My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (16 page)

There was a steakhouse in the same building, frequented by the former prizefighter Rocky Graziano. I went down and told the manager, “You know, I think you need me to play music here.” I took out my guitar and sang him a couple of songs and he hired me for $10 a night, plus tips. It was the “plus tips” that got me by. I loved it. I performed six nights a week, going from table to table playing for the customers. It was my first real job in show business. And since they gave me dinner at the restaurant, I didn’t starve.

Rocky Graziano would come into the restaurant every week or two, sometimes more often. My dad loved to watch boxing on TV, so I had seen him fight. He was a nice guy, but really punch-drunk after so many years in the boxing ring. He was still a big celebrity who made regular appearances on the Johnny Carson show, always making fun of himself.

A few months after I started working there, Mother flew up from Texas to see how I was doing. She was having dinner with me at the restaurant when Rocky came in. I introduced them and he sat down at the table with us. We were having a lovely time making small talk, laughing, and visiting, when after a few minutes, Rocky got very quiet and began slowly listing to the left. Suddenly he pitched right out of his chair and fell to the floor sound asleep. Or, as Mother would say, “He was out like Lottie’s eye.” It must have happened a lot, because he picked himself up, brushed himself off, and apologized like it was nothing unusual.

During her visit, Mother sat in the restaurant’s bar most nights to listen to me sing. Sometimes Rocky would come in and sit next to her and make conversation. He was a great raconteur, but every other word out of his mouth was some kind of profanity. My mother listened politely and then said, “Mr. Graziano, you seem like such a nice man. Why do you have to use words like that to express yourself?” He never uttered another cuss word around her again.

In the daytime, I worked at a little dress shop. It was fun, because even though I didn’t have money to buy new clothes, I could dress everybody else. And when I wasn’t on the clock, I was writing songs and recording jingles with new friends, like the young songwriter and producer Kenny Laguna and the talented troupe of musicians and writers in his orbit. Kenny worked as a sideman with groups like Ohio Express and the Shondells and ran what he called a “bubblegum shop” that churned out ready-made songs for the teen market.

He seemed to know everybody in the music business and could compose just about any style of music. In early 1969, Andy Warhol asked Kenny to produce the soundtrack album for one of his avant-garde films,
Lonesome Cowboys.
I sang on a few songs, including the title track. Too bad the record label folded and the album was never released. But it was an intriguing introduction to New York’s underground art scene and led to my first work in film, as an extra in the Andy Warhol feature
Trash.
Fortunately, I ended up on the cutting room floor.

Later I teamed up with Kenny Laguna and some other musicians to create a group called Moose and the Pelicans. We practiced a cappella harmonies in the subway stations and recorded a few songs, including a wonderfully silly takeoff on the Davey Crockett theme. One song, “We Rockin’,” made the Top 100, but the hit record we all were hoping for eluded us.

I was briefly signed with a small label called Tomorrow’s Productions, run by Artie Wayne, a songwriter and singer who recorded under the name Shadow Mann. Like Kenny Laguna, Artie packaged songs and matched them with performers. He had bought one called “John, You’ve Gone Too Far This Time,” a novelty tune about the naked photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that appeared on their album
Two Virgins.
They needed a girl singer to record it, so I was hired and given the name “Rainbo.” The single got some attention, mainly as a footnote to the controversy about John and Yoko. But thankfully, Rainbo never recorded again. Artie later went on to head the publishing division of A&M Records, and I went back to the drawing board, trying to find my niche in the music business.

Even though Rainbo was no more, I was thinking about taking another stage name, or at least dropping “Sissy.” My parents thought I should call myself Holliday, since it was a family name, but I couldn’t come up with anything that seemed to fit. So I asked Rip and Gerry if they could think of something. I often consulted them when I had big decisions to make, because I had such respect for the way they lived and worked as artists. Mostly I learned from them by example. And when I did ask their opinion, Rip in particular was very careful not to try and influence me, but to encourage me to think for myself. He would often ask me questions rather than giving me an answer. In this case he said, “How will people know who you are, Sissy, if you change your name? How will they know who your family is and where you come from?” Of course, Rip Torn was born with the best name ever, so that was easy for him to say. But he planted a seed in my head, one that grew over the years: Nothing I accomplished would be worth salt if I lost track of who I really was.

… 8 …

Although my dad was supporting me, New York was expensive, and to help make ends meet, I took a roommate in the studio apartment. Then Barbara Blalock, an old friend from Texas, moved in with us, so for a while we had three people crammed into one room.

Barbara had five beautiful sisters back in Texas, all popular girls and all honor students. I visited that family often when we were kids. The Blalocks lived out in the country, and we would take walks together and play for hours in a field we called “The Boneyard,” littered with the bleached bones of long-deceased cows. The Blalock house was much livelier. All six girls slept in two rooms in double bunk beds. There were always boys from town hanging around, clamoring to be invited in for the yummy cakes and pies that were forever being baked and for the beautiful sisters who baked them.

Barbara was a great roommate. We only had one disagreement in the short time she stayed with us. She thought that the fruit in the bottom of Dannon yogurt was the prize you got to after finally eating all that icky plain, unsweetened yogurt. I thought it should be stirred up. Turns out I was right, Barbara, but other than that one thing, you were perfect.

The other roommate? Not so perfect.

This girl, whom I’ll call Club Girl, worked in an office by day and went out to nightclubs every night. Club Girl was strange. She would borrow my clothes without asking and return them dirty. I put a lock on my closet to keep her out, but when she asked me for the key, I didn’t have the guts to tell her that she was the reason I put the lock on in the first place. Maybe she thought I was protecting my clothes from intruders. Despite her faults, I still agreed to move with her to a larger apartment on the Upper East Side after Barbara decided to return to Texas.

By then I had quit my job singing in the steakhouse, and I needed some extra cash. When Club Girl told me I could fill in at her office for a receptionist who was on leave, I jumped at the chance. After I had worked there for a few weeks, the regular receptionist returned and I went on my way. I never gave it another thought until a few weeks later, when my roommate came home from work, wide-eyed.

“We’re in trouble, Sissy,” Club Girl said. “They caught us.”

“What are you talking about? Caught us doing what?”

She explained that the corporate office didn’t stop sending my paycheck after I left the receptionist job. Club Girl was the office manager and she was taking those checks, signing my name, and cashing them at the bank. She kept the money and never told me a thing.

“You did what?!” I said, sputtering mad. “No,
we’re
not in trouble.
You’re
in trouble!”

I went straight into the office the next morning and told them what had happened, that I hadn’t been getting the checks. When I got back to the apartment, she had changed the locks on the door and thrown my clothes—except the ones she wanted—into the hallway. She also left my guitars out there. I guess she knew I would have busted down the door for them. But she did keep all the furniture.

I had no place to go, so I stayed with friends for a few nights. Kenny Laguna had a girlfriend named Meryl Feldman who was thinking about moving to the city, so she and I decided to rent an apartment together.

We found a beautiful second-floor walk-up on East 19th Street, near Gramercy Park. Meryl’s mother was a decorator on Long Island, and she turned our little apartment into a showplace, with bentwood chairs and a couch made from a sleigh bed. I brought up a little antique table that I found in an abandoned house during one of my trips home to Texas. It reminded me of my roots.

In the summer of 1969, Meryl and Kenny went to the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York. I could have gone with them, but the weather report said rain, so I said no thanks. I wasn’t the kind of girl who liked to camp or use Porta-Potties. And I loved the idea of having the apartment all to myself for a whole weekend just to write songs and play music. I wasn’t all that much of a counterculture person anyway. And even though I was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, I wasn’t much of an activist. I went to a few demonstrations in New York and I joined some friends in Washington for a march on the Pentagon, but I wasn’t politically committed, like some people I knew. My parents were alarmed when they found out I was going to protest in Washington, even though I assured them that for me it was nothing more than a long weekend trip with good friends. But there were other things that I never told them about that would have given them plenty of sleepless nights.

Manhattan in the late 1960s was not the same tourist destination that it is today. Instead of the Disney Store and the Hard Rock Cafe, Times Square was lined with peep shows and crawling with addicts and hookers. The crime rate in New York was through the roof. Once when I was waiting for a bus in Times Square, a thief grabbed my guitar case and took off down the sidewalk. Without thinking, I ran him down and wrestled the case out of his hands. He would have had to kill me before I would give up that guitar. I didn’t think for a minute how dangerous that might have been.

Another time when I had just arrived in New York, I got locked out on a balcony while escaping from a record producer who gave me the creeps and was trying to get me to do drugs. I had on a little white dress and was carrying a big Martin twelve-string with me. When he turned his back, I’d taken my guitar and slipped out a door and closed it behind me. I found myself locked out on a fire escape balcony with no way down. But I didn’t dare knock on the window. And it was not in the kind of neighborhood where you would want to shout for help at night. So I just sat down on my guitar case and waited. I was covered with soot and shivering cold when a building watchman found me the next morning. I didn’t have a dime on me, so the kind man gave me money to get a bus back home. I was dirty, but I was okay. And getting out on that balcony may have been the smartest move I ever made.

I had another close call near Times Square. I was going to a recording session with a hot new group called the Cherry People. But as usual, I didn’t have enough cash to get to the studio. So I opened my piggy bank—yes, I had an actual piggy bank—and grabbed a handful of change, enough for a taxi to and from the session. My parents had given me a full-length rabbit-fur coat for Christmas that year, so I would be warm and stylish for the New York winter. So when I stepped out of the cab on Eighth Avenue, one of the neighborhood muggers must have thought I would be a rich mark. He followed me into the lobby and ran to get on the elevator with me. I politely held the door for him.

As soon as the door closed, he turned to me and whispered in a threatening voice, “Give me all your money!” Something in his tone convinced me I’d better do what he said. He had his hand out, so I opened my purse and dumped all my change into it. The coins went everywhere. He cursed and instinctively bent down to try to scoop up the coins. I used that moment to take off the ring I was wearing, an heirloom that had belonged to Big Mama, and put it in my mouth.

When he stood up again, he had a better look at me and realized I had no money and wasn’t worth the effort. When the elevator doors opened at my floor, he ran out and disappeared. I rode that elevator back down to the lobby and waited for a long time to give him a chance to escape before heading back up to the recording studio. Mostly I was shaken up, and embarrassed that my good manners had gotten me into all of this. I swore I would never, ever hold a door for a mugger again.

There were other strange encounters, like the time a guy invited me and some friends back to his apartment, where he had a butcher’s knife attached to a chain hanging from the ceiling. He entertained himself by sailing the knife around the living room, slicing through the air just over our heads. The only time I’d ever seen anything like that was at Kreuz’s (pronounced “Kriteses”) barbeque place outside of Austin. But they were friendly there, and they used the knife to slice barbeque, not terrorize guests.

Mostly, though, I was having wonderful adventures. One of my friends, Jonny Podell, was a song runner—an independent promotion man, like my brother Ed. He would take me along on trips to radio stations all over the Northeast. In the morning I would climb into his tiny sports car, which was filled with stacks of 45s, and end up in Philadelphia or Boston by noon. Then I’d be back in New York for another night at the recording studio.

He introduced me to his girlfriend, Monica Faust, who became one of the best friends of my life. She was beautiful and smart and mischievous—the hippest girl I had ever met. One time we hitchhiked around Manhattan just for fun. We would walk into fancy department stores, like Bergdorf’s, and speak to the salesclerks in gibberish, pretending to ask for the ladies’ room in a foreign language. They would try to find translators for us, to no avail. Most days Monica worked in an office, but every night when Jonny came home from his job, she would have dinner on the table. When I was really hungry, I would go to their house.