Blondie, Parallel Lives

by Dick Porter

  “Drugs was chic,” asserted Deborah. “Everybody in New York was fooling around with drugs. That’s just what the scene was like. It wasn’t like today where everybody knows what the implications are and what the results are. It was just a very small, elitist art world. Up in a loft. ‘Look at my pictures! Aren’t they neat? Yeah? OK, let’s do some drugs to celebrate then.’ It was just a fashionable situation. The stockbrokers weren’t doing cocaine, only we were doing cocaine. It was just for freaks, and the quantities that are available now weren’t available then. It was the sixties, man.”

  “I think that was when I really went crazy,” reflected Debbie. “That’s when I was really weird. My boyfriend [Gil Fields] was a drummer. He had been in the band for about a week. He was an unbelievable, high-calibre drummer, a drummer since he was three years old … He died. But – it’s unbelievable – he taught me so much about music.

  “That’s the thing about the sixties; there were all these tragedies. There are still these articles about … people that are – they call them survivors. I don’t want to be labelled as that … [But] a lot of people died.”

  In retrospect, Deborah retains a strong sense of perspective about her pharmaceutical experiences: “I think we’re all completely vulnerable to substances. I approached drugs in a way that was as obsessive as the rest of my compulsive behaviour. I went and I did them and did them and did them until I got tired of doing them. I think they were really something I needed. Had I been going to a psychiatrist I think they would have had me on some kind of antidepressants to balance me out a little bit. So I was sort of self-medicating, I guess. It works to a certain point, and then you become victimised by the culture of it, and by the addictive process. Getting high is great, but the other side of that is a real drag.”

  Aside from the proximity to drugs afforded by a touring band and the fringes of the art scene, Debbie had mainlined herself into the epicentre of New York Babylon by taking a job as a waitress at Max’s Kansas City, 213 Park Avenue South. Max’s was opened in December 1965 as a clubrestaurant by Mickey Ruskin, a Cornell graduate from Jersey City who had previously opened The Tenth Street Coffeehouse, then Les Deux Magots on Ninth Street and artist-musicians’ hangout The Ninth Circle on West 10th Street. “I didn’t know that Mickey was a junkie at the time,” Deborah later revealed. “My boss was a junkie, I was a junkie, everyone was a junkie.”

  Max’s quickly became a hangout for artists, sculptors, musicians, writers, poets, jet-setters and Warhol’s riotous gaggle of Factory freaks and superstars. The illustrious list of artists who played the club (often in their early days) included Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, Bob Marley, Tim Buckley, Suicide, Tom Waits, Odetta, Gram Parsons and the ubiquitous Velvet Underground – who played their last shows with Lou Reed there in 1970. After becoming a kind of glam-rock epicentre in 1973 – regularly attracting the likes of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, The New York Dolls and the cream of New York’s groupie subculture – it closed the following year but would re-open in 1975, to play a part in Blondie’s early career as a live band.

  “The first incarnation of Max’s was heavy duty. That’s not a phrase I like to use, but it clearly defines what was going on,” recalled Debbie. “All Hollywood came. The photographers, sculptors and artists were all at the bar, in the front, while the back room was full of the Andy Warhol crowd, the late night people and musicians. Who did I serve? You name ‘em. Who’s the actor who was Our Man Flint? James Coburn! He was so gorgeous. Stevie Winwood, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix. Then there was Andy with all of his nutty superstars … Max’s was a perfect place to work. You were a fly on the wall. You could be as visible, or as invisible, as you wanted to be. I could meet people and talk to them – or not. I was just the waitress.

  “I was too stubborn to, you know, get some guy to pay my rent, I figured that was more work than for me just to get another job. So working at Max’s Kansas City was great, I got to meet everybody, see all these fabulous people.”

  “I was basically a kid and I’d be serving dinner to Janis Joplin,” beamed Deborah. “My shift was from 4.00 to midnight or I’d get the later shift from 7.30 to closing. The people who came in at 7.30 for dinner were working people and then, little by little, the people who wandered in got freakier and freakier. I loved Warhol and that whole crowd. I used to go in the back room and wait on Gerard Malanga, the superstars – Jane Forth, Ultra Violet, Viva, this one, that one. It was staggering. Just so delicious and fun.”

  Despite Debbie’s excitement at waiting tables for the glitterati, the slightly soiled glamour of Max’s notorious back room had provided a hip veneer to what could often be a tough working environment. “I used to cry a lot then generally,” she admitted. “It wasn’t just them, they just triggered it off. They were very frustrating people to wait on. The only one I got friendly with was [musician/dancer/actor] Eric Emerson and he was friendly with everybody, especially girls. I made it with Eric in a phone booth upstairs. One time only.”

  The emotional rollercoaster that Deborah experienced was in no small way accentuated by her narcotic intake. However, filmmaker Emile de Antonio provided the young waitress with some sage advice.

  “During the sixties I was still unsure of exactly who I was, which made it difficult to deal with other people and kept me out of whack in relation to myself as well,’ she observed. “This was debilitating and painful. In Popism, his history of the sixties, Andy Warhol says Emile de Antonio encouraged him before he was discovered. Emile was the first person to give me encouragement too. He’s a remarkable, wonderful maniac. We talked about my problems and I said I thought it would take me two years to work them all out. Emile replied that it would take more like eight. I was horrified by his thinking. I was such a nerd and got pissed as hell, but he was right.”

  Another of Max’s back-room habitués was Leee Black Childers, a photographer subsequently hired as vice president of Bowie’s Mainman organisation who later went on to manage Johnny Thunders’ post-New York Dolls band, The Heartbreakers. Leee remembers Deborah as a fresh face amongst the glamorous wolves that prowled the club. “As I recall, she would waitress in the back room – you didn’t make much in tips, because everybody was pretty broke, but at least you got to be in the back room! She was very pretty and everybody was always hitting on her. She always had ambitions of performing.”

  For Debbie, serving food to chemically unbalanced hipsters provided some much-needed fringe benefits: “I met all the stars and served them their steaks. Most of them were so stoned they couldn’t eat and still gave me five dollar tips. I’d wrap up the steaks and take them home.”

  Debbie’s waitressing stint ended after eight months, when she ran off to San Francisco with a millionaire – enjoying the luxury of his mansion for a month, before getting bored and returning to New York. It was another teenage girl’s fantasy fulfilled. “He was just a ‘run of the mill’ millionaire but it seemed like a good idea at the time,” she explains. “It was something I’d always wanted to do.”

  Like Deborah Harry, Chris Stein had returned to Manhattan following his tripped-out summer in San Francisco. “I think I got my first apartment in like 1969 or 1970,” he recalled. “First Avenue and First Street. The funeral home was still there. And then the bathhouse was like the first gay bathhouse in the city.” However, without the focus of a band to bring him out of his private world he became increasingly reclusive, as delayed shock from his father’s death combined with regular LSD consumption to propel him toward a mental breakdown, which would see him committed to Belleville Hospital Centre, a New Jersey psychiatric institution, for several months. Chris considered his incarceration to be just an occupational hazard for acidheads: “Flipping out was the norm. Everyone I knew would do their stint in the nuthouse at some point or another.”

  On his release, Chris then faced the draft board which was calling him up as a potential conscript for the Vietnam conflict. “I told them to check off everything, that I was a drug addict, gay,
whatever,” he revealed. Fortunately, this gambit ensured that he failed the medical, leaving him free to head to Woodstock to enjoy the last rays of hippie sunlight.

  As a means of providing himself with some direction, Chris also enrolled in a photography course at the New York School of Visual Arts. “Photography is easy to pursue because I’m already set up to do that,” he asserted. “And I went to art school and studied graphics too, so I’m just utilising what’s at my disposal. My mother was a beatnik painter; I’ve been around artists all my life.”

  Chapter Three

  Brave New Babylon

  “The New York Dolls were great attitude. If nothing else, they were a great attitude.”

  Johnny Thunders

  Most depictions of New York City during the 20th century opened with the most famous skyline in the world and worked their way down. The city was well established as the port where hopeful immigrants arrived; the capital of capitalism; the prototype for the modern metropolis. It was a place where people came to change their lives, to realise their previously stifled artistic leanings and, hopefully, to make their fortunes.

  But, as the sixties turned into the seventies, the Big Apple entered an economic downward spiral that would render it bankrupt by the middle of the decade. As immigration quotas expanded nearly half a million people arrived from Latin America and the Caribbean, coinciding with a substantial ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. Unemployment soared and, as thousands of city employees were dismissed, the parks became overgrown mugging fields; the subway system regularly broke down; libraries were closed; rather than being paved with gold, the streets were generally caked in grime and uncollected garbage. With fewer police on the beat, drug supermarkets did a roaring trade and crime raged so fiercely that the city would take decades to shake off its reputation as one of America’s scariest urban dystopias. As Alan Vega, vocalist of Suicide, recalls, “New York was collapsing.”

  “Economically, it was just a whole different world. It really was like living in Beirut,” asserted Debbie. “It wasn’t all peace and love,” she added, perhaps superfluously. “Racially and economically, there was a lot of separation. The Lower East Side was a dangerous place to live, although I liked it there. You had these great Russian, Ukrainian and Spanish restaurants, where you could eat well and cheaply.”

  As has often been the case, societal impoverishment gave rise to an upsurge in grass-roots creativity. New York would spawn several epochal musical movements in the space of a decade, including low-rent glam, Bowery punk and its angular aftershock. All were initially made possible through the dirt-cheap rents that facilitated an influx of artists and musicians willing to put up with the squalor and danger. The Cast Iron District (later renamed SoHo – South of Houston – and TriBeCa – Triangle Below Canal Street) had become an abandoned ghost town full of lofts and warehouses. Further East, the area around the Bowery was also eerily vacant, while parts of Alphabet City looked like London after the Blitz. Many of these abandoned spaces provided a fertile spawning ground for alternative strains of creativity.

  Much of this activity was described as ‘underground’. The term had been coined by New York’s Village Voice, ‘the world’s first underground newspaper’, established in 1955, but the phrase did not enter the popular consciousness until around 1964 – following a wave of films, publications and plays. The counterculture hijacked it as the perfect catch-all banner for alternative creativity, and in the immediate post-sixties years, ‘underground’ came to mean a loosely defined anti-authoritarianism striving for self-expression, far-out drug experiences, sexual freedom and, ultimately, an alternative society.

  For Deborah Harry, these winds of societal change initially blew at a distance. After returning from her brief Californian sojourn, she found work as a Bunny Girl at the notorious Playboy Club. Recalling why she took the job, Debbie explained, “I think it was because of this man that my mother and father knew, Mr Whipple – like the [supermarket] commercial – except he was different, real handsome; I always had a big crush on him. He was a businessman who used to travel a lot, wild and exciting; he used to flirt with me a little, and I would die because he was so handsome. He was a Playboy subscriber and raved about the clubs – that was where I first heard about them. I always had it in the back of my mind. I did it for the money.”

  “I didn’t consider it a profession,” Debbie later added. “A lot of the women there believed that, though. They were into it for the huge income. Those girls made some dough. The drink prices were high, and the percentages were good for the Bunnys. I did OK. I only stayed there for seven or eight months. I was getting to the point where I was getting into the big showrooms, where the girls would clean up. In those days, you came away with $1,500 cash on a weekend.

  “There were girls there who started their own businesses from what they made; girls were making from $300-$500 a night. Cash! You had 35 people per show to wait on; sometimes you’d be carrying a double-stacked tray … A man watching a girl in a little costume with her tits hanging out, struggling with a tray among 500 people, he thinks, ‘Holy shit! How did she do that?’ It’s no big deal to give her a tip.”

  The gig as a Bunny paid well enough to finance Deborah’s continuing narcotics consumption. “I was stoned most of the time,” she’d explain. “I wanted the money. It was a goal and something I had always had held in front of me in my younger life. When you’re younger, you have idyllic dreams of things to do. I did it and it’s not so good. It’s pretty disgusting work.”

  “You had to maintain a level of appearance,” she later recalled. “You’d had to go through the inspection line before you went to work. They felt they had some kind of ownership thing, that they could call you and expect you to drop everything and work. It was actually really quite offensive.”

  Despite the need to finance her habit, Debbie had no ambition to appear as a Playboy model. “I was too thin at the time. I don’t think I was Playboy magazine material. I mean, yeah, I looked cute. But they weren’t looking for that. They wanted someone a little more sexual.

  “It was definitely interesting, but it was a short-lived occupation. I got such massive publicity out of doing it. But I never met Hugh Hefner until Blondie took off.”

  Ultimately, the nine months that Deborah spent working as a Bunny Girl would be the final phase of the drug-enhanced dislocation she’d felt since leaving Wind In The Willows. “I did junk for about three years,” she admitted. “I couldn’t stand the surroundings. I like the drug. I like the high, there’s nothing better, but I can’t stand the scene. You have to deal with extortionists. For a while, I had this dealer living in my house on 107th and Manhattan Avenue and I nearly went berserk. That really finished me on the whole trip. These 40-year-old guys with guns and infections all over their bodies. I don’t think they ever went to the bathroom. I just quit. At the same time, I met this doctor on Central Park South who gave vitamin shots with amphetamine and I started doing that instead. And that was like bouncing off and going in another direction.”

  Although fuelled by speed, this new direction provided Debbie with the sense of self she’d been lacking. “I stopped doing junk and I didn’t need the money as much. In a way, I used drugs to stimulate myself or control my state of mind to help me get through a rough, emotional time in my life. When I felt a little more secure, I was ready to go on as a person without any help, assured of what I was.”

  Like many people who seek to establish who they actually are, Debbie returned to what had motivated and, to a degree, defined her as a younger woman: her ambition to perform. “I wanted music that popped and as a Bunny I was losing my hop. I just wanted out. I moved to a $75-a-month studio apartment, but eventually the real estate broker who handled the building came around and said I could stay there for no rent whatsoever if I made it with him on a regular basis. I thought, ‘Oh shit! I’m not going to get involved with this.’ So, burned out but determined to regain my strength, I packed everything and moved upstate to
live outside Woodstock in Phoenicia with my pregnant girlfriend.”

  Having extracted herself from the drugs culture, Debbie continued her self-examination in a less chaotic environment. “I wanted to learn self-hypnosis,” she revealed. “I thought if I learned some kind of technique, a physical technique or a mental technique, that would be able to support me if I ever felt I needed to take drugs – so that I could get out of this rat race. But then I got into the psychoanalytic rat race – and that was another one! I mean, that was taking as much time and money as the other thing had; so I had to get out of that, too.”

  After four months Deborah also got out of Phoenicia, returning to the family home in Hawthorne. “It took me some time to readjust. I got the old blow-ups and put on a lot of weight,” she explained. “By the time I left Phoenicia in 1970 you couldn’t tell the difference between me and my pregnant girlfriend.”

  As her parents both held day jobs, Debbie had an abundance of time for introspection. “The idea of doing music haunted me every day,” she recalled. “I said to my family, ‘I think about doing this every single day.’ My mother never said not to do it, she just said, ‘Be practical.’ I worked in a health spa in Paramus teaching exercises.

  “I did make-up and facials and I fooled around with hair, but I could only really do trims. I’ve ruined some people. I cut my sister’s hair once and she wanted to kill me. I don’t blame her; she looked like a lampshade.”

  In 1971, Debbie helped her parents move to Cooperstown, in upstate New York, where her mother ran a gift shop. Keen to re-establish her independence after a year back in the nest, she scored a rented room from a truck driver, situated underneath the George Washington Bridge on the Jersey side of the Hudson River in Fort Lee. She then fell into a relationship with a young car salesman, who helped Deborah relocate to a new apartment, although the new couple spent the bulk of their time at his place. “Suddenly I was all set for a new life again with my job and my boyfriend,” she recounted. “The job was a bust, but that wasn’t all. We discovered we weren’t meant for each other, and I moved back into my own apartment. I went to cosmetician school, and started a job in a friend’s beauty salon in Jersey. My ex kept calling me in the middle of the night – possessiveness was a major reason we broke up – to make sure I was home alone.”