Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  Lola found it oddly reassuring to see Mick Jagger and L’Wren Scott so engrossed in their conversation. He looked happy. She found it very reassuring that Mick Jagger was happy. She found it was reassuring that Mick Jagger was alive. So many of the others had died.

  Three years and three months after Jimi Hendrix’s performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix was dead. He was twenty-seven. Two weeks earlier he had told an interviewer, in Denmark, that he wasn’t sure he’d live to see his twenty-eighth birthday. He died three years after Lola had last seen him at the Whiskey a Go Go, in Los Angeles. How had he gone from being engaged and engaging and amused and amusing and polite and thoughtful, to being exhausted and strung-out and then dead? What had changed? Just about everything, Lola thought. He had achieved enormous fame, and with that came management issues that Jimi Hendrix was ill-equipped to deal with. Jimi Hendrix, Lola thought, was probably too trusting and too honest. As his stress and his anxiety increased, he became careless. Careless with drugs. Careless with his life. He mixed drugs and alcohol with a reckless abandon. He started to look shaky on stage and off. Lola wondered what had happened to the calm young man with the slow smile. Too much, she thought. The night before he died, Jimi Hendrix had had trouble sleeping. He took nine sleeping pills that belonged to his girlfriend, over six times the recommended dose for a person of Jimi’s size. He had also taken amphetamines earlier in the day. He was dressed and covered in vomit when he was found. The coroner’s report said that death was due to asphyxiation in his own vomit.

  After the autopsy, Jimi’s body was sent to a funeral home where they got rid of his vomit-covered clothes and dressed him in a large flannel shirt, to be flown back to Seattle. Jimi, who chose his clothes and accoutrements with such care, would have been appalled, Lola thought.

  Janis Joplin was also dead. She had died two weeks and two days after Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin was twenty-seven. Her body was discovered at the Landmark Motor Hotel, in Los Angeles. Janis Joplin had been staying there while recording her new album, in a nearby recording studio. Alone in her hotel room after a recording session, Janis Joplin had injected herself with heroin. According to reports Janis Joplin had skin-popped the heroin instead of injecting it directly into a vein. This had given her enough time to go into the hotel lobby to change five dollars so she could buy a packet of cigarettes.

  Back in her room, she sat on the bed, put the packet of cigarettes beside the bed and suddenly fell forward, hitting her head on the bedside table. For eighteen hours Janis Joplin’s body lay wedged between the bed and the bedside table. Rigor mortis had set in by the time she was discovered. When she was found, she was wearing a short blouse and a pair of panties. Her lips were bloodied and her nose was broken. She was still clutching the four dollars and fifty cents change from the cigarettes in one of her hands. Her psychedelically-painted Porsche was still outside in the parking lot.

  A few days before she died, Janis Joplin signed a revision of her will. She had changed a few details. There was now more money involved. And Janis Joplin felt more kindly towards her parents. Janis Joplin left half her estate to her parents and a quarter each to her sister and her brother. She also left two-and-a-half thousand dollars to throw a wake in the event of her death. Lola thought it was strange for a 27-year-old to be thinking about a party after her death. There was a difference between working out who should inherit your estate and planning a wake for yourself, Lola thought. Planning a wake seemed to make the death feel more imminent and, possibly, more anticipated. Three days after planning the wake, Janis Joplin was dead.

  Brian Jones was also dead. He had died just over a year before Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. He was found motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool. The coroner ruled that Brian Jones had died as a result of drowning by immersion in fresh water associated with severe liver dysfunction caused by fatty degeneration and ingestion of alcohol and drugs. Brian Jones was twenty-seven. A month earlier he had announced he was leaving The Rolling Stones, but the reality was that Brian Jones had been asked to leave the band.

  Exactly two years to the day after Brian Jones was pulled out of the bottom of his swimming pool, Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris. He was twenty-seven. Jim Morrison, who had been heavily addicted to drugs and alcohol, was found dead in the apartment on Rue Beautreillis, on the Right Bank, he had rented with his girlfriend Pamela Courson. No autopsy was performed as the medical examiner found no evidence of foul play and therefore, in accordance with French law, no autopsy was required. Later, Pamela Courson told friends that Jim Morrison had died of a heroin overdose as he had thought, after a day of heavy drinking, that he was snorting cocaine. She said that earlier in the evening Jim Morrison had vomited up blood and then decided to have a bath. She said he had appeared to have recovered, so she went to sleep. When she woke up, hours later, Jim Morrison was dead. Pamela Courson herself died of a heroin overdose three years later. At the time of her death, she was twenty-seven.

  In Jim Morrison’s will, made two-and-a-half years before he died, Jim Morrison had left his entire estate to Pamela Courson. After Pamela Courson’s death, Jim Morrison’s parents and Pamela Courson’s parents fought over who had the legal rights to the estate. Jim Morrison’s parents contested the will. But Jim Morrison’s will was clear. Everything he owned was to go to Pamela. And because of that, Pamela’s parents inherited the estate. Jim Morrison had really managed to erase his parents and his brother and sister out of his life, Lola thought.

  After two weeks of mostly sold-out concerts at the London Palladium, during which she received wild applause and standing ovations, Mama Cass was elated. After the very last performance, she went to Mick Jagger’s thirty-second birthday party. She stayed there talking to various guests until well into the next day, before going home to the apartment she was renting in Curzon Street, Mayfair. The apartment belonged to the singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson. Harry Nilsson had asked Keith Moon, who usually lived there, to move out for a few weeks. From the apartment, Mama Cass called Michelle Phillips to say how happy she was.

  After talking to Michelle Phillips, Mama Cass went to another party in her honour, then came back and went to bed. The next afternoon, Mama Cass’s naked, cold, dead body was discovered by one of her staff. Mama Cass was thirty-two. The doctor who examined Mama Cass initially thought she may have choked on a ham sandwich he had seen by the bed. He had overlooked that fact that the sandwich appeared to be untouched. The findings of the coroner’s inquest were that Cass Elliot died of a fatty myocardial degeneration due to obesity. She had died from heart failure.

  The rumour about her choking on a ham sandwich never died down. People still believed it. It was such an ugly rumour. Such an ugly picture. A fat person choking on a ham sandwich. It fed into peoples’ prejudices. And carried a subtext that read a fat, greedy person eating a ham sandwich she shouldn’t have been eating died of her own gluttony. Mama Cass would have been mortified.

  Keith Moon, The Who’s drummer, whose animated, spirited, almost manic drumming style was highly admired and whose erratic, eccentric, destructive behaviour was well-documented, had moved back into the Curzon Street, Mayfair apartment. Four years later, he was found dead in the same apartment.

  Poor Otis Redding was dead, too. He died less than six months after his appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival. Otis Redding’s twin-engine Beechcraft plane crashed into Lake Monona, in Wisconsin, killing Otis and four members of the Bar-Kays, his backing group. Otis Redding was twenty-six.

  All that life force, all that energy and intelligence and talent and level-headedness was gone. His body was found the next day when they searched the lake. No one was able to determine the cause of the crash. Otis Redding was buried on his ranch, in Round Oak, Georgia. One month later, ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay’, which Otis had recorded four days before he died, came out and went straight to the top of the charts. It would have been Otis’s first number one.

  Lilli
an Roxon was also dead. Lillian, who didn’t smoke or take drugs and hardly ever drank alcohol, had died of an asthma attack. She was forty-one. Lillian, who had looked after so many people, died alone, with no one to look after her. Lillian, who had been a compulsive phone caller, had called no one. Lola hoped this meant that she had died swiftly.

  Lillian had just published The Rock Encyclopedia, the world’s first rock encyclopaedia, and was one of the stars of the New York music and art scene. Friends said she had looked very tired on her last trip to Australia, ten months before she died. Lola hadn’t seen Lillian on that trip. Lola felt Lillian hadn’t forgiven her for going back to Australia and marrying Mr Former Rock Star. Lola thought that Lillian saw her as yet another person who had made an uninformed choice and disappeared into good-wife, good-mother land. Lillian was right. Good-wife, good-mother land had very firm boundaries and ill-marked exits.

  Lillian Roxon had also fallen out with Linda McCartney. After Linda married Paul McCartney and moved to London, she had seemed to drop all her closest friends in New York. Lillian had been very hurt. Lola was told that Linda had been bereft when she had heard the news of Lillian’s death, as Linda had hoped to restore the friendship. Lola herself had cried when she heard that Lillian had died. She too had planned on seeing Lillian again and apologising for not taking her advice. Advice Lola had thought about for years after she had ignored it.

  Linda McCartney, who lived on for twenty-five years after Lillian’s death, died of breast cancer at the age of fifty-six. She died in Tucson, Arizona, on the ranch she and Paul owned. Lola was told that Linda McCartney was still riding her beloved horses one or two days before she died. Lola hoped that if there was an afterlife, Linda and Lillian would be keeping each other company, phoning each other every day and going out together at night.

  Sonny Bono was also dead. He had skied into a tree at the Heavenly Ski Resort near Lake Tahoe, in California. His widow, Mary Bono, asked Cher to deliver the eulogy at Sonny’s funeral. Cher’s eulogy had been very touching and very moving. Cher spoke, through tears, of how some people thought that Sonny wasn’t very bright. But she said he was smart enough to take an introverted sixteen-year-old girl and a scrappy little Italian guy with a bad voice and turn them into the most beloved and successful couple of their generation.

  ‘Sonny was a short man,’ Cher said. ‘But he was heads and tails taller than anyone else. He had a vision of the future and just how he was going to build it.’ The epitaph on Sonny Bono’s headstone said, And the Beat Goes On.

  The beat didn’t go on too well for John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas. His drug use kept increasing. He himself said that at one stage he was shooting cocaine and heroin every fifteen minutes, for two years. In 1973, Mick Jagger tried to help John Phillips record another album, in London, but the project came to an abrupt end because of John Phillips’ heavy drug use. John Phillips’ years of drug and alcohol addiction had wrecked his liver. In 1992, he had a liver transplant. A few months after the transplant, he was photographed in a bar in Palm Springs, drinking alcohol. ‘I was just trying to break in the new liver,’ he explained. John Phillips died nine years later. He was sixty-five.

  The list of the dead was endless. Lola had been trying not to think about the dead. She had been trying not to think about Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison or Brian Jones or Mama Cass. She had been trying not to think about Renia or Edek’s dead. Or anyone else’s dead.

  Lola had grown up with the dead. She was trying to remove herself from them. She was trying to discard the dead. She felt glued to them. And she wanted to unglue herself. She wanted to ditch her past and her parents’ past. But it wasn’t easy. You couldn’t ditch the past the way you could ditch last year’s coat or the shoes that weren’t quite the right fit. You couldn’t dump the past in the way you could dump a lover or a disloyal friend. The past seemed to be as much a part of you as the fact that you were short or tall. Lola was discovering you couldn’t will either your height or your past away. Her past was always going to be full of murdered people and barracks and fear and disease and the barbaric aspects of very ordinary human beings.

  Lola thought that part of her relief at the fact that Mick Jagger and Cher had not only survived but had thrived, stemmed from her own episodic ambivalence about surviving and her attraction to the dead. This ambivalence, which had surfaced in her forties, had, two decades later, mostly abated.

  All of the guests had been seated for dinner. Lola was sitting eight people away from Mick Jagger. She had to stand up to see where Mr Someone Else was seated. He was sitting opposite Phyllis-Elissa Earlwood. According to the menu, the waiters were bringing plates of seared peekytoe crab salad with a spicy peach chutney. This would be followed by a pan-roasted Long Island duck breast with cumin and cardamom-seasoned black beans.

  The guest on Lola’s left introduced himself. His name was Irwin Keller. He was a veterinary nutritionist and behavioural specialist.

  ‘Does that mean you look after the dietary and emotional health of animals?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That about sums it up.’

  ‘I didn’t think animals needed nutritional counselling,’ said Lola. ‘Don’t they naturally eat what’s good for them, or do they suffer from vitamin deficiencies like we do?’

  ‘Some of them do,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Lola. ‘I was joking. I thought I was being funny.’

  ‘It’s not funny,’ Irwin Keller said. ‘Take fish, for example,’ he said, looking at his peekytoe crab salad. ‘In the food fish industry, fish generally require a high-protein diet.’

  ‘You mean they eat other fish?’ said Lola.

  ‘They are fed fish meal,’ said Irwin. ‘But there is a problem. Most fish don’t synthesise ascorbic acid, Vitamin C, so you have to give them supplements. A Vitamin A deficiency in fish, which is not as common, can lead to poor growth and retinal atrophy.’

  ‘That sounds terrible,’ said Lola, trying to picture a fish with atrophied eyes. ‘It wouldn’t look great either in the fish market or the fish store.’

  Lola tried to eat her peekytoe crab without thinking about what it had been fed. ‘Do animals have food disorders?’ she said to Irwin Keller.

  ‘They can have,’ he said. ‘A horse that has a thiamine deficiency could suffer from anorexia.’

  Lola started wondering whether an induced thiamine deficiency might be an aid to dieters. She wanted to ask Irwin Keller, but Irwin Keller had moved on and he was now talking about sheep. By the time Irwin Keller had finished, Lola knew that thirty per cent of sheep were homosexual and that fourteen per cent of dogs had separation anxiety. She also now knew that dogs had fears and phobias and that social maturity in free-ranging chickens occurred at about one year of age, although most chickens were slaughtered before they reached that age. That meant that most of the western world was eating socially-immature chickens.

  The peekytoe crab salad had been replaced by the pan-roasted Long Island duck. To Lola’s relief, the woman on her right tapped her on the arm. ‘Frances Withers,’ she said. ‘Has anyone ever told you you look like Cher?’

  ‘Occasionally someone has suggested it,’ Lola said.

  ‘She’s still very beautiful,’ Frances Withers said.

  ‘I think so, too,’ said Lola.

  Phyllis-Elissa and Elwood Earlwood’s apartment didn’t look like the sort of place where Cher was regularly discussed. Lola was pleased to be talking about Cher.

  ‘Her hair is not curly like yours,’ Frances Withers said, scrutinising Lola’s hair.

  ‘I think Cher is fabulous,’ said Irwin Keller, who must have been listening. Lola was surprised that Irwin Keller had even noticed what Cher was like. He seemed to spend all his time absorbed in ascorbic acid and chickens and pigs and goats and fish.

  Lola felt an almost maternal pride in Cher, even though she and Cher were the same age. Lola was thrilled that Cher had been so successful, and had grown up into an independent, powerful
and accomplished human being. Cher hadn’t become bloated with celebrity. In interviews, you could see her humility, her grace and her intelligence. She also had a great sense of humour. ‘The trouble with some women,’ Cher was quoted as saying, ‘is they get all excited about nothing and they marry him.’

  Lola was pleased that Cher had done so well. Thrilled that Cher had been so resilient. It hadn’t been an altogether bump-free ride. Cher’s daughter with Sonny Bono, Chastity Bono, had come out as being gay when she was a teenager. Cher had handled Chastity’s news with the same sort of fear and confusion any mother might feel, but she had adapted and become a staunch supporter of lesbian and gay rights.

  At high school, Chastity Bono had begun to feel more and more certain that she was meant to be a male, not a female. Just before she turned forty, she decided to make the physical transition from being a woman to being a man.

  Lola was pleased that Cher hadn’t pretended that it was easy to have a daughter who had become a man. Cher had looked almost shell-shocked when she was trying to come to terms with having her daughter become her son.

  In interviews, Chaz Bono reminded Lola of a young Cher. Chaz got such joy out of very small things. He seemed unspoiled. And not at all bitter about the struggle to address the imbalance between his body and his psyche. He was the sort of child any mother would be proud of. Lola was sure that Cher, whom Lola had noted with joy was still wearing false eyelashes, was proud of Chaz.

  Lola ate much more of the dessert than she had intended to. The flourless chocolate cake, with its molten chocolate interior, was one of Lola’s favourite desserts. She looked at her plate. She hadn’t left a crumb of cake or a drop of chocolate. She wondered if Mick Jagger had eaten his flourless chocolate cake, but she couldn’t tell. Someone was leaning forward and blocking Lola’s view of Mick Jagger’s plate.

  Lola still hadn’t worked out what this fundraising dinner was for. She didn’t feel that she could ask anyone without coming across as not only stupid, but crass. Lola tried to catch Mr Someone Else’s eye. But he was talking to two or three people and didn’t notice. Lola wanted to go home. She wanted to go home and make some notes about a dialogue Pimp was having with Schlomo. Three days in a row, Schlomo had lost the suspect he was trailing because of his frequent bathroom stops. This was an important case for the Ultra-Private Detective Agency. It was fraud on a large scale. Pimp couldn’t tell the corporation that had hired them that her head private detective kept losing the subject because of a frequent need to pee.