Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (22 page)

The class consisted of me and six other frustrated ladies looking for an outlet, a way to
express themselves. PLEASE
. The wonderfully eccentric teacher who wore long gray braids and Indian print skirts, set an orange on the table and asked us to describe it in three paragraphs. She had us write a three-page sentence, using no punctuation, and then concoct a poem about the death of a pet. Our last assignment was to take a day out of our past and bring it to life. I relished this one and wrote two and a half pages about the day I waited in that long, teen-scream line to see the Rolling Stones back in ’65. The teacher flipped her wonderfully eccentric lid, and on the last day of class told me I was really onto something. She encouraged
me to continue with my story, adding that she enjoyed my “voice.” I didn’t even know I had a voice, so this was spectacular news indeed. Then Stephen Davis, who was about to wreck the rep of Zep by writing
Hammer of the Gods
, came to the pad in Laurel Canyon to quiz Michael on the heaviest, most enigmatic of rock bands and to pick my brain for titillating groupie stories. He turned out to be a very charming, easygoing gentleman and the source of some excellent advice for me. “Hold on to your stories,” he insisted. “Don’t tell them to anybody until you’re ready to tell them for yourself.” He also suggested that I get a cowriter and gave me a couple of names. I had to lie down on the couch after Stephen left and stare at the blank ceiling for twenty minutes to contemplate the vast implication: A published author and a writing teacher both thought my little tale was important enough to tell.

So I finally plugged up the negative holes so those mischief-making doubts couldn’t get through and poked through the dusty, musty, slanted rays in Mom’s garage, looking for the old gargantuan box of diaries/journals. I went way, way back into my past, starting with the first diary I ever wrote at age ten. Mom had stuck the blue, plastic Deb-U-Teen in my stocking for Christmas, and I felt obliged to write in it dutifully every day:

January
1—
Dear Diary, I watched the Rose Parade. After it was over, Harvellee came over to play ball and with balloons. She is a poor sport, she was grouchy. For dinner I had steak, mash potatoes, and Marvo-Mix. Well, so long
.

March 16
—
Today the teacher read our grades. I let down on four subjects. I was very sad after school
.
I went to Iva’s and we traded comics. I was reading
Little Lulu
before I wrote in you
.

April 2
—
I stayed home from school and watched
Our Miss Brooks, Amos and Andy
and many more. Lassie was fed some poisoned meat by a mean little girl; she made Lassie lose the race. She got sick right in the middle of it. I got some M&Ms. I picked one up off the ground and ate it. It wasn’t dirty
.

June 10
—
I had to dance with Jonathan for the square dance, and I had “Jonathan and Pamela” written on my leg, so I went down on the floor and hid it, but before I did that I wiped as much off as I could. I wish he would kiss me on the mouth. Guess what? Harvellee and I made up a new style: one braid and one pony tail. We wore it to school today
.

October 26
—
I was talking to Daddy in a funny language like Donald Duck. Boy, did he laugh. After school, I tried Harvellee’s paper doll’s doll
clothes on her paper doll, then she chased me all over trying to touch the pink dots on my chest. I ran. My parakeet Sunny is sick
.

December 12
—
Sunny died of cancer in his liver. Cancer had eaten his liver away. I was really crying. Gosh, when I was trying to get him to take a bath a month ago, stupid ol’ cancer was eating Sunny’s liver up. I always look at the cage he was in and cry
.

The Big C again. And if sinless, little budgies can get it,
can children get it?
And what about Harvellee? On top of being a poor sport, she tried to touch the pink dots on my chest on more than one occasion. I would fend her off, using Barbie’s pointy toes as a sword and call to my mom for help, but when she came running into my room with a dish towel in her hands, Harvellee’s halo appeared like wide-eyed, innocent-kid magic every time. Even her freckles glowed.

After getting filthy with prehistoric garage grime, I found the ragged box full of the dumb notes about boys, passed back and forth in school. I found my goofy, pained adolescent poetry, so proud of myself for saving every scrap of that teen nonsense for posterity. I came across many crucial, babbling documents—a dreamy wish-letter written to me from me with someone else’s signature:

My Dearest Pam,

First, me luv, I must explain a few things to you. Don’t think for one moment that I enjoyed those weeks in the Virgin Islands with that ruddy Jane Asher. Oh luv, it was pure misery! She’s crackers and drained me of my pay ’til me and Ringo were both skint! Natchally, as you knew, she only went along for publicity. Wouldn’t any jobless actress do the same? Please believe me, me beluvved, you’re the only one in my heart.

If you don’t know by now, I’ll tell you: I wrote your favorite song “World Without Love,” for you and you alone. Oh luv, the night I helped John write those words, I needed you so! I need you now! Oh, luv, I’ve told you how much I love you in every song we’ve written. I hope you know that. Every song speaks of my love for you.

All My Loving, Paul

And I found a crumpled, stoned-out letter to Marlon Brando:

My dear Marlon,

Your name was just mentioned in an insane conversation between a bunch of my lunatic friends. I’m sure everyone I know is a
genius in one way or another—most of them fulfilling their creative need. I never really have totally expressed myself creatively, but at times I feel my friend’s success as if it were my own. Let’s face it, I’m usually frustrated. Unless one totally reacts to any given situation exactly the way one feels about it, confusion occurs, due to the block that is created by the thoughts in between the event and the reaction to it. If you withhold your immediate reaction, then there is a block. Unless you react without thinking first, it’s too late and any reaction is false and useless. EVERYONE has some paranoia—due to circumstances, twisted energies, and misunderstandings of meanings and words—I so want to bring mine under control. Oh yes, I forgot to tell you the circumstances in which your name came up. Led Zeppelin got dressed up in drag last night, and the roadie said, “I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but you can find me at Marlon Brando’s house.” He must have been reading my mind. I wonder when I’ll ever get over this groupie phase. My photographer, Lee, says I’m about to get my Ph.D. As soon as I feel I am contributing to the happiness of this poor race, then maybe I won’t try so hard to reap my rock friend’s trips. I’m doing this play tomorrow at Actor’s Studio, it’s my first real BIG HOLLYWOOD EXPERIENCE. I called to let you know what time to show up. I hope you can see it. I’ll bet you’d wished you had. It’s such a thrill to open up and CREATE with your entire being. I am ready for absolutely ANYTHING that comes my way. There are so many times when I’ve almost stopped smoking grass. There must be a saturation point. I’m so full of it that whenever I get high it spills out of me and seems to SOIL MY BRAIN. It has become a social thing, like the nine-to-fiver’s cocktails. I have been really overindulging on the earth level. I was so drunk when you finally spoke to me on the phone that I must have garbled on a bit. It was so kind and gentle of you to have concern for someone you do not yet know. I read Stevie Wonder’s palm tonight and he said I was “very good.” What a thrill. As soon as I forget the “I” in all of my life dealings and realize it’s all for the entire whole, things will fall into place. I get so bogged down in small details. I’m sure the only place they exist is in my turmoiled head. Ah, Life.

Heavy shit, man. I found I had a lot of material. I had chronicled love-ins, hanging out backstage at Jimi Hendrix concerts, dancing on mescaline to Janis Joplin at the Whisky a Go Go, recording with my all-girl band, the GTO’s (Frank Zappa at the helm), cavorting on
stage with the Who, the Stones, Zeppelin. Wouldn’t people find that stuff interesting?

For the next few months I dripped chunks of yesterday’s dramas and dreams, like Miss Mercy GTO used to drop scarves, tarnished jangling belts, and wildly flamboyant articles of clothing everywhere she went. It became hard to hold a conversation about the present, immersed as I was in my torrid, traumatic, transcendental past, referring to long-gone incidents as if they just happened and speaking of freaky pals on the Sunset Strip as if they had just been over for tea with lots of honey. It drove Michael mad, but he sanctioned my new project. Although I was reliving my raging flings with more than a few rock-god dogs, he was outrageously open-minded, and for that I was truly grateful. Without his tower-of-strength spousal support, I could never have started writing—never mind stick with it for five long years. And now a voice within me piped up, muttering, “Maybe writing could take the place of your fumbled, sad-sack acting career!” Maybe, maybe, maybe, baby.

I was intently recalling the way Paul McCartney’s long, slim thighs made me feel hot and bothered, getting it down on the page, when the phone ringing yanked me out of the panting Beatlemaniac reverie. It was the sweet, high-pitched voice of Melanie Griffith inviting me to her husband, Steven Bauer’s birthday party. “I know you’ll want to be there because Donnie is bringing Patti D’Arbanville, the girl who just had his baby,” she said, giggling breathlessly. Donnie Wayne Johnson—one of my only True Loves and Melanie’s first husband. Melanie and Don had smashed apart a few years earlier, and I had been the one to move Melanie into her swell new Hollywood apartment while she bawled her eyes out. I think Warren Beatty had something to do with it. Since then, she had married another hunky actor, Steven “Rocky” Bauer, and seemed content and semi-domestic.

I hadn’t seen Donnie since we bumped into each other (literally) at a liquor store when I was eight months pregnant with Nick. All charm, he had said to me, “I always knew you’d be big as a house when you got pregnant.” Such a way with words. But he and I checked in with each other every six months, so I already knew about the impending offspring and was oh-so super-duper curious about the mommy. “I can’t wait,” I said to Melanie and started planning
my ensemble. Patti had been a semi-legend in New York and was courted on the coast by some of the same rock gentlemen who had wooed me in the West. For the rest of the day the Cat Stevens song “My Lady D’Arbanville” was spinning around my head. The line, “her heart feels like winter” made me a little nervous.

The night of the bash out in Malibu, I wore a tattered black suede mini-dress, high patent-leather spikes, and tall, teased hair the color of blood on fire. I had recently become a redhead and found that it suited me fine and dandy. After greeting Melanie and the handsome, boyish birthday boy, I clung to my stun-o-rama husband out on the breezy veranda overlooking the crashing, thrashing waves and scanned the crowd for Don and his new
amore
. There they were, D. J. and My Lady D’Arbanville looking way too good with her yards of wavy blond hair. Thumpy-hearted, I started through the crowd, and when Donnie spotted me, he grandly stood up and, laughing, opened his arms for me to run into. He told me how gorgeous I looked and introduced me to Patti, who sort of snarled at me like a taunted, ticked-off cat. Oops. After attempting some trivia talk with the two of them—with Patti glaring at me as if I was about to unzip Donnie’s pants—I excused myself to find Michael, hoping that a glimpse of my real live husband would make Patti retract her claws. Besides, Donnie and Patti were recently sober, and I thought Michael, who was now three long years clean, might provide some invaluable assistance for the former drug beast and his catty concubine. As you know, maintaining a close bond with my T.L.s has always been paramount to me, so I hoped we could get along. Michael and Don forged an instant sympatico sobriety bond, and as the men intensely rambled about the difficulty of staying sane in those excruciating early drug- and booze-free days, I hung onto Michael, making sure to gaze adoringly, and I could feel Patti finally start to relax and soften. I wasn’t a threat, after all.

Gradually she began to gab. “You wouldn’t believe what just happened,” she confided. “Right before you got here, Jan Michael Vincent’s girlfriend trounced over and stuck her tongue straight down Donnie’s throat, just to say hello.” I was appropriately appalled, telling her about all the salacious howdy-hi’s that I had had to get through. We commiserated about the shameless, wanton behavior of the desperate Hollywood dames we both had to contend with. Tsk tsk tsk. Patti was excited that Michael and Don could possibly hang out, and the idea that Michael could be a good influence on anybody, let alone my former passionflower, made me realize just how far he had come from those dastardly coke-couch days, so I
swelled with wifely pride within my tattered suede. By the end of the night, Michael and Don had figured out which AA meetings to attend together, and Patti and I had a lunch date the very next day.

A new friend! Meeting a new girl and hitting it off is almost as thrilling as falling in love. In some ways it’s even
more
rewarding because romantic passion and honey-devotion can be back-breaking, feverish work, whereas female kinship is a constant, consistent, uplifting experience you can always count on. Also, the part of the heart that winds up aching like gangrene rot is usually not involved, which has a lot to do with it. On the other hand, when a true-blue girlfriend does you in the feeling of shocked betrayal is like someone blowing their nose all over your face. Intentionally. Real hard. With malice.