Like the other girls, I had high hopes for our new album, God Bless the Go-Go’s. We heard positive comments from those who got early listens. We felt like it would be welcomed by fans without giving critics a reason to ask why a couple of forty-plus-year-old moms and their gal pals had gone into the studio to play rock star. Whether it could compete commercially with younger acts was another question. All of us were hopeful. We crossed as many fingers as possible.
My expectations were dashed when our management team gave us a frank talk about the latest rules of radio. You had to buy your way into the top 10 these days, they explained, and the cost was several million dollars. Since that sum was beyond the means of our tiny label, we were told they had obligated us to do a million dollars’ worth of personal appearances for Clear Channel. To hype the album, we were told. Groans filled the room. We knew better.
But we believed in the album, so we grudgingly agreed to go forward with the grueling promotional schedule. We began in March with a ton of radio and press and a performance on The Late Show with David Letterman. We also participated in a tribute concert to Brian Wilson at Radio City Music Hall. We were the only act whose dressing room was in a completely different building. We figured they must have heard about our reputation. You couldn’t have found us if you wanted. We joked about having to take a cab to the show. But we had a good old time.
I was obsessed with meeting Elton John, who was among the other participants. I had met his boyfriend, David Furnish, at soirees in Nice, where they had a house. But I had never had the honor of meeting Sir Elton, one of my heroes. I kept a lookout when we were onstage, but they herded us on and off so quickly I didn’t see anybody until we were led back onstage for the finale, which included all the participants joining voices on “Good Vibrations.” Then I saw Elton across the stage.
As soon as the song ended, the producers tried to usher everyone off to different sides of the stage. I saw Elton being directed to the opposite side. It was as if someone knew what I had in mind. I said to myself, “No fucking way.” I tore across the stage as if I was back on the high school track team and introduced myself to Elton, who was warm, gracious, and friendly.
“My boyfriend is always going on about you,” he said. “You live right near us in Nice, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why don’t you just call us when we’re there and pop over?” he said.
A moment later, I was writing down Elton’s phone number and promising to call. Inside, I was thinking, Yeah, right, like I’m going to just pop in on Elton John. It was too bad that real life wasn’t as accommodating; I bet Elton and David were a hoot. But I didn’t have time to socialize.
In May, God Bless the Go-Go’s was finally released to the kind of warm critical reception we hoped for: a B+ from Entertainment Weekly, four stars from Blender, and a three-and-a-half-star high five from Rolling Stone, which said, “Leave a bottle of champagne out for twenty years, and you’d expect its essential bubbly brightness to be ravaged by … let’s not fool ourselves: drugs, infighting, egotism and what have you. To the credit of the Go-Go’s, they don’t forfeit any California sparkle with this slick and listenable reunion effort.”
With the album’s release, we set off on a month of nonstop promotion the label had arranged without considering the effect of such a grueling schedule. Or maybe they had but didn’t care if we were run ragged. We did a show in Irvine, California, then a USO show in Turkey, then television in New York, in-stores, radio shows, and more. We ran from morning till night. I thought it was bullshit. I broke down at a golf tournament in Chicago. We were only two weeks into the schedule and we had an arts fair and a chili cook-off ahead of us. I just started to sob hysterically.
It wasn’t a good vibe with the record company either. As veterans, we knew how the business operated. We also had ambitious expectations for the album. But we heard the label was having financial problems. It wasn’t a good scene.
As a way of coping with the stress and exhaustion, I slipped back into party gear. It was good-bye gym, hello late nights, booze, and coke. I got on a roll where after shows I invited people up to my room without any idea of who they were. If they wanted to party, my door was open. In one Midwestern city, I had about thirty people in my suite. As I walked through, I realized that I didn’t know a single person. It was like that night after night. I continued the party wherever we went. It was the same circus in each city, just with different clowns.
When I think about it, I was courting danger. I could have been letting all sorts of crazies into my room. I probably did, in fact—and who knows, I may have wanted something bad to happen as a way of getting me out of that situation. I remember that I panicked every day when it was time for me to call home and check in with Morgan and say good morning to Duke. Sometimes I was still off my trolley. I always felt like shit, both physically and about my ability as a mother.
How I got to there from the place I was when I shot my Playboy layout was a sad commentary on the sneaky hold of addiction. The August issue of the magazine came out at the end of July, during a short break prior to the last leg of the tour. I had been at home in France when my manager had called with an offer from Playboy. I reacted by going, Me? My parents happened to be visiting, and my mom immediately said, “It sounds great. You have to do it!”
I thought, If my mom says it’s okay, I might as well consider it. So I went to New York and met with a team from Playboy. I explained that I would pose if I could do it in the guise of a 1950s pinup. I didn’t have a problem with nudity, but I wasn’t an exhibitionist either, so for my own comfort I needed to feel like I was playing a character. I also insisted they keep the airbrushing to a minimum so I could show the real me. I was intent on making the point that you don’t have to be skinny, blond, wafer thin, have fake boobs, or be twenty years old to be sexually viable.
Morgan enjoyed the idea. He had dated Playmates before we met—but never, as I pointed out, a Miss August.
I did take the magazine up on its offer to work out with a trainer. I thought, Why not? This was an opportunity to get in incredible shape, something I would never do on my own. I also needed to clean up for my sake and Morgan’s. So I flew back and forth to work out with veteran trainer Dion Jackson. I worked my ass off for a month, lost twenty pounds, and could see and feel the difference in my body when it came time to drop my robe in front of the camera.
I did the shoot in Thailand. Duke came along for the adventure, though I made sure that no one told him what I was doing there. A few years later, when he was twelve years old, he found a stack of the Playboys at home and freaked out. But until then he was blissfully unaware. I had a blast taking the photos. They put body makeup all over me, lit me perfectly, and made me confident that I was going to look my best.
When I saw the test photos, I flipped. They were gorgeous, and I got even more into the session. It was only when I was back home and heard that the same person who airbrushed Elle Macpherson and Pamela Anderson was also working on my pictures that red flags went up and I said, “Uh-oh, how is this going to look?”
Then I saw the photos and they were beautiful—but it wasn’t me. The girls in the band thought they were great. My gay friends didn’t look—or they didn’t tell me—and my straight guy friends didn’t bring it up and I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask my family for their opinion either. I thought I’d leave that alone. However, a girlfriend of mine was looking through the magazine one day and let out an envious sigh that spun me around. What? She pointed to a picture of me holding a parasol and looking over my shoulder and said, “I wish I had a butt like that.”
“I do, too,” I said. “Because the one you’re looking at isn’t mine.”
A month later, I was in Italy, finishing a late lunch with an Italian friend at my favorite little restaurant, when Morgan called my cell phone and informed me that America had been attacked. My voice resonated through the small restaurant as I shouted, “What?” He told me about the pla
nes crashing into the World Trade Center, the people fleeing through the streets of New York City, and the chaos, concern, and uncertainty he was seeing and hearing on news reports.
I hung up and looked off in the distance, dazed. I filled my friend in on the details, at least what I knew, and paid the bill. I wanted to go home. On the way to the car, we stopped in a delicatessen for cheese and sausages. Then I was walking back to my parking space when an older Italian man approached me and asked, “Are you an American?”
“Yes,” I said.
He reached out, wrapped his arms around me, and squeezed. It was such a warm embrace I could almost feel his heartbeat. He let me go and looked in my eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry for what happened to your great country today.”
Throughout that day and week, my European friends called and expressed their sorrow and condolences as if I knew the victims. What I realized when I woke up from the shock was that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t personally acquainted with the people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks. In one way or another, we were all connected—and affected. I watched news reports nonstop that first day and night, but then turned the TV off after I realized it was making me sick.
In the months following that profoundly tragic and sorrow-filled time, I came down hard on myself. Why, I asked myself, was I such a mess when I had so much going for me? Why was I unable to get it together? Why were things such a struggle? Why did I feel full of gloom and despair?
Obviously I was an addict. But I wasn’t facing that reality, not when I relied on drugs and alcohol to take me away from my guilt, shame, and depression.
More conveniently, I assumed my problems stemmed from an inability to connect with the world and with life, not myself. I was so happy one day when I picked up the book The Buddha in Your Mirror: Practical Buddhism and the Search for Self. I had been reading various related books, but this one practically screamed at me to pick it up. It was about Nichiren Buddhism, the practice of chanting “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” as a way of recharging physically, mentally, and spiritually, and also getting to enlightenment, or Buddhahood.
The book was clearly and simply written, the sentences acting like translators to make a complex idea accessible. I thought the idea of finding peace through this chant, which means “I devote myself to the mystic law of cause and effect through sound,” was a beautiful idea. The author recommended chanting with other people and finding them through local sects of Soka Gakkai International, Nichiren’s global organization. I learned there was a headquarters in Santa Monica and another in New York City. I contacted both, and a woman from the Santa Monica group called me back. Vera and I had an excellent, thoughtful talk, and the next time I was in Los Angeles, I met her at a morning meeting, gongyo, at her home in West Hollywood.
Gongyos were twice-daily services where people recited the Lotus Sutra, the highest teaching of Buddha. There were twenty of us at this first one I attended. We sat in front of a gohonzon, a large mandala, beside which were placed displays of water, plants, fruit, and incense. Once the group began to chant, the room took off. It filled with an energy that sent me flying through a different dimension. I had no idea what to expect; it turned out better than I could have imagined.
Back in France, I started chanting on my own to a gongyo tape, but it wasn’t the same. Through a French chapter of Soka Gakkai, I was referred to a woman in Valbonne who organized Soka Gakkai meetings at her house. She turned out to be from San Francisco. We bonded over the difficulty of practicing in French. Little by little, though, I proved myself adept enough to receive my own gohonzon.
Despite my twice-a-day chants, I ended up more torn apart than enlightened. All that time sitting still and thinking seemed to cause the shit in my head to line up like soldiers in front of a review panel. During chants, I asked to be freed from my obsession to use. I pleaded for guidance. I wanted answers. Most of all I wanted release and relief from the dark alleys and self-destructive corridors I walked day in and day out as if I was held captive in a maze.
At the end of the day, chanting forced me to sit with myself and face my feelings, my sense of failure and regrets, my guilt and shame, my fears and insecurity. None of the stuff that other people saw—the rock star, the lucky marriage, the exotic life in a foreign country—none of that mattered. None of it was even relevant when I sat face-to-face with myself. Never mind posing for Playboy. People talk about the naked truth. The person I saw when chanting was the real me, the naked truth. I was fucked-up, unhappy, and seriously depressed.
Maybe that was enlightenment.
If it was, I was in trouble.
twenty-five
I PLEAD INSANITY
DESPITE MY best efforts, the inside of my head was not a pretty place. Even while touring with the Go-Go’s in February and March, and then on my own after the group went on a yearlong hiatus as Kathy waited to give birth to her first child in October, I chanted twice a day and said my recitations, always with the same hope that such religious devotion to the mystic sound would free me of my addictions and deliver me into a normal life. It didn’t.
I was spiraling deeper into negativity when I met a drug dealer in a Belgian restaurant, a meeting that put my life in danger, though I didn’t know it at the time. I had made a brief trip to Belgium, and while lunching with a friend I asked if she knew where I could get drugs. She nodded toward a waiter, then got up from the table, walked across the room, and gave him a tap on the arm as she walked past. They met in the back by the bathrooms, spoke briefly, and she told me everything was taken care of.
After dinner, my friend and I walked to a nearby bar and a few minutes later the waiter came in and sat at our table. A few minutes after that, I had some coke and a new contact. I used him a number of times over the next few months. Then he started to blackmail me.
It was early summer 2003, and I was in Los Angeles, rehearsing for Go-Go’s dates in August, when I received a message from him. What drug dealers call their clients? It doesn’t work that way. I listened to the message and turned ice cold. He wanted money from me, a pretty good sum, and he threatened to go public with my drug use if I didn’t give him what he wanted.
Obviously something was going on with him. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to be able to get rid of this problem. But I didn’t know how. I had no idea what to do.
I thought about telling Morgan, but I chickened out after considering all of the confessions I would have to make and the repercussions. Instead I did nothing. I appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and the British version of Hell’s Kitchen (the show’s star, chef Gordon Ramsay, made me mop the floor), and then I returned to France until I had to go on the road with the Go-Go’s.
Once the monthlong tour began at the end of July in Redding, California, I immediately slipped into that place I got to only on the road, when I could drink and use and isolate myself from the responsibilities and concerns of real life, including the drug dealer trying to extort money from me, which I thought about from time to time. It always upset me. It was one more secret I kept that weighed me down.
In mid-August, the Go-Go’s played the Summer Sonic Festival in Tokyo, and I was boozing and using heavily. We opened for Green Day, and thanks to our friendship with Billie Joe Armstrong, who had cowritten “Unforgiven” on God Bless the Go-Go’s, they rolled out the red carpet for us. Literally. They had a red carpet to the side of the stage, with our own little tent stocked with coolers of booze and beer. A sign said GO-GO’S ONLY. And I took full advantage of it.
The Green Day guys had us over to their hotel several times for champagne and caviar. We ended our nights drinking at two or three in the morning. One night they took us to the hippest rock-and-roll bar in Osaka and I ended up dancing on top of the bar to “Immigrant Song.” The next night, Green Day performed the Led Zeppelin classic onstage and dedicated it to me.
I went out drinking afterward with the guys and followed Tré Cool, Mike Dirnt
, and a couple of Green Day roadies back to Tré’s hotel room for more of the same. From what I heard through the grapevine later on, they told people they were amazed the Go-Go’s could outdrink them. I saw them a couple years later, after I had been sober for a while, and they said, “You look really good. And different.”
“I got some sleep,” I said.
They thought I was a badass, hard-partying rocker, which they said was even cooler since I was a chick. They had no idea I was an addict whose life was out of control.
I had left home in bad shape, and I returned in worse. Worn-out and drugged out, I was in a depression that had me feeling empty, worthless, hopeless, and like I had nothing: no energy, no thoughts, no anything. I thought about taking my life. It seemed like a solution, even a resolution to many problems. I had hurt too many people. I thought things might be better for me and everyone else if I wasn’t around.
I considered various ways, some painless, some inexplicably gruesome, like taking a handful of pills or veering my car off one of the steep mountain roads. I figured Morgan might be able to deal with it, but each time I was stopped when I thought of the pain I would cause my son. Even in the depths of my sickness, I couldn’t be that selfish and heartless.
I was stuck in that state of mind until September, when Morgan had enough of the depression and drama. One day after Duke, now twelve and old enough to know what was what, went to school, Morgan confronted me, insisting I tell him what was going on. He was angry and scared—angry at whatever I was doing and the life I was wasting, and scared that he and Duke might lose me.
That was the trigger. I couldn’t pretend or hide any longer. Nor did I want to. Crying, I told him everything. I was mortified, ashamed, and sorry. I wished that I had told him sooner. I wished that none of it had ever happened.
I asked Morgan to hold me. I needed to feel safe and protected. If he had said no, I don’t know what I would have done next. But Morgan took me in his arms and held me for a long, long time. Only God knows why, but he had an amazing ability to love me.
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