And where was his father? Irene gave us an old phone number for the one and only Marquis Philip Des Barres, squanderer of family fortunes, and after calling around town to find the old geezer, we planned to meet him at a pub in Oxford Circus for a friendly drink and chat. He was already sequestered in a booth when we arrived, holding hands with a round-faced, underage blond girl, whispering in her ear while she giggled gleefully. Wearing an elegant but shoddy black suit, ascot askew, his face lined, his bald head gleaming, he could have been the girl’s great-grandfather except for the fact that he gazed at her small chest lasciviously and gave us a naughty wink when we sat down. He acted as if he had seen his son just last week instead of many years before. The old fellow still held himself like royalty—obviously used to being the total center of attention—and when he insisted on paying the bill, pulled a handful of Tuinals and Seconals out of his pocket with the wrinkled wad of pounds. The pills rolled all over the seat, and he gathered them up, laughing wickedly, and popped one into his mouth seemingly without a spot of remorse. His upright, rebellious pride was ragged but entirely intact. What an unholy heritage I was about to inherit.
I had of course realized Michael’s penchant for the seamy side of life—and now I knew for sure that it ran in the family—but being the optimistic overlooker that I am, I always tried to see my own true love in the kindest, blindest of light. I had certainly taken my share of mind-altering chemicals, wanting to dig around inside myself, trying to find Really Big Answers, hoping to see God. I had sometimes even enjoyed the muggy escape from scary, shocking reality, so I truly understood the need to search for the EXIT sign once in a while.
But Michael seemed to be on his own private search-and-destroy mission. Drugs of enlightenment and inner discovery had been replaced by hard, mean, addictive powders and downer death pills, and Michael seemed seriously devoted to them. He loved to get higher than anyone else in the room, pass out, and start all over the next day. How could I move to New York and leave him in L.A. with his habit? It was worse than sharing him with another woman. He might even wake up dead someday, my panicky heart kept repeating. Dead someday. Dead someday. He ingested any drug that anyone gave him, cocaine being his “drug of choice.” He drank out of any bottle until it was empty, but since he didn’t think he had a problem, his sharp, smart mouth shut me right up when I started blathering on and on. Woody Allen didn’t take drugs, and he was a creative soul; Frank Zappa had never even smoked a joint. Who else? Who else? I searched far and wide for shining examples but was hard-pressed to find any others. Michael’s heroes were all high-as-kite fuck-ups, so deciding all I could do was be a luminous example of squeaky-clean sanity, I swore off all obliterative substances, hoping, praying he would follow suit.
To my delight, Michael got bombed only twice the whole time we were in England, which gave me unwarranted hope that he would continue on this immaculate pathway in Los Angeles while I forged a new career on national television. Oh God, please keep him clean and straight. After much gazing, clutching, and more weepy promises at Heathrow Airport, he slammed back to the manager-dealer’s bachelor den, and I poured prayers into my journal on the plane to Manhattan.
November 14—Away from my darling Michael, but his smile fills my mind. The last ten days have been glorious, I didn’t know there were any more things we could do with our bodies. Blazing hot. He’s never looked or felt better to me. God, I hope he takes care of himself—he needs me around—I hope he’s strong. God keep him, don’t let him wig out. I trust his soul and hope to go through L-I-F-E with him.
VI
On top of being worried spitless about Michael, I was a wretched bag of nerves on my big-deal soap job. I started studying with the wildly acclaimed William Hickey at the Berghof Studio, and even though he was constantly sipping on some mysterious clear liquid, he thought I was a stupendous actress. I made sure he never caught Search for Tomorrow. All my fellow soap actors were encouraging and helpful, but my confidence quotient was pathetic. I could hardly even smile, because I felt like I would crack down the center and expose the sorry smidgen of talent I really had. I carried around a little blurb about my character, Amy Kaslo, and read it over and over between takes, hoping to capture her deep-down essence.
”AMY KASLO—A new friend of Liza Walton. Amy could have been a camp counselor but is now a full-scholarship medical student at Henderson Medical School. She is a warm, funny, slightly ethnic girl as open and full of sparks as the furnace her father fed at a steel mill in Pennsylvania. She comes from working-class people whose feet are firmly planted on the ground, and her parents are just a little suspicious of a girl who sets her sights as high as their daughter has. Going after a medical degree is a little crazy, and if that’s what she wants, she is going to have to do it on her own. They can’t help feeling that aiming too high makes it easier to fall.”
I could certainly relate to that, but “slightly ethnic”? I’m about as white-bread and homogenized as it gets. I don’t know about Amy Kaslo, but Pamela Ann Miller had always aimed too high, only to find that when she got there she was petrified. All of a sudden my hundreds of acting classes dribbled down the drain as I paced around my dressing room trying to learn lines that had been changed over and over again. “Come in, Liza! Gee, why didn’t Bruce come with you? Come to think of it, I didn’t see him in the student lounge. I wonder if anything happened to him? Do you think he’s all right?”
There was a lot of “business” my first day of filming. The full-of-sparks Amy was having a housewarming party and had to drain the spaghetti through a tennis racket. Real cute. Real impossible. The guy playing my bespectacled boyfriend Grover was almost as nervous as I was, so we rehearsed our lines until they were meaningless drivel and somehow got through the stray spaghetti strands, grueling shouts of “action” and the clapboard slamming down in our faces. The shuddering shy guy bringing Grover to life was John Heard, and he’s on the big screen all the time now, so I suppose he figured out a way to deal with his willies. I never did. Oh, I had days when I felt like I didn’t embarrass myself, and even thought I was pretty good once in awhile, but for the most part, I was filled with dread when somebody yelled “quiet on the set.”
I felt like throwing up with actor-jitters, but that wasn’t the only problem. My character was supposed to be smart, hip, and sparkly, but I found myself spewing plot lines half the time, explaining away everybody else’s unseemly actions, and mooning mopily around over my best friend’s nerdy fiance nonstop. They brought Michael Nouri in to play my gorgeous rebel brother and my best friend Liza promptly fell for him, but I still didn’t get to grab Brucie boy; I consoled him instead. Awwww, you’ll be okay, Bruce. She wasn’t good enough for you anyway. I wanted to do something naughty and evil-spirited like the bad girl on the show, played by Morgan Fair-child; instead, I was cutesie-poo Amy—Amy a lump of pre-fab putty, tossed around in the hands of the soap writers like a boring, sniveling jerk with a bouffant. Why did the hairdresser have to tease me out so wide and use half a can of hairspray? Amy Kaslo started out to be a freaky hippie chick, didn’t she?
I wanted to rush back to Hollywood and riot on the Sunset Strip, frolic in a ripped-up lace tablecloth at one more love-in, and pounce on Michael with Father Knows Best mewling in the background. I wanted to bonk the heels of my normal nurse shoes together and whisper, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home … ” and find myself at the Country Canyon Store drinking Dr Pepper in the sunlight. Instead I was under harsh fake lights, shaking in front of a soulless lens, wearing a severe white medical smock dyed gray for the cameras. What was I doing in such stiff, unhip circumstances?
Michael was out on the streets in Hollywood the day of the Amy Kaslo debut and was wildly trying to locate a TV to watch his girlfriend play-act. He wandered around asking passersby if he could please watch their TV for a half an hour and lucked out just in time when a very large black lady and her daughter invited him in to view their tiny black-and-white set. Af
ter settling down in their bungalow off Fountain and Argyle, he had to fend off their seductive, double advances while poor, old Amy attempted to strain spaghetti through that accursed tennis racket. He told me this nutty story on the phone that night, where I was curled up in my loft bed, needing him so bad. He was rehearsing with his new band daily and getting real high at night, and because he knew how hysterically opposed to obliteration I was, he started lying to me. I gobbled it up, pretending his constant sniffle was not self-induced. Yes, honey, I know. You can’t seem to get rid of that nagging cold. Take lots of vitamin C. Drink vast quantities of liquid. Get a lot of sleep. Mmm-mm, yes angelman, I love you, too.
Everybody was getting stoned, weren’t they? It was no big deal, right? Michael could handle it, couldn’t he? Had I known about Alcoholics Anonymous at this point, I would have had some much-needed assistance, but AA was still a backwoods, naked-swaying-lightbulb concept, not even a consideration. Instead, I found a cosmic healer-teacher-saint called Hilda, who provided holy relief from my inner battering ram with her weekly meditation meetings. I could lose track of my panic-stricken, skittish brain, spiral freewheeling into the celestial void and close up the honky-tonks for a little while. It was my first real, true experience of leaving it all behind without a guilty hangover. Hilda told us about a holy lady called Amal, long gone from this planet, who would answer prayers if you asked three times in a row. I slept in a T-shirt with her face on the front and begged and pleaded with her three times three times three times daily for Michael to see the light, shed his desire for drugs and alcohol, and humble his precious, sleazy self before the Lord of his choice.
VII
Two long months later I got to go home for Christmas and rekindle my unwieldy romance. I was nauseated with anxiety, faint with anticipation, but five minutes in each other’s eyes and it was like I never left at all. Instead of crashing at the manager’s raucous pad, we stayed with our friend, Ben Edmonds, the Creem magazine editor who had gotten me an airline ticket home when I was stuck in Toolieville, Georgia, with Silverhead a few months before. I had actually traded him one of Mick Jagger’s garments from Performance that he had given me when we were carousing. I think Ben had a contest with it: Why I Want to Swaddle Myself in Mick Jagger’s Velvet Dress in Fifty Words or Less. Michael and I borrowed a mattress from my dear old roommate, Michele Myer, and lazed around in Ben’s spare room, doing it so many times I was raw. He bought me an engagement ring on Hollywood Boulevard for 32.50 complete with itsy diamond chip, slipped it on my finger in front of my parents’ heavily laden Christmas tree, and I was set for life.
January 3—Michele is real upset, she thinks I devote too much time to Des Barres. We went to Disneyland on N.Y. Eve and brought ’75 in with Mick and Min! So great! His new supergroup is coming together, so that’s what he’ll be working on when I split. Ah, sweet worry, will you split, too? We’ve talked about the drug thing and he says he’ll be cool. God, Amal, watch over him. I’ve had several nasty, paranoid dreams about it, though he’s only been blasted a couple times.
To say I was writhing around in my beloved’s bone marrow wouldn’t be an exaggeration.
I talked Michael into spending New Year’s Eve at my home away from home, The Happiest Place on Earth—Disneyland. As a kid, I had dashed home from school daily to chortle along with Jimmy Dodd and the Meeska-Mooska-Mouseketeers, and Mickey Mouse came to represent all that was innocent and good—no dark side whatsoever. My parents took me to Disneyland for my birthday the year it opened, 1955, and I became one with Fantasyland, soaking the carefree Dumbo-Peter Pan-Snow White innocence into the soles of my black patent shoes, pink lace socks. I needed to share the park with Michael; he had to realize the importance of Mickey Mouse and his slaphappy cronies in the grand scheme of things and what they meant to me. When Mickey kissed Minnie at the top of the Fantasyland castle at the stroke of midnight, Michael kissed me. He probably would have liked to have been rollicking, dead-drunk, raving at a madclub, escaping reality, but he was holding on to me while two small people in costume planted one on each other’s fake noses. But was I escaping reality? Uh-uh. I was pushing the fucking mouse down his throat, but Michael loved me enough not to wring its neck. Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.
After closing down Disneyland, we spent two days in Ensenada, Mexico, with Daddy and his best friend, Ruben, eating cucumbers on sticks sprinkled liberally with chile pepper, riding horses bareback on the beach, buying big silver crosses and loud embroidered vests, taking a much-needed siesta under the smiling orange sun. Ruben and his wife threw a barbecue in our honor, and his many robust children, all dressed up in their frilly best, served us various chunks of blackened seafood drenched in lime juice. Michael drank many beers with my dad, and they shared a warped, semi-bonding experience; two hugely different worlds colliding with peculiar panache. “I go gold-mining too, O.C.,” I heard Michael say, tilting back the cowboy hat he had worn in my dad’s honor. “I dig for gold in the record business. Ha. Ha?” The long-haired, rake-thin, bejeweled and jangled English pop prince and O. C. Miller—Clark Gable look-alike, coal miner from Avery County, North Carolina—each sniffing the other from head to toe while casually discussing the current events of 1975. “No matter what they say about Watergate, Mike, Nixon did us some good.” I wish I had taken a picture.
We didn’t realize Michael would need his passport to get back across the border, so when the squinting, macho, mustachioed gendarme leaned his big face into Daddy’s Caddy and asked if we were all American, I piped up proudly, “My fiance is British!” O.C. gave me the evil eye and, sure enough, the square-shouldered squinter asked for Michael’s papers. “We didn’t think he would need them,” I squeaked. Michael was silent, and I knew he was way past pissed. After a lot of hassling, pleading, and cajoling, which didn’t work, the high-powered border patrol kept Michael in Dos Equis land over-night. We dropped him off at a supposedly safe, crummy motel right by the border. All he had with him was a copy of Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter and a beat-up gold leather jacket.
I had to go to the scary coke manager’s pad to pick up Michael’s passport and got to see the fancy little hole Michael called home while I emoted in Manhattan. He had my picture hanging over the couch he crashed on, and I got a rapturous little tingle while Mr. Dealer chuckled in the background with his cocaine residue, fishy grin, and jittery hands. I tried to deny it to myself, but he and Michael shared a common, albeit depraved, drug bond that I had excluded myself from by trying to set a Goody-Two-Shoes example. I attempted to smile back at him after the passport was procured, but my grin muscles were paralyzed.
I tried to sleep at my parents’ house for a couple of hours before I set out on the trek back to Mexico but was so distressed about my man trapped in his nighttime Tijuana net, I couldn’t even keep my eyes closed. Worried weak, I flew through the bright blue morning in Daddy’s metal-flaked copper-colored Caddy (painted in Mexico, of course; Earl Scheib was nowhere in sight) with Michael’s important passport in the pocket of my jeans and was so relieved to see my man waiting for me outside the border dump. Once ensconced within the frozen-aired comfort of the Fleetwood, he cuddled into me and cracked me up with his tale of woe in TJ. He said it had been a Helter-Skelter frightmare, with Anthony Quinn look-alikes looming in the shadows, loitering outside his flimsy door all night long. “I kept expecting Charlie, disguised as Viva Zapata to knock the door down and offer me some acid,” Michael moaned at me. He could be amusing in the most dire circumstances. He had shoved the only piece of furniture besides a charming, squeaky cot—a three-legged table—against the door because there was no lock. Since all his neighbors resided in cardboard boxes, he realized he should have been grateful for the shelter, but his terror was compounded by reading about wack-eyed Tex Watson and Charlie’s zombie kill-girls. Sitting on the floor by the window, next to the misfit table, he read the hideous revelations by the only available light; a lone bulb out in the hallway, surrounded by drunken, dusty moth
s. A fabulous topper to his first south-of-the-border vacation.
A few days later I got on yet another plane bound for New York, while Michael stood by gallantly. I bit my tongue hard so I wouldn’t beg and plead with him one more time to stay away from the devil drug cocaine and the liver eater alcohol. When I was settled in for the five-hour flight, I plunged into my purse, trying to locate a roll of Turns for my lonesome, aching tummy, and came across a little note Michael had hidden inside. “My Darling Pamela, please don’t worry your beautiful head about my bad habits. I want to be a success more than I want boils. I love you more than ever, and your love and concern for me are too strong for the negativity one can get caught up in. Sweetheart, I adore you and I won’t hurt you.” Michael’s skin was flawless and fortunately he was splendidly vain, so I was always telling him he would break out with big, red gonks if he ingested too much evil poison (one of my ploys to keep him straight). In his inimitable fashion, he was reassuring me he would take care of himself, and I prayed to the saints, holy lady Amal three times, Mother Mary and her beloved son Jesus that he would.
CHAPTER THREE
January 24—Michael’s birthday and our first anniversary! I’m so in love it’s desperate. I hope we can stick it out during all these separations. Sometimes I get a sick feeling in my tummy. Fear? Anxiety? Realizations? I have got to try to understand the boy. It worries me so, and it’s bad for me to worry. It’s just as bad for my soul as what he’s doing is for his soul. God bless me. God bless him, God bless us. Karma, karma, it’s all karmic; past lives reuniting us to completion. Oh help.
Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up Page 4