Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (11 page)

I sat there in a stupor fiddling with my tits. Were they a tiny bit bigger than usual? Were they sore? Wowie zowie. The next day I went to dear, old Dr. Aaron and peed into a cup. He had been my doctor my whole life and was there the morning I was born, although he didn’t quite make it to the actual birth. Mom popped me out all by herself six weeks early while waiting for someone to give her a saddle block. Since she never got her painkilling drugs, I was born unaddled, wide awake, and squalling. She said I flew out so hard and
fast that she was scared I would slide off the table and dangle by my umbilical cord.

So I went home and waited to find out if the rabbit had died, trying to imagine how the impregnated pee could exterminate the floppy-eared mammal. I knew they had stopped murdering hares in the name of motherhood eons earlier, but it still depressed me to ponder it. Back in ’78 a pregnancy test took longer than it does now, so I had to get through an entire weekend with tornado visions of bonnets and booties, bottles and bassinets whirling round and round in my dizzy dreams.

I wanted to skewer Michael with the possibility of Daddom in person, so I was skittish the Sunday evening he came home from entertaining jaded America, and he was, as usual, exhausted. After unpacking his ravaged wardrobe, making him a nice cup of tea, running a bath, and pulling back the covers so he could climb into our queen-size cuddle-den, I told him we were expecting an important call in the morning. He looked confused and asked hopefully if I had gotten a callback on a movie or commercial. I was touched; he was always real supportive of career endeavors and also very good at commiserating when things fell through. “No,” I said, stirred-up giddy and apprehensive at the same time. “Doctor Aaron is going to call.” Dot dot dot. “My period is late.” Dot dot dot. “Wow,” he said softly. My sentiments exactly. He then put his arms around me reassuringly and squeezed me real sweet and hard. “We would have to look for a bigger place, wouldn’t we?” he said, and it was like he sang me a lullabye.

Michael slept and I didn’t, but when the phone rang at nine the next morning, he raised up groggily to get the big news. It was the doctor who rescued me from sliding off the stainless steel table twenty-nine years earlier, and he told me exuberantly, “Congratulations, Pamela, the rabbit died.”

My parents were ecstatic about the upcoming bundle of joy, especially Daddy, who decided it gave him the perfect reason to stick around the planet a while longer. He just
knew
I was having a boy. Right after the big news was announced, however, he took a scary turn for the worse and wound up hacking and choking at St. Joseph’s in Glendale, the very same hospital where his only daughter drew her first breath. The doctor told Daddy he didn’t think he would
live to see his grandchild, and Daddy laughed in his face until the hoot turned into a grinding, coughing hack, and the doctor said, “See what I mean, Oren?” I like to think the doctor was using reverse psychology, because Daddy came home two weeks later swigging a six-pack, playing poker, counting the days until he could teach his grandson the finer things in life—like how to build a rotary engine and the
only
way to clear a stopped-up bathroom drain. I’m sure five-card stud was not out of the question, either.

For Michael and me the joy of our blessed event was profound yet certainly more complicated. Until then, motherhood had never entered my mind. Being an only child, the rare time I spent with small people had been up at the Zappa household when I held kitchen-court as the zany nanny, making cinnamon toast, dancing half-naked around the table with Keith Moon. Somehow it hadn’t seemed like real life; it was all so dazzling and there were always shooting stars in my eyes. I had never really thought of Moon and Dweezil as children anyway, since Frank and Gail treated them as equals from day one. The munchkins even called their parents Frank and Gail. They still do. Did I want my kid to call me Pamela or Mommy? My own impending motherhood seemed so overwhelming at times that I had to sit down and put my head between my knees, until I got too round to bend over, that is.

I never got morning sickness but had to gnaw on saltines and swig seltzer every afternoon for the first few weeks. This was before trendy, flavored sparkling water came into being. No kiwi-passion-fruit, no raspberry-vanilla bean. It was the dark ages fourteen years ago when Perrier was still bubbling under the ground somewhere outside Paris. I preferred plain seltzer to Nestea but was very willing to quaff down many glasses of the brown stuff to grab the national commercial Sonia sent me up for.

The audition was held in a boring office full of listless execs who had already interviewed twenty-eight other perky-eyed girls by the time I arrived. I had to fiddle around, pretending I was oh-so-hot and bothered at a barbecue full of my husband’s important business associates. This stressed-out wifey needed to take the Nestea plunge! That would cool her right off! I must have been frazzled exactly right, because I got a callback and had to fall backwards into a gigantic, glistening pool, holding a nice, tall glass of cool, refreshing Nestea. I was a little late after hunting around to find the type of bathing suit that didn’t reveal my looming mound of baby, and had to start falling backwards in the slapping water before making nice to any of
the grim-faced Nestea people. I fell a dozen times, keeping a satisfied, grateful grin on my face. By the tenth trip into the chlorinated depths, I felt like I was having a psychedelic experience and wondered dizzily if the baby was having a good trip. I drove home with my ears popping, my water-logged brain sloshing mindlessly, and the phone was ringing as I walked in the door. I got the job!

I left for New Mexico two days later, envisioning all the satin booties and frilly bassinets the Nestea loot would buy the Des Barres family. I was so excited that somewhere over the Grand Canyon I made the mistake of telling the clothing person that I was pregnant, and she flipped. The whole team of commercial geeks went into a flurry of confusion, and at the last second I had to have Dr. Zeidner (my new gyno who brought Dweezil into the world) send a telegram saying I was in good enough health to fall backwards into a pool several times holding a nice, tall glass of their thirst-quenching product.

By the time of the shoot I was so practiced at the plunge that I perfected it in only three tries. Nobody cared about me in my puffy pink dress anyway, focusing totally on the Nestea and how the sun glinted on the sparkling tumbler, how the ice cubes tinkled just so, the travels of the water driplets down the sides of the glass, and exactly how much of the brown liquid slid down my throat before the plunge took place. I drank so much tea to get the gulps perfected that when I climbed onto the plane headed home I was tea-logged and numb, having to head for the pee pot every twenty minutes. But it was worth it: Not only would the commercial bring us a wad of needed cash, but I would make enough for my Screen Actor’s Guild insurance to cover all my maternity bills, except for the hospital phone calls.

Still, our finances were dodgy, and our apartment was too small. I had started looking around for picket-fence-Father-Knows-Best-type digs with a backyard, where Michael and I could frolic idyllically with our offspring, but soon found that an actual house was out of our teetering rock-and-roll price range. Although he had always been Mr. Privacy, Michael agreed that we needed a roommate to help pay the rent, so I got on the phone to get the word out. When I called my old traveling partner, Renee, I found out that the girl she and I visited in Wyoming a few years earlier had tired of farm life and had just arrived in Hollywood. The arid flatlands of Wyoming had been my refuge when my then-boyfriend, Don Johnson, met sweet-teen Melanie Griffith on the set of
The Harrad Experiment
and illicit sparks had started to fly right in my face. I wasn’t ready for romantic frost-bite, so Renee and I hitchhiked out to the wide-open spaces so I could escape the inevitable consummation. Give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, don’t fence me in. There in the Middle America brush I ate gnarly homegrown vegetables and practiced complicated yoga positions under the twinkling Big Dipper, trying hard not to think about the virginal miss and the two-timing hunka hunka burning love. Renee’s old friend Denise “Dee Dee” Della-quilla, the lady of the ranch, was a down-to-earth Italian girl who would now become the Hollywood roommate of Michael and Pamela and baby Des Barres. It’s a small world after all.

And then there were two. The five original GTOs—Lucy, Christine, me, Sandra, and Sparkie. Three of them have gone to rock and roll heaven. Somehow Sparkie and I lived to tell the tale.
M
ICHAEL
C
RAVEN

My sweet, supportive mom — Margaret Ruth Hayes Miller. Daddy carried this photo in a handmade frame all during World War II.

O. C. “Hollywood” Miller