Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (16 page)

We spent one bizarre all-nighter with Zeppelin’s hefty manager, Peter Grant—holed up in his stuffy castle—protected from intruders by a rippling body of water and an honest-to-God moat. He sent a limo for us in the pitch-black night and we wound up deep in the British countryside at about two in the morning, waiting with several cups of tea for Peter to come down the stairs. We passed the time by counting the hidden gargoyle faces in the rock fireplace, then Peter finally greeted us with his dreaded black doctor’s bag and led us into his screening room to watch live Zeppelin footage.

Poor old Bonzo had recently fled the planet and Peter needed some understanding company to revel in his late drummer’s mad majesty. Over and over, we watched Bonzo cream his drum set. Stop frame again and again. “Look at that—a better drummer was never born.” Peter wept openly, and every twenty minutes or so he and Michael took a little walk around the grounds in the zero-minus cold. I knew they were snooting a bunch of coke and I tried to stay in my right mind. This has to end sometime, I said to myself, and after the gray sun had been up for over an hour, we crawled into the plush carden and rode silently back to London. I wondered what Michael was thinking about, but my curiosity was coated in icicles and I kept quiet.

After a few days in swinging London we took a train out to the dismal, flat seaside of Brighton to meet up with Michael’s parents at a once-charming, crumbling resort that reeked of mildew and brief, antique dalliances of a former time. World War II, maybe? We peeked into a faded, vacant ballroom where shiny shoes must have clicked on the floors and chiffon dresses flew. World War I? Gilded wallpaper peeled in the hallways, and dampness impinged on the hissy steam heaters as we wandered through the quiet place, calling out for Philip and Irene Des Barres. It was way past eerie, verging on a Clive Barker dreamscape. One of the doors flew back, and a scary Irene leapt at Nick, crying, “The new Des Barres has arrived!” and attempting to wrest him from my arms, but he squawked in shock and Grandma fixed me with an icy stare, like I had goosed his diaper. Behind Irene wobbled Philip, who had shrunk a foot since our last meeting at the pub in Oxford Circle when he flaunted the teenage girl and spilled Tuinals all over the seat. Meek and disheveled,
he loitered in the background while Irene ushered us into the dank winter retreat.

After hot tea, sweet biscuits, and much fussing over Nicky, she continued the browbeating of her husband, which I assumed, had gone on since Philip crawled back to her not long after our first meeting at the pub. “You meaningless old fool,” she chanted wickedly after he humbly attempted to enter the conversation. “No one is interested in what you
think
you might have to say.” She withered him further with a vile gaze tinged with arsenic, then turned to fix a loving smile on Nicky, who gnawed innocently on a jelly biscuit. I was appalled, and Michael was bent over with shame, but Irene took no notice, and whenever the opportunity arose she dropped rank bombs on Philip’s bald head, and never once did he talk back like a bad boy. Why did they get back together? I wondered. What happened to the nymphet girly? I suppose the twisted karmic union of Irene and Philip had to be played out. Her venom was ceaseless, and it seemed the old fellow was past caring, past being able to care—his high-class, aristocratic air reduced to dribbling-down-the-chin rubble.

Their misery was excruciating to witness, and my devoted heart went out to my husband, who was trying to maintain a semblance of dignity during the two-day trial. In between brief snatches of insightful brilliance, Irene complained to Michael about
his
tawdry, commonplace behavior, and they wound up arguing to the point of snippy, all-too-precise one-liners. I wrapped Nicky up warm and walked back and forth on the frightfully empty beach. We sat on the damp sand and did pat-a-cake and “How big is Nicky?” “Soooo-big” until his little nose was crimson from the cold, and we would wander back in and sit by the steam heater. On the second day of our visit, I had just gotten Nick down for a nap and was looking out the window at the charcoal sea, pondering the vast loopholes in life, when Philip appeared, wan and trembling, to ask me for pills. I told him I didn’t have any, but he went through the list anyway, “Seconal? Tuinal? Placidyl? Nembutal?” On and on it went. I kept shaking my head no. It was harrowing. I pictured him as a tiny baby and wished I could rock him into a peaceful sleep. Lullaby and good night.

Michael needed a massive escape from reality, so when we got back to London, after a wacky dinner with Nick crawling around under the table, he went out wild with our pal “Legs” Larry Smith, a magnificent character I had met many years before in the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. “Legs” is a true eccentric, an artist that very few people understand, try as they might. Glory-rock dudes like Eric
Clapton and George Harrison take him on the road for comic relief. He makes you laugh so hard that nothing comes out and your eyes cross, his insights are cringe-fests, though most of his snappy wizardry goes sailing over everyone’s head. He was a pent-up, underappreciated genius on a slide at this point in his life, so he and Michael were gone ‘til the dawn’s early blight and then it was time to catch the plane home.

Michael was still wasted as we dragged our baggage and squalling baby down the steep stairs of our hotel. The front door creaked open and we were stunned to see Irene appear out of the mist with a giant bag, which she flung down in the foyer and then disappeared like an apparition. Michael ran after his lost-soul mother, but a cab had been waiting and was already down the street. Had she taken a train all the way from Brighton? Or had she taken the cab? How did she afford it? The bag sat there, and we were almost afraid to tamper with it. What was so important that she would come out in the pit of night to hand deliver? We looked at each other warily while Nicky wailed, and then Michael finally peeked inside. The bag was full of things for her one and only grandson: a colorful handmade quilt, bright picture books, a yellow sweater, stuffed toys with happy faces, candy bars, and packs of English “sweeties.” Silently, his face full of pain, Michael picked up the bag, our overstuffed suitcases, and went out in the early morning drizzle to hail a cab.

We came home to our tizzied life, after thirteen hours of trying to keep Nick amused at thirty thousand feet. He crawled from one end of the airplane to the other, chasing ice cubes kindly provided by a smitten stewardess. “He’s going to be a real lady-killer,” she burbled, and I knew she was right. If I had had buttons down the front of my dress they would have burst with puffed parental snobbery. Michael flopped into bed, and I put Nick in the stroller and walked down our charming Hollywood street, hoping he’d nod off. As I walked I kept repeating to myself that life was grand. Well, it was, wasn’t it? I took for granted all the humming hubbub surrounding me, all the everyday madness that became mundane. An objective observer pulling aside the curtains of my life would have seen a chaotic, stimulating, hair-raising, cliff-hanging, unique, and totally fascinating existence, but when you’re in the nearsighted eye of the storm, it sometimes seems all too serene.

January 5, 1981
—
I really enjoyed the holidays, little Nick knew all about it and tore into his gifts with
abandon,
always wanting
more.
My mom
went nutty and bought a million wonderful things. Daddy is feeling really bad again, and we all pray he will get better this time. Michael and I loved each other’s gifts. He got me a sexy black dress; I adore that he sees me that way. I was writing in my journal the other night, and he suggested I write how I feel about the world
right now.
I told him I don’t
know
how I feel. I’ve been devoting a huge chunk of myself to Nick, and I do enjoy it, but I think it’s time now to come back to myself. I feel good that I never stopped exercising, it’s like I’ve been “on hold.” I get spurts of confidence and spark, but they don’t last
—
I have to push myself into creativity. Just DO IT, instead of thinking about doing it! Don’t know exactly what
it
is. I feel a void somewhere inside me. (Can you
feel
a void?) I fluctuate from happiness to unfulfillment. I can see how women just “give up their lives,” it’s so easy to slip into. I’d like to make some money; Michael works so hard to keep it all together. We hope we can afford Nick to start preschool in March, he has such an exquisite imagination. When I put him to bed last night he said, “I love you, good-night.” I just wanted to roll over and swoon. I went on an interview today and he said, “Mommy looks boo-ful, Mommy so pretty!” This guy is two years old!

Yes, I was a worshiping mom, and a worshiping wife. I knew I was over the top and even started calling Michael “sahib” on the many occasions when I served his needs before he was even needy. I transferred some of the devotion to Nick, and he got used to sitting on a throne, where I can sometimes still find him if I bend over backwards too hard. Poor Nicky. I kissed his small butt so industriously, he came to expect it from everybody, and when it wasn’t forthcoming he got confused and belligerent. Little did I know that with my ceaseless acts of worship and smother-mothering I was in the early stages of creating a mini-monster. He indeed got to go to preschool, where he climbed up on the table during color time, pretending to play guitar, speaking swimming circles around his peers, and cantankerously demanding constant attention. He was such a quadruple handful, in fact, that by the time he hit three years old, the headmaster suggested he be tested at UCLA. They surmised, perhaps, that it was boredom making him act like Damien from
The Omen
. He spent a lot of time in the corner, where I’m sure he mulled over upcoming creative outbursts, but the little charmer had such a sweet way about him, he got off light most of the time.

He made friends and started having play-overs, dragging his little record player with him so he could turn unsuspecting tykes on to his favorite band, Sparks. When he was two and a half,
Kimono My House
was his fave album, and he could sing along to all the nutty
songs. He had an early penchant for art and got into cars in a big way, even teaching himself to read so he could find out particular makes to include in the steering-wheel drawings he made on dozens of paper plates. After creating these amazing replicas of assorted steering wheels, he would drive around town with me in his car seat, changing vehicles at his whim. The first time I realized he could read, we were cruising along in our big, white bomber Ford station wagon when he pointed to the shiny black car next to us and said, “Look, Mommy, another Ford. F-O-R-D.” I pulled over, intoxicated with his brilliance, and he gleefully read the brand of every car that drove by. For his third birthday Tony and Dee Dee bought him a real Pontiac wheel at a swap meet, and he was momentarily mesmerized before returning to his own ever-changing batch of Porsches, BMWs, and GM trucks. He would race across the room, making growling car noises, and I was paralytic with mama-lion pride.

Nick’s third birthday was absurdly massive for such a small boy. I dressed him up in a little bitty blue suit and made him a Cookie Monster cake from scratch. Our friends from the Knack, KISS, Blondie, and a motley assortment of other long-haired weirdos stood by and cheered when Nicky sputtered at his candles and blew them out, squealing. He got so many gifts he went into overwhelm, and when his two major heroes—Ron and Russell Mael from Sparks—came through the gate, Nick just stared at them unbelieving, his face full of frosting. Russell picked him up, and I snapped a quick Polaroid. The expression on Nicky’s face is serene, but he was really in a mini state of shock.

Beneath the domestic sheen I was still a creative soul and my time was nigh, I just knew it. The agent I had been with got old and retired, leaving me stranded on the Love Boat, lost at sea, already thirty-two years old and a big fat nobody. I found a series of lumpy successors who did very little for me, so I flogged lovely eight-by-tens all over town, sat for asinine commercial photographs in various
bourgeois
middle-American poses, hoping to sell a can of Campbell’s pork and beans to the average consumer, bounced my little kid on my lap while learning yawpity-yawp lines for acting classes. Dragging my Sylvester Stallone screen test behind me like a booby prize, I offered to show it to anybody with eyes. I had wet dreams about bigwigs at ICM or William Morris coming to one of my dopey avantgarde plays and yanking out a contract right after Act One. It didn’t
happen. I knew I was doing everything possible, but I still couldn’t make a scratch, much less a dent into the sanctified business of show. It remained an elusive, invisible trick of light; a sad optical illusion, like an Academy Award hologram I could stick my hand straight through. We needed money, so I took an ordinary dumbo job selling framed posters for a (now defunct) joint called the Graphic Encounter while Nick drove the preschoolers around in his paper-plate cars. I went with forced gaiety through big office buildings, asking to speak to various managers who might want to beautify their surroundings with the all-too-common posters for ten times their worth. It wasn’t nine-to-five, but it felt like twenty-four-hour quackery. And as I wrote in my diary, “It sure ain’t Broadway.”

I harangued myself for feeling insecure, which was a double whammy right between the eyes. I moped and worried, watching the calendar days being ripped off like in the movies when time passes, but there was so much to do, I couldn’t fall into a depression. I couldn’t allow myself that luxury.

Besides, Michael reserved that emotional province for himself, and, sad but true,
both
of his careers seemed stymied. After several meetings with big-boy labels playing hard-to-get, he had signed as a solo act with Dreamland, Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn’s fancy new label with posh offices situated right next to the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. As usual, the hype was high and the promises abundant. Always in touch with his talent, Michael wrote some very cool, verging-on-introspective songs, but it took months before he got into the studio to record the first album, and by then he was weary from pumping himself up, staying on that edgy creative edge while waiting for Mike Chapman to become available. The upper-crust Mr. Chapman had produced Blondie and Suzi Quatro, among many hit-ridden others, so he was highly in demand, and there was nothing Michael loathed more than being on the back burner. He did an occasional TV show, playing the parody of a rock star, which paid the bills but made him feel like the parody he portrayed. The light I had always seen around him despite his anger and addictions became a dim, slow-moving sludge. He didn’t like himself or anyone else. His eyes shot daggers, and I withdrew. For the first time I felt my heart set up a protective shield, his razor-edged anguish finally filling me to the brim. He got high, he stayed out, he smelled like someone else’s cheap musk oil. He spent so many nights in the wilderness, I don’t know how he even stood up straight. There were enough jarring silences between us that words seemed to stop working.