“We can’t live like this,” he said. “It’s like we’re back to when we first started out.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said, sobbing, ashamed, and praying silently that the next words out of his mouth weren’t going to be about a divorce.
They weren’t. We decided to move back to France, where our adventure had begun, and out of the blue we ran into Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics, an old friend of mine, who suggested we use his house in Provence. We weren’t sure. He had a rambling villa in the hills between Cannes and St. Tropez. It was very rock star–like, on six gorgeous acres overlooking the Mediterranean with a guesthouse, chicken coops, and even a track for quad racing.
We looked at it and loved it. After making sure we could get our son into the international school there, we accepted Dave’s offer. Without us realizing it then, the house may have saved our marriage. It was so large and rambling that it afforded Morgan and me the ability to live in our own wings. If not for that space, we might have split up. But he moved into his half of the house and I moved into mine, and we lived distinctly separate lives.
It was an odd arrangement, but we had never been a conventional couple. He spent a large amount of time in Amsterdam, where he was helping to launch Europe’s first New Age cable TV network, the Innergy channel, and I had my occasional meetings in London and Los Angeles, and we went through a period where we rarely knew what the other was doing. However, when we were home at the same time, we had dinner together with Duke and made sure he knew that despite our problems, he had two parents who loved him and were always there for him.
I liked this part of the South of France much better than Cap d’Antibes. But it wasn’t without its drawbacks and quirks. For starters, we were half an hour from the nearest grocery store, so I tended to stockpile food and perhaps went a little overboard in that area when I got swept up in some Y2K conspiracy madness. We were also in the middle of nowhere, and old, traditional, ways still applied.
One time, soon after we had moved in, Morgan and I were on our way into town to get supplies, and as we headed out, he had to suddenly jam on the brakes. A band of Gypsies had set up their camp in front of our driveway. They were real Gypsies with wagons full of supplies, horses, chickens, and tents they had pitched at the edge of our property. Several women were doing laundry at the end of our driveway.
“What do I do?” Morgan asked. “Honk? Turn around?”
We turned around and waited a couple of days until they moved. There wasn’t much we could do. There were local laws allowing Gypsies to camp wherever they wanted. Our house was off an old Roman road and there were certain ancient ways that were left in place and simply understood as they way things had always been.
It was a small price to pay for living in such an impossibly beautiful place. I knew I could never go back to living in a city full-time.
My friend Amanda was also going through a hard time with her husband, and one day she called full of excitement. She had just returned from Marrakech, where she had a villa, and where, she said, she had met a man who was like a guide to various shamans and practitioners of magic and voodoo. She said he had helped members of Led Zeppelin find the right sorts of mystics in Morocco. He could provide anything, she said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Our husbands,” she said. “He can help us find someone who can fix our marriages.”
“Amanda, you’re nuts.”
“Come with me to my villa,” she said. “We’ll go for a few days. Both of us are going through some things. We’ll find someone who can help.
“I sighed. “All right.”
I met Amanda at her home in Medina. We went out on the town, which was like a nonstop party, with streets filled with vendors and snake charmers and people dancing and singing. I heard music coming from every direction. At night, it was surreal. I had the feeling anything could happen. It was like living on the edge of a matchstick.
While out on the town, we met up with the man who had offered to introduce Amanda to shamans and sorcerers. He took us to a small house and led us inside. There an old man who I guessed was in his eighties came out and the two of them spoke in Arabic. I noticed the walls were filled with photographs of the old man with royal families from all over the Middle East. I had no idea what the two men said to each other, but our guide finally turned to me with a satisfied smile on his face.
“I told him that you are having love problems,” he said. “He’s going to fix you.”
As the old man led me into another room, Amanda went outside again to walk around until it was her turn. Before the creaky front door slammed shut, I heard the old man call out to me to pay attention. He laid me down on a table and started to burn things around me. I tried to look around the room to see what he was doing, but I couldn’t move. A fly buzzed right over my face, and I was unable to shoo it away. He had put me in a trance.
When he saw I was frozen, he stood over me, touching different points on my body, checking to see if I was really powerless. Suddenly, as I was looking into his dark eyes, wondering what he was doing to me, he reached up under my skirt and took my underwear off. I thought he was going to rape me. I saw he was aroused. Just then, I heard Amanda at the door, asking, “Darling, are you in there?”
Startled, the old man immediately stepped back from the table. I was able to call out, “Yes, I’m here. Come back here—into the room!” All of a sudden I was able to move. As I sat up, the guy handed me my underwear. Neither of us said anything. The sickest part was that before Amanda and I left, he asked for my phone number, and even though part of my brain said “No, don’t do it,” I still gave it to him. As I told Amanda outside, I couldn’t help myself. He had put some sort of spell on me and I felt like I was in love with him.
At any rate, Amanda and I left with a bunch of potions and instructions on how to use them, which we took back home and tried to put into practice. The whole thing was ridiculous.
However, I did end up with an idea for a new solo album, a pop opera that I called Once Upon a Time. It was a girl-meets-boy story modeled after my relationship with Morgan. In it, the main character fell in love and got married, believing that life was a fairy tale. Then she discovered there was no such thing as a fairy tale.
Charlotte helped write the songs and we worked up some excellent ideas until we hit a roadblock at the point where the main character was desperately trying to figure out a way to spare her husband from her own misery. As in real life, I didn’t know where to go with the story beyond the fact that I knew the main character wasn’t going to leave her marriage. She needed to fix herself.
In both cases, the question was, how?
The work on both the opera and myself was put on hold when the Go-Go’s finally set out on the mini summer tour that Miles had organized. We kicked off the road show July 1 with a surprise warm-up at the Viper Room, the Sunset Strip club infamous as Johnny Depp’s L.A. hangout and the site where actor River Phoenix had died of a drug overdose in 1993. Though it was the band’s first time together in years, our show was a party-hearty frolic that showcased a reborn attitude alongside old hits.
“Why are we back together?” I asked the crowd, which included Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Exene Cervenka, and L7’s Donita Sparks, as we segued into “Cool Jerk.” “We’re still foxy, but we might need a few nips and tucks before we get too old.”
We had decided to have fun this time ’round—and we did. At one point, Jane even lifted her white T-shirt and flashed her boobs. The crowd went wild, and quite a few flashed her back. We were a bunch of forty-year-olds having a girlfest. “Who says women don’t age as gracefully as men?” said one reviewer, who added we were foxier and sounded better than in our heyday.
Our tour took us to Seattle, San Francisco, and through a handful of other Western states. I appreciated the girls more than at any other time since the band’s earliest days. Gina was no-bullshit and one of the funniest people I had ever known.
Jane was a wonderful eccentric whose creativity bubbled out nonstop and made life infinitely more fun and interesting. Charlotte, aside from being a great writer, was a true Libra. She was able to see both sides of an issue and supply the calm, mature, levelheaded voice the rest of us often lacked. Kathy, a superior musician, was the band’s most honest-to-goodness rock and roller.
As for me, I could see why I gave the others fits. In true lead singer form, I just wanted to have a good time. At home or on the road, I didn’t want to be accountable to anything and the girls let me be, as they always had. While they had busted their butts, I had flitted from party to party, traveled the world, rented stupid cars, bought a racehorse, and done all sorts of dumb things—and still did.
At each stop on the tour, we were asked if we intended to make this reunion permanent. Early on, we didn’t know the answer. If we felt good about the shows and ourselves, we didn’t see any reason why we wouldn’t continue. By the end of the tour, we were already planning a longer, more extensive tour for the following summer and a new album, as well as several projects with VH1, including our own Behind the Music episode.
“We’ll tell everything,” Jane said to reporters. “It’ll be sassy and sordid. I don’t care if they know everything.”
All of us shared that attitude as we were questioned in front of cameras separately and together. During my interview, I admitted to having had a $300-a-day coke habit. But I explained that was in the past. I was now married and a mother and living a serene if not downright dreamy life in the South of France, and being in my forties made me more content with myself and into searching for a more spiritual connection. If only such BS had been true.
On-screen, you could see the real story. I looked like shit in that Behind the Music episode. Everything I was doing to myself in private, all the things I didn’t admit—the drinking, the pills, the coke, and the late nights—showed up on camera. When we regrouped in October for QVC’s breast cancer benefit, I was out of control. I got extremely drunk before the show, which was broadcast live. After the second song, I turned to Gina and asked, “How much more do we have?”
As she told me later, her parents watched in disbelief at home in Baltimore. They were mortified for her when I picked up the set list and said, “I hate this fucking song.” Like Gina’s parents, viewers heard everything. Apparently I was bleeped constantly. Our manager, Ged Malone—Jane’s husband at the time—wouldn’t speak to me afterward. I didn’t blame him.
I wouldn’t have spoken to me either.
I dismissed well-intentioned suggestions that I take time off to rest and recover from the road—in other words, dry out. I spent November and December opening for Cher in the UK. At the end of January 2000, I performed at a gay-rights festival in London. Over the next few months, I kept in touch with the girls as they wrote new material. I also worked with Charlotte intermittently on our pop opera.
At home, I went through periods where I tried to be a better person than I was when I was in Los Angeles or on the road. I went through a stint where I enjoyed getting up and walking in my lavender slip like a 1950s movie star out to the chicken coop and getting fresh eggs for breakfast. I took Duke on mini-vacations, just the two of us. As the weather warmed, I also spent a lot of time lying beside the pool, drinking wine, and floating through the day with a mild buzz.
Frequently, I thought about Morgan and Duke with considerable guilt about my inattentiveness. If there was any light in my life, as I well know, it came from them. I was fortunate to have them. When the record deals ended and the crowds went home, they were still there, loving me. Why?
That’s what I wanted to know.
Why did they put up with me when I could barely stand myself?
I didn’t know how to do any better for them. The Go-Go’s weren’t your typical girl rockers for a reason. Similarly, I was not your typical stay-at-home wife or mother. When I thought about it, I had been running away from home since I was a teenager. At eighteen, I left permanently, and I had been on the move ever since. Those Gypsies at the end of our driveway had nothing on me.
I sometimes thought of the Gypsies with an envious fascination. They hitched their trailers to horses, threw their belongings in a wagon, and moved. I saw in them a sense of freedom from the type of responsibility that I feared. They had wild eyes and untamed spirits. They were mystical and taboo, part of a world I was drawn to. I had created my own complex, taboo world, too. One day I would be driving to a doctor’s appointment on the ancient Roman road that ran down our mountain and thinking about the people who had followed this same path through the centuries. I’d have this weird sense like the one I’d experienced on my mushroom trip of being part of the unfolding of an immense story, like I was where I was supposed to be, on an adventure. Then I would zip back to Los Angeles, get caught up in the Hollywood scene, and end up feeling lost and disconnected, like a grain of sand on the beach.
At nearly forty-two, I should have been more together. Sadly, I wasn’t.
In July 2000, we supported the release of the new Behind the Music: Go-Go’s Collection with a monthlong tour. We coheadlined with the B-52’s, who were as sensational offstage as they were on. We had fun with them every night. It was that kind of tour: special. Everything clicked for us, and it showed. “The Go-Go’s played with the vigor of a hungry young band,” said the review after our show in New Jersey. “Adept as ever,” said the Boston Herald.
I liked that one reviewer along the way noted how we fell perfectly into sync when we played “How Much More” and chanted, “How much more can I take before I go crazy, oh yeah!” That line could have been a mantra for the band as well as all of us individually, especially me. Apparently we could take a lot. Even the three new songs (“Apology,” “Kissing Asphalt,” and “Superslide”) we debuted from those Jane, Charlotte, and Kathy had finished for the next album also went over well.
Gina was emphatic when she declared ours wasn’t “a reunion. We’re back.” Given the hot acts were Christina Aguilera and *NSYNC, I wondered. But I found myself rooting for us as we went into the studio that fall and recorded our first studio album in seventeen years, God Bless the Go-Go’s. The good vibes from the tour carried over into the creative process and we actually had a fun time.
If all was good on that front, Morgan and I had reached a crossroads. A few months earlier we had moved from Dave Stewart’s rock star–sized villa into a more normal home of our own on the other side of the mountain. We knew our marriage still wasn’t firing on all cylinders, but we took the place anyway and promised to spend more time together. The house wasn’t my taste, but it was filled with light and felt cheerful and cozy, perfect for a fresh start.
For Valentine’s Day, we went to a favorite little hotel of ours in Florence. It was only a five-hour drive from our house. Morgan had booked a tee time at the nearby golf course, and I was content to be pampered at the spa. On an intimate note, we had never lost interest in the things that attracted us to each other. Our problems related to the inescapable fact that a relationship requires two people making an effort to be together, and I wasn’t always present.
But this getaway started out nicely until Morgan came back from the golf course looking concerned. He said he had been looking out the window in the clubhouse when a black bird had tapped on the glass right in front of him. He had tried to shoo it off, but it wouldn’t go away.
“It freaked me out,” he said with a look in his eyes that telegraphed the reasons he felt that way.
“I understand,” I said. “But you can’t freak out every time you see a black bird. It could just be a coincidence. Don’t even think about it.”
Early the next morning we received a call from Los Angeles. Morgan’s sister, Porty, had suffered a stroke during a medical procedure and gone into a coma. She had recently struggled with health issues. But only a few months earlier, she had visited us in France. It was something of a triumphant visit, too. Earlier, she and Morgan had learned that their father
’s second wife had kept his ashes in a safety deposit box, never having buried him. After their stepmother died in 1994, Morgan and Porty entered into a legal battle with her estate. Finally, they obtained the ashes and Porty had come over to help bury them next to Charlie Chaplin’s grave in Vevey. It was all true to the family’s unorthodoxy.
Porty’s husband told Morgan that he needed to get to Beverly Hills right away. Morgan was justifiably shaken. His sister was all the family he had left. As we drove back to France, Morgan opened his heart to me and talked about how we needed to get our act together. Along with Duke, I was his family, and as he made so very clear to me on that drive, his family was the most precious thing in the world to him.
He asked me if I understood.
With tears streaming down my face, I nodded yes.
“I want to keep it together,” he said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said. “And I want to always be together, too.”
Whether I could get myself together … well, that was another matter. As much as I wanted to, as much as I promised to try, I didn’t know if I could.
twenty-four
MISS AUGUST
WHEN THE GO-GO’S hit Las Vegas for a couple of corporate dates in mid-January 2001, I made a vow to stay healthy for the tour. I wasn’t telling many people why I had cut back on my drinking and made a point of hitting the gym. As they would see soon enough, I had posed for a Playboy magazine pictorial scheduled for later in the year. In the process, I had gotten into pretty good shape. I couldn’t remember starting a tour feeling this good. It was better than being hungover.
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