Blondie, Parallel Lives

by Dick Porter

  Aside from Cag’s conventional aspirations for her daughter, economic necessity played a key role in how Debbie dressed. “I was always wearing second-hand clothes. We were really broke then. And my mother wasn’t really into pop culture at the time, so it wasn’t really driven home to me what the fifties were like.

  “I hated the way I looked growing up. I had this blonde hair, pale-blue eyes and these jutting cheekbones. I didn’t look like any other kids I grew up with and I felt very uncomfortable about my face. I hated looking in mirrors and I definitely didn’t think I was pretty,” Debbie later insisted. “When I was a baby I was real pretty, but in between I was a real mess. I was very ugly. I just grew up weird … My mother always made me get these weird haircuts and I always had to wear clunky shoes and shit. I never thought I was pretty.

  “My mother and I never got along in terms of clothing at all. She wanted me to look like I was a preppy WASP from Connecticut – that was good fashion to her, and I sort of loathed it … I always wanted to wear black and I wanted to wear things that were tough looking. There was a phase where I wanted to wear big flannel shirts and tight pants, and I always wanted to wear my sweaters backwards. I had clear ideas about what I wanted and it really had nothing to do with the times. So my mother and I never agreed.”

  Looking back on the sartorial conflict that parents and their offspring habitually engage in, Debbie now admits to a greater understanding of her mother’s perspective: “I appreciate some of the things she said now; she had some good fundamental rules that she followed. I wanted radical, I wanted sex, I wanted movie stars. But she had very classic ideas and she was right in many respects – that some things would ultimately look better on me; like a tailored line, a simple line, would look better on me than something frilly. I mean, they didn’t have any money, she didn’t have a great wardrobe or anything; a few pieces.

  “When I was a teenager, my father started doing a little bit better, things got a bit easier,” reveals Debbie. “When you don’t have a lot of dough it gives you a sense of humility and value. But a lot of people come up that way; I’m certainly not bragging about it. Plus my mother and father have very old-fashioned values about loyalty and stayed married for 60 years through thick and thin. It wasn’t always great – they had their ups and downs.”

  Despite initially lacking confidence, Debbie first revealed her voice in the church choir. “There I was, a fat, cherubic soprano getting it on with the Christian Soldiers,” she would recount. “I loved singing so much I won the choir’s perfect attendance award, a silver cross, truly earned by my parents for getting me to practise every week.” She would later make an enthusiastic if limited cheerleader. “I wasn’t very good at twirling, actually,” she confessed. “I’d get very nervous and I would always drop it. But I think that’s why they chose me. They had me there twirling and dropping the baton for the bending over aspect. I was there for the pervert fathers. Looking at my underpants!”

  Although Debbie reacted against any kind of preordained suburban destiny, she was never an outright rebel at the high school where she was later described by classmates as “friendly” and “popular”. “I feared and hated school passionately,” she reflected. “School was like treading water to me. Art classes were my favourites, but painting/drawing wasn’t considered important. Having shaken off the fat years I made baton twirler and was voted the prettiest girl in my senior class. Apart from that I didn’t have much going for me in high school. I felt everybody was trying to limit what I was before I’d tried anything.

  “I was always nervous at school. I liked being in the classroom, learning things. But I couldn’t take the tension, having to pass a test. I was terrible at math, although I was quite good at geometry: ratios, envisioning the relationships of lines in space. English and art were my best subjects, but I had no idea of being a writer, or a songwriter, at that point.”

  As a means of escaping the cloying suburbia of Hawthorne, Deborah would travel to Manhattan to soak up the atmosphere and excitement absent from the quiet streets of her hometown. “I was 12 or 13 years old and on a Saturday morning for 80 cents, I could get a round trip ticket to New York City. So I would get on a train and I would go into the city and I would walk around the West Village, which was old timey New York with the little streets and I would look in all the theatres and the clubs and the coffee shops, I would look at all the posters and see who was playing – it was very exciting for me.”

  In common with many teenagers from limited income households, Deborah also took part-time work as a means of raising some spending money. These early forays into the world of employment quickly established the idea that working in the straight world may not be for her. “I had two jobs that I really didn’t like. I used to clean this woman’s house but that was when I was really young, and then later on when I was in high school I got a job in a redemption centre for S&H green stamps, and that was completely humiliating. The people who came in there and wanted their merchandise were really demanding about it. Maybe they thought they were getting something for nothing and they had to be aggressive about it, but it just seemed that everybody was so mean.”

  As her worldview expanded, Debbie – who acquired her first serious boyfriend when she was 14 – gravitated toward the social and creative fringes, “I was an outsider in high school,” she explained. “I always used to wear black, and I had my hair striped out and I always bleached it different pastel colours. Every time I got in with some people I got disenchanted and I got kicked out or quit, and I had to worry because my mother was always worried about my reputation, and my best friend was a fag. It was raunchy, but it was fun.”

  “All I remember about high school was how boring it was,” recalled Debbie. “I made average and good grades at Hawthorne High School. I was never in any trouble. I was just steady. I was just there … I don’t think that anything that I did in school was representative of me. You have to fit into the regime and you get through it.” Despite continual pressure to conform, the teenage Debbie had little inclination to toe the line. “I got into a sorority. I had to run around and act a certain way, supply certain things upon command, like gum if they wanted gum. I was offensive to them, so I got canned. But the reason I got kicked out was because of this friend of mine who was really great, really nutty, but they thought he was too horrible. Mostly because he was gay. They said, ‘You can’t hang around with him.’ So I got the axe. The girl that brought up the charges later on married him.

  “I must have had 10 or 12 different colours of hair. At first I would use a mix of peroxide and ammonia, stuff that was easy to get. I started with streaks, and then it gradually turned orange. That’s when my mother would start to notice. All of a sudden at dinner, she’d say, ‘Your hair is different. What did you do?’ And I’d just say, ‘Oh, I lightened it a little.’ My father would go, ‘Well, I don’t know if I like this, hmmm …’ But he liked it on my mother; so it was semi-acceptable. Later, it was turning up platinum.”

  Her experimental approach to cosmetics also led to Debbie’s first experience of life as a self-invented outsider. “I used to come into school covered in beauty marks,” she explained. “I looked like I was splattered in mud so the other girls thought I was a little bit weird. And I used to come home for lunch and if my mother wasn’t home, I’d whip into her room and start applying stuff all over me. But I was really young.

  “I practised putting on makeup a lot. I used to study it carefully and practise everything. I used to sit in front of a mirror and try to make myself look Oriental. I made a lot of mistakes; sometimes I’d walk out of the house looking like a ghoul and not really know it. One time in eighth grade my mother wasn’t home; so I went upstairs and started fooling around. When I went back to school after lunch, no one would talk to me. Everybody went to one side of the lounge, and I was all by myself, practically in tears.”

  Despite these early setbacks, the realisation that Debbie was not quite the ugly duckling she had imagined he
rself to be dawned upon her, then puberty hit early. “I first became aware of my sexuality when I was about 10 or 11. I think that everybody does, it’s surely not extraordinary to me. I had an interesting experience when I was 11: We were on holiday in Cape Cod, and I used to go out with my cousin … walking the holiday streets at night. When we left the house we used to put on lipstick, without our mothers knowing. Well, we picked up these guys, who were much older than us. They followed us back to where we lived and they said, ‘OK, we’ll pick you up later and we’ll go out for a drink.’ At 11 p.m. that night our mothers had put us in pyjamas and told us to go to bed, when these two guys came knocking at the door. We went down and opened it and you should have seen the faces of these two guys when they saw these two little kids there, without lipstick. It turned out that they were both very famous musicians. They gave us both autographed pictures and stuff. But my parents were really shocked.”

  Deborah’s precocious looks also had the disquieting effect of attracting local weirdos. “I happen to have a sensual nature. And I suppose it comes out in pictures. I’ve always had that kind of response as a female. I know, because I’ve always been followed by perverts. Always the sick kind. In public places, flashers. I remember once when I was a child. It was at the zoo, and I was with my mother. This man came over and whipped open his coat. Disgusting.”

  But as her personal sexuality flourished with hormonal gusto, young Deborah began visiting a pickup drag, known in the local vernacular as ‘Cunt Mile’, in search of sexual kicks. “I liked to experiment, I think I really enjoyed the darker side – the underside of things,” she recounted. “I didn’t do a great deal of it, but it was very meaningful for me. I wanted to see a real cross-section, I wasn’t content to be a white middle class girl growing up and doing what was expected of her. But it certainly was pretty nice.”

  Looking to expand her developing horizons, Debbie took to driving with enthusiasm. “It sort of saved me,” she asserted. “It’s how I got through high school. When things would get too intense I would just get in a car.” Now independently mobile, Deborah found that she was drawn to the nearby town of Paterson. “Both my grandmothers lived in Paterson. A lot of people don’t believe that there is such a place. In the London Times in 1965, there was a piece about William Carlos Williams’ poem ‘Paterson’. They said that, ‘Paterson is an imaginary town in New Jersey which Williams created as his symbol of America.’ Thirteen miles outside Newark, and those limey intellectuals thought it was a myth.”

  Although Deborah had ambitions of travelling around Europe, in 1963 she was enrolled at Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey. “My parents didn’t think going to Europe was the right thing to do. I didn’t really want to go to school, but I did because I was very submissive. I didn’t know what else to do. I really had no idea how to take care of myself. I had been programmed for marriage and a certain degree of higher education. I don’t think my parents contemplated a future for me other than marriage. I was marketed for that, I was produced for that. This two years was to finish me off, to perhaps meet someone.”

  This ‘finishing school’ (described by Debbie as “a reform school for debutantes”) was founded in 1867 by the Newark Conference of the United Methodist Church, becoming a girls’ preparatory school in 1910, then a junior college for women in 1940. Debbie’s graduation with a Bachelor of Association of Arts degree in 1965 was seen as the last educational step before her stipulated future as a fully domesticated housewife.

  While there were several early factors that would prove crucial to the emergence of Debbie’s Blondie persona, being one of the biggest stars on the planet would only have been a wild fantasy at this point. As a teenager, her ambitions stretched no further than becoming a beatnik: “It was always my dream to live the bohemian life in New York and have my own apartment and do things. I didn’t like suburbia. I always had my own secret, private ideas … I always knew I would be involved in entertainment somehow.”

  Debbie had enlivened her New Jersey childhood by creating a fantasy world populated by untouchable movie icons. By the time she reached Centenary College, she had developed a fascination with the anti-establishment archetype exemplified by James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. Naturally enough, her concept of glamour at the time was provided by the then-ubiquitous Marilyn Monroe. “She was the most controversial female while I was growing up, so she cast a large aura and I was very interested in that – her charisma. I never really had that thing of dying to be another person; I was in awe of everybody, really. I knew I wanted to be a performer of some sort. I was kinda vague about it but I was good at music.”

  In terms of adopting such subversive role models in her suburban life, Debbie was inclined to be pragmatic. “It wouldn’t get me anywhere to be a rebel, except I’d always be punished and locked in the house. But I always stated what I thought. [My parents] were liberal intellectually and politically. They themselves and how they were weren’t liberal. They tried to get me to understand it and I did, but they were firmly entrenched in their way of life. I was just waiting for the time I could do what I wanted to do.”

  Exposure to jazz and European cinema laid the ground for much of Debbie’s aesthetic sensibility. “Some of my biggest influences were Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, all those freaked-out jazz musicians, I really got into that,” she’d recall. Indeed, the first album that Deborah Harry fell in love with was the 1955 compilation I Like Jazz, which featured contributions from artists such as Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck. “I didn’t have a lot of money to buy records … so I’d listen to a lot of radio … a little radio where I could have my ear right next to the speaker. In those days DJs could be freaky – the late-late-night DJs were the ones. Funky, soulful stuff, maybe a little bit of rock. What could be better? I was always a radio head.”

  Deborah Harry’s expanding palate of influences was also shaped by the magnetic pull of nearby New York. “When I was a little kid my mother and father used to take me to do the traditional kid things. Radio City shows, the tree at Rockefeller Plaza. New York was always the big fascination and the big Mecca for entertainment, anything that was exotic. My father worked here for more than 25 years. I guess I sort of started taking bus trips to the city when I was in the eighth grade. I would come in to the Village and check out what was going on.”

  Once she was ensconced at Centenary College, Debbie enrolled in creative writing classes. “I seriously started to write in 1964 … poems. They weren’t very good. I used to write little stories.” However, being just old enough to remember a time before rock’n’roll, it was this still new music (rather than literature) that ignited her rebellious instincts. “One of the greatest things about it was that it was forbidden,” she recalled. “That forced young people to have an identity. You could sort through everybody by who they liked, or whether they liked rock’n’roll at all.

  “1959-1965 was a great time to be a rock’n’roll teenager,” she reminisced. “Radio was at its peak. Every show was in heavy competition to discover the newest, wildest sound on plastic … The first rock stuff I got into was Frankie Lymon doo-wop during the fifties. Later, my dancing friends and I did the Strand, the Hully Gully, the Swim, the Jump, the Bop, the Watusi and the Twist – kicked off by the Mashed Potato which, when seen for the first time, caused some kind of scandal at school: ‘You’re dancing like a nigger, girl … You can’t do that!’ Until that time expressing how the music made you feel hadn’t been done.”

  Like many American teenagers of the era, Debbie could hardly fail to notice The Beatles’ impact on the US pop landscape as the band touched down to invade in February 1964. However, rather than being swept away by the prevailing currents of Beatlemania, her artistic sensibility took heed of the dynamics behind the group’s rampant popularity. “I learned a lot of things from The Beatles about sassiness. I always thought they were sassy; that was my label for them. Attitude is very important. And I always felt that sex is a cool thing to sell. It�
�s a sure thing.”

  While John, Paul, George and Ringo enraptured the masses, Debbie fell under the brief supernova spell of New York’s girl groups. These provided some living, breathing rebels to identify with and to model her early individuality upon.

  The 10-storey Brill Building, which got its name from the tailor occupying the ground floor, had dominated New York’s entertainment industry in the late fifties. By 1960, however, while it still housed hotshot songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, most on-the-button contemporary music was emanating from the cheaper, funkier Music Building at 1650 Broadway – a maze of cubicles furnished with desks, phones and an upright piano that played host to the hordes of publishers, promoters and songwriters who descended on the city. As the sixties began to swing, those little cubicles began churning out Top 10 hits at a relentless rate – often from those run by Aldon Music, the company started by music biz veteran Al Nevins and hotshot young entrepreneur Don Kirshner, who made the first of many killings in the white teenage market opened up by Dion & The Belmonts with their young singer/songwriter Neil Sedaka. Happening new writing partnerships of the time included Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry Mann and lyricist Cynthia Weil (who broke the Brooklyn stranglehold by hailing from a rich Upper West Side Jewish background), Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry.

  Goffin and King owned the distinction of writing the first number one single for a black all-female group, the wistfully infectious ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ by New Jersey’s Shirelles, in 1960. This opened the floodgates for the earliest form of girl power.

  The girl-group phenomenon spread like wildfire, prodded full-force by another new arrival called Phil Spector – a diminutive record producer who cast a skyscraper shadow over the early sixties New York music scene. Although born in the Bronx in 1939, he had been taken to California by his mother in 1953 after his father committed suicide, learning his studio craft from Gold Star producer Stan Ross and scoring his first hit record in late 1958 with The Teddy Bears’ ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’ (titled after the inscription on his father’s tombstone). Leiber and Stoller’s mentor, Lester Sill, then arranged for Spector to come to New York and work with the duo, resulting in the lustrously intoxicating ‘Spanish Harlem’, a huge hit for Ben E. King in late 1960.