Dandelion; Memoir Of A Free Spirit

by Catherine James

  The balmy summer made the uncertain, frigid winter well worth the price of admission. When the lake began to thaw and the first crocus bloomed, I’d remember why I had fallen in love with this place.

  Besides being shatteringly beautiful, Connecticut had a profusion of unmined antiques and unknown treasures. I haunted country barn auctions, and church and tag sales, and started my collection of antique pre-Raphaelite and Maxfield Parrish prints. I bought up every Victorian embroidered shawl and patchwork quilt I could find, and started a little enterprise selling them in New York for triple the money. Damian and I skated at the town roller rink, and watched movies at the drive-in theater, and my little boy learned how to swim in the clear waters of Candlewood. Whatever there was to do, we did it. I planted a garden of wildflowers and a variety of organic vegetables; started a freshwater aquarium for Damian; and adopted a regal Russian wolfhound from an ad in the PennySaver. As lovely as it all was, I was beginning to feel a bit lonely. After reading my son to sleep I’d turn up Puccini and gaze out over the moonlit water, thinking how romantic it was here. Where was my handsome young prince? If he even existed, I certainly wasn’t making it easy for him to find me.

  Out of the blue I got a call from Jackson Browne. We’d written and spoken on the phone a few times, but I hadn’t seen him since he saw me off at British Airways, the day I left him standing at the gate to go and be with Denny Laine in England. Jackson had just finished his first album and was in New York to promote it. He said that since he was so close to Connecticut, he’d like to come up for a visit.

  Damian and I were waiting on the country-style platform as his train rolled into Brewster station. Jackson was hanging off the edge of the old-fashioned caboose, holding out a copy of Saturate Before Using, his first record. My sweet Jackson, he did it! As we embraced, memories of our past romance flooded though my head like it was yesterday. The touch and smell of him still sent me. After a cozy home-cooked dinner, I asked if he’d like to stay the night. He looked at me with his soulful brown eyes, and sighed. “No, I can’t. I have to get back to L.A.”

  The possibility that he’d decline my invitation hadn’t even occurred to me. I asked why, and he told me about his new girlfriend in Los Angeles. He said he was in love with her. I got an ill feeling in my belly, probably like what he must have felt when I ran off to England. I put on my best pretend smile, and graciously wished him well.

  Was this it? Would I be alone for eternity, and never have sex again? Oh, well. I’d never really triumphed in romance, but I was raising a healthy child, and we lived in paradise. I was becoming comfortable with my solitary fate, and was actually having the best time in my life when I got an unexpected call from Jimmy Page.

  No matter how much time went by, the sound of Jimmy’s soft, reticent voice always stopped my heart cold. I hadn’t seen him in over two years, but his voice still made my heart skip a beat. He was in New York at the Drake Hotel, and asked if he could come up for the weekend. I thought, “This has to be a dream.”

  Jimmy’s glistening black Cadillac limousine looked so out of place on my sylvan country road, and my summer neighbors were even more bewildered.

  Jimmy was just as dazzling as the last time we met. He’s also the only man who has left me for a loss for words. I don’t know why, but I always felt slightly shy with him. I was more mature now, a whole twenty-one years. I thought I was a bit more self-assured, but the mere sight of him getting out of his limo and strolling up my walk gave me the familiar jitters. Trying to maintain some sense of coolness, I greeted Jimmy like he was a distant cousin. With a quick kiss, I announced, “Damian and I are just off to the market; you’re welcome to wait here or come along if you like.”

  He said he wanted to go with us, and I showed him how I made the silver Pontiac fly over the dips in the road. We were having a sweet time, and my coolness quickly turned into mush. We had a late-night candlelit dinner and kissed till our lips were swollen to Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark album. Jimmy and I passed the weekend in the summer glory of Candlewood Lake. I took him on a tour of my rural terrain and antique haunts. We took splendid late-afternoon walks with my son and Molly, our Russian wolfhound. It was everything I’d imagined. A noble young man had indeed found the path to my door, and I was back in the dreamy days of Avalon.

  Jimmy finally said the magic words: “Why don’t you come to England?”

  Any other time I would have gone like an arrow, but now I’d started a life, I had a son, birds, fish, a dog, and a flourishing vegetable garden to look after. I couldn’t just leave everything and run off to England, but I did accept his invitation to go with him to Los Angeles for a Led Zeppelin show at the Shrine.

  I bribed a girlfriend from New York with an all-expense-paid week in Candlewood paradise to look after my son, and Jimmy and I boarded a jet to Los Angeles.

  Neither of us was crazy about flying, but the in-flight movie was a welcome distraction. The movie was Brian’s Song, the tragic story of football player Brian Piccolo’s untimely demise. By the time James Caan was on his deathbed, Jimmy and I were rolling with laughter in first class, clearly offending the other teary-eyed passengers.

  A Mercedes limo was waiting at LAX to whisk us off to the Continent Riot (Hyatt) House, Zeppelin’s notorious quarters on the Sunset Strip. The word was out—Zeppelin was in town. The lobby was a-flurry with pretty young girls ready and waiting to show their wares, desirous for a chance to pay homage to their English idols.

  The shows at the Shrine were stunning. The silhouette of Jimmy cloaked in shimmery velvet, moons and stars, and the haunting, abandoned sound of the bow gliding across his guitar were enchantingly sensual. To me Jimmy was Led Zeppelin, the sorcerer behind the magic; he definitely had it down.

  After my whirlwind week of rock and steamy, romantic sex, I actually looked forward to the sanctuary of my little house, away from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. The beauty of Connecticut in 1971 made Los Angeles feel like a warn-out high heel.

  The Indian summer was waning, and the city vacationers had packed up their boats and barbecues and scooted back to New York City. This was my favorite time of the year. The pale changing light and cool quiescent lake softly lapping the bank and flocks of migrating Canadian geese landed on my shore for a brief repose. Sometimes there were so many plaintive honkers Damian and would get scared and hightail it back to the safety of the cottage.

  On my narrow road the trees grew together like a glorious covered bridge. Just before the leaves fell, they’d burst in the most luminous shades of pinks, yellows, and reds I’d ever seen. I never missed a day to absorb the beauty. It was our own heavenly little Walden Pond, and we loved it there.

  Although Lake Candlewood seemed a million miles from civilization, it was really only two hours by train from the bustle of New York City. I got a letter from Denny, who said he was coming to New York in December, along with Paul McCartney and their new band, Wings. He asked if he could come up to Connecticut to spend some time with our son. After our last encounter I wasn’t sure this was such a great idea. I was well over my drama with Denny and his turbulent behavior, but on the other hand I thought it would be good for our five-year-old son to spend some time with his father. Damian and I picked Denny up from the Brewster station. Seeing Denny on American soil felt strangely out of context. He also looked completely different. He’d cut his sixties-style long hair into a Caesar-style do and sported a small gold ring in his newly pierced ear.

  In the beginning it was actually nice to see Denny again. One admirable thing about him was that he was quite generous when he could afford to be. He took Damian shopping for winter clothes and filled my kitchen cupboards with all the amenities and nice things I’d been unable to afford. He got a laugh out of my car collection, but thought I needed something a little spiffier. We searched the ads in the PennySaver and found a promising little Mini Cooper just like the one Denny drove in England. The car was fifty miles to God knows where in the outskirts of Connecticu
t, and Denny bought me the Mini on the spot. I now had the Pontiac, the Volkswagen, the Humber, the 1962 MGA convertible I had picked up for fifty dollars, plus the Mini. A total of five decoy automobiles were parked in my front garden.

  I built crackling fires with cord of wood Denny had delivered, and the three of us danced around the log cabin like delighted children to T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong.” There was no romance, but things were going swimmingly well until Denny took the liberty to tell me,

  “If you come back to England, I’ll give you whatever you like.”

  I was briefly almost interested, until he followed it up with, “But if you don’t, you’ll get nothing from me.”

  There was something about an ultimatum that never sat well with me. I was the sort of girl who would rather take her chances backpacking in a minefield than abide stipulations. In my willful stance I declared, “I’ll take nothing then.”

  From there on in, it was the downhill slope. The serene country air was dense with old, familiar bitterness. I had that same sick feeling in my stomach that I used to get when we lived together in England. I just wanted him to go away before things got out of hand.

  The snow was falling like the heavens had opened, and the fire had burned down to a flickering ember. I asked Denny if he would go out in the back and get some more logs to stoke up the fire. I still can’t imagine where I found the impetus to be so wicked, but as soon as he walked out the door, I locked it behind him, leaving him standing in the falling snow.

  As he knocked, pounded, and pleaded at the back door for me to let him back in, I grabbed his coat and bags and set them out on the front porch. I held my ground till he finally gave up and trudged the six miles through the powdery snow back to the train station. It would be some twenty years before Damian would see his father again.

  With all my endeavors, paying the bills was still a struggle. Denny had been sending me 100 pounds a month, roughly $125, but now I wouldn’t be getting a shilling. I’d only had a few years of formal education, and I didn’t want to take work that kept me away from raising my boy. It was a particularly frosty winter and the heating oil was burning fast. I didn’t have the seventy-five dollars to refill the oil tank, and Damian and I were close to freezing. We slept together under my electric blanket in my king-sized bed, and during the day we stayed close to the fire. There had to be a better way.

  It was 1973 when it occurred to me that I could possible make some money modeling in the city. I dug out some old Polaroids of myself and made an appointment at the renowned Wilhelmina modeling agency.

  At the reception desk I encountered the mighty Kay. Kay was Wilhelmina’s shrewd screener and main booker of the models. Getting past her was just the first hurdle. She took a quick, aloof glance at my snapshots, then asked me to wait in the reception. After what seemed like an hour of watching sultry young models saunter in and out of the office, Kay ushered me in to see the chief. The radiant Wilhelmina had been a model in the early sixties and looked like a pristine page out of a Richard Avedon book. She was dressed in an impeccably tailored black suit and a crisp white shirt, buttoned to the neck. Her smooth auburn hair was pulled back tight into a perfect chignon. Sitting across from her grand lectern in the adjacent smaller chair was painfully intimidating. My three little Polaroids looked sorrowfully insignificant amid the other polished professional headshots and contact sheets spread across her desk. Seeing the full magnitude I was amazed I even got in the door.

  Wilhelmina’s office was plastered with imposing black-and-white blowups of all of her top girls. There were Maud Adams, Margaux Hemingway, Janice Dickinson, and a bevy of other big-league beauties. Willie scrutinized my face, then said in her elegant German accent, “Twenty-two is a bit old to start, but you have a good look.”

  In her no-nonsense manner she plucked a measuring tape from her desk, saying, “34-22-34, good. You’ll need to cut your hair, I want you to go to Yoshi, tell him a clean bob to the shoulders.”

  “We already have two Catherines; how about Katrina,” she suggested. I wasn’t crazy about Katrina; to me it sounded like a Spanish dancer. She tossed out some more names and we finally settled on Vanessa. Wilhelmina picked up the phone and set up an appointment for a photo shoot with Patrice, the dashing in-house French photographer. She told me where to buy my little black portfolio and to be sure to call the agency every day by five for my list of “go-sees.” Just like that, I walked out of her office a Wilhelmina model.

  Becoming a working model wasn’t going to be as easy or glamorous as I’d imagined. Living two hours from the city and having a five-year-old to tote along made it all the more challenging.

  We had to rise by 5:00 A.M. in order to make the 6:40 train from Brewster, then ride another hour and a half to Grand Central Station. If the train was already pulling out, I’d have to sling little Damian on my hip and run for it like our sweet lives depended on us being aboard. I’d do makeup on the train, being careful not to poke my eye out with the mascara wand while the train bumped and bounced along toward the city. With half an hour before my first appointment I’d take my hair rollers out in the cavernous, Art Deco ladies’ room in the station. I’d do the finishing touches of lip gloss and blush under the unflattering fluorescent lights. Trying to look glamorous at eight in the morning was never easy.

  Go-sees were my appointments with an array of fashion photographers, and Willie kept me busy pounding the pavement. If a photographer like your look, he’d do a test shoot; in return I’d get the print to put together my portfolio.

  I think I met with every photographer and ad agency in New York City. I didn’t have extra money for a taxi, or even bus fare, so Damian and I hoofed it up and down the avenues. To make matters worse, my little tyke had a fearful aversion to elevators. Whenever I tried to get him into the lift, he’d screech and squeal so loud we’d have to jump out just before the doors closed and scale an arduous twenty or thirty flights of steep stairs. By the end of the day I was weary as Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I’d use my last shred of energy sprinting through the gates at Grand Central Station, just in time to catch the six o’clock back to Connecticut, and then do it all over again the next day.

  My dedication was paying off. In just three months I had a nice little cache of black-and-white beauty shots and a progress appointment with Willie.

  I was stunned when Wilhelmina shuffled through my portfolio and tossed out all but three of my hard-earned photographs. I thought to myself, “I’ll just stick them all back in when I get home.” Willie must have sensed my dejection, as before I left her office she said something I’ll always remember, and which has pertained to all of my endeavors: “Catherine, only show your best work.”

  She said it’s better to show one outstanding photograph than a portfolio full of average shots.

  I decided to trust her wisdom and left the average pictures out of my book. Five months later I got my first paid booking, a full-page beauty ad for Mademoiselle magazine.

  My baby son was now five years old and had started kindergarten at Stadley Ruff Elementary School. Except for my stint as cash register girl at Caldor, we had rarely spent a moment apart. I’d dress him up for school and almost every morning while we waited for the school bus I’d document the start of his day by taking his picture with my Brownie Star Flash camera. Letting him go off on his own was almost unbearable, but there was a benefit. I could now go to my appointment in the city without toting my tot. Wilhelmina was more that gracious and arranged my schedule so that I could be back to Connecticut just in time to meet Damian’s school bus as it stopped in front of our cottage.

  On one of my appointments I ran into my old friend Miss Pamela, the femme fatale who had charmed Jimmy Page away from my heart in Hollywood. Pamela had since become an actress and was playing the part of Amy, a hippie girl on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. In real life she had fallen in love again; this time it was with the pretty English rocker and lead singer of Silverhead, Michael Des Barres. She said she wa
s leaving her soap opera and packing it all in to move back to California and become Mrs. Des Barres. It turned out that we were both enthusiastic treasure hunters, and I invited her up to Connecticut for a final weekend of tantalizing barn auctions and tag sales. Pamela discovered a pristine 1940s bamboo dining set for twenty dollars and couldn’t resist a deal. She had no idea how she’d get it back to California, but it just wasn’t in her to pass up a bargain. Two weeks later Miss Pamela rolled up in a funky blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville to collect her lucky find. She brought along a conservative-looking young man with short blond hair, neatly parted to the side, and horn-rimmed glasses, not at all Miss Pamela’s type. She said he was just a friend from her acting class, but he looked besotted to me. He was smitten enough that he had offered to drive her all the way to Hollywood. Her friend, Joseph, rigged the table and unwieldy chairs to the roof of the Caddy, then snapped a few Polaroids of me and Pamela. Pamela took the last shot of Joseph and me in front of the log cabin, and the Beverly Hillbillies were on their way to gold country.

  Another one of my enterprises was making delicate little purses from remnants of Victorian velvet, which I painstakingly embroidered with bits of silk and tiny glass beads. I sold them at a ritzy boutique on Main Street in Ridgefield. Life has a plan. Each petite fleur I stitched brought me closer to the man who would send me reeling back home to California. My one-of-a-kind bags were selling like hotcakes, and helped pay my train fare back and forth to the city. I was dropping off a new batch when I was introduced to Chris Walker, a friend of the proprietor of the boutique.