Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (6 page)

After closing down Disneyland, we spent two days in Ensenada, Mexico, with Daddy and his best friend, Ruben, eating cucumbers on sticks sprinkled liberally with chile pepper, riding horses bareback
on the beach, buying big silver crosses and loud embroidered vests, taking a much-needed siesta under the smiling orange sun. Ruben and his wife threw a barbecue in our honor, and his many robust children, all dressed up in their frilly best, served us various chunks of blackened seafood drenched in lime juice. Michael drank many beers with my dad, and they shared a warped, semi-bonding experience; two hugely different worlds colliding with peculiar panache. “I go gold-mining too, O.C.,” I heard Michael say, tilting back the cowboy hat he had worn in my dad’s honor. “I dig for gold in the record business. Ha. Ha?” The long-haired, rake-thin, bejeweled and jangled English pop prince and O. C. Miller—Clark Gable look-alike, coal miner from Avery County, North Carolina—each sniffing the other from head to toe while casually discussing the current events of 1975. “No matter what they say about Watergate, Mike, Nixon did us some good.” I wish I had taken a picture.

We didn’t realize Michael would need his passport to get back across the border, so when the squinting, macho, mustachioed gendarme leaned his big face into Daddy’s Caddy and asked if we were all American, I piped up proudly, “My fiance is British!” O.C. gave me the evil eye and, sure enough, the square-shouldered squinter asked for Michael’s papers. “We didn’t think he would need them,” I squeaked. Michael was silent, and I knew he was way past pissed. After a lot of hassling, pleading, and cajoling, which didn’t work, the high-powered border patrol kept Michael in Dos Equis land over-night. We dropped him off at a supposedly safe, crummy motel right by the border. All he had with him was a copy of Vincent Bugliosi’s
Helter Skelter
and a beat-up gold leather jacket.

I had to go to the scary coke manager’s pad to pick up Michael’s passport and got to see the fancy little hole Michael called home while I emoted in Manhattan. He had my picture hanging over the couch he crashed on, and I got a rapturous little tingle while Mr. Dealer chuckled in the background with his cocaine residue, fishy grin, and jittery hands. I tried to deny it to myself, but he and Michael shared a common, albeit depraved, drug bond that I had excluded myself from by trying to set a Goody-Two-Shoes example. I attempted to smile back at him after the passport was procured, but my grin muscles were paralyzed.

I tried to sleep at my parents’ house for a couple of hours before I set out on the trek back to Mexico but was so distressed about my man trapped in his nighttime Tijuana net, I couldn’t even keep my eyes closed. Worried weak, I flew through the bright blue morning
in Daddy’s metal-flaked copper-colored Caddy (painted in Mexico, of course; Earl Scheib was nowhere in sight) with Michael’s important passport in the pocket of my jeans and was so relieved to see my man waiting for me outside the border dump. Once ensconced within the frozen-aired comfort of the Fleetwood, he cuddled into me and cracked me up with his tale of woe in TJ. He said it had been a Helter-Skelter frightmare, with Anthony Quinn look-alikes looming in the shadows, loitering outside his flimsy door all night long. “I kept expecting Charlie, disguised as Viva Zapata to knock the door down and offer me some acid,” Michael moaned at me. He could be amusing in the most dire circumstances. He had shoved the only piece of furniture besides a charming, squeaky cot—a three-legged table—against the door because there was no lock. Since all his neighbors resided in cardboard boxes, he realized he should have been grateful for the shelter, but his terror was compounded by reading about wack-eyed Tex Watson and Charlie’s zombie kill-girls. Sitting on the floor by the window, next to the misfit table, he read the hideous revelations by the only available light; a lone bulb out in the hallway, surrounded by drunken, dusty moths. A fabulous topper to his first south-of-the-border vacation.

A few days later I got on yet another plane bound for New York, while Michael stood by gallantly. I bit my tongue hard so I wouldn’t beg and plead with him one more time to stay away from the devil drug cocaine and the liver eater alcohol. When I was settled in for the five-hour flight, I plunged into my purse, trying to locate a roll of Turns for my lonesome, aching tummy, and came across a little note Michael had hidden inside. “My Darling Pamela, please don’t worry your beautiful head about my bad habits. I want to be a success more than I want boils. I love you more than ever, and your love and concern for me are too strong for the negativity one can get caught up in. Sweetheart, I adore you and I won’t hurt you.” Michael’s skin was flawless and fortunately he was splendidly vain, so I was always telling him he would break out with big, red gonks if he ingested too much evil poison (one of my ploys to keep him straight). In his inimitable fashion, he was reassuring me he would take care of himself, and I prayed to the saints, holy lady Amal three times, Mother Mary and her beloved son Jesus that he would.

January 24
—
Michael’s birthday and our first anniversary! I’m so in love it’s desperate. I hope we can stick it out during all these separations. Sometimes I get a sick feeling in my tummy. Fear? Anxiety? Realizations? I have got to try to
understand
the boy. It worries me so, and it’s bad for me to worry. It’s just as bad for my soul as what he’s doing is for his soul. God bless me. God bless him, God bless us. Karma, karma, it’s all karmic; past lives reuniting us to completion. Oh help
.

Speaking of past lives, Led Zeppelin sizzled into town and my dear, old friend Robert Plant sent a limousine to Bleecker Street so I could enjoy their show at Nassau Coliseum in style. They splintered the place as usual and afterwards took me to a dastardly bash, way out of town at a creepy old guy’s house in the sticks. There was no lighting, no refreshments, no ambiance, and very few party-goers in attendance, and I was confused until it dawned on me that the grotesque old fellow was a notorious, drug-scum-dealing dog. Rod Stewart was there in one of the dingy, darkened rooms, Mick Jagger was hovering. Keith Richards loomed around in the gloom like a storm-cloud warning. I sat on Robert’s lap, trying to make small talk with Jimmy Page’s momentary doll, while these rock giants paid respectful, dutiful homage to this bald troll.

Mr. Page had undergone several transformations since he tossed his naughty whips into the trash for my blushing benefit so long ago. I still had chaotic, tangled feelings about my ex-shame-flame. The
gooey soft spot I had for him remained but was slowly eroding. It scared me to think that he had never been who he seemed to be. What was lurking under those ebony ringlets and cherubic petal face? His beauty was even fading. Going, going. . . He told a girlfriend of mine that the idea of blood mixed with semen excited him. She didn’t spend the night. Poor old Bonzo was always stoned-out drunk morose. He even slugged my friend Michele Myer in the jaw for absolutely no reason and got himself kicked out of the Rainbow Bar and Grill, his Hollywood home away from home. It was sad, sad, sad. When Zeppelin went on the road, it was as if they had been given permission to pillage, rampage, cut loose, and poke holes into millions of eardrums with that unprecedented, massive chunk of top-heavy metal. But when I tried to picture them at home in front of a glowing fire, sipping a nice cup of tea with their wives, the image was hard to conjure up. Robert was still majestic, John Paul Jones, silently enigmatic, but their glory days were crunching, blaring, grinding gradually to a halt.

Even though I had just danced with the demonic Led Zeppelin darlings and decided to stay away from rock madness, I dolled up my skinny self a few days later and went to an Alice Cooper show at Madison Square Garden to revel with my old friends in their success. Alice, the prototype for several copycat ghoul rockers, had opened for the GTO’s at the Shrine back in ’68, and seven years later he was being called a legend already. Pretty extreme. It shows you how rocky the rock world had become. We were having a grand old time backstage after the show, and I was feeling vivacious and sparkly when Bebe Buell strutted by, took in the scene and exclaimed, “Miss Pamela! You look so
good
! I hope
I
look as good as
you
do when I get to be
your
age!!” I was twenty-six and she was twenty-three. There was a stunned hush and Neal Smith, Alice’s tall, blond drummer admonished her tacky rudeness, which she, of course, pretended to know nothing about. “Did I
say
something? What did I
say?”
Her eyes were glittering fraud. Bebe had been Jimmy Page’s concubine after appearing as a
Playboy
Playmate, and I considered her to be one of the new breed of groupies who created a nasty disturbance just to be noticed. I thought it was sad that you couldn’t trust the new groupie girls. There was no camaraderie, no girlfriend affection: It was every bitch for herself. Bebe later lived with Todd Rundgren and had several notorious flings with people like Elvis Costello and Stiv Bators. We get along fine today. Why not? You have to let go of old crap, or it will become a layer of slimy scum blocking your vision.

My most major ex, Don Johnson, and the girl who pulverized my heart harder than anyone else ever had came to stay with me for a couple of weeks on Bleecker Street, and luckily my United roommate was up in the friendly skies somewhere. They slept in her bed, just outside my loft room, and every night I had to put a pillow over my head because their thrilling goings-on made me miss Michael sooooo much. Melanie Griffith was still only seventeen years old, but—thank God—had ceased to be a nubile thorn in my side. She was in New York doing publicity for her early spate of films, in which she played the innocent, Lolita-like danger-angel, torturing the likes of Gene Hackman and Paul Newman with those long legs and turned-up nose full of freckles. She and I shopped up the Village, and every time I oohed over something, she ran in and bought it for me. The only way I found to smoosh her generous nature was to keep quiet, but she must have seen the covetous shimmer in my eyes when I spotted some dangly heart earrings. As I took out the groceries to prepare the evening wad of vegetables, I found the heart-shaped sparklers nestled in the broccoli florets.

May 6
—
Feeling very warm and content, having just come back from the Russian Tea Room with Melanie, also a hoity-toit club where she’s a member. We talked our buns off and danced and had a great time. I feel very sisterly toward her
—
almost motherly. She and Don are having problems, and I hope they’ll make it. It’s amazing how things turn out. Life is such a learning experience, I feel so opened up and twinkling, even though we found an actual rat in the living room today. D.J. came to the rescue
.

Donnie chased the rodent around, swinging a curtain rod while Melanie and I stood on various pieces of furniture, squealing like we were in a nincompoop cartoon. We begged him not to flatten the frightened creature, and he finally coaxed it into a brown paper bag and hurled it out the window, back onto the scummy streets of Manhattan from whence it came.

Hard as it was to be strict with the Johnsons around, due to their lust for life and everything in it, I started a severe health regimen, which severely limited my evening fun options. Who wants to go out to dinner and watch someone starve? I even had to give up the Pink Teacup, the cool, old soul food joint directly next door to the bakery under my pad. The greasy odor of fried chicken livers and scrambled eggs with onions wafted through my window while I
crunched granola, wheat germ, and lecithin with raw milk. I dropped alcohol, gave up caffeine, used pure maple syrup instead of sugar in my herb tea (the only thing that has stuck, except now I use it in my coffee), and took all the fat out of my extremely boring diet. I had stopped red meat three years earlier with Donnie at the first Hollywood health food restaurant, Help, and now added dairy products to the growing list of no-nos. The big jolt of excitement came when once a week I went down to Christopher Street to cheat heavy with a cone of goat milk ice cream. Whoopee. I lost many, many pounds and paid a solemn nutritionist a hefty hunk of my soap salary to deprive me of the yummy things in life. At least I was skinny and looked good. It didn’t seem to make much difference. On top of Bebe Buell’s wide-eyed backstage comment, I got one more gigantic rusty nail slammed into my jumbled self-esteem. One rainy afternoon, after my two measly lines had been severed from the student lounge scene, I was fired from
Search for Tomorrow
.

The soft-eyed producer, Bernie Sofronski, who is now married to Susan (Partridge) Dey, could hardly look at me as he explained how I had been replaced by a big, clean-looking blond girl who understood the character better than I did. He said my heart wasn’t in it and I didn’t trust my own talent. Truer words had never been spoken. They had actually been holding auditions for the new Amy right in my face, and I hadn’t noticed. “Does the rest of the cast know?” my ego bawled at him when reality sunk in. Yes, Bernie said, they had even participated in the auditions. “I told them they couldn’t tell you,” he wimped at me, looking down at a pile of dumb, corny
Search
scripts. I was mortified. Sobbing silently, I wished I could sink through the floor and wind up on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in Fantasy-land. In the middle of John Wayne’s star on Hollywood Boulevard. On the dance floor at the Whisky a Go Go, whirling my brains out. Anywhere but this puny, stuffy office on 57th Street in New York City.

When I came out of the office, my costars—Morgan, Michael, and John—were standing sheepishly in the hallway, waiting it out. I felt like I was burning at the stake while they hugged me, making me feel better and much worse all at once. The actor’s ego is the most fragile thing on the planet, and they understood all too well how dejected, rejected, and deflated I felt. They took me back to the Russian Tea Room, where I trampled on my health regimen with three White Russians and two black ones. While my acting mates patted on me, I tried to eat a gushing, buttery chicken Kiev, but my
unsuspecting tummy retaliated, and the tempting morsel was whisked away. “This is probably the best thing that ever happened to you,” Michael Nouri stated encouragingly. “Who needs an idiotic soap opera? You’ll get back to Hollywood and star in a Scorsese movie.” And hogs will dance in heaven, right, pal? I called my weirdo acting coach Bill Hickey, and he assured me I was too good for the show anyway, and with my squashed ego semi-assuaged, I packed up all my stuff, grabbed Debbie and a guy from acting class, Joe Hardin, to help with the driving, got a spanking-new, drive-away Cadillac and headed west. Don and Melanie helped load up the car and stood at the window above the French bakery, waving as I started the three-thousand-mile trek back to my darling Michael.