Face It

by Debbie Harry

  Through Divine we met John Waters. He was working on his new movie Polyester, and he asked Chris and me if we would write the theme song. When it was done, we went to the studio to watch Tab Hunter sing our title song. Tab, the Hollywood movie star, had been a blond teen idol in the fifties and sixties and was still gorgeous. Chris and I showed up with Bill Murray, the comedian from Saturday Night Live. We had been hanging out with Bill at NBC and discovered that he had this preposterous, croonerlike voice. Who knew? He was a comedian with the voice of Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra. His singing voice was beautiful, but he only used it occasionally or comically. Fortunately, when we told him where we were going, he didn’t hesitate.

  John wrote Hairspray as a parody of a pop music TV show he would always watch in Baltimore. They didn’t have American Bandstand in Baltimore, he said, just this one show, The Buddy Deane Show, where the girls’ hair was higher and the boys’ pants were tighter than on Bandstand, and these kids were huge local stars. They took their dance contests seriously. In 1962, the time in which the movie was set, there was still serious segregation. Baltimore was on the border between North and South. It had been Southern in the Civil War and there were and still are lingering effects. The Buddy Deane Show would play black music, but they didn’t want black kids dancing with the white kids and definitely not out-dancing them in the contests. So for John to tackle this subject in this bizarre but heartfelt comedy was amazing. And he did it in a way that was kitschy and cute and innocent, yet took on this very serious, toxic subject and made it a massive hit. In Hairspray John gave the story the happy ending that often didn’t happen in real life.

  My role was Velma Von Tussle, an aloof, racist, power-mad stage mother. Her daughter, Amber, played by Colleen Fitzpatrick, is entered in the Miss Auto Shop contest by her dad, who sells used cars. But her biggest rival is the bubbly, chubby Tracy Turnblad, played by Ricki Lake. Divine played Tracy’s mom. Sonny Bono played my husband. John was having some trouble getting Sonny to confirm in the beginning, so I joked, “Just tell him I’ll blow him!” Not a joke you could make today. Sonny said yes, without any promises from me. It was strictly a working relationship. Apparently Sonny had been running for mayor of Palm Springs when John approached him. It was pre-election, but Sonny said yes to Hairspray and he won the mayor’s race.

  Sonny was very easy to work with. True blue, no pretense at all. The only time he got a little prickly was when people would come up and say, “Where’s Cher?” That has to get stale after you’ve been divorced for ten years. In fact, he had his new wife with him, this beautiful young woman, and you could see that he was just so smitten; he was totally attentive to her. Sonny was a bright guy and also a bit of a smart-ass, which I liked. There’s nothing like a smart-ass to give you a laugh.

  The kids in the movie were GREAT. John was in love with those kids, and they were real kids; a lot of them were not even wannabe actors. But they all took it very seriously. I think some of them went on to have a showbiz career, like Ricki Lake, Colleen Fitzpatrick, and the one that looked like Elvis, Michael St. Gerard. The casting really was genius. John had Ruth Brown, the queen of R & B, play the DJ Motormouth Maybell. The one and only Ruth Brown. In the 1950s, Atlantic Records was called—for good reason—“the house that Ruth built.” I was in awe. She was fantastic. She did raise holy hell when John wanted her to wear a platinum-blond wig. Then finally she got it—and saw that it was a big send-up. Ric Ocasek of the Cars and Pia Zadora played a couple of beatniks. Pia was like a Broadway baby, sweet, cute, very sociable. Afterward, she would invite us up to her penthouse apartment in the Zeckendorf Towers, which was built by her real estate mogul husband, and we hung out a little bit.

  I love you, John Waters.

  Henny Garfunkel

  Jody Morlock

  John wanted me to do music in the movie but my record label was against it. So that was that. Rachel Sweet sang the title song and I sang a few lines uncredited. When Rachel sang, “Hey, girl, what you doing over there?” I replied, “Can’t you see? I’m spraying my hair.” Those wigs I wore in Hairspray deserved Oscars of their own. Nineteen sixty-two was the era of big, teased-up beehive hair. (I actually wore a beehive in my high school yearbook photo.) The wig that I wore most of the time in the movie was sort of a question mark lying on its side, a brilliant idea. The other wig was a monument, two feet tall, three or four wigs attached to a chicken-wire frame that held a bomb inside, which would explode later in the movie. I had to balance this big hairy bomb on my head. It was good for my posture and I felt like a Vegas showgirl.

  When the shoot was over, none of us wanted to leave. All of us were broken up. We wanted it to go on forever. How many times can you actually say that about any job? I didn’t want to go home, I wanted to keep on living in this movie. John said that making that movie was one of the nicest experiences of his life and I feel the same way. Every accolade and every benefit that he’s achieved or received because of Hairspray, he categorically earned, because it came out of his soul. So the wrap party was a bittersweet occasion. But I left with a memento that I still have to this day. They held the party down on the piers in the Baltimore harbor, where I was bitten by mosquitoes. Now, Baltimore mosquitoes have a ferocity that is all their own. I’ve been eaten alive by mosquitoes over the years, but this is the only time I’ve gotten scarred. I still have the scar from that bite. I should have it tattooed with the Hairspray logo.

  There is a sad afterword to this story. Hairspray turned out to be Divine’s last movie. Two weeks after Hairspray was released, he died in his sleep, forty-two years old. Everyone was completely shocked. John was crushed. The doctors said he had an enlarged heart. None of us will ever forget that fierce, big Baltimore heart known as Divine.

  AS A KID I WAS ALWAYS SEARCHING FOR THE PERFECT TASTE. A flavor that I couldn’t describe—but was sure I could identify if I found it. Sometimes I got a hint of it in peanut butter. Other times, a hint when I drank milk. It was maddening because I was driven to have it, whatever it was. I never ate a meal or snack without wondering if I was about to finally experience the perfect taste.

  Love you, Steve.

  Tina Paul

  As an adult, I mostly forgot about searching for this elusive taste. The flavor of complete satisfaction—but there was a giveaway: I never felt fully satiated after a meal, although I could eat until I burst. I worried about getting too fat, as most women do, and with terrific willpower I tried to appear normal in my eating habits when I was with other people. It was when I was alone that I could just keep eating, usually until I fell asleep or got a headache and went to bed. Occasionally, my thoughts would roll back into search mode and I would remember sadly the quest I had been on throughout my childhood. And once again “the perfect taste” would become part of my daily vocabulary.

  I have a protein and vitamin powder now that I mix with coconut water that has a satisfying familiar flavor to it. I love this mixture and I try to blend one up every day. I know that my birth mother kept me for three months. I reason that during this time she breast-fed me and this was the perfect taste. My birth mother kept me and fed me for as long as she could, then she sent me out into the world of choices. The world of flavors. The world. Now, finally, thanks to my maturing, my searching, and my magical shake, I have regained the ability to feel full, to feel hunger, and to enjoy filling up and ending the hunger. True satiation. It seems so simple. Probably as simple as infinity and the universe.

  The search for the perfect taste links to a ghostly question that haunted me through my entire life: who were my genetic family and what might they be like? I know I’m not alone in this. We all want to know where we come from and who our ancestors might be. We want to know if there’s anyone out there that’s a part of the “tribe.” A survival thing; after all, we are finally communal creatures, pack animals. Today, adoptees are able to discover almost everything. But back then, the laws in the U.S. gave an adopted child no options to find out anything. Every time I tried,
I hit a brick wall. Was I innocently a part of some witness protection program?

  I was adopted at the end of the Second World War, that great world upheaval that took so many lives and made so many people and babies homeless. After the homelessness of the Great Depression, institutions tried to keep more detailed records of the population. But those bureaucracies were most often impossible to access. Before computers made it easy to explore your genealogy or establish contact with old friends and family, agency clerks or private detectives would have to search for people in phone books and newspaper obituaries or other public records, which was a slow, laborious process.

  When I first learned, at age four, that I was adopted, I found myself on shaky ground. I had an unreasonably deep-rooted fear of abandonment. I would burst into tears easily if someone got a little bit angry with me. When I was six and a half years old, my sister, Martha, was born, and it was wonderful having this amazing little bundle that was part of my family. I loved looking after her. I even changed her diapers, though that was my least favorite thing. But as I grew more independent, I would always fantasize about who my birth parents were. My curiosity would wax and wane over the years, depending on how busy I was. And I didn’t want to upset my parents while they were alive because I felt it might have made them hurt and unhappy.

  But around the late eighties, my active curiosity came up again. I decided to try to find out all I could before it was too late. I hired a detective and sent him to find my mother. And he found her. He tracked down her address and drove to her house. He rang the doorbell and my mother came to the door. When the detective started to talk to her and say why he had come, she came outside and closed the door behind her. According to the detective, she said, “Please don’t ever bother me again.” She wanted no contact. She must have been quite old at that time and maybe she had made a resolution long ago to let the past lie. I found out who my father was too and that he had died at age seventy-four.

  Recently, I called up the agency from which I was adopted. The laws had changed, things were more open now, and the woman who worked there tried to be helpful and said she would do a search for me. She was successful. I have found out some things and I do feel a whole lot better, even though the results are not particularly splendid or exotic. Just grounding. It seems that I come from a long line of plumbers on my father’s side and amateur musicians on my mother’s side. I found out that I have siblings, half brothers and sisters, and even a disturbed, incarcerated nephew. The woman at the agency said that she would see what else she could find out. She finally reached one of my half brothers. And, according to the representative from the agency, he just said that I had ruined his family. I was a home-wrecker, heartbreaker. Me, this innocent little baby, a home-wrecker, a heartbreaker. What a picture. Then I realized that all I ever wanted or needed was to see what they looked like.

  But back to showbiz . . . It was two years since Rockbird, my first album for Geffen, which was actually my only album for Geffen and wasn’t successful enough to make them want to do another. Stanley Arkin, who got me the deal with Geffen, didn’t last long as my manager either. He was extremely clever and well intentioned and had been a big help at that difficult time, but as he said himself, he knew little about promoting an album; it wasn’t his world. I remember having a big crush on Gary Gersh at Geffen but this was a very one-sided attraction, sad to say.

  Eventually and luckily I found a terrific new manager who had been in the music business his whole career: Gary Kurfirst. Gary had great taste in music and the best artists, like Talking Heads, the Ramones, Big Audio Dynamite, and the Tom Tom Club. Gary went to Seymour Stein and somehow I was shifted over to Sire Records, which, like Geffen, was distributed by Warners. I knew Seymour pretty well from the old days. Sire Records had been cofounded by Seymour and our first producer, Richard Gottehrer. We didn’t socialize much, but we were on good terms, and the albums I ended up making for him are terrific.

  The first was Def, Dumb and Blonde. It was Gary’s idea that I should work on some songs with Alannah Currie and Tom Bailey from the Thompson Twins. We didn’t know each other at all, but Gary worked his magic and I was on my way to London to stay with them. It was June, I remember, because I was so looking forward to summer and to some hot, sunny weather, and when I got to London it was freezing cold. Oh my God. And I had completely brought the wrong clothes with me. So there I was in their big old apartment with clothes made for a sweltering New York summer, freezing my butt off. Which actually turned out all right because it gave me an excuse to go shopping with Alannah. The apartment was a wonderful place and I got to sleep in a small Gothic tower with a pyramid-shaped roof. In the tradition of grand old Victorian stone buildings, this had once been a school or an orphanage for young girls; Alannah and Tom had transformed it into a warm, welcoming, elegant space. They were a successful songwriting team, Tom focused and serious, while Alannah had no boundaries—and not just in her songwriting. She was a creative, inquisitive person and we had so much fun together.

  On another visit, Tom and Alannah gave me a big bedroom upstairs while they camped in the master suite downstairs, as Alannah remembers. Alannah had just become a mother. This was her first baby, and also her first real songwriting project. She was worried sick that the baby might cry and wake me up and I’d think she was unprofessional. So when little Jackson woke up at five the next morning crying to be fed, she climbed into her wardrobe with him and sat there under all the hanging coats and dresses, trying to muffle the sound of his cries. She didn’t know that I was an early riser. I heard the whole thing. The next morning, when the baby cried I swooped downstairs and opened the wardrobe and handed her a cup of tea. I grabbed Jackson and went off to play with him. When we worked on songs in their little studio, he slept in a Moses basket, which was used to keep the door ajar. Now that he’s grown-up, Alannah tells Jackson that his first job was “Debbie Harry’s doorstop.”

  The house was on Wandsworth Common, opposite the prison. Since Alannah and I both wanted to lose some weight, in the evenings we would go running around the green. Alannah would bring her scissors and when we walked back through the neighborhood, she would sneak into the gardens and snip off roses. She was nuts about roses. She’d have armfuls by the time we got back to the house. Sometimes there would be paparazzi waiting outside, trying to take pictures of me sweating and un-made-up. Alannah would get mad on my behalf, shout at them, and hit them with her stolen roses.

  Alannah and I would ride around on those wonderful red double-decker London buses. We did a lot of walking too, which I love. One day, when we were out shopping, she asked me how I could do it without being recognized. Easy, I said. David Bowie had shown me how. I was wearing a hoodie and trainers; I dropped the hood, pulled back my shoulders, lifted my head, and smiled. People started to recognize me and call out my name. Then I put my hood back up and my shoulders went down and I was invisible again. It’s nice to be able to step out of the light when you’re shopping with a friend. It’s only a matter of projection.

  There are so many stories with Alannah. I’ve stayed with her in London on other occasions, back in the tower, where I had such strange dreams. Alannah said that the building had been occupied by MI5 or MI6 during the Second World War and it was rumored that Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy führer, had been held prisoner in there. Her son, Jackson, was a toddler by then and such an imp, running around, tearing off his clothes. I got used to seeing his cute naked butt flying by. Alannah also came to stay with me in New York. Once I took her to meet my friend Vali Myers. I loved Vali. She was a fabulous, redheaded wild woman, a visionary, a dancer, and an artist, unfortunately long gone now. At that time she was living in the Chelsea Hotel. There was newspaper all over the floor and a few bits of dog shit, so Alannah and I perched on the kitchen table and talked with Vali about her paintings.

  I first found out about Vali in the sixties when I moved to the city. I used to see her walking around the streets with her wild red hair and tattoo
ed face. I didn’t really know her at that point but I was blown away by her look. She was way, way ahead of her time. Vali was from Melbourne and used to dance with the Melbourne ballet, but she left Australia in 1949 at the age of nineteen to pursue a dance career in Paris. Her friends there included Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Django Reinhardt, Jean Genet, and many other creative luminaries. She was an adventurous woman and an interesting artist. She would do fine-line drawings, in pen and ink, with great detail and a lot of patterns, as well as portraits and studies of animals. I have a beautiful drawing of hers of a redheaded wild woman with a large red vagina. It’s incredible. Chris actually named his daughter Valentina after Vali. I think Vali loved Chris very much. Of course Chris is lovable, so there you go.

  But back to London and Def, Dumb and Blonde. Before we had met, Tom and Alannah had written one song for me: “I Want That Man.” Alannah said she wrote the lyrics imagining I might be a demanding diva and a predatory femme fatale. She said that she slipped in the line “I want to dance with Harry Dean” because she’d had a long-standing fascination with Harry Dean Stanton. She didn’t know that I had one too, ever since seeing him in Wim Wenders’s mesmerizing Paris, Texas and, of course, the hilarious Repo Man. I loved how he made such exceptionally good role choices throughout his career. He always played the most interesting characters, often with no obvious commercial appeal, and it always worked out so well. As he loved to say, “There are no small parts. Only small actors.” He was so smart and talented, just a charming person, and a smooth operator. He also had this craggy, weather-beaten look that exuded a sexy soulfulness . . . I didn’t know him personally before “I Want That Man” came out, but when it did, Harry Dean became convinced that the song was about him and that he was the man I wanted. When I was back again in London, Alannah and I went to see Harry Dean sit in with Ry Cooder singing “Across the Borderline.” Since I love the way Alannah tells the story, I’ll hand the mic over to her: