Lips Unsealed
Page 27
For my actual birthday, I got myself a kick-ass suite at the Helmsley Palace in New York. In the morning, I chanted for a couple hours at the SGI center on Fifteenth Street. I acknowledged gratitude for my first fifty years. One might ask if I really felt gratitude for all the turmoil and problems I had experienced. Yes, I did feel gratitude—gratitude for all I had in spite of that trouble, gratitude for all I had learned, gratitude for all the love that was in my life in spite of me and because of me. It was a sense that transcended the conventional thought of aging as bad and something to be avoided at all costs and by all means; instead it made the years seem fortunate and worthwhile.
At night, I went out for a quiet dinner with some of the guys in my band and my friend Sandra Bernhard and her partner. I had a perfectly nice, laid-back, happy evening. Then I got back to my hotel room and a man from the front desk called. He said there was something for me from Carter.
“Carter?” I said.
“Carter,” he repeated.
“Well, send it up, please,” I said.
A moment later, a bellman delivered a small box to my room. I saw it and chuckled.
“Oh, Cartier,” I said, smiling.
The card was from Morgan and inside the box I found a beautiful pink gold bracelet with a delicate pink sapphire. I held it up and appreciated its simplicity. I was extremely touched and thought of the many ways that bracelet typified our twenty-three-year marriage. We love each other, fight, give each other long leashes, and look forward to being together again. He still makes me laugh like no one else. He’s annoying, but funny. I don’t want to hear what he has to say about me. A lot of people may not understand what we have, but we do—and it works. To this day, he’s my best friend and soul mate.
I put the bracelet on. It was even prettier on my wrist.
I wanted to thank Morgan, but I didn’t want to wake him up. I settled for leaving a message on his cell.
Satnam.
In the months that followed, I went back to France and enjoyed being home. I recorded some new music in London and Los Angeles. I appeared on the TV show Dancing with the Stars, which was kind of a lark. I had spoken to its producers a year earlier and forgotten about it. Then, the day before I was supposed to make another trip to India, they called and told me to get to Los Angeles immediately to start rehearsing, I was on the show.
So I went and had a good time for the few weeks I was there, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I didn’t like being judged, and I could tell the pressure I felt wasn’t good for my sobriety. I would have liked to have stayed on longer, of course, but I was also very relieved to leave the show. I rejuvenated by making good on my postponed trip to India. I spent the end of 2009 and early 2010 starring in the play Hairspray in London, and afterward I launched an online store offering bags, shawls, jewelry, oils, and other favorite items from my travels around the world, starting with India.
I stayed busy, but not busy without any purpose. I came to an understanding about my past. I let go of the things that had always brought me down, knowing that I had outgrown them. I appreciated the good times and the crazier times for what they were and how they had shaped me. Without them, I wouldn’t have ended up in such a better place. I didn’t worry about the future either. I thought about a time long ago when I had met Sammy Davis Jr. at a party. He had looked at me and said, “Baby, you are a vision of nowness.” As far as I’m concerned, nowness is a pretty good place to be.
I am still very much sober and grateful for each day. Once I stopped doing drugs and drinking, the real work began. As you have come to know, my journey to where I am today has been sad, tough, amazing, stupid, silly, and enlightening. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
I’m living proof you can teach old dogs new tricks. With the help of my program and loving, patient, understanding, and remarkable family and friends, I have truly changed. I have done something I never thought possible. I have become the person that I’ve always wanted to be and knew I could be, if only I could get through the bullshit.
I recently made the trek from my house in the South of France to Austria, one of the world’s most beautiful, inspiring drives. The sheer cliffs in the Dolomites always test my courage, but then each time I arrive at the fields and mountains in Austria I feel like I should start singing “The Sound of Music.” Anyway, after starting out, I pulled into a gas station in Italy and pinched myself as I got an espresso out of the machine. How amazing was it that I had figured out how to get around—not just these crazy directions from one country to the next, but in my life in general?
I finally appreciate my career. The Go-Go’s will always be one of the loves of my life, something that’s responsible for so much opportunity and so many memories that I will treasure forever. I’m proud of the music we made and the doors we opened for other girls with dreams of rocking as hard and successfully as the guys. I’m blown away by the many lives we have been able to touch. Music, like all art, is born of a time and spirit, but it lives on if it’s any good. I am honored knowing our music continues to be meaningful for so many people.
I wouldn’t have wanted to do it with anyone other than Jane, Charlotte, Gina, and Kathy. Although we’re grown-ups now, I’ll always refer to us as “the girls.” Sometimes we’re closer than at others, but we have that special bond from having grown up together. Some of my fondest memories, not just of the band but of my life, are when all of us hit the vintage stores together when we were on tour. We got to a town and within minutes were doing what we did almost as well as we played music—shop. I love them like sisters.
Before a show we played in 2009 in Las Vegas, I was walking down the hallway to the elevator, where all of us had agreed to meet. Before heading to the venue, and I stopped for some reason and thought about all the years we had played together, all the places we had been, all the memories we had accumulated, and all the people we had entertained, and I really, truly appreciated being a Go-Go.
I have no idea how many more shows we will play or whether we will put out more music. Some days I love being out in front of that band. Other days I ask myself why I’m still doing it. I know I don’t want to be doing it when I’m in my mid-fifties. I’d like to end it on a high note, with a little dignity. I hope along the way we have inspired other girls who want to play music. It can be done.
As for the future, I’ll likely continue to make albums on my own, at least as long as I find songs that I feel I can sing.
If not, I’m okay with that too. My work does not solely define me, as I had believed for many years. I finally realized that I’m so much more.
I am able to receive love and give love and even love myself. My relationships with my husband and son are better than ever. My one regret is all the hell I put them through. For many years I was too selfish to see that or care. Now that I’m present, all that has changed. I’m blessed to have them in my life.
I’m blessed to have my life—and that’s a wonderful way to feel.
I look forward to each day. Sometimes I regret that I didn’t get it sooner. I guess I’m just one of those people who had to figure it out the hard way.
But hey, look at me—a Valley girl who ran off to Hollywood, moved to the South of France, and found herself on the Ganges, in India. Who would have thought, back when I was working the photocopy machine with the crappy boss at the Hilton Hotel Corporation, that all this would happen?
Actually, I did.
A girl’s gotta dream….
acknowledgments
The following people have each, in some way, made a difference in my life, and I am so thankful.
Morgan, James, Pamela, Portland, Duke, Joanne, Butch, Hope, Mary, Joe, Josh, Sarah, Jane, Charlotte, Kathy, Gina, Ginger, Lorna, Miles Copeland, Pleasant Gehman, Rosemarie Patronette, Jenny Lens, Madness, Richard Gottehrer, the Police, Rodney Bingenheimer, Jack Pinson, Stevie Nicks, Rick Nowels, Irving Azoff, Richard Branson, Diane Keaton, Joe Kelly, Diane Duarte, Jeannine Braden, Michael Lloyd, Mike Curb, John Burnh
am, George Harrison, Brian Wilson, Danny Goldberg, Ann Sookhoo, Antonia Goodland-Clark, Heidi Cook, Lynne Easton, Jay Boberg, Michael Plen, Deepak Chopra, Jerry and Esther Hicks, Gurmukh Khalsa, Gurushabd, Mitch Clark, Mark Reynolds, Stuart Wilde, Amanda Eliasch, Johann Eliasch, Tony Denton, Bennie Edwards, Janyne Andrews, Dave and Anoushka Stewart, David Russell, Billy Brasfield, Paul Starr, Syd Curry, Connie Clarksville, Soka Gakkai, Joanna Povall, Charles Cartmell, Chirtian Pisano, June Whittaker Pisano, Bks Iyengar, Michelle Nadler, James Nisbet, Gavin De Becker, Rachel Lara, Lesley Blanche, H. H. Swami Chidanand Saraswatiji Maharaj, Simon Watson, Iggy Pop, Dan Rucks, Angie, Mardette Lynch, Lisa and Piero Giramonti, Bradford Cobb, Steve Jensen, Lorenza Marcais, May Fachelan, Tina Constable, Suzanne O’Neill, Penny Simon, Patty Berg, Annsley Rosner, Tricia Wygal, Linnea Knollmueller, Kyle Kolker, Emily Timberlake, Dan Strone, and Todd Gold.
about the author
BELINDA CARLISLE is known not only as the lead singer of the Go-Go’s, but also as one of the late eighties’ most glamorous adult-pop soloists. Since then, Belinda has released five more albums and continues to tour internationally, both with the Go-Go’s and as a solo artist. She divides her time between America and the south of France.
Copyright © 2010 by Belinda Carlisle
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carlisle, Belinda.
Lips unsealed: a memoir / Belinda Carlisle. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Carlisle, Belinda. 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.
ML420.C25557A3 2010
782.421666092–dc22
[B] 2009053737
eISBN: 978-0-307-46351-7
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