Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up

by Des Barres, Pamela

  My Dearest Pam,

  First, me luv, I must explain a few things to you. Don’t think for one moment that I enjoyed those weeks in the Virgin Islands with that ruddy Jane Asher. Oh luv, it was pure misery! She’s crackers and drained me of my pay ’til me and Ringo were both skint! Natchally, as you knew, she only went along for publicity. Wouldn’t any jobless actress do the same? Please believe me, me beluvved, you’re the only one in my heart.

  If you don’t know by now, I’ll tell you: I wrote your favorite song “World Without Love,” for you and you alone. Oh luv, the night I helped John write those words, I needed you so! I need you now! Oh, luv, I’ve told you how much I love you in every song we’ve written. I hope you know that. Every song speaks of my love for you.

  All My Loving, Paul

  And I found a crumpled, stoned-out letter to Marlon Brando:

  My dear Marlon,

  Your name was just mentioned in an insane conversation between a bunch of my lunatic friends. I’m sure everyone I know is a genius in one way or another—most of them fulfilling their creative need. I never really have totally expressed myself creatively, but at times I feel my friend’s success as if it were my own. Let’s face it, I’m usually frustrated. Unless one totally reacts to any given situation exactly the way one feels about it, confusion occurs, due to the block that is created by the thoughts in between the event and the reaction to it. If you withhold your immediate reaction, then there is a block. Unless you react without thinking first, it’s too late and any reaction is false and useless. EVERYONE has some paranoia—due to circumstances, twisted energies, and misunderstandings of meanings and words—I so want to bring mine under control. Oh yes, I forgot to tell you the circumstances in which your name came up. Led Zeppelin got dressed up in drag last night, and the roadie said, “I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but you can find me at Marlon Brando’s house.” He must have been reading my mind. I wonder when I’ll ever get over this groupie phase. My photographer, Lee, says I’m about to get my Ph.D. As soon as I feel I am contributing to the happiness of this poor race, then maybe I won’t try so hard to reap my rock friend’s trips. I’m doing this play tomorrow at Actor’s Studio, it’s my first real BIG HOLLYWOOD EXPERIENCE. I called to let you know what time to show up. I hope you can see it. I’ll bet you’d wished you had. It’s such a thrill to open up and CREATE with your entire being. I am ready for absolutely ANYTHING that comes my way. There are so many times when I’ve almost stopped smoking grass. There must be a saturation point. I’m so full of it that whenever I get high it spills out of me and seems to SOIL MY BRAIN. It has become a social thing, like the nine-to-fiver’s cocktails. I have been really overindulging on the earth level. I was so drunk when you finally spoke to me on the phone that I must have garbled on a bit. It was so kind and gentle of you to have concern for someone you do not yet know. I read Stevie Wonder’s palm tonight and he said I was “very good.” What a thrill. As soon as I forget the “I” in all of my life dealings and realize it’s all for the entire whole, things will fall into place. I get so bogged down in small details. I’m sure the only place they exist is in my turmoiled head. Ah, Life.

  Heavy shit, man. I found I had a lot of material. I had chronicled love-ins, hanging out backstage at Jimi Hendrix concerts, dancing on mescaline to Janis Joplin at the Whisky a Go Go, recording with my all-girl band, the GTO’s (Frank Zappa at the helm), cavorting on stage with the Who, the Stones, Zeppelin. Wouldn’t people find that stuff interesting?

  For the next few months I dripped chunks of yesterday’s dramas and dreams, like Miss Mercy GTO used to drop scarves, tarnished jangling belts, and wildly flamboyant articles of clothing everywhere she went. It became hard to hold a conversation about the present, immersed as I was in my torrid, traumatic, transcendental past, referring to long-gone incidents as if they just happened and speaking of freaky pals on the Sunset Strip as if they had just been over for tea with lots of honey. It drove Michael mad, but he sanctioned my new project. Although I was reliving my raging flings with more than a few rock-god dogs, he was outrageously open-minded, and for that I was truly grateful. Without his tower-of-strength spousal support, I could never have started writing—never mind stick with it for five long years. And now a voice within me piped up, muttering, “Maybe writing could take the place of your fumbled, sad-sack acting career!” Maybe, maybe, maybe, baby.

  II

  I was intently recalling the way Paul McCartney’s long, slim thighs made me feel hot and bothered, getting it down on the page, when the phone ringing yanked me out of the panting Beatlemaniac reverie. It was the sweet, high-pitched voice of Melanie Griffith inviting me to her husband, Steven Bauer’s birthday party. “I know you’ll want to be there because Donnie is bringing Patti D’Arbanville, the girl who just had his baby,” she said, giggling breathlessly. Donnie Wayne Johnson—one of my only True Loves and Melanie’s first husband. Melanie and Don had smashed apart a few years earlier, and I had been the one to move Melanie into her swell new Hollywood apartment while she bawled her eyes out. I think Warren Beatty had something to do with it. Since then, she had married another hunky actor, Steven “Rocky” Bauer, and seemed content and semi-domestic.

  I hadn’t seen Donnie since we bumped into each other (literally) at a liquor store when I was eight months pregnant with Nick. All charm, he had said to me, “I always knew you’d be big as a house when you got pregnant.” Such a way with words. But he and I checked in with each other every six months, so I already knew about the impending offspring and was oh-so super-duper curious about the mommy. “I can’t wait,” I said to Melanie and started planning my ensemble. Patti had been a semi-legend in New York and was courted on the coast by some of the same rock gentlemen who had wooed me in the West. For the rest of the day the Cat Stevens song “My Lady D’Arbanville” was spinning around my head. The line, “her heart feels like winter” made me a little nervous.

  The night of the bash out in Malibu, I wore a tattered black suede mini-dress, high patent-leather spikes, and tall, teased hair the color of blood on fire. I had recently become a redhead and found that it suited me fine and dandy. After greeting Melanie and the handsome, boyish birthday boy, I clung to my stun-o-rama husband out on the breezy veranda overlooking the crashing, thrashing waves and scanned the crowd for Don and his new amore. There they were, D. J. and My Lady D’Arbanville looking way too good with her yards of wavy blond hair. Thumpy-hearted, I started through the crowd, and when Donnie spotted me, he grandly stood up and, laughing, opened his arms for me to run into. He told me how gorgeous I looked and introduced me to Patti, who sort of snarled at me like a taunted, ticked-off cat. Oops. After attempting some trivia talk with the two of them—with Patti glaring at me as if I was about to unzip Donnie’s pants—I excused myself to find Michael, hoping that a glimpse of my real live husband would make Patti retract her claws. Besides, Donnie and Patti were recently sober, and I thought Michael, who was now three long years clean, might provide some invaluable assistance for the former drug beast and his catty concubine. As you know, maintaining a close bond with my T.L.s has always been paramount to me, so I hoped we could get along. Michael and Don forged an instant sympatico sobriety bond, and as the men intensely rambled about the difficulty of staying sane in those excruciating early drug- and booze-free days, I hung onto Michael, making sure to gaze adoringly, and I could feel Patti finally start to relax and soften. I wasn’t a threat, after all.

  Gradually she began to gab. “You wouldn’t believe what just happened,” she confided. “Right before you got here, Jan Michael Vincent’s girlfriend trounced over and stuck her tongue straight down Donnie’s throat, just to say hello.” I was appropriately appalled, telling her about all the salacious howdy-hi’s that I had had to get through. We commiserated about the shameless, wanton behavior of the desperate Hollywood dames we both had to contend with. Tsk tsk tsk. Patti was excited that Michael and Don could possibly hang out, and the idea that Michael coul
d be a good influence on anybody, let alone my former passionflower, made me realize just how far he had come from those dastardly coke-couch days, so I swelled with wifely pride within my tattered suede. By the end of the night, Michael and Don had figured out which AA meetings to attend together, and Patti and I had a lunch date the very next day.

  A new friend! Meeting a new girl and hitting it off is almost as thrilling as falling in love. In some ways it’s even more rewarding because romantic passion and honey-devotion can be back-breaking, feverish work, whereas female kinship is a constant, consistent, uplifting experience you can always count on. Also, the part of the heart that winds up aching like gangrene rot is usually not involved, which has a lot to do with it. On the other hand, when a true-blue girlfriend does you in the feeling of shocked betrayal is like someone blowing their nose all over your face. Intentionally. Real hard. With malice.

  III

  I was reveling in my fabulous new friendships. I’d spent the years since Nicky’s birth as the do-it-all hausfrau for the mad menage. Even though we had various capable rock-and-roll roommates, someone had to shop, clean, schlep, and baby tend—and that was me. But with my newfound club-a-dub, bonhomie attitude, I felt like the tiger scratching out of the bag, like the social creature I used to be had returned from an arid, isolated mountaintop overlooking K Mart. It had been the right thing to put so much love energy into Michael and Nicky, I knew that for sure, but now Nicky was older, and I realized my own life had been neglected (by me). Writing a little about who I had been, remembering that effervescent, ever-loving, hope-filled flower child made me realize that lack of self-trust and self-love had begun to set in like hardening cement. Before the concrete dried, I needed the balancing encouraging energy of my own friends and my own fun.

  I remained close with Melanie and Donnie, who had stayed sticky, itchy friends. Though they never really reconciled their destroyed, bedraggled marriage vows, a truce had been silently declared since they had both fallen in love with other people. They got along with a shot of sideways bitter humor, but at least they got along, and I thought the effort was grand. Patti and I became inseparable even though it seemed we were from two different planets, and I suppose we were; she from the kick-ass streets of Manhattan, barely raised by a wild bohemian mother, and I from the coddled, clean sidewalks of the San Fernando Valley. Three wholesome meals a day, drivein movies, flannel PJs, getting tucked in every night. I found it fascinating how she spoke (yelled) her mind and took nobody’s bull manure. If some fool dared to flip her the bird in traffic, she had no qualms about getting right out of her car and pounding on his windshield, demanding an instant retraction. She didn’t back down and never backed off; she stood up for herself defiantly, and I watched her like a newly hatched hawk.

  One of our greatest forms of jovial kicks was Trivial Pursuit. The game was really just like a deck of fifties playing cards, the bridge or poker of the eighties; a perfect setup for the festive, high-old-time social intercourse that I hadn’t even realized how much I missed. After a few outrageous bashes Don, Patti, Melanie, Rocky, Michael, and I started calling ourselves “the Face Pack,” after the newly coined Hollywood upstarts “the Brat Pack.” We were so clever and cute, weren’t we? Corralling a mess of smarty-pants people at least once a week, the games took on a private clublike atmosphere, each unhinged session lasting many hours. Eddie and Ingrid Begley, Steve Jones (who cracked up everyone when he read the questions in his full-tilt Cockney accent), old friend Elliot Mintz (personal publicist for only the grandest of stars), newly sober (for the first time) Ozzy Osbourne with his new wife (and our old friend) Sharon, Gene Simmons and sometimes Paul Stanley from KISS, Sparkie GTO, Malcolm McDowell and his cutie-wife, Mary Steenburgen, Tatum O’Neal, Bud Cort, along with lots of interesting fly-by-nights, wouldbe could-bes, and various up-and-comers who would drop in and out of the games, but the nucleus was always the Face Pack. Everyone brought some sort of food or drink and the festivities would last well into the jam-packed, fun-filled, brain-teasing night. Sometimes the guests would find questions about themselves or, in Melanie’s case, her mother. “Which actress was presented a doll version of herself in a coffin, by Alfred Hitchcock?”

  One by one, amazing stuff started happening for each of the fabulous Face Pack. Things were heating up madly for the Bauers. Rocky’s film Scarface, directed by Brian De Palma, was ready for release, and once in a while the seemingly oafish chubby Brian would arrive at the game with some sort of big pie, wearing the usual baggy khaki hunting jacket, take his place at the table and whip our butts with his vast razor-brain. The night Scarface opened the Face Pack sat with Rocky in the theater and watched his magnificent performance as white-powder Al’s goofy, sweet-faced best pal, and we all held onto each other and sobbed when he got blasted into smithereens. By then Melanie was filming Body Double, also with Brian, playing the platinum-blond hooker with the long, lean gams, which would start her climb onto the covers of many, many magazines along with a big fat Oscar nomination.

  Fame was closing in on all of us, I just knew it! I was about to find a buyer for my book, Chequered Past would soon be a million-selling household name, Rocky was already at work on another movie, Patti had regained her svelte shape and was knocking them dead at her acting auditions, and Donnie would grab the world with his charm any minute now. He had always had a ton of self-confidence, and I didn’t see any sign of it letting up. He certainly had mellowed since he became a dad and stopped inhaling and imbibing, but his faith in his talent never wavered. I adored them all—my stew of talented, quixotic, slightly damaged yet brilliantly alive friends.

  IV

  Even our dog Nellie had gotten a new lease on life, becoming queen of the canines on Wonderland Avenue, romping all day and night through her own private Canyon paradise, so it was a cruel blow when our creepy, owl-eyed landlord sold the house out from under us with very short notice.

  The next pad I found was on Gardner Street, right off Hollywood Boulevard, an old-fashioned beauty with a great big front porch and a sundeck in the back that we turned into Nick’s room. I hoped the cheery brightness might help him see the cheery, bright side of things. He still had a penchant for cars, so I found a pair of vivid red drapes full of Corvettes and got him a bed in the shape of a nondescript, flashy race car. I think it was supposed to be a Trans Am.

  The move wasn’t so bad, because Stevie and Michael gathered the rest of Chequered Past and a big load of AA helpers, and our latest mess of bamboo furniture didn’t weigh very much. It was a glorious sunny summer day when I placed my typewriter on the funky yard-sale desk in my cute, new, little office/den and swore to complete my book in that very room. Ron Bernstein, an agent friend of Danny Goldberg’s, had loved the first chapter of my book and was shopping it around. Rejection slips started coming in, but since I was used to rebuffs from my acting days, I wasn’t all that mortified. One of those rejection letters from a giant publishing house said, “This is a well-written document but would never sell as an entire book, maybe an article for Rolling Stone.” A couple years later, when I got my first batch of hardbacks, I sent this oh-so-wrong fellow his very own autographed copy, but I never got even a thank-you note. Some people.

  So every day I hunkered down to work, summoning the right words to appear. After writing a couple pages, I would pore over my self-help, Science of Mind, spiritual, and religious tomes, attempting to get a handle on that seemingly elusive concept: Peace of Mind. It was terrible to grapple with the constant self-doubt and its stranglehold on the soul. Certain truths worked for me: the fact that we are in fear or in love, that fear is what people call the devil, and love is God. And as I got more creative—working on the book, opening that channel—I saw very clearly that imagination is the Holy Ghost; bright sparks appearing straight out of the vast and empty stratosphere onto the page, like heavenly magic. But, of course, if I took too much notice, the flash of splendor would disappear and turn into a crumpling pumpkin. My jittery chatterbox brain
got in my way even as I kept repeating, “Be still and know that I am God.”

  Gardner Street School had no idea what to do with Nick, so skipped him into the next grade way before he could handle it emotionally. I was in and out of ugly, beige public school offices, listening to underpaid, bored officials tell me my son needed help. He came in second in a citywide art contest, but it wasn’t first place, and in his mind it wasn’t enough. I started taking him to the Self-Realization Lake Shrine out in Pacific Palisades, praying a big dose of Paramahansa Yogananda would infuse him with some much-needed self-love. We sat feeding little chunks of bread to the swans, gazing at a beckoning statue of Jesus, discussing why we were alive. Shouldn’t he have been watching after-school cartoons, laughing his small ass off instead of contemplating the afterlife? I encouraged soul study because it seemed to give him solace when nothing else could. His perfectionism had reached the place where nothing he did could satisfy him, so he began to lose himself in all kinds of books, which, thankfully, gave him temporary escape from his ever-intruding inner battle.

  Fending for Nick and filling the empty pages with my past weren’t filling the empty spaces in my life. I had divine friends, a brilliant son, and a husband who could never seem to relinquish his infernal devil-may-care ways. When he wasn’t on the road or rehearsing with his band, he was out with the boys or at an AA meeting. Our sex life continued to diminish, and I was pricked with frightful hints of his philandering. The sad thing was when we did take the time to spend some alonemoments, it was always a rekindling of mutual adoration. I knew he loved me and I certainly loved him, so what was going wrong?