadia Boulanger, and by the 60s was scoring Hollywood films like In Cold Blood and In the Heat of the Night.
Their worlds were on a collision course.
24. She Met Him On A Sailboat
Peggy Lipton and Quincy Jones first met in 1969, aboard a sailboat drifting around the Bahamas. Whether it was the Caribbean sunset or the isolation of the yacht, the spark was instant—but the timing was terrible. Jones already had a wife, his second, Ulla Andersson. “I thought he was adorable,” Lipton recalled, “but there was no point in getting excited”.
Two years later, the "point" came.
25. She Made The Top Ten
When word reached Lipton that Jones’ marriage to Andersson was over, she went straight to work. She already had the inside track; a model friend who happened to be Jones’ oldest daughter, Jolie. The scouting report came back promising: “Jolie called back and said I was definitely in the top ten”. However, Lipton had something the other nine did not.
26. She Hit Her Target
As Jones later put it, Peggy Lipton had what the other women did not: a “bullet” (slang for a single racing up the charts). And Lipton hit her target. Playing matchmaker, Jolie invited Lipton and her father to dinner. But there was a small mishap. “Jolie was cooking corned beef hash,” Lipton, the vegetarian, recalled. “But I said to myself, ‘If I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him, I’m just going to have to give up vegetarianism’”.
27. She Fell Madly In Love
Another version of Lipton’s first date with Jones gives a somewhat more romantic spin to the magical moment. According to a People magazine article, Jones invited Lipton over for dinner and cooked lamb chops. Either way, the result was the same: meat was in, and so was she. “I fell madly in love,” Lipton said of their first date.
Things only moved faster from there.
28. She Got A New Roommate
Barely a month after the lamb chops and falling “madly in love”, Jones was moving his things into Lipton’s place. Domestic life agreed with them, but they were, it would seem, incapable of keeping their hands off of each other. As Jones told it, “if we hadn’t ordered food in, we would have starved”. The honeymoon phase stuck around, no wedding required.
29. She Enjoyed Unwedded Bliss
By year three of their “unwedded bliss”, the good times kept rolling. Jones dropped his album Body Heat, and it flew out of record stores—”selling like pop-rock bubble gum”, he joked. The record went gold and picked up a Grammy nomination. Everything seemed to be going their way…then, in a single moment, the bliss ended.
30. Her Bliss Ended In An Instant
Peggy Lipton and Quincy Jones believed their bliss had reached new heights when they celebrated the birth of their first daughter, Kidada. But that’s just when the unthinkable happened. Jones collapsed at home in Los Angeles; two blood vessels had burst in his brain. For six days he clung to life—and Lipton, a new mother, clung to her ailing lover.
And the ordeal was just beginning.
31. She Nearly Lost Him Twice
Miraculously, surgeons saved Jones and Lipton was ready to breathe a sigh of relief—then they delivered more bad news. A second, even more dangerous aneurysm. And the operation to remove it? That could leave him paralyzed. “They sawed off my skull and put it on the table,” Jones marveled. “Then they put it back on with six metal clips”.
Lipton’s lover would live—but she would never be the same.
32. She Grew Up Real Quick
Peggy Lipton never forgot the night she nearly lost Jones. “We were in bed reading, and just like that he went out, and his eyes rolled back in his head,” she recalled. “That made me grow up real quick. We were newlyweds and had a baby daughter”. The crisis left her with no doubts: “It made me very aware of how I felt about Quincy and how much I wanted him in this world”.
There was only one thing left to do.
33. She Finally Played House
Jones recovered—and wasted no time. Just one day after his divorce from Andersson became official, he and Lipton tied the knot in her parents’ Beverly Hills garden. For the girl who’d grown up behind a wall, it felt like a fairy tale come to life. “I loved being Mrs Quincy Jones,” she said. “It was like being a child and playing house in a way”.
Not everyone shared the newlyweds’ joy.
34. She Saw The Ugly Side
America in the 1970s wasn’t always kind to the Joneses. As an interracial couple, Lipton and Jones drew stares—and worse—wherever they went. “In the past, it could be ugly out there,” she told the website Next Tribe. “Wherever Quincy and I went, there was an edge to people’s reactions”. Closer to home, though, the reception was much warmer.
35. Her Father Approved
Whatever the outside world thought, Lipton’s father adored his son-in-law and held only love for him in his heart. “Quincy is about as nice a person as I’ve ever met, and he’s a lovable man,” Harold said. His praise for Jones, however, would be tempered in time. “It’s sad the marriage didn’t work out,” he mused. But before the end came, the marriage gave Lipton her two greatest gifts.
36. She Raised Confident Girls
Without knowing it, Peggy Lipton became the matriarch of a thespian family. Both of her daughters with Jones—Kidada, born in 1974, and Rashida two years later—would grow up to be actresses themselves. But what made Lipton proudest wasn’t the family business. “They’re superconfident kids,” she beamed. “They have all the confidence I didn’t have”.
Giving them that confidence came at a price—one Lipton paid gladly.
37. She Walked Away From It All
After The Mod Squad wrapped, Lipton made a shocking decision. At the height of her fame, she said: no roles, no sets, just family. “When I met Quincy in 1973, I was exhausted and burned-out from Mod Squad,” she explained. “He never said I should stop working, but there was never a doubt in my mind I was going to. I wanted children very badly, and I knew I couldn’t do both well”.
She might have had a little too much free time without a career…
38. She Chatted With The Departed
Off screen, Peggy Lipton wasn’t all that different from the flower child she had portrayed on screen for years. She leaned heavily into New Age spiritualism—meditation, yoga, and what she cheerfully called “chatting with the departed”. Not that she considered herself extreme. “I’m kind of kooky, but do I look like a religious nut?”
Only one thing could coax her back in front of a camera.
39. She Did Spelling One Favor
Lipton held to her decision to step away from acting—except for one role. After a decade and a half, only The Mod Squad executive producer Aaron Spelling could get her back on set. She suited up as Julie Barnes one more time for The Return of the Mod Squad in 1979. Then it was back to her blissful family life—while it lasted.
40. Her Fairy Tale Ended
The 1980s made Jones a superstar—and it cost Peggy Lipton her marriage. After Jones produced Michael Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller, the demands on his time exploded. “Our love never changed, but Quincy’s life changed after his success,” Lipton reflected. “…By ‘86 he was doing his own thing, and I was doing mine. It was over”. The two separated in 1986, though the divorce wouldn’t be final until 1990.
And that year had one more blow in store.
41. She Lost Her Mother
The same year her marriage ended, Lipton lost her mother—her closest confidante—to lung cancer. But for a woman fluent in “chatting with the departed”, goodbyes didn’t exactly look the same. “My mother passed away in ‘86, but I talk to her all the time and she supports me too,” Lipton said. “She always wanted me to go back into acting, and now I’m doing it”.
First, though, she had some baggage to unload.
42. She Kept A Curious List
Newly single, Lipton looked back on her life. She made a list of every man she had ever loved and carried it around with her, until the day she was ready to move on. “You can’t walk around with that stuff from the past,” she reasoned. “The end of my marriage was sad, and I still love Quincy, but the way things are now is the way I want things to be”.
43. She Came Back Swinging
The Mod Squad had been off the air for 15 years, but Lipton was back on the case. In March of 1988, she stepped back into the spotlight as a district attorney in the ABC movie Addicted to His Love. Slowly, the counterculture’s “it girl” was making her comeback. Behind the scenes, though, the comeback had her shaking.
44. She Earned A Co-Star’s Respect
Lipton’s nervous return to acting didn’t go unnoticed—but neither did her guts. “Peggy was nervous when she first came on the set,” co-star Polly Bergen observed. “It’s difficult coming back when you’ve been away so long…Especially today, when the average age of a casting director seems to be about 12. It’s tough out there, and she’s courageous to do it".
Lipton could feel the difference in herself, too.
45. She Begged To Be Picked
Lipton’s career hiatus might actually have been just the thing she needed to really unlock her potential. “I had a tremendous opportunity when I was young, and I worked my [behind] off,” she said, “but I never had the commitment I have now”. And the commitment was everything. “Back then I just kind of showed up. Now I mean it”.
And the world took notice.
46. She Landed In Twin Peaks
In 1990, David Lynch handed Lipton her second iconic role: Norma Jennings, the kind-hearted, unhappily married owner of Twin Peaks’ Double R Diner. The New York Times marveled that she looked “seemingly untouched by time, with the same long, silky blond hair, slim figure, radiant skin and air of vulnerability”. That last part, Lipton admitted, took very little acting.
This time, she didn't disappear afterward.
47. She Never Stopped Working
Lipton’s role in Twin Peaks cemented her comeback and made it official. But it was just the beginning of her stunning second act. Around this time, Lipton popped up in recurring roles on shows like Popular and Crash, and stacked up more than a dozen film credits, from The Postman in 1997 to A Dog’s Purpose two decades later.
But one role kept calling her back.
48. She Returned After 25 Years
The Mod Squad’s Julie Barnes might have launched Lipton into stardom, but it was Twin Peaks’ Norma Jennings that kept her there. Lipton reprised her iconic role in Twin Peaks’ spin-offs and films like Fire Walk with Me in 1992. She even returned in 2017—a full 25 years on—to the Double R counter for the show’s revival.
That same year brought a moment even sweeter than pie.
49. She Passed The Torch
In 2017, Lipton played a TV mom—to her actual daughter. She joined Angie Tribeca for two episodes as the mother of the title character, played by Rashida Jones. And in a twist worthy of her kooky spiritualism, Rashida’s show shot on the very sound stage where The Mod Squad had made her mother a star. Her career had come full circle.
So would her life.
50. She Took Her Final Bow
Lipton faced her final battle the way she’d faced everything: quietly, and on her own terms. Doctors diagnosed her with colon cancer in 2004, and she kept right on working for another 15 years. However, the end would come on May 11, 2019 and Lipton took her final bow. The Mod Squad’s “it girl” had worked her final case.
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