CAMILA: I made him take a shower before I would say another word to him.
BILLY: I wanted her to leave me. [Pauses] I’ve thought a lot about it and…that’s what I’d been up to. I’d been hoping she’d cut me loose.
That night Camila and I were sitting in my hotel room after I got out of the shower. And I could feel myself sobering up and I didn’t like it. I pulled out a bump and I remember Camila looked at me and she said, “What are you trying to do?”
She didn’t say it in an exasperated way. She was really asking me. What was I trying to do? I didn’t know how to answer her. I just shrugged and I remember how stupid I felt, shrugging at a time like that, with a woman like that. This woman carrying my child. And I was shrugging like a ten-year-old boy.
She stared at me, waiting for more of an answer, and I didn’t have one. So she said, “If you think I’m gonna let you screw up our life, you’ve lost your mind.” And she walked out the door.
GRAHAM: Camila found me and said she was going home, wasn’t gonna deal with his bullshit. She asked me to watch Billy all night. I was getting sick of watching Billy. But you don’t say no to a woman like Camila, especially when she’s pregnant. So I said okay.
And then she said, “When he wakes up give him this letter.”
BILLY: I wake up, sick to my stomach, terrible headache. Feel like my eyes are bleeding. Karen is standing over me with a piece of paper. She has this pissed-off look on her face. I grab the paper and I read it. It was in Camila’s handwriting. It said, You have until November 30 and then you’re going to be a good man for the rest of your life. You got it?
The baby was due December 1.
CAMILA: I think I just refused to accept that he was as low as he claimed to be.
I’m not saying it wasn’t real, what he did. Oh, it was very real. All of it was real. I’ve never been so lost and scared. I was sick over it, every day. And I couldn’t have even told you what part of me felt the sickest. My heart hurt and my stomach felt like it was gonna turn inside out and my head throbbed. Oh, it was very real.
But that didn’t mean I had to accept it.
ROD: I wasn’t close with Camila but her decision to stick with Billy wasn’t so hard to understand. She’d gotten mixed up with him when he was a good guy. And by the time she realized he was coming apart at the seams, she was too far in.
If she wanted her baby to have a daddy, she had to fix Billy. What’s not to get?
BILLY: Like an idiot, I said to myself, Okay, I’ll just take until November 30 and get all of this out of my system. Do it all now. So I don’t ever have to do it again.
Sometimes I wonder if addicts aren’t all that different from anybody else, they are just better at lying to themselves. I was great at lying to myself.
KAREN: He didn’t stop messing around with all of it.
ROD: The tour got extended again when we picked up some shows opening for Rick Yates. It was good news. It was great exposure. The album was off to a respectable start. “Señora” was climbing up the charts.
But yeah, Billy was off the rails. Going at it double time after Camila caught him. The coke and girls and the booze and all that.
To be honest, I thought all of that was manageable. Not great, but manageable.
I figured as long as he wasn’t hitting the strong downers—benzos, heroin—maybe he’d be all right.
GRAHAM: I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to help him or whether to trust what he was saying to me. I felt, stupid, honestly. I felt like, I’m his brother. I should know what he needs. I should always be able to tell when he’s high and lying about it.
But I didn’t know. And I felt…embarrassed that I didn’t always catch what he was up to.
EDDIE: We were all sort of counting down the days. You know, sixty days until Billy has to get clean. Then it was forty days. Then it was twenty days.
BILLY: We were in Dallas opening up for Rick Yates. And Rick was really into snorting heroin. I thought, I need to try heroin at least once.
That made perfect sense to me: that it would be easier to get clean if I tried heroin. And it wasn’t like I was going to use a needle. I was gonna snort it. And I’d had opium in the past. We all had. So when I was with Rick backstage at Texas Hall, and he offered me a bump…I rolled on up and took it.
ROD: I always tell my people to stay away from benzos and heroin. People don’t die staying up, they die when they go to sleep. Look at Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison. Downers kill you.
GRAHAM: It all spiraled from there. Once he and Yates started snorting H, I lived with this dread in my belly. I tried to keep an eye on him. I kept trying to get him to stop.
ROD: When I found out he was with Yates, I called Teddy. I said, “We’ve got a dead man walking.” Teddy said he’d handle it.
GRAHAM: No amount of advice or lectures or trying to chain somebody down ever stopped anyone who didn’t want to stop in the first place.
EDDIE: When it got down to ten days left, and he was forgetting the words onstage, I remember thinking he was never gonna clean up.
BILLY: On November 28, Teddy shows up at our show in Hartford. He’s there backstage when we’re done with our set.
I say, “What are you doing here?”
He says, “You’re going home,” and he takes me by the arm and holds on to me until we’re practically on the plane. Turns out, Camila had gone into labor.
We land and he drags me into his car and drives me to the hospital. We’re double-parked in a red zone in front of the lobby. Teddy says, “Get up there, Billy.”
This whole long journey and all I had left to do was walk in the double doors…but…I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t meet my kid like that.
Teddy got out of the car and went up there himself.
CAMILA: I’d just spent eighteen hours in labor with only my mom by my side. And I’m expecting my husband to walk in the door and straighten up. I understand now that you can’t just fix yourself. It doesn’t work like that. But I did expect it to work like that then. I didn’t know.
Well, the door opened and it wasn’t Billy…it was Teddy Price.
I was so tired and I was sweating bullets from the hormones running through me, and I was holding this tiny baby that I’ve just met, this girl who looks just like Billy. I decided to name her Julia.
My mom was ready to take us both back with her to Pennsylvania. And I was tempted. Right then, giving up on Billy felt easier than trying to have faith. I wanted to say, “Tell him I’ll raise this baby on my own.” But I had to keep trying for what I wanted for me and my kid. So I told Teddy, “Tell him he can start to be a father this second or he’s going to rehab. Now.”
And Teddy nodded and left.
BILLY: I waited for what felt like hours, outside the lobby, fiddling with the latch on the door. Teddy came down finally and said, “You have a baby girl. She looks like you. Her name is Julia.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
And then Teddy said, “Camila says you have two choices. You can get your ass up there right now and be a good husband and father or I can drive you to rehab. Those are your choices.”
I put my hand on the door handle and I thought, you know, I can just run.
But I think Teddy knew what I was thinking because he said, “Camila didn’t give any other options, Billy. There are no other options. Some people can handle their booze and their dope. You can’t. So it’s over for you now.”
It reminded me of being a kid, maybe six or seven—I had gotten really into collecting those little Matchbox cars. I was obsessed with them. But my mom didn’t have enough money to get us very many. So I’d search for them on the sidewalk, in case any kid lost one. Found a few that way. And then when I was playing with other boys in the neighborhood, sometimes I’d palm one or two of theirs. A few times, I outrig
ht stole them from the store. My mom found my stash and sat me down and said, “How come you can’t just be happy playing with a few cars like everybody else?”
I never did have an answer for that.
It’s just not my way.
That day at the hospital, I remember looking at the lobby door and seeing this man coming outside wheeling a lady with a baby. I looked at him and…he just seemed like a man I didn’t know how to be.
I just kept thinking about walking into the hospital and looking at my kid and knowing that I was the shit deal she got.
[Chokes up] It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with [her]. I wanted to be with [her] so bad. You have no idea how bad. I just…I didn’t want my girl to have to meet me.
I didn’t want…that early into her life, I didn’t want my kid to have to look up and see this man, this drunken, strung-out, piece of shit and think, This is my dad?
That’s how I felt. I was embarrassed to be seen by my baby.
So I ran away. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the truth, I went to rehab to avoid meeting my own daughter.
CAMILA: My mom said, “Honey, I hope you know what you’re doing.” And I think I yelled at her, but inside I was thinking, I hope I do, too.
You know, I’ve thought about this for a long time. Decades. And here is what it comes down to. Here is why I did what I did.
It didn’t seem right to me that his weakest self got to decide how my life was going to turn out, what my family was going to look like.
I got to decide that. And what I wanted was a life—a family, a beautiful marriage, a home—with him. With the man I knew he truly was. And I was going to get it, hell or high water.
* * *
—
Billy entered rehab in the winter of 1974. The Six canceled the few remaining dates on the rest of their tour.
The other band members took some time off. Warren bought a boat and docked it off the shore in Marina del Rey. Eddie, Graham, and Karen stayed in the Topanga Canyon house, while Pete temporarily moved to the East Coast, to be with his girlfriend, Jenny Manes. Camila rented a house in Eagle Rock and settled into motherhood there.
After sixty days in a rehabilitation center, Billy Dunne finally met his daughter, Julia.
BILLY: I’m not sure I went to rehab for the right reasons. Shame and embarrassment and avoidance and all that. But I stayed for the right reasons.
I stayed because on my second day there, the group therapist told me to stop imagining my daughter ashamed of me. He said to start thinking of what I’d need to do to believe my daughter was proud of me. I’ll tell ya, that stuck. I couldn’t stop thinking about that one.
Slowly, it became the light that was calling to me at the end of that tunnel…imagining a daughter…[pauses, gains composure] Imagining myself as a man my daughter would feel lucky to have.
I kept working, every day, to get closer to being that man.
GRAHAM: The day Billy was coming out of rehab, I picked up Camila and the baby and we drove over together.
Now, Julia was the fattest baby you ever saw. [Laughs] It’s true! I said to Camila, “Are you feeding her milkshakes?” Biggest cheeks in the world, beer belly. Couldn’t have been cuter.
There was a tiny little picnic table and an umbrella outside the facility. So Camila sat there with Julia on her lap. I went in and got Billy. He was wearing the same thing he was wearing the last time I’d seen him, in Hartford. But he had gained some weight, his face looked healthier.
I said, “Are you ready?”
He said, “Yeah,” but he seemed kind of unsure.
I put my arm around him and I said what I figured he needed to hear. I said, “You’re gonna be a great dad.” I think I should have told him that sooner. I don’t know why I didn’t.
BILLY: Julia was sixty-three days old when I met her. It’s hard, even now, to…to not hate myself for that. But the second I met her, my God. [Smiles] Standing there at that picnic table with them, it was like someone just took an ax to me, just shattered all the crust. I felt raw. In the way where you can feel everything, feel it deep down into your nerves.
I had…I’d built a family. By accident and without thinking and without so many of the qualities that you should have to deserve a family, I think, but I had built one. And here was this tiny, new person—who had my eyes, who didn’t know who I used to be, who only cared who I was now.
I fell to my knees. I was just so grateful for Camila.
I…I couldn’t believe what I put Camila through and I couldn’t believe that she was still standing there, giving me another shot. I didn’t deserve it. And I knew it.
I told her then that I would spend the rest of our life together trying to be twice as good as she deserved. I don’t know that I’ve ever promised anyone anything as humbly and with as much gratitude in my heart as I promised her that day.
I know I technically married her almost a year before but I submitted myself to her then. Forever and always. My daughter, too. I dedicated myself to both of them, to raising this girl with my whole heart into it.
As we got in the car, Camila whispered, “It’s us, forever and always. Don’t go forgetting that again, all right?”
And I nodded and she kissed me. And Graham drove us home.
CAMILA: I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it’s not faith, right?
By 1974, Daisy Jones had refused to show up to any of her recording sessions at the Record Plant in West Hollywood and was in breach of contract with Runner Records.
Meanwhile, Simone Jackson, now signed with Supersight Records, was finding international success with her R & B dance hits, which would come to be seen as classics of the protodisco genre. With her songs “The Love Drug” and “Make Me Move,” Simone was topping the dance club charts in France and Germany.
As Simone set out to tour Europe the summer of ’74, Daisy was growing more and more restless.
DAISY: I was spending my days getting sunburns and my nights getting high. I’d stopped writing songs because I didn’t see a point to it if no one would let me record them.
Hank was checking on me every day, pretending he was doting on me but really just trying to convince me to get to the studio, like I was some sort of prize horse that wouldn’t race.
Then one day, Teddy Price shows up at my door. He was put in charge of me, I guess. He was supposed to convince me to show up to the studio. Teddy was probably in his forties or fifties around then, British guy, really charming, kind of paternal.
I open the door to see him on my doorstep and he doesn’t even say hello. He says, “Let’s cut the crap, Daisy. You need to record this album or Runner’s taking you to court.”
I said, “I don’t care about any of that. They can take their money back, get me kicked out of here if they want. I’ll live in a cardboard box.” I was very annoying. I had no idea what it meant to truly suffer.
Teddy said, “Just get in the studio, love. How hard is that?”
I told him, “I want to write my own stuff.” I think I even crossed my arms in front of my chest like a child.
He said, “I’ve read your stuff. Some of it’s really good. But you don’t have a single song that’s finished. You don’t have anything ready to be recorded.” He said I should fulfill my contract with Runner and he would help me get my songs to a point where I could release an album of my own stuff. He called it “a goal for us all to work toward.”
I said, “I want to release my own stuff now.”
And that’s when he got testy with me. He said, “Do you want to be a professional groupie? Is that what you want? Because the way it looks from here is that you have a chance to do something of your own. And you’d rather just end up pregnant by Bowie.”
Let me take this opportunity to be clear about one thing: I never slept with David Bo
wie. At least, I’m pretty sure I didn’t.
I said, “I am an artist. So you either let me record the album I want or I’m not showing up. Ever.”
Teddy said, “Daisy, someone who insists on the perfect conditions to make art isn’t an artist. They’re an asshole.”
I shut the door in his face.
And sometime later that day, I opened up my songbook and I started reading. I hated to admit it but I could see what he was saying. I had good lines but I didn’t have anything polished from beginning to end.
The way I was working then, I’d have a loose melody in my head and I’d come up with lyrics to it and then I’d move on. I didn’t work on my songs after one or two rounds.
I was sitting in the living room of my cottage, looking out the window, my songbook in my lap, realizing that if I didn’t start trying—I mean being willing to squeeze out my own blood, sweat, and tears for what I wanted—I’d never be anything, never matter much to anybody.
I called Teddy a few days later, I said, “I’ll record your album. I’ll do it.”
And he said, “It’s your album.” And I realized he was right. The album didn’t have to be exactly my way for it to still be mine.
SIMONE: One day, when I was back in town, I went over to Daisy’s place at the Marmont and I was in the kitchen and I saw one piece of paper, with a bunch of lyrics scribbled on it, taped to the fridge.
I said, “What’s this?”
Daisy said, “It is my song that I’m working on.”
I said, “Don’t you normally have dozens?”
She shook her head and said, “I’m trying to get this one just right.”
DAISY: It was a big lesson for me when I was young—being given things versus earning them. I was so used to being given things that I didn’t know how important it is for your soul to earn them.
If I can thank Teddy Price for anything—and to be honest, I have to thank him for a lot of things—but if I had to pick one it’s that he made me earn something.
Daisy Jones & the Six Page 6