Face It

by Debbie Harry

  So much of what has been written about me has been about how I look. It’s sometimes made me wonder if I’ve ever accomplished anything beyond my image. Never mind, I like doing what I do regardless of appreciation and there really is no accounting for taste. Luckily, the face I was born with has been a huge asset and I have to admit I like being a pretty person.

  I had a few art and drawing courses when I was in school with the study of portraiture included. What I noticed in my drawings and paintings was some subtle reference to my own face when I was drawing someone else. I have noticed the same phenomenon with my fan art.

  Before anything, when fans started giving me their paintings and drawings, I was flattered. After collecting these sweet tributes for a while I wondered why I was saving these fragile pieces of paper with their often odd-looking interpretations of me drawn on them. But I just couldn’t throw them away. Partially because I know how hard it is to sit down and make a portrait and also how brave, loving, or curious one has to be to give a piece of themselves to me. Wanting to be known to me but in ways they perhaps never realized. But when I look at my fan art collection I can see little bits of the artist drawn into their attempts to reproduce my face that they don’t even know are there . . .

  11

  Wrestling and Parts Unknown

  George Napolitano

  After the IRS grabbed our happy home and other valuable possessions, we moved back downtown. Our next place was on West Twenty-First Street in Chelsea. It was remarkable to finally live in a neighborhood that I had discovered accidentally in 1965. The block was so pretty, with big leafy chestnut trees and brownstone houses on one side and the General Theological Seminary and church on the other. I had always wanted to live on this block. Our new rental was a duplex apartment upstairs from the actors Michael O’Keefe and Meg Foster, of the ice-blue eyes.

  Chris was still recovering from his ordeal as an outpatient and we were both fighting off our drug demons. We were watching a lot of TV back then, mostly soaps and wrestling. Wrestling is usually booked as a theatrical event with its constant battle between good and evil—it’s more like a sporty soap. One of the things Chris and I had in common was that we had both loved to watch wrestling since we were kids. The difference was that when I watched it, in Jersey, I would thrash around on the rug in front of the TV, pounding my fists and straining to beat up my opponent, while Chris, over in Brooklyn, would maintain a relaxed indifference, keeping cool and insouciant while he lounged in bed.

  We’d watched it together a lot more in the late seventies when we were living on West Fifty-Eighth Street. Wrestling was making a comeback, with the advent of Vince McMahon and Gorilla Monsoon. A few years before, we had met a man named Shelly Finkel who managed fighters and musicians. It seemed like an odd combo of professions, but Shelly somehow pulled it off. Mr. Finkel had gotten us into a few wrestling events at the Garden, some of them big productions, with good seats too. We missed having Shelly as a friend, but as luck would have it, when we moved to Chelsea we made a new friend.

  As I became used to the faces on the block, certain people stood out to me. One of these was a beautiful young woman with very healthy black hair. Being a bleached blonde for so many years has made me acutely aware of what healthy hair looks like. She dressed business-preppy and had a way of walking that signaled confidence, strength, and sexuality. We started to nod to each other as we passed on the street. Then one day she stopped me. She mentioned having seen me and Chris at the Garden, at a wrestling match. I said, “Are you a WWF fan?” and she told me she did PR for the venue. Nancy Moon was her name and she offered to comp us tickets to any event we wanted. We just had to say the word. So we did. This really was a lucky break.

  Thanks to Nancy Moon, we went to as many events as we could, every Big Bang, steel cage, tag team, or championship challenge that came along. Nancy even introduced us to Vince McMahon, who took us backstage, where we met many of the greats of wrestling, such as the Grand Wizard, Andre the Giant, Bret Hart, Lou Albano, the Iron Sheik, Sgt. Slaughter, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Randy Savage, Greg Valentine, Hulk Hogan, and Jesse Ventura, the future governor of Minnesota. I even appeared on the cover of Wrestling Magazine with Andre the Giant, who really was a giant. Instinctively, I stood on my toes, but it made no difference.

  A little while into our trips to the Garden we found out that Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks was a wrestling fan too. Or a fan of one wrestler in particular, Bret “the Hitman” Hart. Bret Hart was from Canada, but he said that he came from “parts unknown,” which was meant to make him sound like an escaped criminal or maybe a backwater wild man. Lydia Lunch was hot for Bret big-time. We took her and her gorgeous boyfriend, Jim Foetus of Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel, to see the fights. I had never realized from seeing Lydia perform just how loud her voice was until she started screaming, “Parts unknown! Parts unknown!” Heads turned, eyes stared—and given how much shouting there was at the matches, you can imagine how earth-shatteringly loud she was. She really was a fan. But Chris had it worse than any of us. He would theorize and try to figure out in advance what the next big drama in the story line was going to be. When we were busy recording or touring and didn’t get to the big shows, Chris would start getting antsy and frustrated at missing out on the latest histrionics.

  In the West End of London there was a musical comedy that had run for a few years that took place entirely in a wrestling ring onstage. It was called Trafford Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap. The flytrap being an unbeatable hold, the coup de grâce that would automatically crush any opponent and win the match. This “play in ten rounds,” as they billed it, was about a girl who seeks revenge on all the jerks in her life: her parents, her friends, and her chauvinist husband, to whom she finally delivers the winning blow. A kind of coming-of-age story with songs and wrestling moves. The mixture of girl power and the madness of wrestling was really funny. They decided to bring it to New York and sent me the script, asking if I wanted to play Tanzi. You can guess what I said.

  This was 1983; I had red hair then and I beefed up for the part, because I didn’t think a woman wrestler would be thin. They had already been rehearsing and tossing each other around the ring for a few weeks before I got involved, so I had some catching up to do. I trained hard. Really hard. We had a wrestling coach named Brian Maxine who had a massive, muscular, no-neck upper body and a perfectly busted-up nose. Brian had been a British champion for years and he was very serious about his job as our coach. For weeks he taught us how to do the holds, make the jumps, take the falls, and do all the different wrestling moves that we did in the show. It was all tightly choreographed, and I got beat to shit. Since the show was a musical, we sang as we worked our way from corner to corner in the ring. At certain junctions we would have either a monologue or a dialogue, and then there would be some kind of wrestling move and my character would get thrown, because she was always the victim until suddenly she wasn’t the victim anymore. I loved getting my fat ass thumped all over the stage. That’s probably how I ruined my back. It turns out pro wrestling is a tough sport and it’s not the best thing in the world for your body.

  The New York cast was a mix of stage, screen, and television actors. I shared the lead part with Caitlin Clarke, a Broadway, TV, and film actress, because the role was too strenuous for one person to play every night and matinees too. The referee was played by the comic genius Andy Kaufman. Andy was in the TV show Taxi and a regular on Saturday Night Live. Andy’s comedy wasn’t boisterous, it was understated. A kind of comedy of the absurd. I think he was asked to be in Tanzi around the same time he had begun his own little obsession with the bad boys of professional wrestling. In tribute to the crazy showbiz side of the sport that we both loved, Andy had an act where he would wrestle women. He proclaimed himself the Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World. But in person he struck me as a quiet man, meditative. When we were doing Tanzi he was on a macrobiotic diet. Maybe he already knew that he had the cancer that would kill him one ye
ar later.

  The only problem with the show was the British director, Chris Bond. His wife, Claire Luckham, who wrote the play, was charming and easygoing, while he was a snob and sometimes a giant pain in the ass. On the upside, he created a unique and creative theater experience; however, he made no secret of his disdain for Americans, especially American theater. It was obvious to him that—matched against Britain’s theatrical superiority—we were just a bunch of witless, jibbering baboons. As a result, he was a prick to everyone. As a director in my band, I know that if you want to get the best performances from people, belittling them does not work. In the end, his West End snobbery didn’t get him too far with the stagehands, because they walked off the job on opening night!

  They renamed the show Teaneck Tanzi for the U.S. audience and it ran for five or six weeks in previews, in a loft space downtown near Union Square. It was great. The audiences were loving it, watching little Tanzi grow up before their very eyes, crawling at first and being kicked around by the hard knocks of life and eventually learning to stand on her own two feet. They would cheer and boo and behave like they were at a regular wrestling match, though sadly nobody shouted “Parts unknown!” I was overjoyed and very surprised when a favorite actor/singer of mine came to the show one night, Eartha Kitt. After that run of previews, they took Tanzi to Broadway, where it opened and closed on the same night.

  The critics slaughtered it. More snobbery, perhaps. They knew nothing about wrestling and the audience participation horrified them. The critic from the New York Times did say something that I agreed with, though. He said he found the script’s feminism “anachronistic” and so did I. I had tried talking to the director, explaining that things were different in the U.S.: we’d had this kind of take on women’s rights five years ago, so it wasn’t the hot topic anymore. I offered suggestions, but he didn’t want to listen. I’m guessing, but I think he felt threatened by the fact that this was a play about women being superior to men.

  It was fun while it lasted. Too bad we didn’t stay downtown where we did the previews. I was disappointed when it closed. I had literally thrown myself into that part. This reminds me again of the time when I was a Playboy bunny and I served drinks to Gorgeous George. Watching him as a five-year-old, I’d beat the rug to shit, just like I had been beaten to shit in that ring.

  That same year, 1983, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome came out. My biggest movie role up till then. I had been sent the script two years earlier, in that busy, creative time before everything fell apart. David’s movies are beyond original—fascinating, disturbing, and thought-provoking at the same time. He would target a deep, subconscious level in the viewer. I was a fan and had seen some of his earlier low-budget movies, like The Brood, Rabid, and the psychosexual Shivers, his “body horror” movies.

  David had a clinical fascination with visceral bodily transformation and infection. There tended to be some mad medical scientist in each movie, whose evil striving for transcendence through bio-experiments would spark mass contagion, mutation, and general havoc. Videodrome included the same strong doses of David’s patented viscerality, but also broke new ground into a hallucinatory world of techno-horror. It was visionary and often cited as one of the first cyberpunk movies. David took fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement “The medium is the message” to a whole new level of subtlety and complexity.

  Videodrome.

  Videodrome [1983], licensed by Universal Pictures

  Hairspray.

  Hairspray [1988], licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

  My Life Without Me.

  My Life Without Me [2003]

  The part he offered me was a substantial one. But in the script he sent me, my character was not even fully formed and the story didn’t yet have an ending. They planned to work on both those things as they went along. It looked like a challenge—and I couldn’t wait to work with David Cronenberg. I had confidence in his talent and his vision and I was extremely over-the-moon flattered that he wanted to work with me.

  The movie is about a man named Max Renn who owns a small cable TV station in Toronto, David Cronenberg’s hometown, where, in the middle of a freezing winter, we shot the film. While looking for some cheap, sensational new content for his sleazy station, Max comes across a videocassette of an underground sex show called Videodrome that broadcasts hard-core porn and what looks like real-life torture and murder. Max tries to track down this mysterious program and along the way he meets and becomes obsessed with Nicki Brand, a TV psychiatrist who shares his taste for S & M. She seduces him and then she disappears. Things start to get very complicated, as the movie does a deep dive into the notions of man and machine, what is real, who is real, if we are watching TV or if we are TV. And all this was before there were even names or terms for technologies like touchscreens, virtual characters, and interactive TV. My role in the movie was the mysterious, kinky Nicki Brand, and Max was played by James Woods.

  Jimmy had already made his name as an actor in movies like The Onion Field and Holocaust, and he was a big help to me, making a lot of suggestions about how to enhance my performance. He realized that I was working/learning while trying to get a handle on this character that blurred the lines between real and virtual. I believe David got frustrated with my indecisiveness as an actor sometimes. Maybe he had a different vision for Nicki that he somehow couldn’t convey to me. One time, David told me that I acted too much with my eyebrows and it was too exaggerated. I’ve known people who do that when they speak. That was a useful lesson to learn. Later, I read that David thought I’d held up well, given the pressure of the ever-mutating script.

  Jimmy not only was generous with his help but was always lightening things up. He was such a nut. At the end of every take, while the camera was still rolling, he would make some kind of quip, an obscene or absurd joke about the scene or the people in the cast, and he cracked me up. The crew loved it. I don’t know if David especially liked it, but it was funny. To me it was a relief from the seriousness and threatening atmosphere of the story. I wish more people could know this side of James Woods instead of his more recent persona. There were some intense sex scenes, but the crew were sensitive around it. I think Jimmy might have been more self-conscious than I was, or maybe he was being self-conscious on my behalf. There was one time, I remember, when I was standing on the set naked, with a towel around me, clinging to that towel like it was a life raft and thinking, I can’t do it. But I did it. I never felt, though, that any of the graphic sex or violence was gratuitous.

  At that time, people had started talking about “video nasties,” which were movies on video that contained sex or violence that supposedly made viewers leap off their sofas and rush out and commit acts of perversion or violence. The week that I went to London to promote the movie, they were actually debating in Parliament about putting age restrictions on videos, and some of my interviews were canceled as a result. But Videodrome was way deeper than that. The line between real and imagined sex and violence in the movie was constantly blurred. It was more of a mind fuck. I am proud of being in that movie and the reviews were good. One critic said that I might have been the first postmodern tough cookie. I liked that. People expected this movie to be Cronenberg’s breakout, but in the end the timing wasn’t right. However, Videodrome was in fact a big step forward in David’s evolution as a writer and director.

  There’s one more Videodrome story that I had forgotten until I saw an interview with David. There’s a scene in the movie where Max grows a big slit in his stomach that sucks things into itself. At one point even Max’s own fist gets ingested. After a long day wearing “the slit,” Jimmy cranked out on us. He complained, “I am not an actor anymore. I’m just the bearer of the slit!” To which I replied, “Now you know how it feels.”

  There were other movie offers, most of them on a scale between lousy and shit. But one script stuck in my mind. Samuel Z. Arkoff, the presenter and often producer of exploitation classics like I Was a Teena
ge Werewolf, Blacula, and The Amityville Horror, wanted me to star as a girl who is locked up in a nuthouse and forced to take drugs until all sex breaks loose. Now, one of my worst nightmares was that I would get locked up in a mental hospital one day and not be able to get out. So that movie might have been a cool thing to do—face your fears and all that—but it was never made as far as I know. Samuel Arkoff intrigued me.

  My mind started turning back toward my music career, except that there really wasn’t a music career. I didn’t have a record deal. One day I was talking about my problems to Andrew Crispo. Andrew was a roguish art dealer and was well-known in the New York gay club scene. He was also involved in a strange, twisted incident involving a boyfriend, a henchman, and a grisly S & M murder that could have been straight out of the Marquis de Sade, but that’s another story. I was crying on his shoulder; Andrew listened and suggested I go see his friend Stanley Arkin. Stanley was a smart white-collar criminal lawyer who loved the ladies. After hearing my story, he decided that he was going to dip his toe into the music business and manage me. Stanley happened to be friends with John Kalodner, the head of A & R at Geffen Records, who was also a big ladies’ man, so they shared a hobby. And that’s how I made my second solo album, Rockbird, for Geffen records. It’s all part of the ins and outs and machinations of the small, incestuous world of the music business.

  My first day in the studio for Rockbird was the same day that NASA launched the space shuttle Challenger. Among the crew was Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, who was chosen to be the first civilian in space. I loved the space program and I was so excited about the launch. I had my eyes glued to the TV in the studio lounge. In the early stages of the launch/liftoff the spaceship exploded in flames. Oh no! Oh no! Oh God! We were all beyond shocked. It was horrifying. This was not an auspicious beginning for the album. I felt a keen sense of loss when I walked into the studio that day. It had been five years since my last solo album and a lot had happened since then. I had no band to get back to. And, for the first time in the thirteen years that we had been a couple, Chris wasn’t there, although he was involved in Rockbird as a writer and as a creative force. It felt odd not having him to talk to and I missed him tremendously. Inevitably, when we were working Chris would come out with the most sarcastic and funny remarks. I loved that about him. So, there were a lot of things I was still trying to figure out. All I knew was that Geffen hadn’t paid me to make another experimental album, they wanted something they could sell.