by Ann Wilson
Our first show was at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, and it didn’t even sell out. The rest of the tour fared better, but since Nancy and I were paying the crew, and the rest of the band, we lost money on the tour. It was worth it, though, since it helped things shift for both of us. I told one reporter I felt like we were “refugees” from Heart.
That next spring, my own family took a surprising turn. A friend called up to say that a Seattle girl she knew was pregnant and was looking for an adoptive mother. Was I interested?
It took me two seconds to say yes. The birth mother was once again a young sixteen-year-old, and I took her to her doctor’s appointments. Marie was seven, and overjoyed she was going to have a little sister. But the baby sister Marie wanted ended up being a baby brother. I named him John Dustin Wilson, after my dad, and the Hannah Dustin lineage. We called him Dustin.
As soon as both my children were old enough to understand, I told them they were adopted. When Marie was little, she created her own legend around it. “You went shopping for me in Heaven at the Mommy Store,” she would tell me. “And you picked me, and we were together.” Dustin was quizzical as he grew older, and he wanted to know if he was part of our family tree. “You were grafted onto our family tree,” I told him. “Now you are a true Wilson.” I put both of them into progressive schools where they were taught that families come in all forms, and that being adopted was a special distinction.
I never shied away from talking about adopting in the press, but I was annoyed when kids were described as my “adoptive children,” as if they weren’t really mine. That language made adoption sound like less of a bond. There were many options in the Mommy Store. I just felt blessed the store had opened for me.
In the summer of 1998, I toured again without Nancy. It was mostly the same band, but this time we were billed as “Heart Featuring Ann Wilson.” We did three-dozen dates, playing everywhere from the House of Blues to the Louisville Motor Speedway.
Marie and Dustin both were on my tour bus. Drummer Ben Smith had just become a father, and his wife and newborn were on the bus with us, too. I brought Pat, the nanny from Trinidad, again, and she tried to corral the children, who at times outnumbered the adults. One of the babies was usually crying, and there was always someone moving around. We might as well have had chickens and goats in the aisles.
We sold more tickets billed as Heart, but Nancy’s absence was mentioned constantly. “Where’s Nancy?” was asked so frequently, I considered making up a sign. We eventually had Nancy record a greeting that we played before each show. Few reviews of the tour failed to mention that my sister was missing. And with Nancy gone, there was increased attention to how I looked on stage, how old I was, and how much I weighed. Roger Catlin’s preview in the Hartford Courant was meaner than most, but not atypical:
“I know what you’re thinking: She ate the other one. No, no, no. That’s rude. Svelte sister and guitarist Nancy Wilson is taking a break from the summer Heart tour so she can work on starting a family. So it’s up to singing sister Ann Wilson to front the same band.”
This would never be written about a man, but it was the kind of meanness critics thought was clever when applied to me.
The prior year, the Lovemongers had played a one-off acoustic benefit, and after the show my old nemesis Patrick MacDonald of the Seattle Times came up to me. “We just did this benefit to raise money for Puget Sound,” I told him, “and you’ll probably now filet me in your paper about how much I weigh.”
“Maybe I will,” he said coyly.
I then did something that was so unlike me that Nancy’s eyes about popped out of her head: I punched MacDonald on the arm. It was a real punch, and he flinched. “It hurts my mom’s feelings,” I said as I slugged him. Patrick MacDonald ran away. He wasn’t afraid to criticize my weight in his newspaper, but he was afraid of a girl singer. In his review of that concert, he didn’t mention the incident, but he did give us one of the first positive notices for us he’d had in years.
It was the only time in my adult life I ever punched a man. It, too, felt like a blow against the empire.
NANCY
In February 1999, my Live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop album came out. I did a short tour to promote it, including a show at Seattle’s Crocodile Café. It felt so odd to be playing solo in my hometown. Ann had taken a job singing with Teatro Zinanni that season as a nightclub singer. It was a musical theater production, and she got to sing every night and still get home to her kids. It had been strange when I watched Ann’s band onstage in Los Angeles, but it was even more bizarre to be playing at a Seattle club on the same night my sister was doing her gig across town.
When I wasn’t touring, I was working with Cameron on Almost Famous. I loved every one of Cameron’s movies, but Almost Famous is my favorite because it told both our stories in a way—he being the youngest journalist in the rock world, and me being the youngest member of a band. Kate Hudson and I became friends during the shoot, and we would sneak off set for a cigarette together. She was a really square girl, and was always grilling me for stories on wild rock guys, or drugs and parties. I didn’t have much to offer, but I think she wanted to absorb what she imagined was my wildness for her role as Penny Lane. I told her she reminded me of the silent film actress Clara Bow, so Kate got a dog, and named it Clara Bow.
Earlier that year, Cameron and I had made the decision to find a surrogate to carry the child that I couldn’t have. It was still a cutting-edge procedure, and we tried a few options, first using my eggs. That failed. After a decade of hormone treatments, and fertility injections, it ended up that another woman would have to provide the egg for my child, and Cameron and I would only have children together through the alchemy of modern science. There was terrible grief in that, but also wonder, and acceptance, mystery, and even awe when I thought of the magic of it all. And I felt immense gratitude that there was another option available to us, because there isn’t for many.
I remember when I first told Ann that this was the only option we were left with, after everything else had failed. “I’m so proud of you,” Ann said. “You are able to find acceptance because you went to the end. You tried everything. You had to jump through hoops that few other parents have had to. You left no stone unturned, and once you did all that, it became easier to accept what once had seemed unacceptable.”
My big sister was right. I always follow everything to the end. I had learned an awful lot about fertility from the best doctors in nation, and I had learned that I couldn’t carry children in my own belly. It had made me want to go back to college to study microbiology.
We discovered that our surrogate was carrying twin boys. Now we’d have an instant and large family. I had struggled for so long wanting just one child, and now two were due. To me those were the same souls of the children that I had once carried, but that I had temporarily lost. Now they were finally coming to me. Those were the most wanted children in any family. They were mine.
My boys arrived in January 2000, two days early. The entire Wilson clan flew immediately from Seattle and gathered around the Sacramento hospital where they were born. Ann, Lynn, Kelly Curtis, and many other friends all came to the hospital and got there just after the boys had arrived. The only one who didn’t leave immediately was Cameron. We were in Los Angeles, where he was working on a script. The car was packed and everything was ready, but when I told him the boys were coming he delayed leaving. So I drove off to Sacramento without him. By the time our sons were born they had met everyone but their father. It was a great day of celebration and healing, so I was quick to forgive him for being late.
We decided to name them Curtis Wilson Crowe and Billy James Crowe. Curtis came from Kelly Curtis, my old friend, Cameron’s friend, and Pearl Jam’s manager. Kelly also was appointed the godfather of the boys. Billy came from two places: First he was named for William Miller, the character in Almost Famous, who is a loosely drawn version of Cameron himself. But William immediately, and forever
after, was called “Billy” after the director Billy Wilder.
When we told Billy Wilder that we named one of the twins after him, he asked us what they each were like. “One is very serious, and the other is a comedian,” I said.
“Which one did you name after me?” he asked.
“The comedian.”
Billy Wilder comically pretended to be hurt.
Though they are fraternal twins, the boys are so different, there was comedy from the moment they were born. The way they negotiate and compete has always been funny. Curtis is one minute older. He has never let Billy forget that fact, and he also insists that he is one minute taller, when in fact Billy has a slight height advantage.
I had wanted children for so long, but growing up in a house with two sisters, I had no idea what boy energy was like, and particularly twin boy energy. Not long after the boys were born, we gave them the nickname “the Pilkers.” I took the name from a favorite Roz Chast cartoon titled “Parallel Universes.” It showed a normal mom baking cookies in one panel, and then an alien mom baking “Pilkers” in another. As a mom, I sometimes felt a bit like an alien.
Since my husband was a filmmaker, the Pilkers had elaborate home movies from babyhood. Our home movies, though, occasionally included cameos by Orlando Bloom, Kristen Dunst, and Billy Wilder. But other than the guest stars, they captured typical scenes of the Pilkers during holidays, first steps, and eventually, their first day of school. The school they attended required them to wear uniforms, so their first school day video captured their tiny jackets and ties. We set that short film to the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”
From a very young age, the twins were a club unto themselves. Even Cameron found himself amazed at the bond they formed. “I find myself wanting to be cool enough to hang with them,” he said in the voiceover to one of our videos. “It’s the same cycle as high school, but you find yourself cast out by your own children.” Cameron took them to his movie sets. The big trucks on the studio lot, rather than A-list movie stars, fascinated them.
They turned five the year Cameron’s Elizabethtown came out, and we made a video of them talking about the film. “What’s the name of Daddy’s new movie?” we asked.
“Bang Bang, Boom Boom,” Curtis said.
In that footage, Cameron asked Billy if he was into “the kind of movies that Daddy and Mommy work on, soulful, romantic movies.” Billy’s response: a yawn. We knew they were true boys, though, when they watched “Spiderman II,” and their eyes got wide when they saw Spiderman kissing Kristen Dunst, whom they knew from the Elizabethtown set.
They don’t even call each other by their names when they need to signal each other. Instead they scream out, “My brother.”
Around the time the Pilkers turned ten, we decided to tell them the unusual story of how they came into this world. I didn’t want them to hear it from anyone else. They were starting to ask about sex and conception around that age. To share the story of their birth with them, I made my own children’s book complete with photos of me from the decade before they were born, sometimes pregnant for a moment, but also with photos of them in the hospital when they arrived. I titled it “When You Were Born.”
I read it with them. “I took a lot of pills, and shots, at the hospital to try to have you, and they were dangerous, but we so wanted you,” I told them. “We wanted you so much, we had to use modern science, and because of modern science, and God, and magic, and our wanting you, you came along.”
My book fascinated them. They looked it again, and again. A few months later though, on Easter, they came to me with a burning question: “Does this mean that you are our mom, or not our mom?” they asked.
“Yes, I’m your mom. Science, or DNA doesn’t matter. A mother’s love is stronger than any of that. And my love for you is stronger than any force in this world.”
“You are the babies I had always been trying to have. You are the souls I had been calling. It took me years of calling to get an answer from you, but finally I called, and you heard my voice, and you came to me.”
“I am your mom. You are my sons. That is forever.”
Two weeks after the boys were born, I took them to Seattle to meet my parents. Dotes got to hold the boys, and we took pictures of them with him, and my mom.
And then, three weeks after that, our dad died at seventy-seven years of age.
Dotes had been in poor health for sometime, and the complications from his stroke twenty-two years before had been great. He often got pneumonia, and there were a half dozen times when the doctors had told us he might not make it. On several occasions, Lynn, Ann, and I had hurried to the hospital, and bid him good-bye for what we always thought was the final time. We’d sing to him, kiss him on his head, and leave with heavy hearts. But Dotes always seemed to bounce back.
He had been declared dead in two wars, had survived a stroke, years in a wheelchair, and it seemed for a while that nothing could take down our old Marine. It reminded me of the scene in Little Big Man where the old Indian thinks he’s dying, and lies down, but jumps back up, and says, “I think I’ll pick another day.” I think Dotes wanted to hold out just long enough for all his daughters to have their families. Lynn, Ann, and I now had two children apiece, and once our entire clan was there, Dotes felt it was time.
Dustin, Billy, and Curtis had all arrived. The boys marched in. The Major marched out.
23
Send Up a Flare
Dotes leaves with a twenty-one-gun salute. A band leader
becomes a Band-ster. Carrie Underwood is left alone.
And a windmill goes flying skyward. . . .
ANN WILSON
After our dad’s death, the newspaper did a big story on his big life. They ran a photo of Dotes when he was a big strong Marine at Camp Pendleton, standing at attention, with a little boy asking him, “Where’s my dad?” It was perfect. It showed our dad as he had always been, a gentle warrior. We always knew he had been a popular teacher, but after his death we were deluged with cards and notes from his former students. Almost every one said he was their favorite teacher.
The last decade, our parents had lived in a home we called “The Windmill House,” across from Nancy’s farm, thus named for the windmill in the backyard. And it was there we held the memorial for Dotes, led by his old friend from church Reverend Lincoln Reed. The Marine Corps sent out a full honor guard in formal blue uniforms. They folded a flag and presented it to our mom, and fired a twenty-one-gun salute. Whatever problems our mom had with the Marine Corps in her young life, they disappeared in that moment. She had dreaded this ceremony for all of their early marriage, but when it came late in life, she was nothing but grateful for the respect the Marines showed our family that day.
The rest of 2000, for both Nancy and me, was taken up by the demands of raising young children. I did take on a couple of music projects. I put together another “Ann Wilson Band” for the opening celebration of Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project in August, and I also did a few more months with a musical theater group called Teatro Zinzanni, including stints in San Francisco and Seattle.
While in San Francisco, I had a fling with composer Norman Durkee. You can’t even say Norman is smart, because that doesn’t begin to cover it. He’s a genius, but also a whimsical person. He’s also incredible ladies’ man, and had been married four times, so his reputation preceded him. He took me to amazing restaurants off the beaten track, and told me wild tales of his life that drew me in. Physically, though, the relationship didn’t connect. It had been my first relationship in a long time, but it ended when my stint in the show was over.
In 2001, my life took another shift when a company approached me that was beginning to market a weight-loss surgery. It was called the “Lap Band Adjustable Gastric Banding System.” It was a non-permanent band that made the size of your stomach smaller, tricking you into feeling fuller sooner. It was an expensive procedure, but one with a lot of promise, and they offered me the surgery, and m
y sister Lynn as well, if I would act as a spokesperson. They weren’t asking me to do television commercials, but they wanted me to make a promotional video, talk about it in the press, and meet other candidates.
I had reached a point where I had tried everything to lose weight. I was tired, and here was another choice. I saw it as a path to better health. I didn’t want to take on any more secrets in my life either, so if I agreed to have the surgery I wanted to talk about it. In January 2002, I underwent the procedure.
I became what they call a “Band-ster.” The lap band is still controversial because it harkens back to the old-fashioned ideas of willpower, and control, and you have to take the weight off by following rules. If you eat the wrong foods or drink too much alcohol, you won’t lose weight. Having the band trains you to eat less, but you are also required to go through therapy because you can’t just turn off the feelings.
In the first weeks after the procedure, I was on a liquid diet while my stomach adjusted. I obsessively watched the Food Network, and other cooking shows, when I couldn’t eat. It was a way to enjoy the look, and life-affirming qualities of food without eating. It was probably a different kind of eating disorder.
The first solid food I ate after the procedure was a steak with Larry King at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. “Do you think you’re going to be able to hold up under the public scrutiny?” Larry asked. I told him I had to get healthier, and that if I could help other people, it would be worth it, too. Larry asked if I was going to make different music because of the lap band.
