Then, when the assistant led me back to the office, I was face-to-face with my ex-stepsister Didi, the daughter my mother’s second husband, Oliver Rea. I had not seen Didi, who was nine years older than me, since 1974, when I got drunk at El Morocco one night, danced with her older brother, Peter, to “Midnight at the Oasis,” and passed out in a cab. I’d been fourteen.
“Jesus Christ!” Didi stood bolt upright behind her desk.
“Omigod!” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t put it together that Didi Rea was her.
We hugged and laughed, and she sent the assistant out for a bottle of champagne to celebrate our reunion. While the girl was out getting the wine, we caught up. It had been seven years; she was married now and had a little girl. Her husband was a photographer, and they lived on West End Avenue in the Eighties near Fairway.
I didn’t have that much in the way of news, except for the show and my upcoming screen test. Didi asked about my mother. I felt my face flush—it pained me to think of how my mother had caused her parents to split up. “We’re not really speaking right now,” I said. “She’s living in Connecticut.”
I still felt, in a kind of guilt by association, that just being my mother’s child made me somehow partially responsible for all the havoc she had created in other people’s lives. I also knew that my mother was one of Didi’s least favorite people. In fact, they had loathed each other openly. I couldn’t say I blamed Didi—who would be happy about some young, pretty thing coming along and busting up your family?
The summer of 1967, the only one we all spent together as a family, we lived in Southampton. After the two divorces and our parents’ marriage, Pop rented a huge house that belonged to Andy Warhol. The enormous, two-story, barnlike structure with an open floor plan had an entire wall of windows that moved on a track like a massive sliding glass door. Tall shrubbery enclosed a huge lawn in which stood plenty of good climbing trees. This cozy enclave was where we were supposed to get to know one another and blend as a family.
That summer, Pop spent the weekdays in the city at our apartment in the Dakota. I was never sure what he did for a job exactly, but the husbands stayed in town and sent their wives and children out to the Hamptons or Connecticut; that was just what people did then. On Friday evenings, while it was still light out, my mother would pick him up at the train station, sometimes with me, Robbie, and our youngest stepsister, Maggie—who was two years older than me—in tow in our nighties, already dressed for bed. We’d wait for the train and put pennies on the tracks to pick up after they’d been squished into flat ovals by the train’s steel wheels.
By the time Pop made his weekly appearance, the tension at the house that had been building all week was as thick as kudzu. My mother had enough trouble being a parent to Robbie and me—but throwing three more kids she barely knew into the mix, two of whom were opinionated teenagers, pushed her limits of patience. Maggie, only nine, was our playmate. We’d put the sound track to Exodus on the stereo and perform big dance numbers or play tag out on the immense lawn. Didi, who was sixteen and had a summer job at a pie shop in town, clashed the most with Mother, who incessantly nagged Didi about her smoking, her diet of Bazooka bubble gum and Jack Daniel’s, and the general indifference and annoyance that Didi didn’t bother to hide. Then Friday would come, and my mother would say icily to my stepsister, who had just changed out of her pink pie-shop uniform, “When your father gets here, everything will be fine.” Didi would merely smirk at her; I suspected she was saving up points to exact her revenge on Mother at a later date.
My stepbrother, Peter, was a whole different story. First, and most important to Mother, he was a man—so Mother set out to charm him. He seemed taken with her—one reason might have been that there was only an eleven-year difference in their ages. She was closer to his age than Pop’s and she enjoyed the attention. Peter’s girlfriend was pretty, coltish, without much going on between her ears—or so Mother claimed.
Further complicating Didi’s and my potboiler summer was the drama of our now dismissed au pair, Michelle. Mother had hired her to watch us so she could go to Elizabeth Arden whenever she liked and to lunch and cocktail parties at the country club. Unfortunately, homely Michelle, who wore old-lady glasses and a mousy Dorothy Hamill hairdo, promptly fell in love with my stepbrother and, a few weeks later, ran into the ocean trying to kill herself because Peter didn’t return her feelings. Luckily, she failed, but Mother fired her on the spot and called a taxi to take her away while she cried on her bed in the spare room.
Left with no help and severe limitations cramping her social life on the island, Mother fumed in the kitchen, turning out bland Midwestern dishes that Didi blatantly turned her nose up at and the rest of us listlessly pushed around on our plates.
Then Pop would zoom in for the weekend and cook us all gourmet meals. Mother had married someone who was sophisticated and well traveled—whose kids were, too. Suddenly Robbie and I were expected to eat fancy foods we had never tried—smelly asparagus, spiky artichokes, monsterlike lobster, and stinky fish. Pop had even brought live eels home, which he energetically clubbed to death on the patio before throwing them on the grill, horrifying us. We would sit at the dinner table for hours, not eating, begging to be excused—Mother was infuriated. Eventually, we’d be dismissed and sent directly to bed, tummies rumbling.
At the end of the summer, Pop, who had a weird sense of humor, thought it would be fun to have a whipped-cream-and-pie fight in the yard. Peter and Didi drove into town and cleaned every store out of Reddi-wip and all the pie they could stuff into the station wagon. No room was left in the fridge by the time the big day came.
The fight started out fun—Maggie, Robbie, and I each threw a pie but missed because we were the smallest and everyone else could run much faster than we could. A lot of people threw stuff at Peter’s girlfriend, whom no one liked, so she was completely coated in seconds. Then before our eyes the whole thing morphed from a simple game to a food-fight rugby match. A frenzied aggression sprang from all the chaos, ratcheting up to a point where it became a big person’s game, and Maggie, Robbie, and I were too little to play or to protect ourselves. So the three of us climbed up into a tree and cried, waiting for it to be over. No one on the ground noticed.
The shadows lengthened while we sat up in the branches watching Mother, Pop, and the big kids scream and grind pies into one another’s faces and shoot whipped cream into one another’s hair. When they ran out of ammo, they dashed through the huge sliding glass doors into the house to grab anything they could find in the refrigerator. Eggs flew through the air at people’s heads and cracked open against tree trunks. Didi emerged from the house with a container of ice cream and a scoop and started pelting my mother with gobs of rocky road. Peter ran out with a jar of peanut butter and smeared it all over his sister’s face with his hand. Finally, the grown-ups collapsed, spent and laughing, on a lawn littered with lumps of peanut butter that looked like dog turds, smashed pie crusts, and empty Reddi-wip cans. The air smelled like sour milk; Maggie and I climbed down, helping Robin, and, holding hands, snuck into the house and to bed.
A few days later, we were back in our apartment in the Dakota—Maggie having returned to her mother’s apartment on the Upper East Side, and Peter and Didi were dispatched to their respective boarding schools in Massachusetts. I had seen them only once since then—the night at El Morocco.
The assistant returned with the champagne, and Didi and I drank a toast. We agreed that she would negotiate the contract for me, she even offered to loan me a suitable skirt and blouse to wear for it, as my Bowie style wasn’t going to work on daytime television.
“What do you call that look?” She gave me the up and down as she pointed at my clothes.
I shrugged and laughed, sipping the fizzy wine.
“We always wondered what was going to happen to you poor girls.” She looked at me wistfully, shook her head, and filled my paper cup with
more champagne. I was touched by her concern and by her acknowledgment that Robin and I had been handed a train wreck of a childhood.
I didn’t have a response, so I just said, “Cheers!,” and tapped my cup against hers, sealing the deal.
The test was later in the week. In the meantime, I was seeing Lincoln when he could get away from his girlfriend, which sometimes meant he called me from a phone booth close by. “She thinks I’m out buying cigarettes,” his voice rasped into the phone. Lincoln told her he was getting milk, picking up the newspaper, or grabbing a beer with a friend. He was running out of reasons to go out in the middle of the night.
“Unless I get a dog!” he joked.
Eventually, our romance—which had never been especially deep—just petered out. We met one night after the show in a bright coffee shop on Second Avenue, with shiny red banquettes, stained plastic tablecloths, and one of those revolving cake-display cases. We drank coffee under the harsh overhead lights, and he fiddled with the sugar packets, looking down at the table. I could tell he was worried I’d be hurt, so I spoke first and assured him that I understood and felt the same way. He didn’t want to two-time her anymore, and I had begun to feel badly about my role in it, too. It was over; we said good-bye.
Lincoln had been fun, a sexy Band-Aid that made me feel wanted after my celibate summer in Colorado. With all the men I felt drawn to—Michael, Oedi, Lincoln, and even Stanley the Mormon—something was always missing; they were unkind or unavailable in some way. But if I was honest with myself, I wanted a real boyfriend, someone to call my own.
The next day, I splurged and took a taxi to my screen test. I arrived at the studio, was shown to a dressing room—where I put the pretty celadon-colored silk blouse and skirt that Didi had loaned me—and went over my lines one more time before the AD took me up to hair and makeup. The actor I was reading with was on the set when I got there. He was one of the handsome young leads on the show—very Ken doll meets Bobby Sherman. I told him I was nervous.
“Don’t worry—you’ll do great. Just relax and look at me,” he whispered, placing his hand on my shoulder.
“Thanks, I’m just afraid I’ll forget my lines.” I noticed his hair was perfect.
“Hey, if you do, just make stuff up—they’re only looking at how you look on camera anyway.”
The second I saw my face on the TV monitor, I knew it was over. My round Irish face blew up all over the screen like an oversized dinner plate. I got through the scene, miraculously remembering my lines and blocking. When it was over, I thanked everybody and took the subway home. When Didi called to tell me I didn’t get it, I wasn’t surprised. My head was far too big for television.
So when Spring Awakening closed, this young starlet had no job and wasn’t going to be famous anytime soon.
I went back to being the chief cook and swabbie at the apartment on Ninety-seventh Street. I perfected my navarin of lamb, a French stew with vegetables and potatoes, and my chicken curry, playing house with Pete and Jenny.
My doldrums were lifted a short time later when my pop-star pal, Lee Thompson of the band Madness, arrived in New York. We’d met almost two years before at WBCN when I was hanging out at the listener line with my girlfriend Amy and his band had come to the station for an on-air interview. Madness was just blasting through town on their way to dates in other cities, so Lee and I didn’t have much time to explore our relationship—which was a curious combination of crush at first sight with a kind of brother-sister, I-knew-you-in-a-past-life thing tossed in. Plamantic? Romontic? This meet-up was only the third time we’d ever laid eyes on each other—the last time had been in Boston after a gig at a club called the Paradise, where he was drunk out of his mind when I finally found him. I had been angry at him and he probably didn’t even remember. So I decided now to live in the moment and not overthink it. It wasn’t as if I was his girlfriend. He was here for twenty-four hours, and we had larks together.
I popped down to the Wellington Hotel on Seventh Avenue in Midtown, dressed in a little black dress, a blood-red toreador jacket I’d picked up somewhere, and long, dangly gold earrings I’d borrowed from Jenny. Walking through the seedy lobby, I felt I was being watched. Having been in many hotel lobbies in my day, I recognized the gaze and uniform of the house detective. He sidled up next to me.
“Excuse me, miss, are you a guest here at the hotel?”
I turned and looked at his olive, wide-lapelled polyester jacket, the Brylcreem comb-over, the bulge of his .38. Bingo.
“I’m visiting a friend, actually.” I smiled effervescently, putting on my best Hayley Mills accent.
“May I ask whom? And on what floor?” He pulled at the knot of his wide tie, giving me the steely gaze he’d probably learned in security-guard school.
“Mr. Lee Thompson, room 1702.”
He evidently decided I wasn’t a lady of the evening and nodded wearily, waving his hand to dismiss me. I headed for the elevator, remembering the only other time I was mistaken for a prostitute—in the lobby of the London Hilton, where I had been propositioned by a Japanese businessman. I was fifteen, so he must have been into young girls. When I told Lee that the house dick had thought I was a hooker, he laughed. I pulled one shoulder of my jacket down and puckered up my lips, doing my best floozy face.
“It’s those earrings, girl! Take ’em off. Not nearly classy enough. Here, I’ve got something for you.”
He rummaged around in the top drawer of a dresser, then handed me a little red-and-gold silk pouch. Inside was a pair of simple pearl studs.
“Really? Lee, thank you! They’re beautiful.”
“We were just in Japan, and I picked them up.”
“I love them.” I did. Even though I wasn’t sure they had been intended for me specifically, they made me happy. I stashed Jenny’s harlot earrings in my purse, put on my new pearls, and we went out on the town. Since Lee had just been in Japan, we took a taxi downtown to have sushi before the show.
Madness was playing that night at the Ritz, a club in the East Village. Instead of staying down on the floor, I watched from the first row of the balcony. The place was packed, and when the band came out, the audience went absolutely, well, mad. From the first blast of Lee’s saxophone, the opening chords of the band’s eponymous monster hit “Madness,” the audience went berserk—the balcony was shaking from all the people dancing, threatening to come crashing down at any moment. Madness’s energy onstage, combined with the pounding sound of dancers jumping all over the floor and singing along to every song, created a prolonged explosion of giddy joy and rock-’n’-roll mayhem. They blew the roof off the joint, and by the end, after the third encore, everyone was glistening and rapturouslike with a great after-sex glow.
I waited at the bar for Lee, not wanting to go backstage with all the groupies; there were far more of them now than at the show I’d seen the previous year. I was different from those fangirls—above it all. Hell, I thought, I’m practically with the band. Lee came out, shaking hands with people and posing for Polaroids, eventually making his way over to me. His hair was soaked and sticking up; I thought he had the sweetest face and loved the little crinkles around his eyes.
“So, you up for checking out a club? It’s in Times Square—we’re going over to meet the owner and have some drinks. Might play a gig there.”
“Let’s go.”
Bond’s International Casino on Broadway at Forty-fourth Street had been a swanky supper club in the 1930s, then a department store in the seventies, before it was transformed into a nightclub with an enormous dance floor that claimed to be the biggest in town, bigger than Studio 54’s. You entered the lobby and climbed a musical staircase that sounded notes and lit up with colored red and purple lights as you walked up to the second floor. It was like being in a Busby Berkeley musical, except darker; you had to hang on to the silver railing, as it was hard to see. Crazy water fountains—leftov
ers from a Liberace TV show—were on the dance floor, and velvet banquettes lined the walls. Silver balloons shaped like people hung from the ceiling along with huge, spiky star sculptures. The bare-chested bartenders wore gold bathing trunks. When we arrived, the Clash song “Magnificent Seven” was blasting through towering piles of speakers the size of refrigerators.
Lee and the rest of the boys were huddled together, talking—I couldn’t hear anything except Joe Strummer and Mick Jones singing, “You lot! What? Don’t stop! Give it all you got!” I danced my way over to the ladies’ room, which was filled with women riffling through suitcases, swiftly changing their outfits to get back out on the dance floor, and piling on more makeup in the murky blue light. Three punky types did coke in one of the stalls. I used the other one.
After about an hour, the band determined that the club was too big for them—it would look empty until there were seven or eight hundred people in it.
Lee came home with me, citing his need for sleep and a bit of quiet, as the rest of the band would keep going into the wee hours. He placed his black Keds high-tops on the ledge outside my window, which I assumed was a weird British custom, and we squeezed into my tiny single bed and fell asleep immediately. The next day, he met Jenny and Pete, had a cup of coffee, and I walked him downstairs to put him in taxi. I didn’t know when, or if, I would see him again.
“Write to me, okay?” I asked, sad to say good-bye.
“Will do. Jesus, I’m tired. Still, it’s the life I chose, I suppose.”
I smiled. “Yeah.”
“Take care, my girl.” He folded himself into the taxi, gave me a thumbs-up, and was gone—my ship that passed in the night.
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