“We slept in the truck that night with the radio playing and I swear, it was the most exciting night of my life. Better than being onstage and ten thousand people applauding. Better than the Grammy. Better than meeting the Queen of England. I know what they say about country men, but I’d rather have a man breathe tobacco on me than mouthwash. I like to smell a man sweat—shows he’s a man. I’d had it with those music-business men who smell like they’ve had the fumigators in, and when you have sex the sperm come out with their hands up and little gas masks on. Anyhow, one thing led to another with Lee, and we got engaged and we got married, and then we got divorced. Why did we break up? Well, it’s all in my hit song, honey: ‘He Wore Out His Wedding Ring on the Steering Wheel.’ Lee was always off in his truck somewhere, and not always alone. And I’ve never been the kind of gal to chew my nails and wait for my man to come home.”
She married husband number four on the rebound. Another Wayne—E. Wayne Woolf, a tour promoter who promoted himself to her manager, robbed her blind, and beat her soundly. Her clippings file had pictures of LeeAnn and E. Wayne in the tabloids, huge dark glasses not quite covering her swollen cheeks and eyes. Then one night, driving home from the bar, E. Wayne spotted the license plate on the car in front of him. It read: ‘911 NOW.’ Which E. Wayne took as a sign from Jesus that it was an emergency. That from this moment on he should give up drinking and music and all other godless things (though he negotiated an exclusion on the beatings) and follow the True Path of the Lord. When he came home, sober, clutching a Bible, LeeAnn left him. “I don’t remember all the violence,” she tells me. “Just the greatest hits.”
By this time she’d recorded eight platinum albums. She’d won two Grammys and several CMA awards. People magazine put her on its cover. A writer and photographer went to her hometown to interview her family and her mother shouted at them through the screen door that her daughter was a whore. They had a picture of Tommy Moorhead, who was no longer the cutest guy—he’d lost most of his hair and some of his teeth and a beer gut was poking through his checkered shirt. His sentiments on his childhood sweetheart pretty much echoed those of his former mother-in-law. Wayne B. could not be interviewed, since he’d been shot dead in the Cactus Joe’s parking lot by a crazy drunk last year, but the magazine ran that wedding photo too, and the one with E. Wayne, and a picture of Lee and LeeAnn, standing by a semitruck hung with streamers and silver horseshoes and white flowers, smiling like two kids in love.
“When Lee and I fell apart, it hit me like never before. Or since. I drank too much—I know I fucked too much, anyone who would buy me a drink. Not that I couldn’t have afforded to buy my own—for Christ’s sake, I bought a fucking bar, I bought Cactus Joe’s and gave it to Wayne B., God rest his soul, to get him off my back—it’s just, we don’t do anything without a reward really, do we? A drink, a cigarette, even just a hug. It was not a good time for me at all; I was kind of drowning. E. Wayne Woolf Enterprises”—she scraped quote marks in the air with four scary red talons—“wasn’t much of a life belt. Really it was getting that part in the Willie Nelson film that pulled me through.
“Yeah, that was the film where I got to kiss his nipple. I kissed Willie Nelson’s nipple. That was weird. But Willie was a great guy, he really stuck up for me—I was giving everyone a hard time, turned up late on the set a coupla times, with the drinking and all. I didn’t really know that I wanted to kiss Willie Nelson’s nipple, but that film sure turned me around. What did it taste like? Hell, girl, you’re crazy! I guess I didn’t do it too well, because that was the first and last film part I got offered.”
“Excuse me?” A young man with a North London accent and an utterly nondescript appearance has come over and is hovering at a safe distance. LeeAnn looks up and gives him a radiant smile. He just goes on standing there; he doesn’t appear to actually want to say anything else. She holds out her hand and says, “Hi, I’m LeeAnn.” “I know,” he says self-consciously. “I just wanted to say I’m a big fan of yours and, er, well, that’s it, actually, I just …” “Well, thank you,” says LeeAnn graciously. “Which is your favorite record?” The guy looks pinned to the spot. He says, like he’s afraid to say it, “Well, actually, Two’s Country, the album you did with your—” He stops short before the word “husband” and substitutes, “‘Big’ Willie Bean.”
“Well, that’s one of my favorite records as well,” says LeeAnn, beaming. “Thank you—what’s your name? Gram? Oh, Gra-ham. Thank you, Graham. It was a pleasure meeting you.” Poor Graham looks like he’s going to dissolve on the spot. He turns to go, remembers something, and thrusts a beer mat in front of her, then grunts something inaudible which LeeAnn, bless her, interprets correctly as an autograph request.
“Willie Nelson,” she says when we’re alone again, “was the one who introduced me to Willie Bean. Like I said before, I figured one Willie was as good as another and a ‘Big’ one better still, but”—she grabs my forearm again—“don’t believe all you read, honey. Men lie. But Willie Bean came into my life right when I needed him. He’d been a hard-living man, a country singer of the old school, and he’d had problems with drinking and drugging of his own. He was cleaned up when I met him, and he cleaned me up too.
“It was kinda weird being with Willie Bean at first. Up to now I’d been the big star in my relationships, and I was getting kind of used to it, though it came with its own heartaches—men don’t like you to do better than they do, it eats away at them and they can’t get it up no more, and of course that’s your fault. But with Willie Bean and me, we used to take it in turns. I’d go sit in the wings when he did a show and watch the crowd go crazy for him, and he’d sit in the wings at my shows and do the same for me, and the audience would see him and they’d make me bring him out and sing with me, and he’d drag me out onstage to sing with him as well. And then we figured, Hell, we might as well just do our shows together, so that’s what we did.
“He was a wonderful man, Willie Bean—a Capricorn, and Capricorns are real romantics. Never laid a hand on me. He was never mad at anyone, not as I know of; I guess I was the first. He used to say to me, ‘Women are such beautiful creatures. You can never figure out the way they think. I think that’s why God put them here on earth, to make us men think all the time so we’d have something to do and stay out of trouble.’ I guess in the end there were three things wrong with Willie Bean. He believed in God, he believed in me, and he wanted to stay out of trouble. I guess I should have met him while he was still a hard-living man.”
There’s another young man standing at the table, even younger than the last one, maybe all of seventeen, but this one doesn’t look shy at all, and he’s gorgeous. A tall, thin, leather toothpick of a guy with an enormous blue-black quiff. He bends over; at first I think his neck and shoulders can’t stand the weight of his hair, but he’s bending down to kiss LeeAnn on the lips. “Can I get you something, darlin?” he drawls in a Southern accent. He has cheekbones you could shave your legs on, except he would have to shave mine first. Everyone in the pub is looking at his hairdo except me; I’m looking at the enormous stiffie straining to break out of his leather pants barely six inches from my face. I can’t take my eyes off it. LeeAnn must have noticed; she grabs his butt. “Meet Joe-Bob,” she says. “A couple more beers would be nice, angel.” “Sure thing,” he says, adding, “Nice to meet you,” although she hadn’t told him my name.
“Joe-Bob,” says LeeAnn while he’s at the bar, “is my guitar player. Seventeen years old.” I guessed right then. “I’m taking him on the road with me—I’m not letting this one out of my sight! Anyhow, you want to have something for the girls to look at as well, don’t you? You can’t work with older guys because as they get older they’ll have either made it as a musician and have their own thing going, or they won’t have made it and so they hate you. And old guys always have encumbrances—families, house payments. I think women are so much more flexible, we can work out those little problems much more easily, but I don’
t like playing with other women on the road, they’re too goddamn competitive. So that only leaves younger guys. Tough, huh?” She laughs. Joe-Bob returns with our beers, runs his hand along LeeAnn’s cheek, and goes back and sits at the bar.
Does Joe-Bob make her feel like a kid again? I ask, pretty stupidly, but it’s hard to think of anything smart to say when all your blood has abandoned your brain and gone to your genitals.
“Hell no!” she exclaims. “Being a kid again—I dreamed about that not long ago, being back home in my bedroom with my sisters and my mom and dad in the next room. I woke up scared stupid. It’s number one in my top ten of things that scare me stupid, followed by waking up in bed with my first, my second, my fourth, and my fifth ex-husbands—I still have a soft spot for Lee Starmountain—then waking up and finding I’m waitressing, or finding out there’s really a God, or losing my mind, or losing my teeth, or my tits, or anything beginning with T until you’re up to ten.”
She hadn’t been back home again since her mother died.
“Shit, that was one crazy time.” She gives a skewy laugh, but you can tell it wasn’t funny. “My mother. It was January—real cold. My father had been real ill and my sister—the youngest one, who lives in San Diego; they all moved far away as possible eventually—she told my mother she was coming over to take my father back with her for the winter. Which caused a mighty row, my mother figuring on Southern California as the next best thing to Sodom. But my sister, good as her word, flies out and fetches my father, who is too gaga to protest even if he wanted to.
“Like I said, it was a bitter winter. So cold that my mother got up in the middle of the night, stood on a chair, and took down the suitcase off the top of the wardrobe where she’d packed away their old electric underblanket the year before. She pulled off the bedclothes and strapped it onto the mattress, plugged it in, turned it on, and remade the bed and lay down. The effort made her ill and she reached over for her pills and they say that’s when she had the stroke. Couldn’t move—couldn’t get her pills and couldn’t turn off the blanket, which was a real old one, no thermostat, just kept getting hotter and hotter. And she broiled on it for a whole week before a neighbor thought to call the cops.
“I didn’t really accept that she was dead till I saw her laid out in the Chapel of Rest. It was my mother all right, looking like one of her overcooked Sunday roasts. My sisters all kissed her and cried, but I couldn’t do either. I took a taxi to the airport and flew right on out of there and when I got home I went to the nearest bar and said, ‘Take everything you’ve got off those shelves and pour it into one big fucking glass.’”
Her new manager comes over—one of those sharp-suited-young-businessman types, nothing to do with country but fingers in all sorts of pies. Though not LeeAnn’s, judging by the way he’s looking at Joe-Bob’s behind. I figure he must have heard where the conversation was going.
“How are you two doing?” he asks solicitously, which all journalists recognize as shorthand for “Time’s up, interview’s over, now fuck off.” The pub’s starting to fill up anyway and people are staring at us. Show time’s less than an hour away.
“Lord, is that the time?” says Lee Ann exaggeratedly. “I do go on. I hope you have everything you need.” Joe-Bob comes over and gives her his arm and helps her up like a real Southern gentleman, and there it is again, at eye level. A hot ball of lust grips my crotch and glides up my insides like a Lava lamp. I think I’m falling in love.
“Have you ever been in love?” LeeAnn asks me, and I must have blushed because she pats my arm and says, “You don’t have to answer, honey, I was just being curious. Just wondered how it would be to ask you a question instead. You know, you’re the first woman interviewer I’ve had in a long time. Usually I get men. We girls have to stick together. A lot of women say they can really relate to my songs. They say, ‘This is my song,’ and I say, ‘Yes, honey, it is.’ The best songs are like listening in on a private conversation, don’t you think so? Well, it was a real pleasure talking to you—I’m sorry, what was your name again?”
SPITTING IMAGE (THE ‘80S RETRO TRACK)
Perry Kaye was number one. Princess Diana loved him. Quite how much she loved him led to a good deal of speculation in the press. His lips were ripe and full without being meaty or dangerous, his chin was lightly stubbled, and his hair, short and wavy, was slicked back off his face. He had a part in a bad soap opera and a worse Lloyd Webber musical and an album and two singles high in the charts. He had just released the second part of his autobiography, Don’t Just Sit There (It’s Your Life, Get On With It); part one, You Can Do It (If You Really Want), still topped the Times best-seller list. His face was in all the Sunday magazines, and his butt was in tiny cycling shorts. Whatever you thought of Perry, his ass was a masterpiece. What Elvis was to lip curls, Perry was to butts. So when Spitting Image made Perry’s puppet they started at the bottom.
The original plan was to recycle the puppet of Andrew Ridgely of Wham!, which had been sitting in a cupboard since the first series, but no one could find it; it’d probably gone the same way as Andrew Ridgely. Then someone came in from the storeroom waving Samantha Fox’s talking mammaries. And in a studio that smelled of scorching latex and looked like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre—dripping heads and limbs on meat hooks above vats of steaming glob—they prised off Samantha Fox’s puppet’s lip-nipples and messed with the electronics so that each buttock rolled and bumped independently. And from piles of photographs they built the perfect popstar parody. Not an easy job when most popstars are already parodies of themselves.
Not every famous person loved their Spitting Image but Perry did, with its fat red lips like double-parked London buses, how when they parted in a smile the other puppets would throw their arms across their eyes to shield them from the dazzle. He loved the sketch where his puppet sat at a desk chewing on a pencil, scrawling titles with lots of brackets in and scribbling them out, while Princess Di, gooey-eyed, hovered by him with a Biro, playing join-the-dots with the stubble on his cheeks. He adored the “Botty Ford Clinic” sketch, where a puppet George Michael, shamefaced and in shapeless trousers, shuffled into a room full of aging popstars whose rear ends all spread over the edge of their seats. As each of them got onstage to confess their backside backsliding, Perry’s puppet watched from the corner, his tight round buttocks sliding gaily from side to side like a cow chewing the cud.
He sat in front of the TV with his remote control and reran the videos over and over. He decided without bias that his was the best puppet Spitting Image had ever made. He had to have it.
Clive MacFee, Perry’s manager, called the TV company. First he tried to get it for nothing, in exchange for promises of lots of valuable coverage in the press. They laughed and said it wasn’t for sale. Finally, after long negotiations, everyone agreed on a sum that equaled the economy of a small third-world country, and Perry started readying his home for its arrival.
The den—the room where he kept his gold and platinum records and framed photos of himself with his arm draped chummily round Donald Trump, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Fergie, the Pope, politicians left, right, center, and Cicciolina, and Princesses Diana and Stephanie, plus the statue of him currently on display in the Whitney that Jeff Koons had made—would henceforth be Puppet Perry’s room. Decorators redid the white walls and matte-black designer minimalism in Saudi Moderne rococo red and gold. Heavy gilt frames now encased the awards and pictures. Fat rugs squatted on the floor. In the center of the room stood an ornate French daybed. Perry’s personal assistant was kneeling in the corner, blowing up the sex doll that Perry had sent him out to buy, in a moment of inspiration, as a partner for his puppet. He propped it up on the pillow, where it sat staring dumbly, its red mouth yawning, its plastic pussy puckering between splayed pointy legs.
Perry decided he should throw his Spitting Image a “Welcome Home” party. MacFee called up columnists and all his famous friends. Paparazzi scaled his walls when word got out that Princess
Di would be there, and hurled abuse at an army of shed-shaped men in dinner jackets who threatened them with castration if they didn’t remove themselves pronto to the other side of the street. Flashes flashed as Mick and Jerry, tailed by Saint Bob and Paula, glided up the pathway and through the door. A famous politician sat on the daybed swigging Cristal, while two even more famous footballers kicked the blowup doll across the floor. Perry wove among them, theatrically cuddling, noisily kissing everybody’s lips, gripping their shoulders and jumping back dramatically to ooh and aah at their svelteness or their clothes. He accepted their outsized compliments with a burr of his eyelashes and a birdlike wiggle of his butt. He chatted with the selected journalists and posed beaming with designers, stars, and supermodels for the photographer his PR had hired for the night.
Then one of the footballers—purple-faced with alcohol, bouncing the sex doll up and down on his knee and telling no one in particular, since everyone had moved away from him, that Perry’s puppet’s condoms should be made of human skin—suddenly ejaculated: “Well, where is it then?” And the whole room, as it does, went suddenly silent. They looked at him and he grinned sheepishly and repeated, more quietly this time, “Where’s the bleeding puppet?” And Perry’s smile imperceptibly melted and a droplet of cold panic dribbled down his spine. His manager felt it across the room and teleported to his side.
Too Weird for Ziggy Page 12