Lips Unsealed

by Belinda Carlisle

  “And if it doesn’t work out? What’s the worst that can happen?” he asked. “You move back. It’s not that big of a deal. You just start over.”

  In early January 1994, Morgan, Duke, and I traveled to Cabo San Lucas for a brief post-holiday vacation. On the beach and away from home, we were able to assess our lives with a new perspective. We talked about Deepak, and I underscored how both of us were feeling when I quoted Helen Keller: “Life is an adventure or it’s nothing.”

  Morgan agreed. We were still young, both of us in our mid-thirties, and yet it felt like we had been through so much separately and together. We kept asking each other, “What next?”

  I knew what I didn’t want. Earlier that summer, Morgan and I had attended a dinner celebrating William Morris chairman Norman Brokaw’s fiftieth anniversary at the agency (he had started in 1943 as the very first mailroom employee). On the beach at Cabo, I flashed back on that night and thought, Oh my God, is that my future? I told Morgan that I didn’t want that life. I didn’t care about status in Hollywood, a big house in Brentwood, membership at the right country club, or driving a Mercedes or a Range Rover.

  “That’s not what life is about,” I said. “That’s not my adventure.”

  “I feel the same way,” he said.

  So we sat on the beach and talked, and we agreed that it would be such a shame not to have an adventure, not to take a risk if we could afford it. We were young and healthy. We were hooked on the movies To Catch a Thief and Breathless, director Jean-Luc Godard’s influential French new wave film about a crook on the run in France. We kept watching them over and over, each time feeling the ache for our own adventure. More relevant, I read Calvin Tomkins’s enchanting book Living Well Is the Best Revenge, the almost unbelievable story of Gerald and Sara Murphy, an American couple who moved to the South of France in the 1920s and befriended Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and other great artists and writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald patterned Dick and Nicole Diver of Tender Is the Night after them.

  I had Morgan read the book and he adopted my South of France fantasy, too. The two of us, though bourgeois on the outside, thought like bohemians. I could see us chucking everything familiar like the Murphys. How exciting! Much more so than the predictable life I saw unfolding if we stayed where we were.

  “Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a life like that?” I said.

  “Let’s do it,” Morgan replied.

  My jaw nearly hit the ground. What? Morgan was serious. For the next few days, we sat on the beach with Duke and tried to figure out where to move. Australia was too far, we decided, and Mexico was too close. We mentioned a dozen spots, but none sounded right. The last place we brought up was the one that both of us knew was the only place we could possibly move—the South of France.

  It was obvious. We had spent a week talking, reading, watching movies, and fantasizing about it. Maybe we had purposely avoided it out of fear that the other one would say “Yeah, let’s do it,” which was what happened. As soon as we mentioned France, I thought, Okay, that’s it. I said something to that effect, too. And Morgan agreed.

  He then did something that to this day remains one of the most romantic, risky, and amazing things I have ever seen in my life: He went downstairs—there were no phones in the room—to the phone booth off the lobby and motioned for me to step inside while he called William Morris and gave his notice.

  I was in shock. So were our friends, who tracked us down at the hotel as word of Morgan’s resignation spread through the agency and then across town. “What do you mean you’re leaving?” they said, freaked out. “You can’t do that!” But we had done it—well, Morgan had. But I was ready to go, too. It was a movie-type moment, an unexpected plot twist in our lives. Most people fantasize about packing up and moving into a new life, but they don’t do it. We were taking the leap.

  Or so we said. Other than Morgan quitting his job, obviously a huge step, we didn’t make any specific plans or set a time line.

  We flew back from Mexico on Sunday, January 16, 1994. On Monday morning, I woke up just before four thirty A.M. I heard our Jack Russell terrier barking under the window. Annoyed, I got out of bed and put on my robe to let him out and see what had caught his attention. Suddenly, everything began to shake—the floor, the roof, the walls. It was violent, loud, and completely disorienting. My first instinct was to think, Oh my God, the house is exploding; a second later, I realized that it was an earthquake. It felt like the proverbial big one that I, like every other Southern California resident, had been warned would one day hit. Here it was—or so I thought.

  Morgan woke up and tried to pull me into bed. I shook him off and ran down the hallway to get Duke. My mother instinct took over. With adrenaline racing through me, I wanted to get my baby.

  The shaking from this quake, which turned out to have a magnitude of 6.7 and was centered in Northridge near where I grew up, seemed to last for a minute or two. Actually, it felt interminable. It turned out to be only twenty seconds. But those twenty seconds changed life across the southland. Some seventy-two people died as a result of the powerful upheaval, more than nine thousand were injured, and damage was eventually estimated at $20 billion.

  At first, we stood outside like everyone else, nervous, on edge, wondering about the state of our family, friends, and the city itself. It was still dark and eerily quiet. We saw occasional flashes of light in the distant sky where transformers were bursting with loud pops and blasts of white flame. After a little bit, we went back inside. Our power was out, but we listened to the news on the transistor radio we had in our emergency earthquake kit. We were shocked at reports of collapsed freeways and hospital patients being wheeled out of buildings and into the safety of outdoor parking lots.

  Like many in L.A., I freaked out at aftershocks, which continued throughout the day and for days afterward. When your house shakes and the ground rumbles, you don’t feel safe. Nothing does.

  Later that night, after things began to calm down and we had checked in with our loved ones, all of whom were okay, Morgan and I looked at each other with a sense of having already prepared for this moment on the beach in Cabo. He had quit his job. My career was happening only in Europe. We had agreed to restart our lives in the South of France. Our only outstanding question had been when—when would we go?

  The Northridge earthquake made that decision for us. It was like a push out the door. We said to each other, “Okay, we’re out of here.”

  twenty

  LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS

  THE EARTHQUAKE HIT on a Monday. We left on Friday. We would have gone sooner except that we had to get a visa for our Filipina nanny.

  Once in the South of France, we checked into the small La Colombe d’Or Hotel in Saint Paul de Vence, Provence. It was a dreamy place to stay as we set about looking for a house, like a French fantasy. Situated up in the hills with picture-book views, the hotel’s stone walls dated back to the 1600s. There were only twenty-six guest rooms. The dining room boasted artwork by Picasso, Klee, Calder, and Dufy, all of whom had stopped at this chic outpost early in their careers when they had little or no money and traded paintings for room and board.

  After a couple weeks, we found a house in Cap d’Antibes and returned to Los Angeles to pack our belongings, take care of loose ends, and put our house up for sale. Financially, we couldn’t have picked a worse time for this dramatic change, especially selling our house. The real estate market had bottomed out, and we had poured a ton of money into renovations over the years. My business manager warned me we were never going to recoup our investment. His voice was among the loudest in the chorus of our friends and associates who said, “Just stay. Take your time. There’s no need to rush.”

  Morgan and I didn’t care. We wanted to get out of there. We were following our instincts. We weren’t concerned about conventional wisdom. If the house didn’t sell, we’d leave it empty and figure out what to do with it later, which was what happened.

  In the meantime, before leaving
, I made an appointment with my hairdresser Art Luna and asked him to cut off my long, red hair.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Cut it,” I said, thinking of everything else I was cutting, too. “I want it an inch long.”

  In March, we returned to France. With our nanny in tow, we piled into a black stretch limo with about eight duffel bags bursting at the seams and set out for the airport. Everything else we had was boxed up, shipped by boat, and expected to arrive six months later. We returned to Le Colombe d’Or, where Duke ran up and down the halls and Morgan and I found ourselves having afternoon cocktails and playing boules with actor Yves Montand.

  A few weeks later, our house was ready. We had rented a beautiful pink villa in Cap d’Antibes. It had a guesthouse in back and a large, rolling lawn. The famous Hotel du Cap was down the street. It could not have been more gorgeous or glamorous. Every day I expected to see Noël Coward or Zelda Fitzgerald cross the lawn on their way into the house. I couldn’t believe that we lived there.

  A month later, my sister Hope brought our menagerie of dogs from Los Angeles. I had a good laugh seeing her with all those doggie crates at the Nice airport. It wasn’t the way she had imagined arriving in the South of France. I loved seeing my pets again, though the reunion was frustratingly brief and then they were quarantined for a month. Since our furniture wasn’t scheduled to arrive for four more months, we sat in lawn chairs and used boxes as tables. The humor of roughing it in a beautiful home wore thin pretty quickly.

  The reality of life there was a trying adjustment. Everything closed for three hours each afternoon, including the local supermarket. The French lessons I had taken were no use, and no one in the area spoke English—or if they did, they didn’t want to speak it around me. The French people can be nice and helpful, but back then I found them surly and difficult. Shopkeepers scoffed at my bad French. We had housekeepers who didn’t want to work. Then four of our six dogs died suddenly from various causes—poisoning, old age, hit by a car, and a dog fight.

  I finally had a meltdown one day when I couldn’t figure out how to use the washing machine and couldn’t find anyone to help. I pulled at my hair, then covered my eyes as if to wish myself away, and then slowly crumbled to the ground and cried.

  Ugh. I figured we had made a terrible mistake. We were supposed to be living our fantasy. But this was crazy.

  Homesick, we returned to Los Angeles and stayed with Morgan’s mother for several weeks. We celebrated Duke’s second birthday there. I saw friends and family, went to a few meetings, and came to my senses. I didn’t need to sever all ties to life in L.A. I didn’t need to go to such an extreme. I realized that life abroad could be more manageable if I knew I could return to L.A. every so often for business or a fix of friends.

  I had reason to come back. In the fall, IRS was planning to release a special collection of old Go-Go’s material. Though Miles had the right to put out a boxed set of our material, the idea of him gathering our B-sides, rarities, and outtakes, along with the hits, without our input, upset all of us girls. Miles may have owned the songs legally, but they were our lives. We couldn’t just let him open the vaults without being there. Or could we?

  We talked about our options. As we saw it, we had three—fight him and lose, ignore him, or get involved and try to add some new luster to the old gems. We chose the last, and the end result was that we decided to write and record some new songs and make our reunion permanent.

  The idea of getting back together, as far-fetched as it might have sounded a couple years earlier, felt strangely right. Timing is everything. The five of us were having fun together. Why not?

  Personally, I wanted to have a reason to return to Los Angeles. When I was there, as became my routine starting that summer, I slipped back into party mode without Morgan knowing, and without the day-to-day responsibility or guilt of being a mom. I thought of it as a vacation from my life. Without hurting the two people I loved, I could be naughty—and I was.

  Work was good. To prepare for Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s, I listened to tons of old tapes and soaked up the memories of an era that bright, fun, and full of youthful enthusiasm. I knew not everything had been golden, but there was a spark and spirit on those tapes that was magic and couldn’t ever be duplicated. In the studio, Jane and Charlotte were in reflective moods; Charlotte was pregnant and looked wonderful, Jane was mellow and mature.

  I was the only one who didn’t appear to have grown up and learned the requisite lessons from past mistakes. Instead I was still making the same old mistakes. Charlotte may have had my behavior in mind one day in the studio when she and Jane sat back and reflected on the disappointments of our second and third albums, saying each of us had been responsible in some way for various problems.

  I knew that I hadn’t been much of a presence on those albums because I was partying too much, and in retrospect I wished I had been there to help write and offer my opinions. I said as much to Jane and Charlotte without admitting that I had slipped into the same pattern of behavior a decade later. I couldn’t face the truth. It would have been too painful.

  I had a hard enough time leaving home. I flew to Los Angeles so often that Duke said, “Mama lives at the airport.” I cried when I heard him say that. I felt incredible guilt for the way I treated my family, and even more shame for the secrets I kept from them. And yet it didn’t stop me.

  In November, I blocked out the sadness in lieu of celebrating the release of the 36-song, two-CD boxed set and a new Go-Go’s tour, albeit a relatively short one. Since Charlotte was close to her due date, we enlisted Vicki Peterson from the Bangles to substitute on lead guitar, and she did a fantastic job. She fit right in, starting with gigs at the Coach House and the Troubadour.

  Music was very different in the mid-nineties, with flannel-shirt-wearing rockers popularizing a grungy rock that spoke to kids the way punk had once been our salvation. However, the Los Angeles Times still found merit in our live shows and said the Go-Go’s “made a persuasive, celebratory case for their curious mix of punky drive and bittersweet pop confection.”

  By the time we finished a six-night stint at Las Vegas’s MGM Grand hotel and played New York’s Academy Theater, I’m sure my partying left Vicki surprised and shocked. I was pretty messed up when we did two weeks of Christmas-themed acoustic dates, and I slipped even further when we traveled to the UK for dates in February. In London, I went on an all-night coke binge prior to our appearance on the iconic morning show The Big Breakfast, and I showed up at the studio sweating and unable to string together two sentences.

  Embarrassed and frightened, I broke down afterward to Kathy and Charlotte and for the first time confessed that I had a problem. They were sympathetic and consoling, but they were also honest. They said they couldn’t do anything to help me until I was ready to help myself.

  “Are you ready to help yourself?” Kathy asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Then you aren’t ready,” she said.

  What was it about being on the road that made the five of us have such trouble getting along? I didn’t know. But we had once again broken down into bitter factions by the time we played the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London at the end of February. We were barely able to get onstage together for the two nights. Drugs were usually the biggest problem, plus egos, and this time there were also squabbles about royalties. A critic noted that onstage I was “detached from the others, swearing and bitching.” Lovely, right? It was a perfect storm of problems, and we left England saying the Go-Go’s were done forever.

  Jane was furious with everyone—and rightfully so. She felt we were a great band, with new songs that were excellent and not being given their due because of problems that were a decade old, and thus boring and pathetic. She flat out said we were blowing a big opportunity.

  She put us on notice, saying that this time she wasn’t the only one walking away from the band. The rest of us were screwing up. She may have looked direct
ly at me when she said that. I didn’t know for sure.

  Nor did I care. The band’s reunion had been an excuse for me to run away from home and indulge my addiction without sneaking around, but following the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire debacle I gave up and went home, telling myself that I was going resume normal life, whatever that was. But how normal was life when I found myself at a party talking to Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, who suggested we get together?

  Deep down I was still a Valley girl. I had a hard time reconciling that anyone connected with the British royal family wanted to socialize with me, but Fergie and I got together. She was renting a house in the South of France. Her marriage to Prince Andrew was over in every way other than an official divorce, but that was coming. In the meantime, from what I could see, she was really struggling to make a life for herself. In a way, I understood.

  We had lunch several times, and Fergie impressed me as a nice, funny woman who seemed lonely. We were a pair. She was lonely, and I was lost, and there we were, reaching out to each other, though she did much more reaching than me. I was surprised, in fact, by how much she opened up to me, a relative stranger in her life, but it revealed how desperate she was for someone to talk to about Andrew and the press, her life as a royal, and various other intimacies she shared about the Queen Mother, Prince Charles, and even Princess Diana. Basically, I was amazed by what and how much she told me.

  As I said, she barely knew me. If she was telling me that stuff, she must not have had anyone else in whom she could safely confide. I knew what that was like, to keep secrets and not feel like you could talk to anyone.

  One day I invited Fergie to go to the beach with Morgan and me, which she thought would be great fun. I remember her lighting up at the thought of a relaxing day on the water. I had the same thought. As she had to do, she sent her secret service to scout the area and somehow word leaked, as seemed to always happen around her. When we got to the beach the next day, the water was full of paparazzi in motorboats. We went water-skiing and had a blast. However, as we walked back to the beach from the boat, Fergie shook her head at the way we were grouped. She stopped and told Morgan to move into the front and me to stand closer to her.