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

by Des Barres, Pamela

  Helena’s soon became our new hang-spot. That twinkly magic man Jack Nicholson was there every Friday night, lighting up the dive. He held court in the corner, allowing only certain babes to grace the seat next to him for no more than five minutes at a time. Lou Adler was usually with him, and sometimes the old charmer, Warren Beatty came by for a glass of Evian, scanning for beauty. We got to be fairly friendly, flirting like fools, and I graced Jack’s table for several five-minute slots of fun, wondering what it might be like to find myself trapped in his naughty lair for several five-hour slots of sin. Can you tell I was slowly turning into a horny beast? I guess writing about all my lovers woke up my sadly neglected libido. It’s all the more sad because even the smell of Michael, the touch of his silky skin still thrilled me. But it seemed he believed the grass was always more emerald, chartreuse, sea green, jade green, lime green, moss green, avocado, and leaf green way over on the other side.

  One night when the peel-back ceiling was peeled back to reveal the splendor of the smogged-out stars, Marlon Brando made a brief appearance at Helena’s, and even the high-stepping cream of the swank set started buzzing. I was tempted to sashay over to Brando’s table to ask what he did with all those half-naked shots I sent him back in ’72 but decided to keep my cool intact. One night somebody claimed they saw Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn peeing against a wall outside, and it became a spirited topic of conversation—just to show you how really silly Hollywood-types can be. I was an observer the night Sean bopped a guy called “Hawk” over the head with a chair for cozying up too closely to Madonna. Even Prince showed up on a fairly regular basis, sitting near the dance floor with his dad and two giants who constantly kept their eyes peeled like neon grapes, peering into the dim, creamy night light. Helena must have paid a pile of loot to make the beautiful people look and feel even more bee-yoot-i-full within her precious pinkened walls. I was feeling pretty delicious one Friday night, dancing maniacally to Prince’s “Kiss” in a skintight getup, when his majesty arrived wearing that very daring, belly-button-baring black “Kiss” ensemble and a pair of pitiless black sunglasses that screamed “I VANT to be alone,” even though he was at the world’s hippest nightspot. While I reamed the dance floor, the funniest thing happened: Just at the part in the song that goes, “You don’t have to watch Dynasty to turn me on,” Michael Nader, who played the sensitive yet studly hunk on Dynasty, walked through the door and stood grandly, in plain view of the entire place. Even Nader didn’t get the hysterical significance. I laughed so hard all by myself, hoping that at least Prince caught the retarded magnitude of the ludicrous moment. I took a peek but couldn’t tell because his shades were as dark as night and twice as impenetrable.

  After just about having sex with myself on the dance floor two feet from where Prince sat, I dared to approach his table, tossing my cool and all caution out the star-roof. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” I declared, forgetting I wasn’t Pam Miller in Reseda, circa 1962. I stood there after the brazen preteen act, frozen to the spot, and all he did in response was to lower his shades a smidge so I could gaze at those rich brown beauties for a brief instant. I flew across the floor like hot-rod lightning and took a few swigs of my white wine spritzer. “What made me do that?” I wondered out loud. I told Patti about it and she spit her cappuccino across the table, getting a splotch on Rob Camelletti, Cher’s boyfriend—the poor, innocent guy the rags called “the bagel boy”—but he didn’t seem to feel a drop.

  One packed Friday eve, as the stars of stage, screen, and CD bopped to the beat, a rancid odor filled the dance floor, engulfing the hipsters with skunk-stench. Scattering, they all headed for the door. Who dared to let off a stink bomb at Helena’s on a Friday night? Helena’s eyes spit fire as she blazed around, scanning for the perpetrator. I saw that unruly, outspoken diva-donna, Sandra Bernhard slyly sneak out of everyone’s way, like she knew they just might be getting ready to leave. What a daring, villainous deed.

  It would be at Helena’s that December, amid tons of joviality and Christmas cheer, that Michael would finally meet the girl of his—and my—nightmares. Where else?

  IV

  Our lives appeared charmed again, but the distance between Michael and me seemed to sprout wings. It was as if glittering nights and our fun-time friends were all that held us together, whether at Helena’s dancing under and among the stars, or at home, the now famous site of fab-ulous dinner parties, dar-ling. After cooking little tidbits all day, I would sweep around the house, wearing some forties satin number, tasting my sweet-and-sour turkey balls, feeling just like Lauren Bacall. Ever-witty Michael was George Sanders, Eddie Begley was Jimmy Stewart, Ozzy Osbourne was Oscar Levant, Steve Jones was one of the Bowery Boys, Bruce Willis could have been Bogie, and Sheena Easton sort of resembled Judy Garland in a certain kind of candlelight. After all compliments about my vegetarian curry had dwindled, Eddie would begin charades or an equally HOLLYwood fungame that kept everyone on their toes and off their asses.

  Together with a few intellectual poet friends, Michael jump-started a serious re-trend among Hollywoodites: Poetry Nights at Helena’s. I hadn’t written any poetry since my beloved hippie stint, but wanted to get in on the act, so shoveled through my ancient pages, looking for the perfect dumb poem that recalled with fervor the love-in mentality that was so lacking in the overdone eighties. After Ally Sheedy read a tale of psychological woe, and Judd Nelson wowed the pack of Kir-sipping, would-be beats, I grabbed my banged-up book and made my way to the podium to read a poem:

  November 16, 1966

  Restless and burning

  Our souls are yearning

  Still no heads are turning

  And no minds are learning

  Our minds they’re destroying

  And this they’re enjoying!

  “Did we raise this generation?

  They’re against segregation

  They have no discrimination!”

  How can we show this aching nation

  To be full of love’s elation?

  They’re too busy with machines

  Riding around in limousines

  Wanting dollars by the score

  So they won’t be labeled “poor”

  Or be classed with you and me

  Being what we want to be

  With our souls flying free

  Frowned on by society

  Too quick to hurt each other

  Always judging one another

  Making others weep

  And not losing any sleep

  Taking the name of God in vain

  Doesn’t cause them any pain

  We cannot forget about it

  And there’s no way we can doubt it

  While the TV tube is teasing

  There are others who are freezing

  And parts of this great nation

  Are dying of starvation

  The way of life is changing

  The world needs rearranging

  If all hate would cease

  We would need no more police

  Everyone would be respected

  No one would be rejected

  For the color of their skin

  Or the financial shape they’re in

  And if we keep believing

  Ignoring the deceiving

  Love can lock the doors

  On any threat of wars

  Certainly nobody should be neglected for the financial shape they’re in. Right?

  Michael and I spent two looooong days at the theater with a bunch of pals seeing Nicholas Nickleby, and I remember one particular intermission, Patti and I trailed along behind our friend Sheri and her love man Bruce Willis. We watched Bruce’s ass under a thin layer of blue silk for a few mischievous moments, then looked over at each other with the same lustful thoughts and cracked up so hard. “If Sheri only knew what was in our indecent heads,” she said, grinning at me, and we pretended to be pious for about three seconds.

  Donnie’s rocketing celebrity was giving all
our lives a new and glamorous sheen. Despite the glaring fact that all those rumors Patti heard about him stepping out with a young brainless model were true, they weathered the formidable front-page breakup and had called a truce because of their devotion to their son Jesse. Men.

  Since D.J. and I went way back, he invited me to Miami, where he could review the chapter of my book devoted solely to him: “I Met Him on a Monday and My Heart Stood Still.” I stayed at his pastel mansionlike pad right on the water, with its pinks, pale greens, aqua, and mauve abounding; with its marble floors, gigantic featherbed couches, high glass walls letting in the constant sunshine. Wowie. Cooks, assistants, secretaries, gofers, aiders, and abettors of all kinds came and went while we discussed the past and roared with laughter about stuff that killed us back then. And the palm trees swayed. I spent hours on the set of Miami Vice in the super-snazzy metal-jet trailer, eating low-fat cuisine, sitting in cool-air comfort with a stack of pages and waiting for “Cut!” so we could get back to perusing our own personal history. When it came right down to it, there were only two details he wanted taken out of the chapter: the first involved a mutual enema during one of our health kicks, and I’ll have to remain silent about the other one. I was afraid I would have to fight him over certain specifics but was relieved when he realized it was all the big, fat truth, just like the diary entry in which I called his member “huge.” Little did I know I would have to discuss those two piddling words—huge cock—on national television about three dozen times.

  After the work was done Donnie led me to his private jet, outfitted with catered caviar and baby vegetables ripe for the dipping, and to his new two-story dream pad in Aspen. I didn’t ski even though I was supplied with the newest in slope fashion. Freezing, falling down, getting real wet, and sprouting a Rudolph nose in front of Jack Nicholson didn’t appeal to me. Instead I wandered around the tiny shopping area in the snow, marveling at the chichi fashions and baubles for billionaires. Aspen in late ’86 was a cross between Melrose Avenue and cowpoke country. Now it’s almost exclusively Mel-rose verging on Rodeo Drive, but it’s still a beautiful place. You can bump into Don Henley at any given moment. Ha ha. Anyway, while I was scarfing illicit strawberries and honeydew melon balls in Aspen, Michael was doing the same thing back in Los Angeles, only with a luscious human female piece of fruit. And once again I was kept blissfully in the dark.

  IV

  The one bond between Michael and me that never wavered was our commitment to Nicky, and together we wrung our tied hands over his growing difficulties. We were becoming painfully aware that he needed a new shrink, that Janine, with all her puppet work and singsong games, was totally ineffectual. I asked around and came up with the name of a supposedly “good” child psychiatrist, for I’d begun to wonder if, as a last resort, some type of medication could help Nick’s powerful mood swings. In her book Patty Duke described how her life had been a tortured shambles until somebody had prescribed lithium for her (. . . they walk alike, they talk alike—at times they even drop alike . . .). So Nick and I waited in the stuffy, tiny outer office until the great man let us in. Nick was understandably agitated, and the “doctor,” who studied him like he was an amoeba under a microscope, had the gentleness of an iron lung and the patience of a demon on speed. In fact, after about a half hour of attempting to reach Nick, he became more and more red-faced and furious, until Nick climbed behind the couch, shrieking and sobbing, “Demon! He’s a demon!!” After I’d coerced him out of his hiding place by promising him we could leave, the good doctor said—right in front of Nick—“Yes, I agree that your son is crazy, and I don’t think there is anything I can do for him.” The word crazy sank into Nick’s head like a hatchet, and he cowered behind me, shaking and breathing hard like he had just witnessed an exorcism. I glared at the beast in doctors’ clothing, but it was too late. For the next few years, when anyone questioned his behavior for any reason, Nick declared that he was crazy. I canceled the creep’s check and wrote him a scathing letter, but I should have called the American Medical Association, taken him to court, and put his pancreas through a meat grinder. Thwarted mother-hen retaliation dies hard.

  It wasn’t only maternal pride that made Nicky’s intellect seem dazzling. Since he was a tiny kid he had been enthralled with all things Japanese, and at age nine was actually teaching himself to speak the language. Our main weekly outing was downtown to Little Tokyo, where he bought Japanese comics and browsed among the much-coveted robots. One remarkable afternoon, as he carefully walked the fence in our front yard, he told me a wondrous tale about his previous life as the caretaker of sharks in a “Sea World—type place,” where he had drowned after falling into the water while feeding his shark charges. “Now you know why I don’t like to swim, Mom,” he said, “so don’t bother me about it anymore.”

  But there was a kernel of darkness in his brilliant imagination that made him prey to haunting fears he could hardly name or describe. He saw tortured faces, ghosts, and other strange apparitions in the corners of his room. He saw people from other planets out the windows. He would finish a book about scientific progress and worry it was all going too fast. After watching a TV show about children starving in India, he sobbed for two days. Already an eco-monster, he clipped the plastic six-pack holders so they wouldn’t wind up on the snout of a porpoise. He mourned the vanishing rain forests. In attempts to help him figure what in the world was going on, I took him to the Bodhi Tree bookstore, and he pored through spiritual tomes seeking refuge. He tried yoga, putting himself in all sorts of contorted asanas (yoga positions), he went through a stage of transcendental meditation, oming for inner peace. We kept up our trips to the Self-Realization Lake Shrine and the air would fill up with incense smoke and comic books on Krishna and Shiva. Lordy, Lord, Lord.

  Speaking of the glorious Lord, Nick spent a few months at a Jesus-oriented school after the final, final straw at Westland, in which he tossed a chair over the heads of his classmates, almost breaking a window, and was asked to leave the fancy, haughty private school. I had to find a replacement fast and came up with this Bible-thumping institution. The long-suffering, do-gooder born-agains thought it was their Christian duty to help the pissed-off little fellow find Jesus, and in their attempt to save his soul, he was placed in many corners and given many hellfire-type lectures, but they never asked him to leave. He told me about these outmoded procedures and complained about being bored and understimulated, but I was at my heart’s end and needed some of my own time and space, please Jesus, and I also believed it was better for him to be with other kids then to sulk around the house. However, after a little Christian walk to McDonald’s one afternoon, I yanked him from Jesus school real fast. The class had wandered by a Far East antiques store that sold Buddhas and other religious statues, and when Nick pressed his nose to the glass to check out the merchandise, the teacher harped, “Cast your eyes away from the devil, Nicholas. Those pagan statues came straight from Satan.” I realized their shallow values were so foreign to Nick that the potential for screwing up the one thing that gave him solace was too strong. I also remembered visiting my born-again relatives down in the gorgeous hills of Kentucky and the agony I felt. Guilt-stained and wracked from carrying the cross down the Sunset Strip, I found myself down on my knees in front of the TV set, praying with Billy Graham. Seeking forgiveness for being young, free, joyously wild.

  Michael and I had a thousand meetings with the Santa Monica school system and state board of mental health, and Nick was put through way too many days of ink-blot and IQ testing. For one test he was told to draw a picture of himself, and Nick produced a perfect log like the one the “log lady” carried around on Twin Peaks. Confused by the boy wonder, the official fools could only advise us to find him a good therapist while they attempted to find us “proper placement.” So Nicky returned to the local public school under great duress, and I met with many child psychiatrists, extremely wary and on guard, until I finally came upon a sweet, big bear of a man called Lauran
ce at a children’s facility in West Los Angeles. Since Nick didn’t think this guy was on a mission from Hades, sent to torment him, he started twice-weekly sessions and actually seemed to be feeling a bit better about himself.

  He had even made a new friend, Taliesin Jaffe, T.J., the blond little actor boy in the movie Mr. Mom. T.J. was an outgoing, intelligent charmer who had to work on Nick for thirty minutes to get him through his front door, but when he did, they found they were both interested in astrology, astronomy, Greek myths, and most important, Japanese animation. T.J.’s mom was a casting director friend of Michael’s, and the next time we all got together T.J. introduced Nick to the spellbinding world of Nintendo—and the all-encompassing place where he could destroy the bully bad guys and control his own destiny. He soon had his own Nintendo system, followed by every game he wanted, then more systems, more games. More games. More systems. More. Sega. Genesis. Turbo Grafx CD. P. C. Engine. Sega Master System. Game Boy. Game Gear. Famicom, Super Famicom. Neo Geo. Super Nintendo.