Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (10 page)

The brief, sweet escape behind me, I went back to pounding the sticky Hollyweird pavement, seeking fame. Masochism, anyone?

The word was out that the amazing guy who had pulled off
Rocky
was going to direct a movie about wrestling and a love interest was needed. Could that be me? My agent finagled an audition, milking my soap credentials for way more than they were worth, and after finally deciding on a short, sexy black dress, I drove to Universal Studios to meet Sylvester Stallone.

Waiting in those Hollywood offices when your heart is a yammering hopefest, an unknown nobody aching to be
somebody
, is enough to liquify your insides. The secretaries treat you like parakeet poop, and you have to handle it with devil-don’t-give-a-shit nonchalance. I picked up
Variety
and gave it a practiced once-over, waiting to be announced. The double door opened, and I made my entrance. Gonna fly now.

I took in the scene: Stallone behind a massive desk, picture window behind him with a view of the lot, a couple slick-looking guys lounging around, drinking coffee, soft, muted lighting, thick beige carpeting . . . “It’s you!!” he shouted. I looked behind me to see if anyone else had come into the room. “The Real Don Steeler!!” he raved. “I’ve wanted to meet you for years!!” I actually pointed at myself, just like in the movies. “Me?”

It was true, I had danced on
The Real Don Steele Show
, wiggling around in a flashy go-go ensemble while different bands lip-synced to their Top Forty tunes. I had to hang all over host Don Steele and tell him how handsome he was before the cameras rolled, but I never dreamed a future superstar might be watching. Somebody who could make me a star myself!! Sly (ha!) and I had a fine chat, then I read
cold from the script he handed me, just the way I learned in Charles Conrad’s acting class. When I got home, Michael told me I had a screen test the following Monday. I couldn’t breathe. The movie was called
Paradise Alley
, and the part I was up for was Stallone’s love interest, a hooker with a heart of twenty-four-carat you-know-what.

I studied the lines until I was shouting them out in my sleep. I went to Frederick’s of Hollywood and bought a lacy negligee for my screen test with Stallone that was going to take place
in bed
!! I had Peter Vizer streak my hair with shimmering golden highlights that would gleam just right, had a pearlized pink pedicure, since I was going to be barefooted, and bought a bottle of fruity white wine to calm my sizzling nerves. I felt like sparks were shooting off me. Ping! They gave me a trailer on the Universal lot with my name on the door, and I drank three glasses of fruity confidence while I waited my turn. Six girls were testing, and I was third on the list. Time was given a sleeping pill. It seemed like hours crawled by, and I tried not to get too tipsy as I paced shreds into the mini—motor home carpeting. I looked in the mirror and found fault with my entire being, powdering and repowdering my nose to matte perfection. The second girl, Joyce Ingalls, had been “testing” for over an hour and it worried me.

When I finally got under the covers in front of a bunch of bored guys behind cameras and Stallone climbed in with me, I was ready. I remembered all the lines and did a really good, choked-up reading, almost coming to tears as the scene closed. My final line was “The clock’s runnin’ ” because I had decided to charge him for the time in bed with me. I loved the big lug, but he didn’t love me, so he could just pay for my services. So there. As I got dressed in the trailer, I was so full of hope that my heart seemed pumped with helium. I sang Dave Clark Five songs at the top of my lungs all the way home. Glad all over, yes I am—glad all over, baby, I’m glad all over, so glad you’re mi—i-i—i-ine.

I waited by the phone for a whole week for the call to glory, but it never came. Joyce Ingalls got the part, had a fling with Stallone, and was later almost severed from the film when the fling came to an abrupt halt. It was one of the times that Sascha almost left him, right before his fling with Susan Anton. It’s amazing how we know these silly facts about famous people, isn’t it?

The Real Don Steeler did get a small role in
Paradise Alley;
as Vonnie, the naughty girlfriend of the bad guy played by Kevin Conway. I was delirious about snagging this morsel of work. Maybe I
might actually infiltrate the tawdry sanctity of show business! Even though I knew the roses had zero scent, I wanted to bury my nose in two dozen long-stemmed red ones and breathe deep.

January 8, 1978, has started off with a bang! I worked all week on
Paradise Alley
for Sylvester Stallone, and I was good! He put his enormous arms around me after my big scene with Armand Assante and said, “That was great
—
you ran the full gamut of emotions.” I know when he sees the dailies he’ll use me again in one of his upcoming movies. I had only one line, and he gave me three more. He likes me and thinks I’m talented and so does everyone there. He is so sweet and nice and self-confident and gorgeous, even though I think he has personal problems of a grand nature. (Stature? Kevin says he’s only five feet nine inches and wears lifts all the time.) The gossip is that he gets major crushes on starlets and then crushes their hearts. Oh well, it doesn’t affect me. It really makes me feel like a different person to be
working!
It puts other things (like my relationship) in perspective. Look out, I predict big-time stardom for Armand Assante
.

I came away from
Paradise Alley
with some serious high-apple-piein-the-sky-hopes. The little taste had whet my star-bitten taste buds, and I wanted more more
more!
The following week I had a crumb tossed at me in the form of a local car wax commercial. Wearing yet another pair of tight-ass shorts and a halter top I scrubbed and rubbed on the hood of a dull dirty car, straining to get those darn spots off! Here comes my next-door neighbor, Broderick Crawford, the fifties TV star from
Highway Patrol
, one of my very favorite half hours, holding a fabulously bright bottle of some sort of Turtle Wax, ready to do the neighborly thing and help me out. After expressing amazement in several different ways over the glory of the product, I was cut loose. I hung around to watch Brod’s closeups, reminiscing about my childhood when he had represented all that was strong and lawful. He leered at me and reeked of gin at eleven in the morning, but kiddy memories die hard and I wanted to have my picture taken with him. He took the opportunity to press against me without anybody noticing, but I understood. I gave the photo to my dad and he was impressed. He had my mom put it in a frame. I guess he thought his daughter was finally going places.

Feeling high about my car wax experience, I went trotting into my commercial agency to see if the big babe, Sonia, would start sending me out on a lot more interviews. I wasn’t getting my share! Instead of the glowing reception I expected, all I got was a tongue-lashing
from the elite waxlike Sonia about the way I had been dressing for these normal soap-suds interviews. She told me I had to go on a search for boring Midwestern-acceptable, straitlaced outfits. I suppose she realized my closet wasn’t brimming with shirtwaists and acceptable shoes. I remember exactly what I had on for this punifying, finger-pointing experience—a short hot-pink ensemble full of lavender flowers and Frederick’s of Hollywood sling-backs. It reminded me of the time I got expelled from Cleveland High for “looking absurd,” one of my very favorite, top-five high school memories. My humbling blush matched my painted red toes, and I promised to head straight for Sears.

Michael went to San Francisco to see the Sex Pistols and came back knowing down deep that Detective was a dinosaur that had to be stuffed, mounted, and put to rest. He was only going through the motions anyway, since the band’s second album had gone nowhere slow. He told me the Sex Pistols were about to stomp all over the leaden music industry with their gigantic punk boots, chop off the excess, and kick it to death for bad measure. It was only a matter of time before the pistol-punk shot would be heard ’round the world.

Michael was in serious trouble with his drug and alcohol problems, spending more and more time out in the wilderness, but what good did it do to dye my brains black and envision a funeral? Despite his nightmare life away from me (I squeezed my temples impossible to keep from seeing the whole thing in sordid, florid Technicolor), I kept up the fantasy front of married perfection, trying
so hard
not to think about his “other life” and the possibility that it might involve “other women.” Since I took care of the money, I knew he wasn’t spending a whole lot on cocaine—how was he getting it? Things disappeared from the house, a pair of diamond studs he got from Sharon Arden, a leather jacket. “I guess I lost them somehow, honey.” Uh-huh.

Several months before, I had stopped whining and begging with him, because I finally realized it never did a smidge of good, and my most recent form of retribution was taught me by my sweet mom—the punishing Silent Treatment. Back in Reseda the Dodgers game would blare; Vin Scully all excited about Wally Moon’s homer; the Swiss steak sizzling on the grill, the pop, crack, and sizz way too loud, like the dumb hunk of beef was cooking inside my head. My
big, powerful daddy was bent low by the silence emanating from my five feet-three-inch mom. Silence directed right at him. Somehow when I did the same to Michael it wasn’t as intense. When I withheld my love it was still apparent, like I had rubbed that pheromone sparkling gold-dust lotion all over my body, mistaking it for Vaseline Intensive Care.

But one sad dusk after Michael had gone missing for thirty-two hours following a record company cocktail bash I was burning with accusations. I had the shades drawn, wallowing around in the bleak certainty that another grotesque encounter was on the horizon. Or maybe he had OD’d somewhere? Been in a horrible accident? Waiting for his appearance after he had been missing in action was insufferable, unendurable. I couldn’t read, eat, hang out with friends, or watch TV. I just got madder and sadder until my entire being was a red-hot brick. By the time he stumbled through the door with his eyes stuck together and his mouth lined with old, destroyed chewing gum, I actually had a fever.

This time he was even more disheveled and vacant-eyed than usual. He had blood running down his neck and ragged rips in his clothes. “I just got hit by a car.” He recited in a monotone drone, “A car just hit me.” In supreme silence I cleaned the gash on his chin, bandaged it up, and got him out of his wrecked clothes. He was a zombie, his eyes a bomb site, and even though I sat him down in a chair and could look straight at him, Michael Des Barres, my honey husband, was definitely AWOL. I slapped him in the face to wake him up. He just sat there. I slapped him again. He didn’t move. I slapped him really, really hard, tears gushing, a sound coming out of me that I didn’t know I could make. He stared straight ahead, one lone tear dripping down his chiseled, reddening cheek. Oh, Michael, I love you! I hate you! Where are you? Where have you been? I could just see him out in the wild, untamed, filthy night, squirming in the underbelly of transgression. Why are you doing this to me? To yourself? Don’t you know you are my whole life? Please,
please
let me make you sane, content, at peace with your anguished soul!

I got him to bed, and he was out like a black light for the next twenty hours while I blubbered to every guru who was ever born. I still had no idea I was dealing with a disease. I saw Michael as a man who was ruining his life, ruining my life, tromping on our happiness—drinking it, snorting it, dropping it with selfish, cavalier abandon.

I fully expected another one of those peeling, gold-plated silences to follow this miserable, wrenching altercation. I slept on the furthest edge of the bed, a mile away from his blasphemed body, my heart in two separate bloody pieces, and had been up for two or three hours when he emerged from his black-cloud coma. Usually I ignored his attempts at conversation, the observations and pleasantries he made through squinted eyes. I knew his head felt like a squashed cantaloupe, and the knowledge that he felt god-awful gave me a fictitious, holier-than-thou upper hand. It was the only time I could look down on him, smugly ensconced within my pure, unravaged temple. I went to the market, cooked his meals, did his laundry, drove him places, but I temporarily withheld adoration; my only power. But something was different this time. “I’m a fucking cocaine addict,” he announced thickly, with truth clearly in the room with us. “I’m an alcoholic and a goddamned drug addict, baby.” He sort of staggered down onto his knees in supplication to me—and I went to him without hesitation, holding his head against my tummy. Our tears streamed. This was a revelation. Would he finally be delivered? Could the miracle be close at hand?

When Michael went back out on the road with Detective he promised to
try
to stay away from the evils that hotel rooms bring: butt lickers who carry razor blades and mirrors around in hopes of hanging out with the band, tempting females with full bottles of Jack Daniels, seventeen joints, and a bong shoved in their spandex waistbands. The night of the Big Confession we made up in front of the mirror, doggie-style, and six weeks later, as I perused the calendar, I realized I hadn’t bled since. Hmm. The birth control we practiced was the old-fashioned rhythm method. It had always worked so well that I figured the tilted uterus inherited from my mom had given Michael’s tap-dancing sperm the bum’s rush, sending them wriggling off in all the wrong directions. But making up that night had been ooh-la-la. I could swear I saw the soul flutter into my middle and lodge itself there; a smidgen of smiling light within the frenzied, pent-up thrusting. I instantly recalled witnessing that Tinkerbell flicker of radiance in the mirror. Wow. Double, triple, quadruple WOW.