Cherry on Top

by Bobbie Brown

  This is a Genuine Barnacle Book

  A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Bobbie Brown and Caroline Ryder

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic.

  For more information, address:

  A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  Set in Dante

  epub isbn: 9781644280867

  Photographs Courtesy of Bobbie Brown

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Brown, Bobbie, 1969–, author. | Ryder, Caroline, author.

  Title: Cherry on Top: Flirty, Forty-Something, and Funny as F**k / by Bobbie Jean Brown, with Caroline Ryder.

  Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Barnacle Book |

  New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781644280157

  Subjects: LCSH Brown, Bobbie, 1969– | Actors—United States—

  Biography. | Rock musicians’ spouses—United States—Biography. | Models (Persons)—United States—Biography. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Rich & Famous. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts.

  Classification: LCC PN2287.B6965 C44 2019 | DDC 791.4302/8092—dc23

  Dedicated to my supportive loving family, friends, and fans. Thank you for loving me even when I don’t love myself.

  I’m blessed to have you all. XO.

  Contents

  Life’s a Gas

  Funnily Enough...

  Out of the Vortex, into the Hole

  Why do the Children Play?

  Southern Harmony

  Stay Gold

  Not for a Million Dollars

  Running in Flip-Flops

  Hormonally Yours

  Game Over

  Breadcrumbing and Other Sins

  Tiger Droppings

  Ice Cream has a Soul

  The Dickening

  Baby’s First Bomb

  Blast from the Past

  The Babe Station

  The Emperor’s New Clothes

  Sad Clowns Versus the World

  Three’s Company

  Marsh Gasses

  This is s Mam’s World

  Bobbie Brown’s Killer Set

  Coda: The Last Word

  Acknowledgments

  Life’s a Gas

  It was around midnight on a Tuesday and moonlight crept over Arleta, the quiet LA suburb I call home. These days, I sleep alone in my four-poster bed—unless you count Nupa, my ten-year-old Chihuahua. After years of sharing me with various male interlopers, Nupa was pleased to finally have me to herself. She lay on the bed, watching me as I gathered clothes from around my bedroom, a little snaggletooth protruding from her lower jaw. During quiet days at home like this one, I’d catch myself thinking about Josh, the musician sixteen years younger than myself with whom I’d spent the last five years of my life.

  An ex-Mormon who worked in construction, Josh had a band whose goals, according to their social media pages, included “waking up in the van covered in glitter in front of a church on Easter morning after a long night of swimming in Jack Daniel’s and getting some strange.” Marriage material, if you’re me. My daughter, Taylar, who is an excellent judge of character, loathed Josh so much she sent him a bag of dirt for Christmas one year. Yes, Josh had more red flags than a Communist parade, but I was blinded by his long brown hair, lazy smile, and slender body, which took me back to a different time in my life. A time when the Sunset Strip still had a pulse. A time when life was a beautiful mess of music, love, and hairspray.

  I stuffed my dirty laundry in the basket and stomped down the beige-carpeted stairs, scolding myself for missing Josh and swearing I would never again date anyone who is a fan of Mötley Crüe. In a Mötley fan’s mind, you see, sleeping with me takes them one step closer to being Tommy Lee, to whom I was engaged many moons ago. Well, guess what, you’ll never be Tommy Lee, I fumed. And if you were, I sure as hell wouldn’t date you.

  Distracted by my thoughts, I misjudged a step. My slipper flew off my foot and I tumbled down the stairs, headfirst into the corner of a marble side table. Laundry went flying and there was a thud as I hit the floor, and for one terrifying moment, the whole world turned black. Slowly, I opened my eyes. Psychedelic globes bounced lazily about my field of vision like an old screensaver. Whimpering, I felt for my cell phone in the back pocket of my jeans and dialed my younger brother, Adam, who lived a few blocks away with his wife, Laura, and their baby, Ollie.

  “Adam, help,” I whispered, as Nupa hopped down the stairs and gave me a look of concern.

  When Adam arrived at my condo, he gasped; I looked like Rocky Balboa after twelve rounds with a meat grinder. He helped me into his car and drove me to the emergency room, urging me to stay awake, promising me that everything was going to be okay. Adam was my lifeline, my only family in Los Angeles, though I worried that he and his wife were growing weary of Lonely Aunt Bobbie visiting every day, clinging to their newborn infant with tears in her eyes for reasons no one quite understood.

  At the hospital, the neurologist told me that fifty percent of people who hit their heads as hard as I did wind up in the morgue. Had the marble side table impacted my head just three millimeters to the left, it would have ruptured some vital vein whose name escapes me, resulting in instant death. I was lucky to be alive, even though my skull ached with indescribable pain and a bump the size of a softball began taking shape on my forehead.

  “Off topic,” said the doctor, “but…are you the ‘Cherry Pie’ girl?”

  I nodded, trying not to rattle my tenderized brain.

  “I thought so!” he exclaimed. “Wow, you really were an It Girl back then. I had the biggest crush on you!”

  I was an It Girl, once. Miss Bobbie Jean Brown, Southern pageant queen, runner-up in Miss Teen USA 1987, and for a minute, the hottest girl on the Sunset Strip. “Helter skelter in a summer swelter,” I was built for stonewashed jeans and stadium rock, with my long legs, sun-kissed hair, and a smile that lit up rooms. Secretly, I always wished I looked like one of those waifish brunettes, the kind you see on the Paris runway, but the reflection in the mirror confirmed that, in the words of Raymond Chandler, “it was a blonde.” And in LA, people want blondes. Casting agents want them. Bands want them. Men want them.

  For fifteen years, during the peak of my good fortune, I had my pick of rich and famous lovers. When I met Rod Stewart at the Roxbury, he asked me what I wanted—I told him a cranberry vodka, and he laughed, “No, I meant Ferrari, Porsche, or Jaguar?” Strangers would approach me in clubs, offer me $100,000 to spend the night with them—and if only I hadn’t been so principled, I might have moved up the property ladder by now.

  Romance came thick and fast. I spent several coked-up months with Rob from Milli Vanilli, enjoyed dance-floor flirtations with Prince, shared intimate moments with a Chippendale in a broom closet, brushed off overtures from O. J. Simpson, spent dreamy nights on ecstasy with Dave Navarro, shared kisses at the Chateau Marmont with Ethan Hawke, and experienced a titanic roll in the hay with Leonardo DiCaprio. We mustn’t forget the night I set Kevin Costner’s bedroom on fire. Literally. Nor the strange, chaotic year I spent engaged to my teen idol, Tommy Lee, drummer of the most notorious rock band on the Str
ip: Mötley Crüe.

  But it was my marriage to blond, blue-eyed singer Jani Lane of the hair band Warrant that caused middle-aged neurologists to recognize me in hospitals. You see, in 1990, Jani handpicked me to star in the video for one of the biggest songs of the decade, “Cherry Pie,” which placed my all-American body on heavy rotation on MTV, VH1, and television screens all over the world.

  Overnight, Jani and I became sweetheart darlings of rock ’n’ roll, on- and off-screen. We were the perfect match—I was the fun-loving, bubblegum-chewing girl of his melancholic dreams, the bombshell who could shock him into laughter. That’s the thing: beautiful blondes are everywhere in Hollywood, but try finding one who can make you laugh.

  On The Howard Stern Show, Jani announced to the world that he was going to marry me. His public devotion and chivalry won me over, and after making love on the bullet train in Tokyo, I became pregnant with our baby girl, Taylar Jayne Lane. Four months later, on July 15, 1991, we married on the rooftop of the Wyndham Bel Age Hotel, the air heavy with the scent of five hundred pink roses and several dozen cans of Elnett. All our friends came to the wedding—Guns n’ Roses’s Duff McKagan, Def Leppard’s Rick Allen, and my dance-floor buddy, R&B singer Bobby Brown. Our wedding was a fitting climax to the perfect Sunset Strip fairytale—even though behind the scenes, the cracks in my relationship with Jani were already starting to show, and the Sunset Strip was inching closer and closer to implosion. It didn’t matter what the future held, though, because from that day on, my fate was sealed.

  I would forever be the Cherry Pie Girl.

  •••

  When I came home from the hospital after my tumble down the stairs, I cried like a baby, and not just because I looked like the Elephant Man. It was a slap in the face, a reminder of how unraveled my life had become. I was that old Hollywood cliché—the small-town blonde, fallen from grace, her fifteen minutes long behind her. Hollywood had made me pay the price for the hubris of my youth. Over and over again I’d been knocked down, passed over, and dismissed as too old, too fat, too loud, too Bobbie. Blonde hair and a quick wit no longer opened doors for me. In the past five years alone my TV show had been canceled, my agent had dropped me, my body ached because of a traumatic car accident, and I’d endured the most humiliating breakup of my life with Josh, who, it turned out, was secretly sending high-resolution photographs of his dick to every girl in LA with a cell phone and data plan. On top of all this, wildfires were circling the city, temperatures were rising, the ice caps were melting, and so were my breast implants. Then I heard someone say rock ’n’ roll was over—“bye, bye, Miss American Pie,” might as well throw yourself down the stairs.

  For weeks, the bruise bulged out of my head, protruding like a unicorn’s horn, a reminder of how alone I was in the world. What if my brother hadn’t been there to take me to the hospital? Who could I count on? Most of my immediate family lived far away in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I had no husband, no boyfriend. Yes, I had friends, but friends got busy. My home seemed unsafe, a place where bad things might happen. I trod carefully down the stairs, stopped doing laundry at midnight, and installed a Nest Cam. Mentally, I felt like a senior citizen with brittle bones and one foot in the grave even though I hadn’t even turned fifty.

  Then came yet another blow, one that hit even harder than my fall: my brother told me he was moving. Not to another neighborhood, to another planet. Planet Minnesota. I understood the sane, pragmatic reasons why my sane, pragmatic brother was leaving Hollywood; it was expensive now, prohibitively so, and there was no way he could afford to buy or even rent a home fit for raising his family here. Adam, like so many others, was about to become an unwilling economic exile of Los Angeles, whose blushing sunsets have been marred by the shadows of wage stagnation, rent hikes, and social inequality. The American Dream was out of reach for Adam in this town, but it could still happen for him in the Midwest.

  The day before they left, I promised to entertain my nephew while Adam and his wife supervised the movers who were loading their stuff into trucks. Watching them, I grew emotional. I couldn’t stand the thought that this might be the last time in months I’d get to hold my little nephew. I couldn’t stop the tears, so I asked my brother if I could go home for an hour to calm myself down.

  “Of course, Bobbie,” he said.

  I fell asleep crying in my bed and woke up two hours later to messages from Adam’s wife, Laura. They’d had to leave already and were checking in to a hotel by the airport. I begged for one last dinner together with them like we did every Sunday. But it was too late; Ollie was asleep. They promised to text me in the morning and arrange to meet so we could say goodbye in person. But in the end there was no time, and I didn’t get to hug my brother, or Laura, or worst of all, my nephew. I so wanted to tell him that his auntie loved him very much, that he brought joy to my world, that I felt alive playing with him, enjoying his perfect little soul. I didn’t get to say any of that.

  After they left, I looked at myself in the mirror, at the dent in my forehead, a permanent reminder of the night I fell. That incident had felt like a fork in the road, yet months later, here I was, still lingering at the crossroads, unsure of which way to go. My brother’s departure felt like another prod from above. Why are you still in Los Angeles, Bobbie Brown? What are you doing here? What’s your purpose? Should I go back to Baton Rouge? Follow my brother to Minnesota? Should I just remain a widowed bride of Los Angeles until the day I die?

  This city had once felt so full of promise to me. At twenty-one, I walked the Strip like it was my own personal catwalk. At forty-eight, with a dent in my head and enough baggage to fill a cross-country freight train, it seemed like maybe it was finally time to pack up my hair extensions and call it a day.

  Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I hated what I saw: a fallen starlet whose life looked like one huge, long joke. I was a promising career littered with fumbled opportunities, a love life where each lapse of judgement was grander and more ridiculous than the last. It was bad punchline after bad punchline, and I’d had enough. You’re not a joke, Bobbie, you’re not a joke, I told my reflection firmly.

  Then it hit me. I’d been seeing it all wrong. I am a joke. A really, really funny one. I’ve just never gotten ’round to telling it!

  Funnily Enough...

  In 1995, Tommy Lee got high on ecstasy and married Pamela Anderson on a beach in Cancún four days after he and I called off our engagement. That’s when I first considered pursuing comedy professionally.

  I’d always been known as a funny girl—in high school, the teachers would put my desk in the hallway to keep me from distracting the class with my wisecracks. My mom, Judy, always said to me, “You can turn a dumpy day into sunshine, Bobbie.” And Sharise Neil, ex-wife of Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil and my ride-or-die bestie for nearly thirty years, had been telling me for ages I should give comedy a go.

  “Yes, you’re beautiful,” she once told me, “but you also talk about diarrhea in a really funny way.”

  Sharise thought I should star in rom-coms or have a sitcom like Seinfeld. In the early 2000s, thanks to the encouragement of my loved ones, I finally drummed up the courage to audition for the Groundlings, one of the best improv schools in the world. And to my surprise, they loved me. I nailed the audition. I couldn’t believe it.

  At the time, I was dating Jay Gordon, singer of the industrial band Orgy. Jay had spiky silver hair, wore cyber-goth platform boots, and shaved his eyebrows. Taylar, who was around eight years old at the time, refused to be seen with Jay in public. She called him Frankenscissors because to her he looked like a cross between Frankenstein and Edward Scissorhands. She thought Jay was a dork, but as usual, I was utterly impervious to her good advice.

  “Jay, I auditioned for the Groundlings, and I got in!” I told him when I got home, so proud to have been accepted.

  Jay looked at me, bored. He always looked bored. “But you’re
not funny, Bobbie.”

  “I’m not?”

  “Nope.”

  He’s right, whispered the voice in my head. You’re just some dumb blonde who can’t keep a man. What’s funny about that?

  I never went back to the Groundlings. Self-sabotage is a career choice too.

  In 2015, I tried once again, gingerly, to explore the idea of being funny for money. I went to the Comedy Store, where a few friends were doing stand-up. After the show, I asked their advice on breaking in and the responses were overwhelmingly negative.

  “Don’t do it, Bobbie.”

  “This is a really hard field to get into.”

  Et cetera.

  I didn’t have to read too far between the lines to understand what they were saying: I was too old to hack it. It was too late in the game. I was already in my mid-forties, and my chances of failure were 100 percent. But there’s nothing like a near-fatal fall down the stairs to kickstart your career goals. I no longer cared that Jay “Frankenscissors” Gordon didn’t think I was funny. I didn’t care that comedy was a tough field to get into or that I was older than most people starting out on that stage. This time, I was giving comedy a shot.

  I called Jerod Zavistoski—an actor, male dating coach, and comedian—who had interviewed me on his podcast, Modern Male Radio, several times. I told him I had been thinking about trying stand-up comedy and asked if he could give me any pointers. He invited me to accompany him to a comedy class in Hollywood and see what I thought. His teacher was a man called Jimmy Shin, a booker at the Comedy Store and the Hollywood Improv. Sort of like the Yoda of the Comedy Strip, he and his teaching partner Gary Robinson are known for helping young—I mean aspiring—comedians break into the game.

  Jerod showed me into the class. “Everyone, this is Bobbie Brown, the Cherry Pie Girl!”

  I rolled my eyes. Something about being introduced as Cherry Pie Girl makes me feel uncomfortable, like I’m supposed to leap into character and do a little dance.