I was at the hotel having a bath when Bob walked in. We were so happy to see each other. We smoked some pot, ordered up a slice of pecan pie and another of cheesecake, made love, and went to sleep. I had a wake-up call for early in the morning, as I was to appear for a taping of the Tonight show. When the phone rang, Bob did not stir. It was still dark when I tiptoed out, careful not to wake him. I had not yet unpacked but had pulled out of my suitcase the white satin shirt and python maxi skirt and vest I’d had made up at Carnaby Street in London, after my return from the Walk with Love and Death set in Austria. The Tonight show, one of the first on-air interviews I’d ever done, was unremarkable except for Johnny Carson’s evident boredom. As I was answering a question, he’d invariably check his notebook for the next one. It was an odd style, quite unbalancing.
I was looking forward to getting back to the hotel room to see Bob. I turned the key quietly in the lock. By now it was midmorning. When I opened the door, a single ray of light seeped through the join in the curtains, and I beheld a strange sight. Naked, like a martyr fallen from his cross, an arm flung across his eyes, his limbs so scattered as to look broken, Bob lay on a couch across the room. For a second, I wondered if he’d been attacked or mugged, but this was evidently not so. My torn dresses and broken jewelry littered the floor. Some garments clung to the window ledge, while others had made the journey through the open window to the pavement below, never to be recovered.
“What have I done?” I cried, casting off my stiff python suit and standing before him half naked. “Tell me, what have I done?” I cried again. I think this was an attempt to prove to him that I was unarmed, that I was not a threat. I stayed for hours with Bob in the darkened room, pleading with him to forgive me for leaving my suitcases unpacked. That had been my offense. In that short time, I had become the enemy.
I felt responsible for having hurt his feelings and was addled and shaken by his behavior. Even though I couldn’t understand the train of thought that brought him to this state of confusion and despair, it was evident that he really cared a lot about me. Bob had a magic knack of knowing with great precision what was to be my breaking point, when he would become human and loving again. He said that because I had not unpacked my bags, it had made him feel temporary, unimportant, and insecure—this reaction should show me how much he loved me.
In the weeks that followed, there were other interviews, appearances, and obligations to the movie. By now Ernie had apprised Dad of my decision to stay in an alternative hotel with a boyfriend, and I had received a stern call from Dad saying that he did not like the sound of this arrangement and would be coming to New York imminently to check it out. I had nightmares of his showing up in the slightly shabby confines of the Gramercy Park Hotel lobby, ready to haul me off in chains to a nunnery. I burrowed down with Bob. Ernie Anderson called to tell me I was booked on The David Frost Show. The night before I was due to go on, I wept, telling Bob how much I missed Mum. “I’m scared of Dad,” I told him. “He frightens me.”
Bob exploded. “What are you saying? He’s your father! He’s the one you really love, the one you love the most! You know you love your father more than you ever loved your mother!”
He told me to apologize to my father on television for having been insensitive and difficult to work with, and for having disappointed him when he had done so much to help me. In fear and shock, I went out like a robot and did The David Frost Show. I said word for word what Bob had told me to say. After I got off the show, Ernie said, “Well, that should bring them in, if nothing else does!” David Frost named me as one of his most interesting interviews that year. I guess he hadn’t interviewed Richard Nixon yet.
The truth was that I was confused and out of my depth while hopelessly attempting to make Bob happy. I was unaware of the extent and seriousness of his condition. I did not know that he was clinically sick, and I felt responsible for his pain. Anything, even the smallest thing, could threaten him or put him in a tailspin. It took several days for Bob to recover from these episodes, sometimes longer. He never told me that he used to hear voices and hallucinate badly. That he once destroyed his studio and was sent to a private clinic, where they placed him in a padded cell and put him in a straitjacket. Or that he had a brother who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. In time I learned that Bob was bipolar, schizophrenic, and bisexual. He had attempted suicide at twenty-two and at least four times in the years that followed, the evidence of which crisscrossed his veins in razor scars, from the wrists to the upper arms. I thought of Bob as a wounded soul and believed it was my mission to save him. When he would turn his head away from the wall and back to me, it was cause for celebration. We’d go around the corner to Luchow’s and make up over a bottle of Lancer’s rosé, and everything would look brighter.
• • •
Norma was now living in Woodstock with their four-year-old son, Terry, so on weekends Bob and I would often take the bus to Woodstock from the Port Authority on Forty-second Street, a derelict and ugly place, and watch out the window as the shabbiness of midtown Manhattan gave way to the green of the country. I loved Woodstock, with its rivers warm enough to wallow in during the summer. There was always something going on. Because it was a frontier town in music, they were all living there, from Richie Havens to Robbie Robertson and the Band to Bob Dylan. But if you wanted, you could just be quiet and cook and hang out, which was what I loved to do, and it gave Bob a chance to visit Terry.
Sometimes we would stay in a sort of open-house arrangement with a music-producer friend of Bob’s, Ron Merian, and his wife, Valma. There was a story going around at the time about a very young, very pretty model of the moment who, one day, while tripping on LSD, jumped off a tree, thinking she could fly. She hit the ground and died. Although drugs were ubiquitous and always available, especially in a town like Woodstock, I was not tempted to try anything stronger than grass. The word “acid” scared me, and still does. When Bob and I heard that thousands of hippies were headed to Woodstock on August 15, 1969, we decided to stay in New York City, thereby missing out on a huge chunk of history.
CHAPTER 15
Anjelica applying makeup backstage at Zandra Rhodes’s charity fashion show, London, 1973
Though the photographs from my trip to Ireland with Dick Avedon had not yet run in Vogue, I had gained confidence from the experience and had made up my mind that I wanted to be a fashion model. I had always doubted my own physical appeal but, oddly, I felt powerful in front of the camera.
When I told Bob that I wanted to be a model, he didn’t laugh at me. He asked why I didn’t want to act anymore. I told him that it was too painful, that the criticism was unbearable, and that I had lost my nerve. Bob said it was obvious that I needed to join an agency. He called Eileen Ford and asked if she would see me as a favor to him. I walked into Ford Models some few days later and was shown into Eileen’s private suite. When I entered the room, a pert, freckled woman in her forties with a reddish bob and a girlish headband looked me smartly up and down. “Let’s see your legs,” she said.
I told her my ambition was to be photographed by Guy Bourdin, and she replied nastily, “What do you want, dearie? A plane ticket to Paris?” I ran home to Bob. Kindly, he consoled me. “We’ll show her,” he said. “She’s just a pain in the ass.” He assured me that Eileen had nothing against me, even though she was friends with his wife, Norma. Despite her testiness, she did take me on as a Ford model.
I was very shy and I loathed go-sees—walking through the streets of New York brandishing my two-foot-square modeling book full of photographs like a weapon, riding up in strange elevators to photography studios, mostly on the Lower East Side or downtown on Broadway, to be looked over like horseflesh. You never knew what might come out of the shadows. On one of my first meetings, a photographer leafed through the book and suggested we do some test shots. When I raised my arms in a pose, he exclaimed, “Don’t fly away!” I ran to his desk and grabbed the book before darting down the emergency
exit stairs in tears.
Again I confided in Bob. “Watch me,” he said. He went to the record player and chose a song. “This is important. Always carry your own music.” Hypnotic and compelling, Bob showed me poses to seduce the camera. Then he sat me down and showed me books with pictures from his favorite photographers, the ones who inspired him—from Alfred Stieglitz, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Bill Brandt, Robert Doisneau, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and George Brassaï to the fashion photographers Horst, Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn. He gave me a list of photographers I should work with, starting with Helmut Newton and ending with Guy Bourdin. “Stick with me,” he said. “We’ll show them.”
For four years I went in and out of the light with Bob. He was crazy and troubled and fierce, but he was an amazing teacher. In times of unity, we had a strong collaboration. He taught me about timing, movement, what the camera sees. If it was there to steal your soul, well, he aimed to do just that—the conversation was seductive and the lens was a catalyst. But in order for us to live together, I had to believe that it was him and me against the world.
• • •
We had very little money. One option that we hadn’t explored in New York was the infamous Chelsea Hotel, through the years a refuge of sorts for artists and drifters. It smelled of bad luck. It was the place where Dylan Thomas was staying when he died of pneumonia on November 9, 1953, and where, later, Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, was found stabbed to death on October 12, 1978. I don’t mean to denigrate it as just a graveyard; living at the Chelsea Hotel was a rite of passage. From the moment you walked through the double doors into the lobby, you were on your way down the rabbit hole. “Red,” the doorman and night porter, an older black man with orange hair and freckled skin, showed you to your room with an air of uncertainty and a rattling of keys. One felt lucky if it was unoccupied; half the time it seemed like the management didn’t know. But in effect they had a point, as when the moment one entered, a thousand cockroaches revealed themselves, frozen in the sudden glare of the electric light. I hated them with a passion—their transparent bodies, their feelers testing the atmosphere, hiding in the dark cracks of the room, waiting for the darkness to manifest so they could reemerge to creep onto your pillow as you slept.
One night Bob and I came back to the room from the cinema. I was wearing the red fox fur coat that Marianne Faithfull had given to me as a parting gift in London. The sleeves were tight, so in order to take it off, I was pulling at some rings I was wearing. As Bob and I were talking, the closet door opened and a youngish man, dirty blond and strung out, pulled a straight-edged razor on us. “Tie her up!” he screamed. He ranted about how evil women were, chattel for the corporations, pigs that should be eradicated. During this diatribe, he wielded the razor, waving it about with abandon. Quietly and calmly, Bob sat down, raised his open hands as if in a blessing, and said gently, “I understand, you need help. Take what you need and leave.” The intruder made a few more threats, then seemed to take stock and calmed down.
After severing the telephone cords and promising to cut our throats if we called the management, he grabbed my rings, took the key, fled the room, and locked us in from the outside. I had to climb across the outer balconies on the fifth floor to knock on the window of a lonely hippie girl in a bedroom. “Oh yeah, come in,” she said tolerantly, without batting an eyelash. “This happens all the time at the Chelsea.”
When we reported the incident, two cops came up to our room to take a statement, to examine the telephone cord, to touch Marianne’s fur coat. They asked if I’d go along with them to the second floor, accompanied by Red, and proceeded to unlock a number of doors with a skeleton key. When I asked them about the logic of this, they explained that at the Chelsea, the perpetrator easily could turn out to be a patron. We didn’t find him. Later I saw more of the inner lives of the hotel, including a bearded man in an all-white room with only newspapers and a bowl of goldfish for company, and an apartment on the top floor that seemed to be lined with bricks of hashish.
The artist Richard Bernstein lived at the Chelsea and was just starting to illustrate the covers of Interview magazine. His best friend was Berry Berenson, my friend from long-ago vacations in Klosters, now a photographer. She shot one of the first color covers of the magazine—a picture of me holding a microphone in one hand and a cigarette in the other; I must have said the word “groovy” fifty times in the article. I loved Berry. She had unique style and class. She was an American exotic—green eyes, honey skin, hair cut close. Soon she was to interview Tony Perkins for Interview, fall in love with him, marry him, and have two sons, Oz and Elvis. She was often at Halston’s taking photographs. Andy Warhol’s muse Viva was living at the Chelsea. She was quite beautiful in an emaciated way, with a long nose, heavy-lidded eyes, and a slow, stoned drawl. And there was Gerard Malanga, a dark, handsome poet with bad skin, who would hand me poems surreptitiously in the elevator. One of the mysteries of the Chelsea that I never solved was why there were gray footprints on the ceiling of our room.
• • •
I never felt so fragile or vulnerable as when Bob became demonic and flew into a rage, or worse, when afterward he retreated into his shell. One morning, four days into one of these ordeals, I walked into our bathroom at the Chelsea and, in desperation, drew a razor blade across my left wrist. I ran back into the bedroom, blood spurting from the vein, crying to him, “Will this make you love me?” Bob came to, applied a tourniquet, and took me to the nearest emergency ward. The doctor stitched up my wrist without anesthesia, looked at me suspiciously, and asked me a lot of questions. I claimed I had fallen while carrying a knife. Later, when I told Bob I could not live like this anymore, he decided we should go on vacation. We were under too much stress, he said; we needed some sun.
Bob chose the small town of Zihuatanejo in southern Mexico, on the Mexican Pacific Costa Grande. Lauren Hutton had recommended it. We were to stay at the Hotel Caraçol, some two hundred steps up a cliff from the beach—a horseshoe of sand under the cover of a green mountain populated with little houses, mostly beach shacks and vacation homes for hippies. On the bay, a hefty-looking vessel—which we joked could be one of Richard Nixon’s warships—idled out in deep water. On our first day in town, we met some students and shared a joint with them. We asked if they knew where we could get some grass.
That night a man came to the door with a one-pound paper sack of marijuana. Bob and I were having a disagreement of some sort and didn’t invite him in. Bob paid the man and he left. We smoked a spliff and the mood changed between us. Suddenly, we were happy and laughing. We decided to skip down to the beach at sunset for a swim in what looked to be a warm, inviting ocean. As we passed a group of soldiers, Federales, sitting by the seawall, we wished them a good evening. Gingerly, we made our way barefoot across a mound of rocks and through a tide pool to a second beach that ended in a cluster of black rocks, a promontory that jutted into the bay. Here we undressed, smoked the rest of the joint, and swam happily in the dark waters for some ten to fifteen minutes. When we emerged dripping onto the beach, something brushed against me, and I made out the shapes of more than a few men moving toward us in the dusk. By now I had four gun barrels trained on my torso. Back and front. “Put on your robe,” Bob whispered after he realized that we were not alone. Silently, I obeyed him.
One of the Federales had a flashlight and was examining the contents of Bob’s bathrobe pockets. He came up with the key to our room. “We are American tourists,” said Bob, grabbing back the key. All I could think of was the pound of grass in the closet. Finally, the soldier gestured for us to walk on in front of them, in the direction of the hotel. He began to speak in Spanish on a walkie-talkie, but as we walked up the beach ahead of their guns, they began to overtake us, forcing us into the surf. It was a dark, moonless evening. A searchlight came on, shining from the mountain above, trailing up and down the sand like something out of a war movie, followed by a blackout in the vil
lage. Another spotlight, from the Nixon warship, burned a white hole through the night. The Federales began to load their rifles; by now they were surrounding us in a semicircle. Their leader called out something in Spanish and the men lifted their rifles.
I tried to scream for help, but the sound was smothered by my throat constricting and came out as a yelp. We were clearly about to be murdered. The soldier’s radio started to crackle, and Bob grabbed me by the hair. “Hit the dirt,” he said, pushing me down. I sank to my knees in the surf and watched in terror as the searchlights played on the surface of the water. The men lowered their guns. There was chatter among them. Some started to move off toward the jungle. Bob pulled me up from the water. “Run,” he told me, and like an Olympian, I flew down the beach in front of him, fully expecting to get shot in the back, scaling in one fell swoop the rocks it had previously taken us five minutes to negotiate.
As we turned the corner of the street leading to the hotel, a flashlight shone directly in our faces. For a moment, I thought all was lost. But as we moved past, we realized it was only an elderly Mexican gentleman out with his dog in the darkness. He laughed at us, and we ran on until we reached our room, gasping. Later that night I tiptoed out to the building site behind the hotel and flung the bag of grass as far as I could into some weeds. The next morning I tried to book a plane out, but there were no flights for four days. Bob and I were like caged lions again. I was afraid to leave the hotel by night for the rest of our time there, and pondered whether it was worth it to retrieve the pot. Ultimately, I decided against it.
A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York Page 18