by Dick Porter
Unfortunately for Debbie, her promotional visit corresponded with a reading of Bright’s proposed bill in the House of Commons. With any movie featuring adult themes now a political hot potato, a scheduled interview on BBC’s Breakfast Time was cancelled, as were radio interviews and other promotional opportunities. “I think the controversy surrounding Videodrome in Britain has been stirred up by the Conservatives,” asserted Deborah. “It has nothing to do with the film, it just has to do with their desire to control and to censor. But the guys from Palace [who distributed the movie in Britain] are thrilled because of the attention it has attracted.”
“I got here and my PR said, ‘There’s a bit of a thing on, a bit of a controversy about this video nasty business,’” she explained. “We’ve had calls from ministers, town councillors and religious groups saying, ‘We’re not going to let this film in our town.’ How do they know if they’ve never seen it? ‘We don’t want to see it, we don’t want to know about it, we read about it – that’s enough,’ they said. That’s funny, isn’t it? It’s a comedy almost.”
Alarmingly, those who refused to allow logic to obstruct their opinions actually sought to blame Debbie for Videodrome‘s content – particularly the scene where a lit cigarette is tracked across her breast. “It’s been, ‘Why did you let Cronenberg write this thing?’” she marvelled. “I’ve not been held totally responsible, I’ve been held totally irresponsible with regard to the number of people who are going to go out and commit violent acts and perverted sexual things now, and ‘My God, how did you do that to your chest!’ They don’t even say ‘breast’, it’s ‘chest’. It wasn’t my ‘chest’, it was my tit!
“The most important thing to realise about it is that it has a very crucial message,” Debbie concluded. “I really believe that. In fact, it’s got a lot of messages. I mean, what place is video and television taking in our lives? There is a terrible danger that we are becoming what we watch. And I think Videodrome has driven that message home.” (As director Cronenberg later conceded, the grand irony is that the ‘message’ is vaguely simpatico with the National Viewers and Listeners Association’s own simplistic view.)
Having unsuccessfully read for a part in British director Alan Parker’s post-Vietnam War drama, Birdy, Debbie – who had also previously been passed over for the roles of Linda Marolla in the Dudley Moore romantic comedy, Arthur, and Vikki LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull – directed her acting aspirations toward the stage. It resulted in her being cast for the shared title role in the American adaptation of Claire Luckham’s wrestling-themed battle-of-the sexes drama, Trafford Tanzi. Transplanting the lead character’s background from Manchester to New Jersey, the play was renamed Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap for its US run.
Directed by debutant Chris Bond, the physical demands of the wrestling scenes were reduced by Debbie and actress Caitlin Clarke alternating in the lead role. Despite this, it still presented a considerable challenge for Debbie – who was also wrestling with heroin-related issues and closing in on 40 years of age, and whose only prior sporting experience had come as a high-school baton twirler.
“I was heavier for Tanzi. I thought that a lady wrestler couldn’t be so thin. It really worked – I put on 10 or 15 pounds. I had my hair brown and very long when I started, and they made me cut it. It was very sporty – all-American – which turned me off,” she recounted. “I went into training for eight weeks. We had the welterweight champion of Britain as our trainer … it’s real. You get hurt. I got beat to shit.”
Although the play had been successful in England and its American adaptation featured Saturday Night Live /Taxi star Andy Kaufman (who would die of cancer the following year) as The Ref, Teaneck Tanzi suffered the ignominy of closing on its opening day at Broadway’s Nederlander Theater.
“I was really disappointed it closed after just one night” said Debbie. “We had been doing the show for audiences downtown in a showcase kind of venue, and it was really popular. We did that for weeks, and it was doing great, but then the producers decided to take it to Broadway. However, I think if they left the show downtown, we would still be doing it. It was just too rough and tumble for Broadway, if that makes any sense, but it was great for downtown. It really worked. We had everyone in the audience cheering on different members of the cast. There was a lot of shouting and stuff going on. It was a little too funky for Broadway.”
The critics panned the play. Writing in the New York Times, Frank Rich declared, “Teaneck Tanzi is an Americanised, retitled version of London’s biggest comedy hit since Steaming, and its charm must have bailed out somewhere over the Atlantic. What we find at the Nederlander is a theatrical gimmick whose execution produces a pounding sensation in every part of one’s head except the brain.” While offering Debbie sarcastic praise for slurring some of her lines, Rich gave free reign to his disdain for the drama: “Because Tanzi and her antagonists are symbols devoid of flesh or blood, we don’t care who vanquishes whom in the ring: they’re all pop-up dolls. The wrestling, though noisy, is less convincing than an average Three Stooges melee. There are also songs, seemingly composed on a washboard. The instrumental accompaniment, led by an electric organ, isn’t worthy of a seventh-inning stretch at Shea Stadium.”
“The reason we closed,” Debbie asserted, “was because of the critics. They really didn’t like the show. They didn’t understand it. They didn’t appreciate the popularity of wrestling. [The critics] weren’t into the audience participation, which was a very important part of that show. So, the show closed on Broadway despite advance sales and a certain amount of popularity through word of mouth.”
Frank Rich also took issue with what he saw as the “anachronistic” nature of the play’s feminist subtext, a criticism Debbie agreed with. “The so-called feminist content in that play is really old-hat, right? But when I talked to the people about doing it, we were talking about a lot of rewrites. I had a lot of ideas about it but … pffft! When the time came, they really just didn’t intend to change more than a few words. That wasn’t gonna make it work – America and Britain have totally different realities where that subject matter is concerned. And oh [groans], I was really sorry, because wrestling is so popular and it could have been so great … The problem was I really tricked myself. I had it so rewritten in my mind, I was so into transforming it that – it rather sneaked up on me that they could be totally intransigent about changing it. About the basic orientation. But – it was still very good experience. Theatre is so rigid; it has its own hierarchies and discipline. And I had to go through it to find out.”
Debbie’s return to the world of cinema was in order to record vocals for Giogio Moroder’s ‘Rush Rush’, on the soundtrack of Brian De Palma’s high-octane update of Scaface. As a dancefloor filler the track was in a similar vein to ‘Call Me’, with Debbie’s yeyo-referencing lyrics celebrating the septum-eroding lifestyle of the principal character, Tony Montana (Al Pacino). Released in February 1984 as Debbie’s first post-Blondie single, the track made disappointingly little impact on the charts despite being a minor club hit.
It had been 18 months since Blondie broke up, but their influence was still evident at the forefront of popular music, particularly how elements of Debbie’s style were appropriated by a new generation of vocalists. Although by no means a new phenomenon (in Britain, Kim Wilde and Hazel O’Connor had scored hits while taking cues from a still rolling Blondie bandwagon), by 1984 Madonna had assimilated elements of Deborah’s image into a post-modern blonde persona that also referenced Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow and others. This combination proved to be a commercial gold mine, generating a string of hugely successful (if bland) hits supported by an assertive sexuality that largely owed its provenance to Debbie’s Blondie persona. “There are two different ways to look at that,” mused Deborah. “Homage or rip-off? There were a few incidences of direct … you know … lifts and others are just flattering references.”
When Andy Warhol asserted that
“Debbie actually was the first Madonna” in October 1984, it seemed unfair that her enforced recording hiatus had enabled others to cash in on her image – particularly at a time when she was facing financial hardship. “Sort of the same thing happened to Iggy Pop,” she would observe in 2005. “His legacy and his reputation and his style have been copied, and he was a groundbreaker. He was so far ahead of his time that he was shocking everyone. He never really made a bundle of money, yet the people who followed after him did really well, and I just think sometimes that happens. Sometimes the people who were first don’t really make the bucks.”
Signed to Sire by Seymour Stein, who had started the label with Richard Gottehrer in 1966 and later released The Ramones’ and Talking Heads’ early albums, Madonna Ciccone’s emergence as a globally successful entertainer – between her debut single in 1981 and her first US number one with ‘Like A Virgin’ in November 1984 – initiated a lineage of marketable female vocalists who owed much to Debbie, including Wendy James, Courtney Love, Gwen Stefani and Lady Gaga. “I knew she was happening back in the early eighties, a friend of mine had some romance with her, but it all happened when Chris was really sick so I was paying most of my attention to him” Debbie recalled. “So I guess I didn’t really catch onto Madonna until she was marching on up.”
Aside from recording ‘Feel The Spin’ for the soundtrack of hip hop movie Krush Groove in 1985, in the mid-eighties Debbie disappeared almost completely from the public radar as she helped nurse Chris back to health. “I can remember Chris coming over to my apartment to meet William Burroughs” said Victor Bockris. “It was amazing to see him because he was a completely different person – so turned on, and so funny, just talking and talking. That was in 1986, and it was definitely the moment at which I recognised he was back completely. It did take a few years, because it wasn’t just a physical illness. The fallout at the end of Blondie also created enormous stress. To get out of the tangled web they were when he fell ill was very complicated and took a long time and was very boring and stressful.”
Chris emerged from his confinement weighing noticeably more than he had before he fell ill. “I have a sort of biker image now. I’m going to get a big tattoo on my stomach of an eagle holding a beer can in his claws,” he laughed.
For Debbie, his recovery was a huge relief and, so far as she was concerned, reward enough for the devoted care she had provided. “It didn’t seem like a sacrifice at all. Because our careers were so entwined, so enmeshed. We had always worked as a team. And being sick on your own is no fun,” she reflects. “I would have expected the same from him. And I did do other things – different projects that just weren’t so visible. But what many people don’t realise is that, at the time Chris was sick, our record label had dropped us as well, our business had turned to shit, the tax people were attacking us. Everything sort of went down the tube at the same time, so it appeared that I was devoting myself to him – but, in reality, things had just collapsed. I was holding everything closer because we had everything to lose and we were losing most of it, after all that success.”
“When I was loaded up with steroids, and who knows what other kinds of strange chemicals, my mood swings could be intense. Debbie was constant, though,” Chris remembered. “Other people would have found me impossible to handle, but not her. She was amazing at coping with me, and did so in a way that was above and beyond any possible call of friendship or duty.”
“It’s taken a while, the recuperation, but he’s really back to his former self,” said Deborah. “He’s got terrific ideas, as usual. He’s a very creative person. He’s never really stopped. One of the worst things about being sick is your mind keeps going and you’re so limited. He never stopped thinking about things, so he’s about to carry them out … It was frustrating for me too. I’ve felt really terrific since we’ve been working on the music again.”
With Chris back in circulation, plans for Debbie’s second solo album returned to the top of the agenda. Now managed by lawyer Stanley Arkin, who assisted Deborah in renegotiating her deal with Chrysalis, arrangements were made to record the disc at the Power Station and Electric Lady studios with J. Geils Band keyboard player Seth Justman producing. Although Chrysalis would release the album worldwide, in North America Debbie would be on the Geffen label. “Geffen is very artistically oriented,” appraised Chris. “I’m not naming names, but a lot of these companies get so hung up on the business side of things that they totally lose sight of what’s going on.”
It had been more than four years since the couple last entered the studio to record an album. For Debbie, it was a challenge she approached with a degree of trepidation. “I was kind of lost after Blondie,” she recalled, “but I kept on trying to figure it out. And then I wanted to make more records. I guess the best thing that I know now is what it really takes to be creative and to hold on to my artistic soul. And I guess I really didn’t know that, I didn’t know how to activate it. I think one of the reasons that I was so attracted to Chris is that he is so naturally adept at expressing that constantly. And it’s taken a while just to become habitually in touch with that, and just to live my life like that.”
Although the disc that emerged as Rockbird featured over 20 additional musicians and vocalists, the label was keen to relaunch Debbie as a commercially viable solo performer. To facilitate this, there would be none of the radical experimentation evident on Koo Koo or the last two Blondie albums. As Debbie stated, “They gave me money to make the record and now they have to sell the record to make it back.”
Indeed, Rockbird is an entirely safe album, with many of Justman’s arrangements typical of the sequenced and programmed fare providing hits for artists such as Madonna. ‘I Want You’, ‘Buckle Up’ and ‘You Got Me In Trouble’ are emblematic of the vaguely sassy, upbeat pop of the era, while only Chris and Debbie’s title track and ‘Beyond The Limit’ (which she co-wrote with Nile Rodgers) possess the kind of urgent attitude that was always a key element of Deborah’s material.
“I sort of feel like this record is maybe too mellow, or too nice, and not bitchin’ or spunky or whatever as it could be,” she mused. “But I’m coming out of a really quiet part of my life, been very involved with inner feelings, and the thing is very personal for me, it’s just me. I’m not singing for five men, I’m singing for myself and I’m writing for myself. And that’s what this record is. After I do some live shows, and after I get my ass kicked around by being in the business for a while and out in the real world, maybe I’ll write something that’s tougher, maybe I’ll be tougher again. You know, I’m just a product of what everybody else is.”
Released in a Stephen Sprouse/Andy Warhol-designed sleeve on November 29, 1986, Rockbird can be retrospectively viewed as a moderately successful attempt by an artist to find her feet after an extended break from recording. Commercially, it did little in the US but in Britain it sold relatively well, achieving gold disc status in the lower reaches of the Top 40. It spawned a global hit in the shape of ‘French Kissin’ In The USA’, written by Chuck Lorre who would later go on to create the Two And A Half Men TV sitcom.
“To get an A&R department of a record company to back me, I had to do a song like ‘French Kissin’,” explained Debbie. “Which happens to be a good song, it’s somehow a little more gutsy, but yet it can be commercial. They’ve made everything so cutesy from a girl point of view. There is no edge. And how many girl singers are around that are rock stars, or performers that are selling records, who can do that?”
The single made the Top 10 in Britain, Ireland and Australia, and its video secured Deborah airtime on the increasingly important MTV cable channel. Two other singles were also drawn from Rockbird: ‘Free To Fall’, a plaintive if pedestrian ballad, and the gently seductive ‘In Love With Love’ – neither of which made any significant impact on the charts, although the latter did top the Billboard dance list. The album was only lightly promoted by Geffen, which at the time was concentrating on more easily marketable rel
eases by Elton John, Kylie Minogue, Peter Gabriel and Irene Cara.
“I was really on their B-list and that hurt me a lot. It hurt me in business and it hurt me in other ways. I felt sort of worthless,” Debbie recalled. “Had I stayed with the identity of Blondie, the industry would have considered me more of a sure thing. But because I veered off, it was hard for anyone to grasp – or to be bothered grasping – where I was headed. I wasn’t a big enough world seller by that point to merit anyone giving me that kind of attention.”
Sadly, Andy Warhol’s contribution to the Rockbird sleeve proved to be among his last pieces of work. He died from a heart attack on February 22, 1987, while recovering from routine gall bladder surgery. Paying tribute to his friend, Chris observed, “I have a lot of admiration for him, as an artist. And whatever anybody says, he’s been the fucking kingpin of the New York art scene for years. Also, I think he’s been very radical.”
“Here we are,” Debbie said, “left here without him, and it’s really been boring, I must say. It hasn’t been as much fun. Andy was really great fun.”
Rather than tour in support of an album put together in the studio and necessitating the recruitment of a new band, Debbie’s focus returned to acting. She had already shot an episode of the Tales From The Darkside portmanteau horror TV series, which aired in October 1987. “It’s a thriller kind of show, like The Outer Limits,” she explained. “I play a witch who comes back in another body. It’s called ‘The Moth’.” This was followed by an appearance in another television series, Crime Story. “I play a bimbette. You know, like a fancy hooker. I’m the comedy relief, so I got to do a bit of comedy, which was nice.” She also got to do a little more comedy in the movie Forever, Lulu, a mildly amusing mystery directed by Amos Kollek (previously responsible for 1985 romantic drama Goodbye, New York) and starring iconic Polish actress Hanna Schygulla.