“Put the knife down, honey, it’s just your old man.” There was her dad, with a flashlight in his hand, Mets cap on his head, in his drawstring shorts and a gray U.S.P.S. sweatshirt.
“Dad, you scared the hell out of me! Were you waiting up?”
“No, I was just . . . I was just sitting out in the garage.”
The bicycle hooks again. Had the Mets’ latest loss driven him to that? Or the fact that she’d stood him up?
“Dad, why do you torture yourself like that? The Mets aren’t worth. . . . ”
Her dad cut her off. “I got a call tonight, Siobhan,” he said, looking out the window into the dark yard. “Rose Birnbaum died.”
Now it made sense. It wasn’t the Mets, or Sib, who had driven her dad back into the garage, had made him want to stare it all in the face again. It was Rose Birnbaum. Fat Rose. Maybe the last person to speak to Kieran.
10. New York City, Summer 1982
She was on her daily trek up Madison Avenue. She didn’t have much shopping to do today — all the birthdays and anniversaries within three months had been checked off in her planners. So she headed toward Central Park, and she knew she was getting close from the smell. She didn’t mind the horseshit; it was the hot dogs that bothered her. Around the point where she was thinking about turning toward Fifth Avenue, the bumper-to-bumper traffic reminded her of the little scene she had with the brother on the eve of the release of their third album, when she was quickly learning that success came with its share of inconveniences.
“So let me get this straight,” she’d said to him. “They want us to play in a parking lot?” She’d understood, kind of, when they weren’t allowed to sing their big hit movie song at the Academy Awards because they weren’t movie stars. Never mind that their version of the song was still in the Top 10 the week of the show. At least the producers did get one of their favorites, Petula Clark (Petula Clark!) to sing it. And one of the songwriters had the class to thank them when the song actually won the Oscar.
That song became their third consecutive million seller, and the next single was well on its way to becoming their fourth. Their third album — the one with just their name on the front, in a big new swirly logo against a tan background — had to be held back from release because the second was still selling big, after the bump it got when they were surprise winners of a couple of Grammy Awards the month before. They’d beaten the Beatles, for chrissakes. At that televised ceremony she let him do all the talking when they accepted the awards, while she basically just tugged on his sleeve. They even talked to John Wayne (John Wayne!) backstage. He’d seen them playing somewhere a few years earlier, when he was getting ready to film True Grit, and contacted them, told her she should come to audition for the part of the tomboy frontier girl. She went to the screen test but didn’t get the part. That night at dinner she tried to tell the parents how exciting it had been, the screen test, reading the lines, how the casting director told her to keep at it, she really had something. But the brother started talking about some new arrangement he had written, and that was that.
It was right after the awards show when he told her about the parking-lot gig, which they had to play because it was a request from the wife of one of their bosses, for some shopping center or hotel dedication or rich-ladies social club or something. This was the kind of gig they were supposed to have left behind, the minor leagues from which they were supposed to have been permanently promoted: the high-school assembly, or the seedy, smoky club set where they’d follow or precede some hippie trippers and then be shorted of their take, when they’d load their gear and instruments into the wagon and hope the twine keeping everything together would hold.
“You have got to be kidding,” she said. “A parking lot?”
“Put a sock in it,” he said. “He’s our boss.” And so she did what he said, as usual. He always said her opinions were too blunt, just like their mother’s, and he rarely listened to her anyway. When he brought her that song he’d heard on the Tonight show, the song about the groupie, she balked. She knew the song already and told him she thought it was kind of dopey and just tossed off her vocal, reading the lyrics off a napkin. He changed one word, “sleep,” to “be.” Wouldn’t the mother have blown her top if they’d come home with the line “sleep with you” in one of their songs.
After she finished the take, there was silence in the studio, and then the engineer, the second engineer and the bass player and the oboist and, yes, the drummer, broke out into a round of applause. She snickered. Oh, they’re making fun, she thought. I’ll definitely have to do a more serious take.
But they weren’t kidding. The brother kept that first take, and it went on the album. Ah, well, she thought, that song will never be a hit. O.K., so she ended up being wrong about that one.
She remembered eventually looking forward to the parking-lot gig, once she was resigned to doing it. If it was a nice day, then maybe her drums wouldn’t get too banged up from being outside. Even though she wasn’t playing drums much on their records now, she did still play during the concerts. It got a little tricky, maneuvering the sticks and the kick pedal in a maxidress. But she managed to hold the beat, to keep time.
In their new single, she sang about the weather, and after the session, the label presidents themselves had come into the studio to tell them how much they liked it. She’d be singing the song live for one of the first times that day. But the other reason she was excited about the gig was that F. would be in the audience. F. was the wife of one of their managers and had been assigned to “mentor” her once it became clear that their success was no fluke. She didn’t have many girlfriends. There were her childhood gal pals back east, but once the family moved to L.A., when she was 13, it seemed all her friends at school and then in the band were guys. She’d tried a few times to find some new girlfriends, but there just wasn’t much time between classes and rehearsals. The summer after she graduated from high school, she found herself in a studio where one of those mixed vocal groups — men and women — was recording. She tried to strike up a conversation with the husky girl who sang lead, but all she could think of the whole time was that the girl had been off-key for most of the session.
She preferred hanging out with the guys, anyway. Girls were just too concerned with perfume and gossip and boyfriends. You never found a girl who wanted to go bowling or talk time signatures.
At first she didn’t like F. much. She seemed too glamorous, too magaziney, too showy with her sapphire earrings and that ridiculous gold watch (it turned out her father was a jeweler), just a grown-up version of the obnoxious girlie girls from school. Silk scarves. Not her style at all. F. had probably never owned a pair of sneakers in her life. But she had to admit that F. was shapely and pretty and had a handsome husband and money. And really seemed to like her. F. had taken her shopping on Rodeo Drive and introduced her to a hairstylist in Beverly Hills. “Did you ever think about growing out your bangs?” F. asked her soon after they met. The mother, who usually picked out or made her clothes and did her hair, hit the roof when she heard this. “What do you need with that Uptown crowd?” the mother had said. “Uptown” was the mother’s way of saying she didn’t approve of F.’s Jewishness.
So she was particularly on at that gig. When she got to the crescendo of the new song, the one about the weather, she let it rip, her voice in that last phrase completely cascading over his, then crashing over the audience, which itself seemed to snap to rapt attention, in awe and just a little bit of fear at such a force of nature. Odd that she was singing words about being down when she had in fact been soaring. Even the brother seemed surprised, as he turned to her from behind his keyboard, his eyes so enlarged that his brows practically touched the rim of his pageboy cut.
She was elated. After the show they made the obligatory rounds with the greeters, paid their respects to the label boss and his wife and the members of whatever society club they were being shown off to, and then while the guys broke down the stage, she w
ent to find F. It took her a few minutes to wade through all the autograph hounds, more and more of them hanging around now at every show. Grandmothers and kindergartners and everyone in between. One older woman came up to her and said: “Thank you for saving music. There hasn’t been much on the radio since Elvis that I could stand, but you kids give me hope.” When she didn’t see F. right away, her tiptoe mood sagged a bit. But then the crowd parted, and there was F., in a smart blazer and a mini-skirt that matched her sapphire earrings, with spiky boots and an unspiky smile.
“Oh, honey, you were wonderful,” F. said.
She blushed and dipped her chin down. “Well, slightly sharp sometimes, and the guitarist missed a couple of entrances” — they’d be sure to talk to him tomorrow about that — “but not bad.” She spoke metronomically, practically cutting off every word early because she was in a hurry to get to the next thought.
“You’re way too hard on yourself,” F. said, now locking their arms. “What are you doing tonight? Want to go eat? I found a good new sushi place.”
Sushi, yuck, she thought. She’d much rather go for pizza with the guys. But maybe it would be O.K., with F. Maybe she’d try it.
As they were walking, the smog dissipated and the late-afternoon L.A. sun broke through in a way she had rarely seen. It bounced off the Crayola palette that lay in the field ahead of them: crimson Darts and goldenrod Novas and periwinkle Dusters, the occasional onyx Lincoln or Cadillac. They fell in step a few feet behind an unwitting young couple about midway between her age and F.’s, he in sideburns and shades and green bell-bottoms, she in culottes and flats. “That girl has a marvelous voice,” the woman said. “It’s so distinctive. She’s so strong and low, almost like a man, and yet so tender and expressive.”
“Yeah, I’ll give you the voice,” the man said, “but now after seeing them live, I think there’s just something strange about them. He looks like a Sears mannequin. And what’s the deal with her playing the drums?”
“What’s the matter with that?” she said. “Do you have something against a girl playing the drums?”
“Eh, I don’t know. She just looks weird. Those bangs, those severe brows. I mean, Mama Cass may be fat, but at least she’s kind of pretty. That girl just looks like a linebacker in a prom dress.”
She’d read a few reviews that called her “pudgy,” but she’d never heard anything like this before. She suddenly didn’t feel much like sushi, or pizza. The smog rolled back in.
F. just squeezed her hand.
Back on Madison Avenue, a horn suddenly honked her out of her memory.
When she got back to the hotel that night, she made her usual pass at the dinner tray from room service. She’d heard somewhere that carbohydrates after 6 p.m. were like double the calories, so she always ordered a salad and iced tea, her old meal from the days when they were touring 200 nights a year. A few bites of wedge, half a dip into the low-cal dressing, lots of lemon. Then she changed into her nightgown — a Mickey Mouse T-shirt that drooped off her like a collapsed sail, catching only slightly on her hips, which, though drained of every bit of body mass, still jutted out a bit. Those damned big bones.
She was swimming in the king-size bed as she fired up all the video equipment she’d had brought in. There were stacks of Dallas episodes she hadn’t seen, and after she got through a couple of those, she watched a taping of the Tonight show, and one of the guests was a great songwriting friend of theirs. They were the ones who made him famous. They had been all set to release that moon- dust song when the brother saw a bank commercial — and recognized the songwriter’s voice in the background, singing something about white lace and promises. The brother called the songwriter and found out that there was a full song, worked up an arrangement, and from the first minutes they started to record, there was something magic about it, some cosmic confluence going on unlike any of their previous sessions, even the one for the moon-dust song. The ace studio drummer said, “This is it, this is the one.” They almost halted the release of the moon-dust song, but as it was already set to ship to radio and was written by legends (who were also tight with their record-company bosses), they decided to hold the bank-commercial song for the next release.
Many of the musicians praised her lead vocal, but she just let those comments slide off her in a slick of denim and self-denial. This song, she knew, worked because of his genius: in hearing the song in a commercial and recognizing it as a hit, in working up the great arrangement with the raised 7th opening, the dynamic build, the tambourine that shook like a lead instrument, setting her voice in the right range. He was the one who, years ago, realized that she even had that amazing low voice. “The money’s in the basement,” they often said.
The drummer, though, persisted in his praise for her. The drummer who was the top session guy in L.A. The drummer who wasn’t she. She’d played drums on every cut of their first album, but the company decided it wanted a “stronger” sound now. The mother flipped out. But she wasn’t going to win a battle with the men who signed the royalty checks.
She felt behind the small mound of goose-down pillows. Then in between. Still there. Her stash of laxatives. She kept them around even though she wasn’t ingesting them as much. She hid them be- hind the pillows, in drawers, in the pockets of sweaters and blazers. She even slipped them into every one of her new running shoes, which lined the perimeter of the suite. Even if she wasn’t taking them, she just liked knowing they were around, like those crazy dolls and figurines and amulets that bingo ladies framed their cards with to bring them luck.
The songwriter — who was short and chubby but, she always thought, cute in a cuddly, teddy-bear way — was yukking it up with Joan Rivers, who was the guest host that night. Look at him, she thought, such a big star. He’d had a better second half of the ’70s than she’d had; he scored movies, he even starred in a few, he won an Oscar writing a song with the Greatest Singer of All Time. When the GSOAT had her other blockbuster movie-song hit, earlier in the decade, the one about memories, a few journalists were sharp enough to point out that it was basically a slowed-down version of their second big hit, and one writer even suggested that by listening to them (to her!), the GSOAT had finally learned to stop singing in all caps. There were a few years when she would get fan letters that compared her to the GSOAT, telling her that she had a future in movies and Broadway, too. She shrugged them off. The GSOAT just “fractures me,” she said in an interview.
They’d met, almost, a few years ago at a fund-raiser in L.A. This was during her midchart years, when nothing she and the brother put out could get much higher than No. 35. The kooky one about the extraterrestrials almost got them back to the Top 20, and then there was the perky country ditty, the only song they recorded that she actually found herself and brought to the studio. These were good records. But they couldn’t break through to that upper tier of radio anymore, the stations that just a few years ago would have played anything they put out — how many times in the early years had she heard the old line that she could sing the first 10 pages of the phone book and it would be a hit? One nutty fan even wrote to say that the brother should “strap a microphone to her so that you can record whatever she sings around the house or in the car.” She’d get maybe five to ten marriage proposals a week. The cops were often called to clear stalkers from their house.
Nowadays, though, they weren’t getting many letters like that. After their chart fortunes started to falter, she said to a reporter, “If somebody would just let us know what the problem is.” But no one ever really did.
The GSOAT looked all permy at that fund-raiser and was wearing some glittery white get-up, out to promote a new movie and a big new disco hit. She herself had her own perm and was making her own disco-y album, with P., who had also worked with the GSOAT. It was her first solo project, and it was taking a long time, all the sifting of material, the flights back and forth to New York, learning to work with a new producer, new arrangers, a new band, trying out a higher range i
n her voice. Well, she had thought, I’ve got time. Disco will be around for a while.
Their eyes met across the room, and there was a flash of recognition from the GSOAT, but then she quickly turned away as she was driven inside by the mini-swarm of fans. Oh, well, she thought, don’t consider it a slight. The GSOAT, she figured, probably didn’t recognize her without the bangs and the old curtainy dress. She then stepped into the press ring herself, but in spite of her oversize name tag, only a few stragglers, from the back of the GSOAT’s train, bothered to say hello.
Joan Rivers and the songwriter broke for commercial, and she lunged for the remote. She hated commercials like everyone else, but for her they weren’t just interruptions to a program; they were more ways for food to find her. She didn’t want to know about having it her way, or the break she deserved, or the piles of grease-free chicken that could be made with Mrs. Brady’s cooking oil. Commercials for her these days held no lace or promises.
She must have dozed off then, because the next thing she knew she was watching another talk show, a new one, hosted by someone she didn’t recognize. She was feeling herself nodding off again when she thought she heard him say . . . their name. She bolted up in bed. Had the host just said that they were going to be on his show? No, it wasn’t possible. Had their manager booked them without telling her? They hadn’t rehearsed in months. They didn’t even have a record out. True, she was eager to get back to her career — too eager, her therapist suggested — but even she knew that she was in no shape to sing on national TV. Her pulse quickened, almost doubled in rate, the way it used to when she downed a triple dose of thyroid medication. The medication that was confiscated from her at her first therapy session, when she, once the premier singer of love songs, got her first dose of tough love from her doctors. You won’t live to see the end of this bottle if you keep it up, they said.
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