Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  At any given time in his life, Warren was in the middle of reading upward of five books during the same period; he admittedly used current events and the daily newspaper headlines as fodder for his writing and took advantage of his touring schedule to scout each visited city for local museums, art galleries, and concert halls. But he had always steered clear of politics. Crystal recalled that Warren had only taken part in 1978’s “Save the Whales” concert campaigns because Jackson Browne had urged him to join him for the brief tour. Likewise, Anita Gevinson recalled Warren’s panic when an interviewer had begun asking his views on international affairs. “He was funny politically, unless he was fascinated by the topic,” she said. “I remember being in a hotel suite with him and he was being interviewed and I was still in bed in the adjoining room. They had asked him some topical thing and he burst in and asked me, ‘Am I for the Sandinistas or the Contras? Which one is Jackson for, again?’”

  After coping with disintegrating tour budgets for over half a decade, the one for Sentimental Hygiene was easily the most extravagant of Warren’s career. Having grown accustomed to rearranging and modulating his old songbook for the necessity—and having also acted as his own road manager of sorts during the Philadelphia years—the end of 1987 found Warren in a lap of luxury unimaginable following the Elektra/Asylum termination. Many of the stops throughout the tour included a few days of press opportunities and rounds of interviews with local major outlets; in New York, Virgin had put Warren up in a suite at the Helmsley Palace, which John Milward noted made Warren appear “somewhat self-conscious about his sumptuous surroundings.”

  Clad in black jeans, a black T-shirt, black sneakers, and a fully cultivated sandy beard, Warren had walked to the window before commenting on Milward’s observation. “At these rates,” he finally said, facing the New York City street below, “they let you jump if you choose.”

  During the interview, Milward also took note of the eclectic hodge-podge scattered around Warren’s sitting room: coffee, Silk Cut cigarettes—he was smoking again—and a stack of well-thumbed books, including the 1969 compendium of world poetry, a poetry compendium called Technicians of the Sacred, a mystery novel by Jonathan Valin, and both David Schiff’s biography of American atonal classical composer Elliott Carter and a separate book of Carter’s original sheet music. Warren shared his preference for reading along with the score when listening to classical works on his new headphones. He also had just purchased the books during that New York visit; bookstores within walking distance of the hotel was the first order of business in every city he visited—once he had cleared the room of any and all “unlucky” objects and omens.

  Warren’s odd behavior had a cause. It was a by-product of his diligence in remaining sober, but only flickers had shown themselves throughout his years of drinking and drugs. Years earlier, Warren had enlisted his father’s help in getting him out of the military draft. Crystal later recalled that Warren couldn’t bear to look at posters for Army recruitment following his disingenuous play at dodging service in Vietnam, and now girlfriend Merle Ginsberg was witness to seemingly stranger behavioral ticks. At first curiously charming, she noticed that his entire wardrobe now exclusively contained gray items of clothing—a symbolic ritual that harkened back to his banishment of the color green following his departure from lyme and cybelle in 1967. “He was truly the most superstitious person I have ever met,” Ginsberg later recalled how his behavior shifted toward changing color preferences. “He wore gray cashmere sweaters from Ralph Lauren, gray jeans, which were never easy to find, gray knickers, gray Calvin Klein underwear, gray Calvin Klein T-shirts, he had a gray Corvette and all his furniture was gray. He wouldn’t even touch black.”

  Old friend Jimmy Wachtel later recalled a memorable sight in Warren’s home in “Cat Piss Manor,” having taken a peek inside his sock drawer. “He had a drawer of socks that were all the same socks,” Wachtel claimed. “He had like forty pair of gray socks all balled up in this drawer, and I thought it was one of the greatest art pieces I’d ever seen.” He also theorized on the nature of Warren’s unspoken obsession with the color itself, recalling, “Warren was hung up on the color gray, which for me is like not white and not black, it’s gray. It’s like walking down on a tightrope… you’re not here, you’re not there.”

  Even Warren’s new brand of Silk Cut cigarettes came with its own set of dogmatic practices. Later in the tour, Warren’s new road manager, Stuart Ross, quickly caught on to the demands that the syndrome seemingly dictated. “[Warren] told me Silk Cuts were hard to get in the places we were going,” Ross later recalled, “so he said, ‘I need you to get me three or four cartons of these cigarettes.’ Then he said, they can’t have the C-word on the warning.”

  “What?” Ross had asked, confused by the request.

  “Look,” Warren told him, “I don’t care what they talk about on the warning, but it can’t have the C-word.”

  Before the tour launched, Ross found a tobacco shop in Beverly Hills apparently unfazed by the strange requests of their patrons. When he stipulated that “cancer” couldn’t be present on the warning disclaimers of the packs within, they didn’t “bat an eye.” Low birth weight wasn’t an issue, but the “C” word was unacceptable.

  Although no one in Warren’s life was completely certain when or how his obsessive-compulsive disorder began, it became overtly pronounced to friends and colleagues soon after his release from Minnesota’s Detox Mansion. Andrew Slater recalled Warren asking him in the studio how often he washed his hands throughout the day. When Slater estimated about two or three, Warren had asked, “You don’t ever wash ’em like thirty, huh?”

  “He had the whole thing about stepping on lines in the street,” Slater recalled. “He told me that whenever he heard the word ‘cancer’ in a day, anything he had bought, shoes, food, anything, he’d have to return everything, or get rid of it.”

  Gevinson recalled that Warren’s OCD seemed to manifest when things were at their lowest points, both his career and personal life. And when he was distancing himself from alcohol or drugs, the concept of luck became his focused nemesis. “He thought anything bad that happened was just bad luck,” she later recalled. “Any time something would work against him or roadblock an idea or project, he would go, ‘Now look!’ or ‘More bad luck!’ He would mutter and repeat his little mantra in the apartment, ‘Nothing’s bad luck, is it?’ but not to anyone in particular.”

  In the past, Warren had often used his touring schedule as a way to visit with friends and family; his longest gap in keeping in touch had been during his stint in Philadelphia, which, aside from his condition at that point, had also yielded no performances he’d wanted them to see. Now riding the wave of the largest and highest-budgeted tour of his entire career, he was proud to connect with his cousins in New York, returning to them in glory.

  “During my college years, [Warren] mainly toured alone, although I saw him perform in Providence with some of the Eagles,” his cousin Lawrence recalled. “That was a cool show because none of the people I met in school believed that Warren was my cousin and, suffice it to say, this convinced them—especially when they waited for me to reappear from backstage to catch a ride back to campus.” Lawrence recalled that most of his best visits with his famous big cousin was when Warren would be passing through with Duncan Aldrich, beginning with their New York stops during the Sentimental Hygiene tour. “Duncan was very cool and always remembered me and my brothers,” he said, “and without so much as asking, he made sure we got to spend time with Warren… After [Late Night with David Letterman], my brothers and I wanted to hang out with Warren, who was sober at this time, and my brother Dan convinced him to take a walk with us to his bar, Crossroads, on Seventy-Seventh and Second Avenue. It was a cold fall night and I think Warren was frozen when we got there, but he was game to show us how to make a ‘great drink.’ In the end, it was just a Diet Coke and a slice of orange—so much for the mystique!”

  On the few occa
sions that Warren was able to carve out time for his younger family members, the generosity that he always bestowed on his own children in lieu of being physically present trickled down. As a child who been bounced around between the homes of both divorced parents, Warren seemed to revel in becoming the cool older-brother figure for his cousin Sandford’s sons. “I also want to convey how generous Warren was,” Lawrence said. “He loved Hammacher Schlemmer and our gifts were these cool things like, for example, a snow-cone machine—totally random, but so cool. Once after a show when I was in college, Warren mentioned his next stop was playing St. Lawrence. I said, ‘Oh man, I’d like a shirt,’ since I wanted my first name as its logo. A week later, I had every conceivable item from the school bookstore—shorts, hats, T-shirts, a sweatshirt, everything.

  “Most of my time with Warren was backstage at clubs, and when the conversation moved away from family and usually to random topics like Francis Bacon and intellectual talk, I struggled to keep up with him,” Lawrence fondly remembered. “Warren was incredibly bright and witty and sometimes it could be intimidating, frankly, because I think he assumed I was at his intelligence level—and I’m sure not many were.”

  Even amid the positive reviews, both Virgin executives and Warren himself began to notice that audience numbers dipped as the two-month-long, fifty-city tour rolled on. By the first week of October, the second half of the Sentimental Hygiene tour was downgraded to smaller venues, finding Warren playing sold-out club dates as opposed to semi-filled arenas. Still, the insinuation made by the budget cuts depressed him. When the numbers for Sentimental Hygiene rolled in just prior to the European leg of the tour toward the end of the year, their results sparked no more enthusiasm. Releasing the six singles within a short amount of time prior to the full album’s release hadn’t quite backfired, but it resolved much of the mystery behind Warren’s “comeback” before the push that was needed to catapult Sentimental Hygiene to blockbuster status. Songs like “Boom Boom Mancini” and “Reconsider Me” had been on the radio and available as stand-alone singles for nearly a month before their parent album hit the street. The album’s title track fared best of the bunch, remaining on the Billboard charts for nine weeks, and reaching its peak at Number 9 by the first week of June. Enthusiasm waned by the time “Detox Mansion” was released at the beginning of August, spending a mere three weeks on the chart and only reaching a peak 44 position. When the album itself came out two weeks after that, the buzz had already dimmed. Sentimental Hygiene spent a reasonable eighteen weeks on the Billboard chart, but terrified Virgin executives with its meager spot at Number 63—not the numbers the record label had been expecting when Warren, Slater, and company had gone way over their original budget, ballooning to the $1 million Virgin had no choice but to cover.

  Playing a near-identical touring strategy Elektra/Asylum had used in recouping their losses for 1982’s The Envoy, when Warren returned from Europe in July 1988, he was already booked for another around the United States—a solo tour.

  CHAPTER NINE

  (1988–1990)

  WARREN HAD VERY LITTLE PREVENTING HIM FROM EMBARKING on a European trip for as long as the label dictated. After a little over two years together, his relationship with Merle Ginsberg had come to what she later described as an “ugly” end. The first few months had coincided with three consecutive lapses in Warren’s sobriety, all of which had required Slater to escort him back to rehab.

  On tour, he’d been able to stay as strong as possible, even amid the stress of returning to the stage after so many years away. The small-time gigs he’d suffered through at the end of 1983 were like a boxer’s rise to a title shot through a series of human punching bags. That disastrous European festival circuit, his drunken offering of refunds to dissatisfied attendees in Cork, Ireland—experiences like palookas in comparison to a heavyweight challenge like New York City’s Beacon Theater. But that pressure hadn’t broken him—The New York Times had praised the show, and his focus. Even the constant temptation of watching younger musicians drinking and smoking pot on tour, as annoying a spectacle as it was, didn’t wear him down. “He could never be around alcohol,” Merle Ginsberg later recalled. “If he saw a liquor bottle, he’d have a meltdown.” But that mental willpower manifested elsewhere, as Warren’s OCD habits deepened and expanded, as did his temper. Noting that Warren was “always in a dark mood,” she recalled one incident when they were grocery shopping and she’d inadvertently selected a carton of milk that wasn’t “lucky” enough to his satisfaction. “I’d come back with the milk,” she said, “and he’d say, ‘That’s not lucky. You didn’t get a lucky one.’”

  Like many within Warren’s close circle of friends, Ginsberg initially wrote off the odd habits and mood swings as just Warren being a typical creative type—a brooding rock star, with all the spoiled demands and behavior ticks that came with it. Only after they had been dating monogamously for a number of months—and Ginsberg had been privy to more than a few of Warren’s tumbles off the wagon—did she realize the correlation between his drinking and his obsessive superstitions. Those in turn had also started influencing his eating and cleaning habits, which Ginsberg found “disgusting.” She didn’t know what to make of his explaining a love of fruit flies being the reason he wouldn’t take out the accumulating trash. When he told her that he had begun to name them, she couldn’t be sure whether he’d been joking. “But,” she recalled, “he was fastidious about himself. And his laundry. He was fanatical about how his laundry was done. He loved art and beautiful things, but he lived in squalor.”

  It was a dynamic that Warren’s friends had long noted: even in his ongoing pursuit of the seemingly unattainable “quiet, normal life,” there was a part of him that needed a timeshare in the seedier part of town. For every cottage in Los Feliz, there was a room at the Hollywood Hawaiian he couldn’t cover; for every single-family home in Montecito, there was a mink-lined sniper’s nest at the Chateau Marmont, down the hall from a willing groupie.

  Warren had first asked Ginsberg to move to Los Angeles indefinitely before the Sentimental Hygiene sessions were underway. Since his return to Los Angeles, Warren had made a genuine attempt at his recovery, never missing his A.A. meetings and instilling its positive influence in his personal life. Within a month of becoming Virgin’s first US client, he had successfully completed the fourth step of A.A.’s twelve-step program. Having proudly made the required “searching and moral inventory” of himself, Warren had set the list aflame and watched as his sponsor advised him to welcome the smoke’s aroma as the smell of victory. Although Warren had been warned by multiple advisors from A.A. about the risks of attempting a serious romantic relationship so soon in his recovery, his long-distance love affair with Ginsberg seemed stable enough to continue its path. Serenading her over the phone was one thing, but what good was having a beautiful, younger girlfriend if she wasn’t around to attend concerts and PR events with him? With a certain amount of misgivings, but excited nonetheless, Ginsberg put in the machinations to leave Rolling Stone and find some form of journalistic employment in Los Angeles.

  As Ginsberg later recalled, by the time she up and left New York, there was very little love lost between her and the editors of Rolling Stone. Many of her fellow writers began to treat her differently now that she had crossed the unspoken, sacred line of becoming personally involved with one of her interview subjects; Paul Nelson had made the same mistake years earlier, inadvertently making himself a major player in the epic saga of Warren’s 1978 downward spiral. Now, Rolling Stone’s new corporate atmosphere had almost no tolerance for a writer who had no issues in dating the stars they were supposed to cover objectively. She later recalled, “Suddenly, I was a rock star’s girlfriend and my coworkers started to hate me for that.”

  The mood at Rolling Stone had shifted almost immediately after her feature article pitch to publisher Jann Wenner. Having read all of Paul Nelson’s extensive coverage of Warren’s past, Ginsberg was excited at the prospect of pen
ning a new work on his newfound sobriety and apparent return to superstardom. She was shocked at Wenner’s response, and vividly remembered the heated exchange that took place in the publisher’s office when she told him of Warren’s new sobriety and comeback status. “He’s not sober,” Wenner said. “I’ve known him for years and it ain’t happening. We are not running that bullshit.” Wenner put his feelings succinctly, adding that to him, Warren was merely “the greatest at fucking up.”

  Ginsberg hadn’t been completely deterred by Wenner’s words. Although the interview with Warren that she’d prepared for publication never ran, her fascination with him continued past the confines of the journalistic assignment. They continued to date as the Sentimental Hygiene sessions rolled on, until finally she was able to solidify a job in Los Angeles with the new basic-cable entertainment network, the E! channel. As soon as Ginsberg shared the good news, however, his nerves immediately took over. “I told him I was going to move there, thinking that’s all he wanted in the world,” she later recalled. “But, he was freaked out… He said, ‘What are you going to do? Where are you going to live?’ I thought, don’t you want me to be with you? The minute I was going to give everything up to be with him, it freaked him out.”

  Ginsberg had already walked from Rolling Stone and her start date at E! was imminent, making her relocation to Los Angeles a done deal. In balancing his focus between the studio work for Sentimental Hygiene and proactively walking the tight line of maintained sobriety, Warren soon became a higher-maintenance boyfriend than the younger journalist had bargained for. She later recalled that their relationship soon became for her “a full-time job,” with all the chores, habits, and unconditional acceptance of his behavioral quirks thrown into the mix. “He expected me to go to the grocery store with him,” Ginsberg recalled. “We’d go to Book Soup and buy a million magazines and books. Then, we’d go to the video store and rent movies he’d already seen.”