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

by Des Barres, Pamela

  Donnie didn’t have a date for the New Year’s festivities in Aspen, so I flew out to hang on his arm at some ridiculous party full of celebs. We ate stuffed capon with Michael Douglas and his wife, chewed the carbs with Jack and Anjelica, discussed the slopes with several trendy downhillers, and got a stiff dose of a very angry, bombed Hunter S. Thompson. I don’t think he went skiing the next day, but Donnie did, and I spent the first day of 1988 waving to red-cheeked superstars in thousand-dollar ski suits, sipping spiked hot chocolate on top of old smoky, all covered with snow. I sat in the sauna, ate lots of endive and radicchio, watched a bunch of big-screen TV with Donnie, and made a valiant, thwarted attempt not to think too much about HIM. Big stuff had been reawakened, stuff I hadn’t allowed myself to ponder for too many years. It seemed I always had a slight temperature, 98.6 a thing of the past. It felt like I was walking with my pelvis thrust forward, but nobody said, “Pamela, why are your hipbones entering a room before you do?” Constantly on the verge of a full-body orgasm, my insides were shakin’ like a leaf on a tree.

  January 1, 1988, 2:20 A.M.—I hear Donnie wandering around up there; he wanted me to watch TV with him—the envy of millions—but I’m so tired. I was with strangers at midnight. Oh well. D.J. ran into Barbra Streisand yesterday, and she told him she was adoring my book. Wow! That’s so cool. He’s having “tea” with her tomorrow. Hmm. The year is about to start up again—work, exercise, money, success. Oh yes.

  When Donnie went to have tea with Barbra, he said, “I’ll be back in about half an hour.” Three hours later, as I went into my fiftieth sit-up in the middle of the living-room floor, he arrived grinning like a smitten goof-pot.

  The blasted year that had crept in on black-widow legs was finally coming to an end. I had surging hopes, as usual for brighter dawns, dreamier nights. Could somebody crawl out of a cocoon at my age? Actually, I felt I was halfway out already, straining to stretch my wings.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I

  A aahhhhh! What would the new year hold? Always on the search for the psychic who might help me sweeten the existing course of fate, I was excited when Chuck Wein, my old mentor-director-cosmic cohort called to tell me about Ariana, an amazing lady from Nevada who was in town for a few days doing readings. I made an appointment for Nick and myself, praying this good lady could reach the place in him where so many others had been denied access. He had gotten even more morose and uncommunicative, just waiting for the day when he was “grown-up” and might be understood.

  After leaving our shoes on the porch and waiting barefoot in somebody’s airy, too-white living room for about thirty minutes, we were taken upstairs to an even whiter room where Ariana sat on some Indian-print pillows in a corner—an ageless, sweet-faced angel with a froth of blond curls, smiling beatifically. She took Nick first, holding his hand, reaching into his spirit, comforting him instantly. She surrounded him with light, called on her guides to watch over him, and told him the name of his guardian angel, Araul. She told Nick that Araul folded his wings over him every night and demonstrated the way his pale, gentle wings enveloped Nick as he slept. She whispered a lot of things to him that I couldn’t hear and sent him back down to the blank living room while I had my reading. He seemed slightly awestruck but peaceful as he headed down the stairs. My little boy—I wanted to wipe out his problems with a twinkling Tinker Bell wand, comfort, cuddle, cleanse him, make it all better, but I just didn’t know how.

  I got myself comfortable on the pillows in front of her, and as Ariana held my hand and called on her guides, for a split instant I saw the inside of the universe, where all was noiseless and ecstatic. Full of vacancy—Wheeee . . . After coming back to the planet, I told her about some trouble I had been having with my right wrist, weakness, pain off and on for years. “Let’s see where that came from,” she said and closed her eyes again. More quiet breathing. “I see you in a large wooden structure, held against your will by a man who keeps women in this kennel, selling their services by the hour, by the night.” I could see myself, seated on a small wooden bench beside a beaten old table, long, ragged dress, black straggly hair, hollow, flattened eyes. “You are required to do what the men ask of you, or you are taken out to the woodshed and severely beaten. Customers come and go, rough hands—many, many brutal encounters. One day a fine gentleman comes in and sits with you for the full hour, just talking. He elicits your opinion, welcomes your answers. Makes you smile. Gains your trust. He comes every day, requesting your company, paying for the pleasure. It seems he values greatly your answers to his many questions and finds you very clever. You start to trust the man, look forward to his visits. One afternoon the finely dressed gentleman takes your hand in his and as usual asks you a question. When you blithely answer, he snaps your index finger, breaking it…” Ariana seems to have a hard time carrying on, she sees the whole thing, as I do, a wide screen movie. “Aah, a sadist. . .” she says sadly. “You are required to stay with the customer, under any and all circumstances. The man continues to ask questions, and as you answer, he breaks another finger, and then another, until you answer the sixth question in dire agony, and he snaps your wrist. As you try not to weep, he gets up and bows gallantly, takes his leave and never returns.”

  Not exactly Cleopatra, eh?

  Ariana came out of her trancelike state. “We’ll see if that helps,” she said sweetly, patting my hand. My right wrist throbbed, got hot, and continued to hurt for a few days, then the pain faded away and has never come back.

  Nick started sleeping better knowing he was not all alone after all. He started paying more attention to his altar, the one he set up when he was about six years old. Paramahansa Yogananda, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna—they soothed his weary mind. He meditated, burned incense, and read their comforting words every night before falling asleep with the light on.

  II

  Nick and I were scheming over a page of math one night; I refused to let him use the calculator, and he was ticked off. In the middle of the standoff, the phone rang. “Hello, Pamela, this is Barbra Streisand.” “Yeah, right,” I mewled. “Ha ha, who is this, really??” Silence. “I met you at Sheri’s house, remember. On Christmas Eve?” Oh God, oh Godgodgod, it really was Barbra Streisand! I sank through my own kitchen floor, red as an inflamed beet. When the phone rang, Nick made a mad dash for his Sega system, so it was me, myself, I, and Barbra Streisand hanging on the telephone. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled and tried to pretend it never happened. She laughed like it happened every day and invited me to dinner at her house the following week. She and Donnie were warm and weighty getting close to hot and heavy, so she was making nice with his best pals. I thought it was smart and admirable and accepted the invitation at once.

  The dinner was held in one of her magnificent pads at the beach—the one with about thirty-five Tiffany lamps and the lighting was awesome. She adored Michael, having met him with Donnie, so he was one of the guests, and everyone admired our obvious rapport. There were big Deco bowls full of all kinds of Indian food, chutneys, coconut slivers, three types of raisins. We served ourselves, chatting and chortling at a gorgeous antique round table that King Arthur probably had wild sex on hundreds of years earlier.

  Barbra even showed up at my Valentine’s Day party, bringing me a Godiva chocolate wrapped in a gold box, signed “With Love, Barbra.” Of course, I still have it, tucked in my diary drawer along with treasured notes, loveladen mementos, and a couple of vibrators. A very safe place. The Hollywood Kids came to the heart-party, a local boy-gossip version of Hedda and Louella, and they were gaga, their double-double-take a priceless classic. Barbra hung out in the kitchen with Patti and Sheri, leaning against my wonderful Wedgwood stove, chatting busily about this and that. Amused with all our personal D.J. stories, charmed by the fact that he stayed so close with his former lovers, she seemed comfortable but had to have felt all those stolen glances. All gigantic icons are right at the front of the line for stolen glances and sometimes downright stares. Do they feel
warm and good—a caress—or cold and sharp—like a stalactite crystal right through the eye?

  I was a solo babe at these glittering dos but was learning to brave the cocktail chatter without expecting Michael to jump in and provide the perfect anecdote. I was nowhere near ready to have any sort of romantic entanglement; it would have been a ghastly failure. I was so confused, so swamped with dammed-up emotional chaos, Michael still attached to my hip like a Siamese twin that had been excised at birth, a phantom honey-husband, twice removed. I continued to see HIM because it was a perfect setup for me at that particular point in my life. Still, it was difficult to keep my yearning throbber at bay, because the manic passion I had with HIM felt real close to love. Something’s got a hold on me, yeah, whoa—it must be love. But I knew it wasn’t. My purely puritanical streak was at odds with my “purely sexual” peak, battling it out on a daily basis, and lust usually won out.

  III

  Speaking of lust, Us magazine was putting out an issue on the Seven Deadly Sins, and what better lusty femme fatale than me, to discuss the tantalizing topic of Lust. Ha ha. I flew to NYC, rolled around on the floor in a damp piece of muslin, goose bumps rising, while some avant photog snapped from every upside-down angle, hoping to depict damp, ardent eroticism. I had splinters in my ass and hooted inside about the zany situations I found myself in. The interview was held on my bed at Melanie’s rent-a-pad in Greenwich Village. She was there filming Working Girl, and I stayed with her three different times in March for various career-oriented moves. She invited me to the set during one of my spare New York minutes, so I could watch her emote with Harrison Ford. She was so good, I was flabbergasted with pride.

  Cree McCree, my illustrious interviewer for Us, turned out to be a comrade spirit, and we hit it off so well that we still hit the clubs whenever I wind up in New York. Our interview was forty-nine pages long, but the good stuff didn’t make the magazine.

  Cree: Do you have a definition of lust?

  Pamela: First of all, I do not consider it a sin at all. It’s one of the great things in life to feel lust for somebody. It makes you feel alive! In touch with your body. And since that’s where you reside, why not?

  Cree: Why does lust happen?

  Pamela: It’s the scent—the pheromones—the stuff that emanates from the skin. I heard that when you make love with someone, his beard rubbing on you releases all the pheromones, and all that passion comes out.

  Cree: I thought it was the rub, the burn—

  Pamela: The burn! That’s right. Sometimes I can see lust on someone or feel it on myself like a film over my body—kind of shimmery, sticky, an ooze. It’s slurpy; you get this feeling downstairs just like fire burning.

  Cree: Do you think everybody is capable of experiencing lust?

  Pamela: Some turn it inward, a religious fervor that could be taken for lust. The Zen masters don’t fuck, so maybe you can transcend lust. I’m happy I haven’t transcended it yet!

  Cree: It’s a manifestation of the life force.

  Pamela: It’s a cross between pornography and heaven, right? It really is all in one. That’s why you feel so united, in touch with your body and soul at the same time. And that’s why I never saw lust as being a sin. When I lust, it oozes, dribbles, pours out into a puddle around me.

  Cree: Did you ever have a purely lustful relationship?

  Pamela: Keith Moon. (Ooops! I couldn’t mention HIM, so I went way back). He had amazing charisma, unparalled really. He was so there. When he was in the room, he was in the fucking room! To be with someone with that kind of incredible passion for life—you could almost see he was going to use it up real quick, which was what he did. He was using his life force up, it was spinning around him, he was going, going! I wanted to be near that lust for life.

  Cree: Were the sixties the golden age of lust?

  Pamela: I’m sure there was a lot of passion going on in Rome, the Greek theater. Please, it’s been going on forever and ever. I’m sure Mary Magdalene was hot for Jesus, there’s no way she wasn’t. If I had been around then, I’m sure I would have been hanging around with Jesus—and not just because I lusted after him.

  Cree: Whose word do we have to take for the whole story, anyway? Paul’s? That old tight-ass celibate?

  Pamela: When He told her to keep her hands away from Him, it wasn’t because she was a tainted whore, I don’t think. He was trying to preserve His power. All of His power to save the world. But I don’t think He meant she didn’t deserve to touch him, or that she was a slovenly bitch.

  Cree: She was one of the women right there at the cross.

  Pamela: I know I would have been there too.

  I could just feel my preacher grandpa Pop Miller spinning in his grave in the green, green hills of North Carolina.

  Lust must have been in the air, because I soon got a call from Playboy. I had been writing pieces for magazines—Cosmo, New York Woman, Rolling Stone—and it seemed everyone was fascinated with the red-hot sixties and somehow I represented that pulsating, freewheeling time; a wanton rock-dolly who lived to tell the tale/tail. But Playboy’s offer was rock-shocking. They wanted a photo layout of me—pushing forty—stark-raving naked! I was concerned about how I might have been portrayed in the piece—aging super-groupie bares ALL or something equally hideous—so after a period of hassle while they scrutinized every word I had ever written, they agreed to let me write the text myself.

  I worked on the head dame, Marilyn Grabowski, to let my photographer, Randee St. Nicholas, shoot the pictures, but even after paying for some outrageous test shots, they would up using one of their own tried-true-blues. We found out later that only one woman had ever shot a layout in all those years. Oh well, we tried. It took six days of shooting with nice-guy Robert Faegli and twenty thousand photographs to get six pages in the magazine. You might think it’s a sexy experience, rampant with erotic poses, but after the first day as a gymnast-contortionist, being lined up perfectly within the lighting and satin sheets, holding a bent-out-of-shape position for endless moments, walking around in a chilly room stark-raving in front of eight hunky workers, sucking in the tummy, thrusting out my midget titties until my innards ached, I realized that bare-all modeling is just a bunch of ragingly hard work. I made them play endless loops of Prince and Terence Trent D’Arby so I could at least have a steamy expression while I held a certain angle for half an hour. I tried to think lush, wicked, tangled thoughts while two different guys adjusted the hem of my frilly garment so not too much pubic hair peeked out from between my trembling thighs. No pink allowed. It was almost scientific, like a gynecological exam. The Playboy people see so many naked women all day, every day, they don’t notice if you wear clothes or not. After a while I didn’t bother to put on my robe at all, absolutely comfortable, like I was invisible.

  After a tough day wearing just a gold lamé trench coat, I bumped into Jessica Hahn in the hallway and after a brief gab thought she was a tough and tender cookie snaring, entrapping her fifteen minutes of fame with a determined vengeance. Her mouth was slicked, painted-plumped-up, tossing naughty words around like X-rated conversation hearts. Proud of her new bosom, thoughtfully provided by Mr. Hefner, she was starting a new life, her Bible definitely left in the dust, under Jim Bakker’s shoes. Have you ever caught Jessica’s late-late-night TV show, Love Phone? It brings new meaning to the 900 number.

  IV

  Sex seemed to be the dominant theme of my working life, but on the personal side romance was ever elusive. Still, I went to parties, hoping for a cupid strike, including a bang-up basharoo thrown by Mitch Schneider, my publicist. It was held in the Coco Bowl Room at Kelbo’s Restaurant—a tacky-tiki, plastic island masterpiece built in 1947 for people who wanted their drinks to arrive on fire. The black light was always on, plastic vines crawled through dusty fishing nets where long-dead puffed, stuffed blowfish seemed suspended in thick air. Some had sunglasses on, and I’m not kidding. I love the place. An old guy with a dyed black pomp played “Don’t Be C
ruel” like it had been recorded yesterday, while I sipped my scary glow-in-the-dark, bright blue fancy drink (it arrived on fire). I kept bumping my lip on the paper umbrella. It was perfect.

  When Sandra Bernhard walked into the dim mini-ballroom, I thought to myself, Oh, there’s that smarty girl with a wit like a razor-stick scabbard dipped in laughing gas. Or something like that. Her persona intimidated me, while mine still eluded me. I was proud of my accomplishment but slightly mortified at the same time, gradually adjusting. I figured this caustic, pointed comedy queen would automatically assume I was a blight on womankind for blabbing about my romances with famous men. It’s sicko how these paranoid ideas dig down into our psyches and sit down like they belong there. But we all go through it, don’t we? I was totally wrong, of course. She sat down next to me, and when Mitch introduced us, she couldn’t have been sweeter. We sat and nibbled tidbits off the pu pu platter, shared a baked-bean sundae, cracking up about the chopped up American cheese slices on top along with a shriveled maraschino. We laughed about the sorry, seedy surroundings and actually traded phone numbers for future fun. We enjoyed a would-be exotic, goopy, rubbery yam, and it was time to split the scene.