Face It

by Debbie Harry

  Because of our democratic ideals, with everyone sharing equally and having equal say, Chris and I had set ourselves up for problems. What had sounded good in theory proved unworkable. It might have helped some if we’d ever had a manager who knew how to mediate, or who could come up with ideas that everyone could live with. But now there was this divisive dynamic at work in the band that kept us all on edge and competing instead of being a united force. Not the best environment for creativity. I remember one of the record execs saying to Clem, “We hope this isn’t going to be another Autoamerican.” Clem had replied, “You mean, you don’t want The Hunter to have two big hit singles and go platinum in the U.S. and the UK?” So, we were butting heads within and without the band.

  But some good things did come out of The Hunter. We did a primitive-sounding remake of “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” the Smokey Robinson song that the Marvelettes recorded in 1967. I had no problem relating to lyrics like: “Secretly I been tailing you like a fox that preys on a rabbit,” although I’d actually been a bunny. “The Beast” was a song we wrote about being famous; it had a rap about the devil going out on the town. We’d originally written one of the songs as the theme for the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, but apparently Chris and I got it wrong. They already had a song, and they only wanted me to sing it. In the end Sheena Easton did the job. “Island of Lost Souls” was somewhat similar to “The Tide Is High,” with its Caribbean feel, but what I remember most about it is the Isles of Scilly video shoot. Such a wonderful place. The islands themselves are oddly tropical, lying off the southwest coast of Britain and being affected by the Gulf Stream. We had to get there by helicopter instead of the ferry because the seas were so rough. The gliding and the bucking and the swooping over the foaming waves below, a rush all its own.

  On the air . . .

  Dennis McGuire

  Then there was “English Boys,” a ballad Chris wrote as a tribute to the Beatles after John Lennon was shot. Oh God, that hit us hard. Not long before his assassination, our photographer friend Bob Gruen told Chris and me that John and Yoko wanted to get together with us, because we were a couple just like them. We had taken a copy of Autoamerican to the Dakota for them and heard that John played it all the time. Sean, John and Yoko’s son, said that “The Tide Is High” was the first song he heard as a little kid. We’d been scheduled to meet with them in their beautiful apartment. And then came the horror of John’s being gunned down outside the Dakota while signing an autograph.

  The hunter and the prey. People could be so obsessive. They would go to my parents’ house and knock on the door and they’d be nice to them. I told them not to talk to anybody. I started getting paranoid. This one time, I saw a guy pick up the garbage bag outside my door and walk off with it. I chased him down the street thinking he was an obsessive fan going through my trash. It turned out he was just a homeless guy looking for something to eat, so I made him a sandwich. I think it was even more difficult for Chris when I became so famous, because Chris was always very protective of me.

  The Hunter was released in May 1982. The cover photo was pretty bad; we wanted the makeup artist to do us half human and half animal and it ended up as this weird airbrushed thing. But weirdness of any kind was in keeping with everything else that was going down. The album made the top ten in the UK and number thirty-one in the U.S. If the record company had given it more of a push it might have done better. But there were big changes going on at our American record company. The Hunter would be our last album for Chrysalis U.S., although we wouldn’t find that out until later. So for the last time, we were going to go back on the road, with Eddie Martinez replacing Frankie on the tour.

  That fucking tour. We never should have gone. Chris was sick. Very sick. I have pictures of him where he was emaciated and weighed 110 pounds. I remember Chris talking to Glenn O’Brien beforehand and joking that this was his tour diet. But that tour nearly killed Chris.

  I can’t say exactly when the problem started, and I think that Chris has succeeded in putting it out of his mind, but he was unable to eat. He was having a terrible time swallowing anything, which is why he was getting so thin. We thought it was strep, we thought it was this, we thought it was that, and he just kept getting worse. Glenn thought that Chris had AIDS. Chris thought so too, or that he had cancer, or he was dying, and none of the doctors could give him an answer. We were doing drugs during that tour because it was the only way we could handle the stress or have enough energy to perform. Our designated gopher, “Bernie,” would go out and score the smack for us. There were times on the road, of course, when he couldn’t connect, and that would be really rough. Hell. And Chris kept getting sicker and sicker . . .

  We were in the U.S. touring with Duran Duran in stadiums at the time, with a UK and Europe tour to follow. I remember there was talk of going to Japan. Our Japanese promoter and our U.S. agent asked me, “Do you want to go?” I said, “Yes, of course I want to go,” but I didn’t want to say how sick Chris was, because he didn’t want people to know. The Japanese promoter ended up suing us: he’d translated my answer into a contractual confirmation and had sold a bunch of tickets. But that was the least of our worries. Chris was wasting away. More than once, he collapsed. We managed to get through the last night of the Duran Duran tour, at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia in August 1982. There was no way we could go to Europe.

  And that was it. It was over. Not just the tour, but Blondie. The band officially broke up a few months later. Mike Chapman, our producer, said he could tell things had changed in the band during the recording of The Hunter. He could feel something ending, he said, and he was right.

  We went back to New York, to our new home on the Upper East Side. It was a huge town house with five floors on East Seventy-Second Street. A symbol of our success. Money had started coming in at last and it was our accountant’s idea that we should buy this place. He was the one who set up the deal. The house was so big it had an elevator. Chris had his own studio down on the garden level and on the top two floors there was a separate duplex apartment that we never went up to. In fact we let a couple of people we knew live in it: Patrick, a poet who dealt a little bit of heroin, and Melanie, who was working as a phone operator for call girls and phone sex. Some goons with Doberman pinschers had evicted them from their little apartment on First Avenue downtown. That was happening a lot in the early eighties. Landlords were trying to get everybody out of these places so they could raise the rent. Things were changing in so many ways.

  About all Chris and I did at that point was to go from doctor to doctor, all of them testing Chris for AIDS and cancer and everything else and saying, “We don’t know what it is.” They would check him into the hospital but Chris would get fed up and he would check himself back out and return at four o’clock in the morning, saying, “I had to go, I couldn’t stand it.” I would try to make something he could eat. I would take a whole chicken and pulverize it, making it as much of a puree as I could, but he couldn’t even swallow that. The only thing he could swallow, we finally worked out, was Tofutti, an ice cream made from tofu that was cool and soothing and would just slide down his blistered throat. He was living on Tofutti, although there was really no nourishment in it, so he continued to shrink away before my eyes. We felt so desperate and so isolated from hiding his strange illness from the world and imagining the worst. We were terrified.

  “Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller that there is.”

  —Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs

  Bobby Grossman

  Then one morning, I woke up and Chris looked horrific; his legs were swollen. “I’ve had it,” I said. “That’s it!” and called up a young doctor we’d met, asking him to come over to the house, which he generously did. One look at Chris and he said, “This is real trouble, he can’t stay at home like this.” So he got us into the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital, which was only blocks from our house. Then one of the doctors associated with Lenox Hi
ll got involved in the case. After a couple of weeks, Dr. Hambrick was able to correctly diagnose the disease. During those two weeks, Chris had been put in isolation and no one could go into the room unless they were masked and gowned. All the nurses thought that he had AIDS and many of them refused to even go into his room.

  What Chris had was pemphigus vulgaris, a rare and complex disorder of the autoimmune system. Until not so long ago, pemphigus would kill over 90 percent of its victims outright. The throat is the first part of the body to display its characteristic blistering and broken skin. Then it keeps spreading and spreading and spreading externally if left untreated. Western medicine originally thought pemphigus was caused by stress or burnout but later figured out that there was a viral component. Now that they knew what the disease was, they started Chris on steroids. They gave him a cream used for second-degree burns for external use, because his flesh was raw and open, much as if it had been burned. I’d spread it all over the bedsheet. That Silvadene cream gave him some comfort because without it he couldn’t lie down.

  Chris stayed in Lenox Hill Hospital for three months. I stayed with him most of the time and some nights slept on a cot in his room. The press were trying to portray me as the second coming of Mother Teresa, but that’s ridiculous. Chris and I were a team. We were partners. Of course I would look after him and he would have done the same for me. People would say how difficult it was for me, and it was difficult, but it was life-threatening for Chris. For the first month, he was spaced out on heavy steroids, having weird hallucinations, some of them involving me. There was one where he thought that I was running around in a Marrakesh market, or he would wake up thinking he was in Hong Kong. I kept him supplied with heroin. He was on heroin the entire time he was in the hospital. I think that the doctors and nurses knew that he was high all the time but cast a blind eye because it kept him relatively pain-free and mentally less tortured.

  The heroin was a great consolation. Desperate times, desperate measures, as the cliché goes. I would head out in the middle of the night and score by myself. Fortunately, at that time in downtown New York City, it was a chic drug, so my connections were more like colleagues rather than some stereotype lurking in a back alley. They were kids, small-timers who dealt to support their own habits. I’m not putting this all on Chris. I was most certainly indulging too, staying as numb as possible. I don’t think that I could have coped any other way. Drugs aren’t always about feeling good. Many times they’re about feeling less.

  It took some time but the steroids finally took effect. Chris was released and allowed to come home and return to the clinic as an outpatient for monitoring. He was improving, which was wonderful, but he was still very weak and his body was trying to cope with the side effects of the medication. The steroids made him put on weight, which in the beginning at least was a good thing. They also caused terrible mood swings. The illness had taken a lot of his strength. Chris has a very strong mind and an ingenious brain but he is not the most obviously physical or athletic person. This disease sapped the strength right out of him. He couldn’t even walk a block before he was all in. He really was done, and it took him two or three years to fully recover.

  I tell myself, “It’s not your fault,” but part of me blames the rest of me for adding to his stress. He was already under a terrific amount of stress as the leader of the band—and then there was me, the partner. He always took on the role of being my shield and bodyguard—a seriously tough gig for someone with his kind of sensitivities and sensibilities. But now it was my turn to look after him—to be his shield and protector—as the world started to crumble around us. We had lost our band. We had lost our record deal. And we were about to lose our home.

  We were broke. What else could you be but broke when you’ve sold more than forty million records, you’re at the top of your career, and you’ve worked nonstop for seven years with no vacation, except for a few days with some black sheep in the Frischzellen clinic? Because: well, that’s showbiz—or at least, the music biz. Musicians are often notoriously shambolic at taking care of business, which leaves the window wide open for the wolves to come loping in. I guarantee: anything we could have done wrong business- and management-wise, we did it. We had terrible contracts and the people we paid to look after us were naturally more concerned with what was in it for them. We got taken.

  Cocaine at the time wasn’t considered addictive for the most part and in the industry it was used liberally and frequently. Heroin was considered too dark and dangerous and there was a big divide in many people’s minds about using H. Our relationship with Shep came to an abrupt end when he found out that Chris and I were doing heroin as well as coke. He had been to the house and then left and that was it. No calls, no messages, nothing. And it turned out that we had huge tax problems. Because unbeknownst to us, our accountant hadn’t paid our taxes for two years—the two years when we were making the most money. I suppose he just kept getting extensions, trying to look for loopholes and tax shelters, which might be one reason for the big town house on East Seventy-Second Street. I was happy in our rented penthouse on West Fifty-Eighth Street, but he insisted the house was a good investment. So Chris’s mom had moved into our old place and for the first time Chris and I had a house of our own.

  When we first moved into our house, the shock of it was at times intimidating and then exhilarating. I didn’t feel comfortable in the neighborhood. The Upper East Side in those days was very conservative and there were none of the colorful people and the street life of the Lower East Side that I loved. But it was good being in such a gigantic space for a while. I remember going up on the roof one night to look at the moon and stars through this high-powered telescope. I had zero experience at looking through any kind of telescope, so finding focus was a whole new deal in itself. I thought that I would be able to just lie there and look into space and drift into whatever ideas came my way. Well I did find focus, and in finding it I found that I had lost my way. In order to keep the moon or a single star in my sights I had to keep resetting the position of the telescope, and it was while making this adjustment that I suddenly felt the spin. For the first time, I could feel the rotation of the Earth and exactly how fast the planet was moving through space. I was stunned. It was an amazing physical sensation, something I’d never felt before. It was an awakening about the size and the power and the weight of this planet that I lived on. It was magnificent. I went back downstairs into the house, my own tiny little space on the planet, thinking, Wow, I’m an earthling!

  There have been times when I’ve felt the immensity and weight of the world. One of them was directly connected to this house on the East Seventy-Second Street. When there was blood in the water, you could count on our former manager, Peter Leeds, to swim right up. And sure enough—as I was signing the papers to give up all legal rights to our home—I looked up and lo and behold there he was again and I don’t know how he knew, but he was sitting across from me at the table. In my mind he was legitimately involved in protecting his interests, but as far as I could see, he had no other reason to be there except to put me down and gloat over my failure. He always seemed to show up when he could pay witness to any kind of loss or downfall or negative threats that came my way. He certainly hadn’t been around to save us from the piss-poor business manager that helped us into tax hell.

  Much later, when a few of the tax problems had been set aside and we were about to reunite the band, some former members of Blondie wanted to be paid even though they weren’t going to be working with the band. They decided to take us to court and sue us for this potential future income. Well of course, once again, Leeds turned up. The judge asked, “Why are you here?” I sort of remember him saying, “I have a vested interest in their fortunes, Your Honor.” Ha! What “fortunes” was he talking about, exactly? He could have mentioned our misfortunes—but then he might have had to plead the Fifth. The judge told Leeds to scram. I felt so vindicated; the New York court system had declared Leeds to be exactly what he
was: a nothing.

  We didn’t just lose our house. The IRS took away everything they could lay their claws on. They took my car. They even took my coats—which was bizarre. I was pissed: what were they possibly going to get for them? They kept looking for things that were valuable, but we really didn’t have that much. They couldn’t get their greedy little hands on my Warhol because I’d already taken it to a usurer, who had his own claim on it.

  The sickest thing of all was that the IRS took away our health insurance while Chris was in the hospital. They weren’t legally entitled to do that, as far as I knew, and it shocked me. Here was Chris, in a private room for an extended stay, with no way of paying for it. But Chris’s doctor, Dr. Hambrick, saved the day with his generosity. He arranged things with the hospital so that Chris could stay in his room and continue to be treated. Since we had nowhere to live, I went out looking for an apartment to rent. I found one downtown in Chelsea. I borrowed some money for the security deposit. Since they had also taken our bank account, the only way to pay the bills was to buy postal money orders with cash. So I started looking for jobs that paid cash.

  Peekaboo

  Robert Mapplethorpe, 1978.

  BABIES LOVE TO PLAY PEEKABOO, RIGHT? YOU HIDE BEHIND YOUR hands, then quickly open them and squeal to peekaboo, then laugh like crazy. This infantile little game is probably the earliest recognition of one’s own face, another step on the road to consciousness and perhaps even self-consciousness . . . And then come the mirrors and those images gazing back at you, inevitably inducing a change in you as you view your own reflection. Imagine the startle and then the fascination when primeval creatures first caught a glimpse of themselves in a body of water . . . Or remember Narcissus, the original selfie man, frozen by the beauty of his own image in a pool . . . And now we hang mirrors along the halls and the bedrooms and the bathrooms and the living rooms and the dining rooms, so we never quite lose sight of those precious reflections.