Lips Unsealed

by Belinda Carlisle

  By mid-year, I gave up on college. It wasn’t an easy decision because the parents of one of my Mormon girlfriends had generously helped figure out a way I could get a partial scholarship to a Mormon junior college in Utah. But after I got a taste of the Hollywood scene, I couldn’t envision myself leaving town.

  I had a job at the House of Fabrics but knew that wasn’t a career and began to think of life after graduation. I thought I might like to become a hairdresser and enrolled in night classes at the Newbury School of Beauty. What a crazy, wild place! The girls enrolled there were as funny as they were terrifically naughty and bad. They were chain-smoking, hard-partying, delinquent drama queens who shocked me with stories of their escapades.

  And I wasn’t exactly a bore. Through a few girlfriends who liked to go belly-dancing at Middle Eastern clubs, I got involved with a bunch of Iranian men. They were newly arrived in L.A., part of the influx of Iranian immigrants settling in the city around that time. From what I saw, they enjoyed leaving their restrictive culture back home and turned into wild men.

  Freddie was one such guy. He was a hairdresser in his early fifties. He hit on me when I was on a cigarette break outside the House of Fabrics at the Conejo mall. I almost burst out laughing at the site of his toupee, something I never understood. He was a hairdresser with an awful and obvious rug on his head. Ugh.

  Why did I say yes when he asked me out? It was probably because I was so amused by his look: in addition to his toupee, he wore jumpsuits and carried a man purse. We dated for about a week or two. He used to pick me up after beauty school and call me his “beautiful French fry.” I called him “Papa.” He was focused nonstop on getting into my pants. He would’ve had an easier time breaking into Fort Knox.

  A few hours with Freddie was like a wrestling match. I finally stopped returning his phone calls after he gave me a painting of palm trees and camels on black velvet and talked about treating me like a princess if he could take me to Tehran. I didn’t want to go to Tehran with Freddie, let alone be with him anymore.

  I then started going out with Reza, a struggling Iranian artist who was even fresher off the plane than Freddie. We met at a different Middle Eastern nightclub. Reza, in his mid-twenties, had an enormous nose. A comic would say it arrived five minutes before he did. He also wore thick cologne. Maybe that’s why his nose never bothered me. I couldn’t get past his scent. In all seriousness, I didn’t mind either.

  We danced all night after we met. He was a great dancer. After we had gone out a couple more times, Reza proposed to me—and of course I said yes. I was never serious and refused to take the ring he offered me, but Reza thought he had snagged a wife. I had the toughest time thinking of a way to get out of that jam. I felt bad when I came to my senses and realized my silliness had gotten out of hand. I worked up my nerve and broke off the engagement—and then told Reza I didn’t want to see him anymore.

  I had to watch myself. I couldn’t lead guys like that on and not eventually get into trouble.

  My parents never knew about any of these shenanigans. They wouldn’t have understood. Actually, they would’ve asked where I found the time between school and work to have these wild romances. Honestly, I can’t imagine how I made the time or found the energy. It helped that I was eighteen. I didn’t have to sleep. I didn’t even think of sleep.

  Not long after I broke up with Reza, my schedule opened up unexpectedly when I was fired from the House of Fabrics. The manager caught me leaving with yards of fabric hidden under my clothes. He didn’t even ask for an explanation; he just said I didn’t have to come back. It was mortifying.

  It was then that I quit beauty school and signed up for secretarial classes, where I learned to type and take shorthand. With graduation coming up, I was going to need a way to support myself. I had no idea what I wanted to do and figured I better have some skills.

  four

  LUXURY LIVING

  AFTER GRADUATION, I went straight to the Roxy to see one of the guys from Heart play in a side project. I didn’t care as much about the show inside as I did the one outside. I flitted around the parking lot with my crazy girlfriends, feeling like I was finally out of school and free to do whatever I wanted.

  I wanted to go to Rome and ride around on scooters with cute Italian boys and smoke cigarettes on the Via Veneto. I had recently seen Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and left the theater imagining myself as Anita Ekberg, who had played a Swedish-American movie star pursued through Rome by a journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) on a search for meaning in life amid the city’s wealth and decadence.

  Inspired, I had saved money for months and just had to sell my car to put me over the top. But my plans were derailed when I lost control of my car on the freeway while switching radio stations and smashed into the back of a truck. My Thrash Datsun actually flipped over. Just to show how focused I was on getting to Rome, as I was in midair, instead of thinking I was about to die or be seriously injured, I thought, Oh shit, now I’m not going to be able to sell my car.

  Miraculously I wasn’t hurt. But my car was irreparably damaged, along with my travel plans and immediate future. It was summer 1976, and I figured I might as well have a good time in Hollywood. Without school, I stayed out later and partied harder. My parents, who were still raising five other children ranging in age from sixteen to two, charged me $60 a month to live at home. I assumed that meant I could come and go as I pleased.

  Wrong. A short time after my eighteenth birthday, I returned home from the Rainbow at three A.M. to grab some albums and clothes, maybe some other things, too, before going to my boyfriend’s place. Stacey, who was actually more of a friend than a boyfriend, was in my car as I pulled into the driveway. In his satin pants and platform shoes, he looked as if he had stepped off of a New York Dolls album cover.

  I had him wait outside while I grabbed my stuff. But as I hurried back through the house my mom intercepted me in the living room and said I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Sorry, I have to go,” I said, and pushed through the door, leaving her in her nightgown to watch from the window as I backed out and drove away.

  My parents were more upset when I didn’t return until early the next evening. We had it out, and soon after, Theresa and I got a small, very cheap one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood. Other than our beds, we didn’t have any furniture. We didn’t have food either. I ate instant oatmeal with margarine and Sweet’N Low three times a day. I didn’t care. Along with cool clothes and shoes, all that mattered was location—and our place was within walking distance of all the clubs.

  Our arrival was perfectly timed. In fall 1976, Rodney Bingenheimer, also known as the “Mayor of the Sunset Strip,” began hosting a Sunday-night program on KROQ, a tiny Pasadena-based radio station with an underground sensibility. It was a hub for new music, and Rodney’s show, Rodney on the ROQ, was at the leading edge of all that was new, different, punk, and straight from England.

  Rodney’s background prepared him to be ahead of music’s curve. He had been Sonny and Cher’s publicist, a stand-in for Davy Jones on the hit series The Monkees, and more recently proprietor of his eponymously named club, Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, which was so hip the Stooges and David Bowie went there when they were in town. As Bowie once said, Rodney knew more cool, cutting-edge music than anyone.

  I thought of Hollywood as one great big outdoor club with its own soundtrack. Theresa and I began our nights at the Rainbow and as soon as we heard about a party, we sped through the Hollywood Hills, looking for the address. As young, attractive girls, doors opened easily for us. Once inside, I needed a couple drinks to get loose enough to enjoy myself. A quaalude also helped. At the time, my drug use was strictly recreational.

  But still, a girl had to be careful. The city was full of predators. There were old letches like “What’s Happening” Bob, a guy in his sixties known for laying his slimy hands on girls as he drilled his smile uncomfortably close and asked, “What’s happening?” And there was P
aul with the purple Excalibur, who had a similarly sleazy act.

  I learned my lessons like everyone else. I remember flitting through a club one night when a good-looking guy pulled me aside and within minutes had me telling him my life story. A classic Hollywood smoothie, he put his hand on my shoulder as if to balance himself, stepped back, and said I had a beauty that was unlike any he had ever seen. He said I could be in Playboy magazine if I wanted.

  At that point, he had my head spinning. I had never been flattered like that before.

  “Really?” I said. “You think so?”

  He nodded. “Why don’t you come to my place and let me take pictures of you?” he asked.

  Moments later, I was following him to his house. Halfway through the photo session, as some of my clothes came off, he came on to me. I cringe as I think back on how stupidly and predictably that scene unfolded. I was so ignorant. Luckily for me, I sobered up in time to realize the whole thing was bullshit and I got the hell out of there, scolding myself for being so gullible and naïve.

  I supported myself with secretarial work that I got through temporary agencies. I started out at Home Savings and Loan and typically moved on to another job after a ninety-day probation period. The cash was good, it was convenient, and I never got attached enough to feel guilty about coming in at nine with my eyes still half-closed and my head not yet cleared from the previous night.

  By afternoon, I was sneaking personal phone calls, making plans for later that night. As always, though, my evening centered around the Rainbow’s parking lot. I had a feeling that rock stars and Hollywood A-listers went through the same thing during the day, calling around to find out where the parties were going to be, who was playing in which club, and eventually ending up at the Rainbow, too.

  Inevitably, I saw everyone who was anyone, including Robert Plant, Ron Wood, Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, and Linda Ronstadt. The difference was they got out of fancy cars while I had walked down Sunset and hung out with other kids, smoking, whiffing amyl nitrate, gossiping, laughing, and fantasizing about being a star myself.

  I was at work one day in early 1977 when Theresa called me with breaking news. Queen was in town. She was breathless from the excitement. They were staying at the Beverly Hilton hotel, she said, and she asked if I wanted to go there with her and try to meet the band. Of course I did, I said. I didn’t even have to think about it.

  That night, we dressed up and went to the hotel. Theresa had found out what Freddie Mercury’s room number was, and we headed straight for it after making it through the lobby and into the elevator without getting stopped. We laughed nervously and wondered what we would say if Freddie actually answered the door and invited us in.

  Outside his room, we encountered two other freaks on a similar mission to meet Freddie. They told us their names, Bobby Breahm and Georg Ruthenberg. They were our age and from West Los Angeles. They immediately pegged us as a couple of girls from the Valley. It didn’t matter.

  “Is this Freddie’s room?” I asked.

  They nodded and added that they had been camped there for a while and hadn’t seen him come or go.

  “Or heard anything going on inside,” one of them added.

  Theresa and I turned toward the door and knocked. We waited and then hit it again. We probably knocked about a dozen times without anyone ever coming to the door. In retrospect, I know from personal experience that this didn’t mean he wasn’t in there. I’ve been in plenty of hotel rooms over the course of my career and heard fans in the hallway debating whether or not to knock on my door, and then knock over and over again. I never open the door.

  So for all we knew, Freddie could have been inside the room and just didn’t want to be bothered by four fanatical kids. Eventually we sat down in the hallway and forgot all about Freddie. Instead we got to know one another. We talked for hours about music and emerged at the end of night as friends. Bobby and Georg said they were going to start a band and asked if we wanted to be in it. Theresa and I said yes.

  At the time, L.A.’s punk scene was barely a blip in the city’s more commercially oriented music world. Disco was the fad of the day and although I saw a Bee Gees show that is still the best concert I’ve ever seen, the music and the silk-jacket scene didn’t resonate with me. Nor did it grab anyone in my immediate crowd.

  We were different from even most of the kids at the Rainbow. I’d say 99.9 percent of them wanted to be rock stars. Only a handful of freaks and misfits thought of themselves as punks. I’d say there were only fifty people in all of L.A. like us who were paying attention to the Sex Pistols in London, the bands at New York’s CBGB, and the new era that dawned when Rodney played the Ramones’ first album.

  We read NME and Melody Maker, not Rolling Stone. We knew that Malcolm McLaren had spotted Johnny Rotten, aka Johnny Lydon, on Kings Road wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt over which he had written “I HATE,” and so we wrote on our T-shirts. When Rodney declared he was “anti–the Eagles,” we nodded in agreement and ventured out of the shadows, realizing we were part of the same intense tribe—a tribe that would soon ignite a full-fledged revolution.

  We stayed in touch with Bobby and Georg and eventually got around to making good on the idea of forming a band. We jammed in Georg’s garage and started messing around with lyrics. It was fun. Georg was the only one who played an instrument, but actual proficiency was not a requirement in a punk band. Theresa, who dyed her hair platinum blond, picked up the bass. I sat down on drums, and Bobby, as we assumed he would, stepped to the front as the lead singer.

  We went at it with a noisy recklessness and disregard that was so much fun we didn’t care what we sounded like, though we thought we sounded pretty good, or at least good enough. In the spirit of Johnny Rotten, we adopted noms de punk. Bobby became Darby Crash. Georg became Pat Smear. Theresa came up with Lorna Doom. And I chose Dottie Danger.

  Why Dottie Danger? It sounded cute and angry at the same time.

  Darby and Pat had been down this road before. They’d started a band after being kicked out of high school. They called it Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens—a great name. But when they couldn’t get all those letters on a T-shirt, they renamed themselves the Germs.

  We got really into the band as we practiced, picked up some steam, and set our sights on doing something Darby and Pat hadn’t done in their previous incarnation as the Germs—perform a show, a real show at a club.

  We didn’t possess anything close to the skill and polish of bands that were headlining clubs in L.A., bands like the Ramones, Blondie, Television, the Quick, and Joan Jett. But we still got booked at the Orpheum Theatre in April 1977. We printed flyers and posted them around town.

  However, as the date drew near, I got very sick and was diagnosed with mononucleosis. I had to drop out of the band and move back home with my parents for three months. Becky Barton, another girl from my high school art class, took my place. She called herself Donna Rhia. Hilarious.

  I still attended the show. I wouldn’t have missed it even if I had been hospitalized. As I think about it, wearing a hospital gown might have been very punk. Anyway, as I recall, about eight people showed up to hear the band, which was typical of hard-core punk shows at the time. They drew fans who were early adapters and very plugged in or friends of the band. People didn’t just casually go check out a punk band, not one like the Germs.

  You had to want to see Darby.

  Among all his screaming and histrionics, he stuck the microphone in a jar of peanut butter and covered his body in red licorice. As Pat recalled, they were thrown off the stage after five minutes.

  But we thought that was a huge success. The band had played in public! We felt validated and real. The Germs were considered legit and later on were regarded as L.A.’s first homegrown punk band. I had been disappointed that I wasn’t able to participate as originally planned. I was also bummed about living at home again. I seemed to have regressed.

  Little did I know I was about to rev up.

>   After recovering from mono, I stayed connected to the Germs as their publicist, which meant I put flyers up in record stores. I also announced the band before shows and stood off to the side of the stage, handing Darby his peanut butter, licorice, and salad dressing. I wished there had been a place for me, but another opportunity arose when my friend Connie Clarksville called and asked if I wanted to sing backup for Black Randy and the Metrosquad.

  Someone had dropped out and they needed a fill-in. I was glad to help, and even happier when I found out I could take my place onstage wearing a dashiki and a beehive wig. It was the best dress-up party I’d ever been invited to. Black Randy’s show was like a circus, and part of the performance was the assemblage of this crazy horde of musicians, singers, and dancers, all of whom contributed in some way to his reworking of James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” as well as funny and funky originals he wrote about drugs, prostitutes, and whatever else crossed his mind. He had one song about Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

  Randy was an acquired taste, both brilliant and self-destructive. Like Darby, he did heroin, which I didn’t like being around. Drugs, like the geographical divides that made for Hollywood punks, beach punks, and South Bay punks, created their own culture, look, and rituals. From what I experienced, there were two basic groups: those who did heroin and those who were into dropping acid and partying. The junkies were dark, violent, and scary. Those who preferred acid, like me, were more sociable, fun, and interested in a good time.

  And I had a good time. Once I was healthy again, I moved out of my parents’ house and went back to Hollywood. Without my own place, I relied on friends letting me crash on their couches or in most cases, their floors. I didn’t care where I slept as much as I did about getting into hot shows featuring the Plugz, the Deadbeats, and the Screamers. In July, Devo played at the Starwood, and the Ohio art school grads were so good they subsequently ended up being the house band at the Whisky.