Lips Unsealed

by Belinda Carlisle

  Morgan and I hired noted architect Brian Murphy to make our dreams real. I told Brian that I wanted the style to be “Alice in Wonderland on acid”—and that’s exactly how it turned out. The kitchen had a lavender slate floor. A mural in the dining room was an homage to Maxfield Parrish. Outside, the French gardens overflowed with flowers and vines that bloomed year-round.

  But I was sidetracked somewhat from that very personal project when I returned to work sooner than expected. Miles, who wished that Belinda, despite its impressive sales, had been edgier and more in the style of IRS acts, forgot to pick up the option on my contract with IRS and I found myself a free agent. My management and I decided to shop around for a new deal. Miles was furious. But we thought, Why not test the market?

  It turned out to be a shrewd move. After a bidding war between several major labels, I signed with MCA in the U.S., kept my foreign rights till after the next record was finished, and eventually made seven figures on both sides of the Atlantic.

  In a way it was like a reunion. MCA president Irving Azoff had managed the Go-Go’s after Ginger, and he was very supportive and enthusiastic about adding me to his roster of artists. Irving was also an astute businessman. After spending a significant sum of money to get me, he wanted to recoup it. He put me to work, scheduling the release of my next album for the following fall, barely a year away.

  Michael Lloyd expected to work with me again, but Irving had another producer in mind. I was given the difficult, if not heartbreaking, task of telling Michael, who was understandably upset. I felt awful, but it was one of those things. The silver lining was my new executive producer Rick Nowels, who had scored major triumphs working with Stevie Nicks, another MCA artist. In fact, Stevie had suggested he try to work with me. In a way, we may have been destined to partner. It sure felt like it when we met. We had instant chemistry.

  Rick was tall and blond, a Californian from head to toe, very passionate and a little eccentric. He wrote songs with Ellen Shipley, an amazing artist in her own right. They created songs specifically for my voice. For me, it was a brand-new and exciting way of working. I had never been anyone’s muse.

  When Rick and I talked about the album and how we envisioned it—what we wanted it to feel like and how we wanted the listener to feel—I had the sense he was reaching into my soul, removing tiny pieces, and magically turning them into songs. I was at his house when I first heard “Circle in the Sand,” and I thought, Oh my God, this is so good. He and Ellen topped themselves with “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” I heard the song the day after it was written. Rick sat at the piano, and Ellen sang. It was like they were showing me a newborn baby.

  I’ve had few reactions like the one I had after hearing them. I knew the song, even better than a hit, was a classic. Then the great songwriter Dianne Warren came into the studio one day and played me “I Get Weak.” Few people know the quality of Dianne’s voice; it’s gravelly and soulful and always moves me. “I Get Weak” was a perfect example. As she sang the final chorus, I literally felt weak myself. Again, I wondered how I got so lucky.

  At the same time, I had never worked as hard. Rick made me sing parts forty or fifty times. I could never figure out what specifically he was listening for. Thank God he eventually heard it, though, or I might still be there.

  Everything fell into place. Through Morgan’s best friend, John Burnham, I was fortunate enough to get Academy Award–winning actress Diane Keaton to direct the videos for “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” and “I Get Weak.” I was almost intimidated to meet her, but she was utterly charming and thoroughly inspirational in her approach to work. I only had to look at her body of work or the way she dressed (beautifully and with style) to know she had great taste, so I said, “Just do what you want.”

  She came back a week later with concepts and a storyboard. I said great, and we got started. On September 18, “Heaven” was released as the first single. Within two months, the song hit number one in the U.S. It also topped the charts in the UK, Germany, and a handful of other countries. It’s rare that lightning strikes twice. I knew the odds against it happening to me a second time. I had to pinch myself when my album, released in October to mixed reviews, turned into a worldwide hit: a top 20 platinum seller in the U.S. and multiplatinum around the world.

  As I kicked off the “Good Heavens” tour, I asked Morgan if it was real or if I was dreaming. It seemed like a mistake. I figured it had to be. He didn’t know how to deal with that kind of mind-set other than to tell me to realize that these things were not accidents; I had worked hard for years.

  His comment caused me to flash back to a time when I was on tour in the early days of the Go-Go’s, just as the band was first taking off. It all seemed too fantastic; I had a moment right before we went onstage when I wondered where I was going to be ten years later. Now I knew. A couple days into the tour, I had another similar sort of moment. I was standing behind the curtain, atop a small platform, getting set to descend the three stairs as the spotlight hit me, and yet instead of breathing, focusing, and doing all the things I normally did in the seconds before the show started, I was thinking about how weird it was that I was doing this.

  Me? Belinda Kurczeski from the Valley? What was I doing here?

  I felt an odd and slightly unnerving disconnect between what I was doing and … and me … whoever that was.

  seventeen

  RUNAWAY HORSES

  WHO WAS I?

  It was a good question, and one I was trying to figure out. For the Heaven album and tour I grew my hair long and dyed it red. I was wondering if being punk’s Ann-Margret suited me when I was walking down the street one day in Beverly Hills and ran into the Sparks brothers, Russel and Ron Mael, whom I hadn’t seen in a while, and Russell blurted out, “Oh my God! You’re a redhead! It looks great!”

  He had great taste, so I figured it must be true. My friend Jeannine, who had been my roommate after I split with Mike Marshall, also reassured me it was a good color, and she had excellent taste, too. She came on the road with me, along with Jack and Charlotte, all of whom knew to one degree or another that I needed their friendship and support. They didn’t know how badly I needed it, though.

  On my previous tour I had seen Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” video and got it in my head that I had to be as thin as her. For this tour, I wanted to be even thinner. The irony was I knew I photographed well no matter what I weighed, and beyond that, in discussions with friends, I always took the position that you didn’t need to diet or reshape yourself to look a certain way in order to be beautiful.

  I could even hear myself telling girlfriends, “You can diet all you want, but beauty comes from the inside. You have to like yourself before you can ever feel beautiful.” But I wasn’t listening to my own advice. I had become my mother, a gorgeous woman who had, when I was growing up, always been on a diet even though she didn’t need to lose weight. I never understood that until I had done the same thing and later came to realize the diet wasn’t at all about weight; it was about feeling inadequate and wanting to be in control.

  Once the tour started, I fell into a bad state of mind. Publicly, I told people that either it was impossible to eat healthy on the road or I told them that I was on a health kick and exercising regularly. In reality, I was obsessed with eating and exercising, to the point where I weighed myself ten to fifteen times a day. And my day was ruined if I gained a pound. If I got dressed in the morning and the waistband to my trousers felt a little tight, I got hysterical.

  All the self-doubt and insecurity I never dealt with during my so-called recovery bubbled up to the surface, making it so nothing I did made me feel good enough. I should have been ecstatic as “I Get Weak” rocketed up the charts in early 1988 to number two and was then followed into the top 10 by the next single, “Circle in the Sand.” My tour sold out, too. However, I wasn’t able to celebrate or enjoy the achievements. Instead I stood in front of the mirror when I was on the road or in front of Morgan after I re
turned home and asked, “Do I look fat? Am I fatter today than yesterday? Okay, forget that. Do I look fatter than I did this morning?”

  It was all about holding on, and holding myself together, when inside, without such insane resolve, I could have easily fallen to pieces. Morgan wanted no part of such craziness and was somehow able to detach himself from it. He turned his attention to producing and spent most of 1988 working on Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a low-budget independent movie that his young discovery, Steven Soderbergh, had written and was set to direct about the effect a voyeuristic guy has on his former college roommate and the roommate’s wife.

  Morgan had given me the script and asked for my opinion. After reading the opening dozen pages, I told him it was fantastic. After I finished reading it, I was unsettled by Steven’s take on sexuality and fidelity, but, as I told Steven at some of the dinners we had together, getting a strong reaction from me was a good thing.

  I liked the freshness of his work, and I liked Steven even more. He was a brilliant nerd. He reminded me of a lot of artists I had met in the punk world—guys with talent, vision, a strong, unique voice, and a need to work in their own unconventional way.

  Morgan was wrapped up in production when I went into the studio to make my next album, Runaway Horses. Though a number of major producers inquired about working with me, I teamed up with Rick Nowels again. For a second time I was in the studio trying not to think about the pressure and high expectations. Yet the industry’s reigning A&R guru John Kalodner laid it right out there by saying, “If Belinda gets this album right, she’s going to be the biggest star in the world.” I tried not to think about it, but I knew the opportunity was there.

  Rick, who immediately brought in some amazing songs, like “La Luna” and “Summer Rain,” wanted to record part of the album in the South of France, and after the label gave permission, we set up camp outside Aix-en-Provence in the massive Château Miraval, the same thirty-five-bedroom estate Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie lived in twenty years later.

  Although the château was beautiful and on first getting there I imagined myself a princess arriving at her castle, I found it to be a depressing place in the middle of nowhere. I got a boost when Charlotte and Jeannine arrived. At first, they thought they’d gone to rock-and-roll heaven. We went on long morning hikes across the countryside, ate rich lunches prepared by a private chef, recorded, took naps, and then ate dinner in the nearby village.

  It was ideal—for a week. Then they were as bored as me and the three of us took off to watch a Formula One race.

  For me, the highlight came during work on “Leave a Light On,” another gorgeous Rick and Ellen Shipley song. Rick said we should try to get someone cool and with a distinctive style to play the lead guitar part. I thought for a moment and said, “What about George Harrison?” I had met George briefly a few years earlier in San Remo, Italy, and Morgan, through his work on Sex, Lies, and Videotape, knew someone who was close to the former Beatle and able to get word to him. George responded right away, saying he’d love to help out.

  He had worked with very few artists, so I was honored. I absolutely loved the work he eventually did. After he passed away, his widow, Olivia, told a mutual friend that she had found an old Runaway Horses cassette as she went through some of his stuff. She said, “Please tell Belinda that George really loved her voice.”

  Overall, we worked on the album as if money didn’t matter. We took a year and spent close to $1 million. That may have sounded great in the press, but now when I hear something like that I know, because it was the case with my album, that it signals trouble. We second-guessed ourselves right and left and lost touch with the basics and ended up with an expensive album, not the great one we had hoped to make.

  In January I was with Morgan at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah when Sex, Lies, and Videotape debuted and captured the Audience Award. Four months later, we went with the film to the Cannes Film Festival. We stayed at the Hotel du Cap and partied on yachts, and I bought a pink Chanel suit for the premiere. The film was awarded the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. It was an unbelievable time.

  Morgan was pegged as Hollywood’s hottest, most imaginative young producer. There was no doubt he had a Midas touch. I stared at him admiringly as he chatted with stars on the red carpet and spoke with reporters after the awards. He handled the attention with graceful appreciation. I could not have been prouder.

  But my smile was pretend. As I did press in preparation for my upcoming album, I knew I wasn’t telling the truth when reporters focused even more on my looks. Each time they asked about my transformation from the cute, chubby Go-Go to the glamorous pop siren with the chic, skinny body and long, red hair, I felt my skin crawl. I gave them the answer they wanted, but the truth was different.

  Privately, my eating disorder had a stranglehold on me. I was either a good girl or a bad girl. I would go five days in a row where I was a “good girl,” eating lettuce leaves with vinegar, a couple vegetables, and not allowing myself anything else. I was always on a severe diet. It was like holding a ball underwater, because I’m not built to be skinny. Then I would wake up starving, “allow” myself a bite of chocolate chip cookie, and immediately spiral into a depression.

  As far as I was concerned, at that point my day was ruined. I used it as an excuse to go on a disgusting, all-day binge. All I could think about was food and putting something in my mouth. I would eat until I went to bed, obsessively counting the calories I consumed. Sometimes I got up to five or six thousand in one day.

  If I didn’t punish myself, I picked fights with Morgan. I wasn’t any good at feeling happy. I attended Overeaters Anonymous meetings and called my sponsor every day to tell her what I planned to eat the next day. But those calls made me feel like my food obsession got worse, not better. All I thought about was what I was going to eat.

  I found reasons OA wasn’t for me. First I didn’t like the people, and then I said I couldn’t connect with my sponsor. Obviously I wasn’t ready to make it work. As with any twelve-step program, you have to invest in the system and work the steps, and I didn’t. I wasn’t willing to acknowledge the first step: admitting I was powerless over my problem and my life was unmanageable.

  I thought I was managing.

  In September, “Leave a Light On” came out and was a hit everywhere in the world except the U.S., where it failed to crack the top 10, an indication that times and the music-buying public’s taste had changed. When Runaway Horses hit the stores a month later, it opened well overseas but struggled here at home, needing six months to creep its way to a very disappointing peak of 37.

  Although I put on a positive face for the press, I was deeply hurt by the album’s failure to live up to expectations. In many ways, it was my favorite collection of songs. Morgan counseled me to work at the things I could influence and let go of everything else. I tried. Some days I managed. Other days I was filled with anxiety and struggled with all of my issues.

  On the bright side, I crossed paths with Gina one day. After a fun catch-up, the two of us on a whim arranged for a reunion with the other Go-Go’s. Without telling anyone, we met for dinner at an Italian restaurant in West Hollywood. It was the first time the five of us had been together since Jane left and our subsequent breakup. All of us were nervous. Jane held up her palms and said, “They’re sweaty!”

  We agreed to one ground rule: none of us would say anything that would piss off someone else. Then we had a great time. We reminisced about the crazy times we’d had in the early days, offered apologies for things said in the latter days, worked through some hard feelings, and, as we told a local reporter who got wind of the reunion, we realized “even the bad times we’ve gone through didn’t seem so bad.”

  I left dinner appreciating the special camaraderie the five of us shared—and that it had survived. But all was not rosy. As I later confessed to Morgan, I felt uncomfortable about having a successful solo career when some of the other girls were struggling in their end
eavors. While Jane and Charlotte were both working on albums, Gina’s label had dropped her and Kathy didn’t have a deal.

  I realized everyone might benefit from a Go-Go’s reunion. I mentioned it to my manager, Danny Goldberg, who had a lengthy background as a political activist. A former Village Voice journalist, he had coproduced and codirected the 1980 documentary No Nukes and was involved with the ACLU, all in addition to managing Bonnie Raitt, Rickie Lee Jones, and other artists.

  He loved the idea of a Go-Go’s reunion. But it sat a few months until Danny found the right event, a fund-raiser Jane Fonda was spearheading for California’s environmental ballot initiative. It sounded good to me. I called the girls. Everyone was game.

  In January 1990, we announced our reunion show at a press conference with Jane Fonda. Two and a half months later, we got together for rehearsals at SIR, where I was also in rehearsals for my Runaway Horses tour. I felt self-conscious running back and forth between rehearsals and maybe some resentment from the other girls, who I sensed—and it could have been me being overly sensitive—looked at me as Miss High and Mighty with her rock band, getting ready for her world tour. At the end of the day, I was left feeling like I should apologize.

  But I was able to set that aside and enjoy stepping back into the Go-Go’s. It wasn’t hard for me to switch gears. The band was part of my DNA. On March 27, we played a surprise warm-up show as the KLAMMS at the Whisky, a stage that was like a second home in our punk days. We still looked like an odd collection: Jane wore short-shorts, Kathy was in a polka-dot negligee, Charlotte radiated laid-back L.A. rock chic in a long, embroidered shirt, Gina had on her trademark jeans and T-shirt, and I was in a fancy black gown that a girlfriend of mine laughingly said made me look like I had dressed to go to Harry’s Bar in London.

  The fun we had carried over into the next night at the Universal Amphitheater when we performed a set of the band’s hits to a crowd of L.A. politicos and celebrities that included Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal, and Sandra Bernhard. Afterward, all of us were agreeable to doing more shows and maybe even a tour later in the year when IRS released a greatest-hits package.