Late, Late at Night

by Springfield, Rick

  Looking back, I see that despite our own issues and the fact that we were troubled spirits, Lynne was clearly the catalyst in getting me to abandon the 16 Magazine/teen-dream path once and for all. She was most certainly in my corner as far as my music went.

  Post-Lynne, I refocus on my goals and where it is I want to be in my life. “My aim is to win” becomes my mantra, and I scribble it everywhere: around my apartment, on streetlight posts, the back of my hand, even public restrooms. In the ’70s, without knowing it, you just might have seen it somewhere. Once more it’s musicians to the rescue. I go back to my band and we continue doing gigs. None of them is meaningful in any way, but no record company dismissal is going to stop me from playing, goddammit. I am sure of one thing: I love playing live. I connect to it on a level that goes deeper and is more meaningful than merely having a good time with a bunch of strangers. It is the only true way I connect 100 percent with humanity. Relating to dogs is very easy for me, to humans much less so. And this gigging is my avenue to the social need I have for community but am ill-equipped to pursue in a “normal” setting. And lucky for me, I don’t need the nod from a record company to play live.

  One night, we’re playing at the Whiskey A Go Go on Sunset. It’s a far cry from the one in St. Kilda, although I think I get paid less. I do two sets, and in between them a girl comes upstairs to the dressing room to say hi. Linda Blair is the hottest young actress in the movies right now and has just come off the tidal wave of adulation and press from The Exorcist. She sits on the floor with me while I dry my hair, and we talk. She’s sharp and funny and pretty hot in a perky, bright-eyed way. She invites me to the Rainbow club up the street after I’m done with my last set and says she and her sister Debbie will buy me a drink. I don’t know how old she is but I soon learn she is only fifteen. I am twenty-five.

  I’m drawn to this girl. Sitting at the Rainbow drinking (I don’t think either she or her sister is of legal drinking age, but again, it’s the ’70s, so who cares—obviously no one) she puts her hand on my thigh. I light up like a Christmas tree. She is pretty, sexy, and very famous, and apparently she has the heater on for me. We end up at my apartment—more specifically, my bedroom—and most specifically, my bed. I am her first lover and she is an enthusiastic learner. She’s an adventurous girl as well, which is probably why the world’s biggest Hollywood starlet (at this time) lost her virginity to a penniless musician in a $180-a-month apartment.

  She leaves for the East Coast the next day. I’m in love, and we spend hours talking on the phone every night. I speak with her mom Eleanor, who becomes our cheerleader and defender when the media gets hold of the story. We plan for me to come out to their home in Connecticut over Christmas, which I do, and I end up breaking my foot Christmas morning running up and down the stairs trying to wake everyone up. I spend the rest of the holidays in a leg cast.

  Linda goes from coast to coast on business trips and always stays with me when she’s in LA. We share a love of dogs and sex—separately, not in combination. Most of the time we don’t leave the apartment. She’s invited to premieres and Hollywood parties, and we go as a couple, blindly and innocently to the media slaughter. We’re actually really shocked by the incensed articles in both teen and regular press about our affair. Either we have zero understanding of what makes the press tick, or it’s a really slow month for news. We’re pilloried for the whole age-difference thing, but eventually the media relents and backs off—whether they get bored of it or used to us is anyone’s guess. Because of the manner in which Linda arrived in the public’s consciousness—as the little girl in The Exorcist who infamously said “Let Jesus fuck you”—and her later roles as a teenage alcoholic and a sixteen-year-old rape victim in a women’s prison, I guess it’s almost assumed that she’s headed for trouble. So when it shows up in the form of an Older Guy (and a musician no less), I’m not actually brought up on charges.

  At one point during all of this, I finally get the cojones (thank you, Lynne) to pick up the phone and call Steve Binder and Robie to tell them I want a divorce. Steve, who I’ve always liked and even loved for his commitment, just walks away. Robie, on the other hand, throws a quarter-million-dollar lawsuit at me! At this point I’m digging quarters out of my plastic Goofy bank to put together the finances to eat once a day, and he wants $250,000? I’m also about to be evicted from my cheapo apartment/love nest.

  My girlfriend, who happens to be wealthy, comes to my rescue. For this moment in time alone, I owe Linda my eternal fealty and quite possibly my future career in America (so blame her). She rents an apartment for us (okay, for me really, since she still lives mostly with her folks on the East Coast), fills it with furniture and even a TEAC 3340 four-track tape machine on which I can record demos of my songs.

  I begin writing and recording furiously, when she isn’t there to distract me. I’ve passed through the pain of being without a record deal for the first time in five years and concentrate on my goals with a single-minded drive. Unfortunately, I am not evolved enough to leave well enough alone, and I continue to have sex with other partners when Linda isn’t around. But to be honest, so does she. I don’t know it at the time, and in true double-standard form I would have been crushed if I’d been aware of it. Meanwhile, I have to break up the band for obvious financial reasons, and we each go our own ways.

  Linda and I are together for a year, but she just comes and goes, and I feel we’re slowly drawing apart. I’m smoking a little dope, taking acid, and also nailing a female drug dealer for free Quaaludes (my drug of choice back then), but Linda comes over from visiting “friends” even more stoned than I am, so I tell her that it’s she who has the drug problem (!) and I break off the relationship. To be honest, although I initiate it, I can see she wants to move on too, so it’s kind of mutual at this point.

  Our lives follow different paths, but we never totally lose touch and I’m glad to say that we’re friends even now. I got a Christmas card last December (2009) from her saying “Happy Holidays and watch out for stairs.”

  Now I am truly on my own in Hollywood. Any friends I had are all attached to Binder/Porter, my band is gone, and Linda and her family are out of my life. And … he’s back! Just like that, my old friend the Darkness returns, pulling me down in a way that’s getting to be typical of our on-again/off-again, possibly bipolar romance. He’s happy to see me, the supercilious fucker.

  I’m struggling to pay the rent. My parents sense that something is wrong and send me a couple of hundred bucks to buy a plane ticket home to Australia. I spend it on rent and food. I never mention it and they never ask, but I can tell by the tone of my mum’s letters that she’s getting really worried. I think about what I would do and how I would feel if I went back to Oz now, having basically failed in my mission. I couldn’t do it—I couldn’t go home. But survival is getting tougher. I make some inquiries about jobs at markets and the like, but I have no work history at all, zero references, and no résumé, I’m still recognizable (“Hey, honey, isn’t that Rick Springfield bagging our groceries?”), and I have no other skills. (“Do you need a guy to play guitar for your customers while they squeeze the produce, maybe?”) I’m getting more and more depressed by the day.

  A little while later, I’m at a club watching a band and some guy leans over and says, “You’re Rick Springfield, aren’t you? You were good, man. You should have gone farther.” I think to myself, “Is this it? Is this really the death knell of my so-called music career?” Around this time I get a fan letter from some kid in Nebraska saying that she’d love to come to Hollywood and visit me at my mansion. What a sorry joke. Mr. Darkness is back with a vengeance, and he has really missed fucking with me. “Little bit of a hiccup here, pal? What’cha gonna do now? Go home and say, ‘Man, it’s tough in America.’ That wouldn’t look too good, would it? Not after all that press and everyone saying ‘All right, little Ricky’s gonna make it …’ You know there’s a gun store just down the street. You’ve been in there looking at all t
hose big, heavy pistols, I know. It’d be real quick. And pretty painless too, Sport.”

  I can’t believe I’m actually contemplating this. Suicide is always an option. I count out the coins in my stupidly happy Goofy bank. Guns are at least in the low-hundred-dollar price range, aren’t they? This all seems familiar somehow. Almost expected. It’s like the possibility has never really left me.

  I have exactly $37 left to my name. Not enough. Not nearly enough. I continue to exist. But I’m not happy about it. Neither is Mr. D. His default position for me is “miserable,” but he’d prefer “dead.”

  I’m not sure when I see the article, but I do see it. I’ve picked up a newspaper from somewhere and there’s a story about a singer who’s just begun to find success. Bob Seger talks about his early, tough days in Detroit and the battle he’s fought to get where he is now. I cut out the article and tape it to my kitchen cabinet door. It gives me a tiny jolt of inspiration every time I see it. I start reading a book called Psycho-Cybernetics that someone recommended a while back. It’s the latest in positive thinking and using visualization to reach goals in your life. It becomes my constant companion, and I read it and re-read it. In the continual seesawing that is my emotional state, I’m now trying to focus on my path again. In fact, my “positive thinking” is rapidly evolving into a mania.

  I look now at the entries I made in a diary through this part of my life. They all read, “I must make it! MY AIM IS TO WIN! There is only one result—SUCCESS! I WILL succeed!” On and on and over and over. It’s a little frightening to see the obsessive repetition: it reminds me of Jack Nicholson in The Shining: “… all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy …” At least he had a focus, right?

  I cross a line here, mentally. It isn’t real healthy, maybe, but at least it’s in the opposite direction from thoughts of blowing my head off with a handgun. Where I am now is bullshit, I tell myself. And I know that I cannot rely on anyone but myself to accomplish my goals. I walk the Hollywood streets some nights just to get out of the apartment. It’s on one of these walks (they become runs, actually, as I finally start to take care of my body—apart from the occasional acid trip) that I bump into Colette, Robie’s now ex-wife, walking her dog Yan, the very snappy dresser. She asks me what I’m doing. (I later find out that she’s asking because she’s trying to decide whether or not to take “half” of me in her divorce from Robie. Thank God, that’s a bullet I dodge.)

  I tell her I’m not doing much of anything, which at this point is true. She suggests I check out the acting class she’s taking at a workshop here in Hollywood. By this time I’ve forgotten my ignoble beginnings as Captain Scuttleboom and I agree to do just that. Praise the Lord, my mum calls me to say some residuals have come into my Australian bank account from Mission: Magic. Almost $2,000, which back then translates to nearly twice that amount in 1970s American dollars. (There actually was a reason for doing that stupid-ass show, besides giving a young Quentin Tarantino something to watch while his mom made him breakfast!) It’s these residuals that begin to pay for my new acting classes at the slightly bizarre Vincent Chase Workshop. Vince is proud to be a forty-year-old virgin and announces it at the slightest provocation. He is, we all believe, a nonactive gay man and has obvious crushes on the hotter young men in the class. He also has fits of rage that make everyone go very still, like field mice in the presence of a circling hawk.

  While my music career is in the crapper, I can at least make some money acting. It doesn’t dawn on me that most of the actors in the class are waiting tables in lieu of working as actors. Ignorance is bliss. But it becomes much more than a long-shot way to make some money. I fall in with the community of actors, and once again I get a reprieve from my darker leanings. I set the imagined handgun back down.

  Although I don’t realize it, I am in desperate need of the family connection that is so missing in my life. Doug Davidson, a nineteen-year-old actor at the workshop, steps into the breach. Like me he is a child/man, and we connect immediately and often laugh ourselves silly over lame things that occur in class, much to the chagrin of our occasionally apoplectic acting coach, Vince. Doug takes me to meet his family in prestigious La Cañada-Flintridge, just west of Pasadena, where he is still living at this juncture.

  His is a warm, funny, loving family, and I’m adopted without a question or a doubt. His mom, Corinne, was a child vaudeville star in a dancing and singing troupe called the Kaitlin Kiddies, and she encourages my pursuit of music and acting. Doug and I go through all his cool toys and settle on his BB gun and a few plastic soldiers. We take them out to the driveway at night, set little bonfires all around, and proceed to blast away at the enemy with hundreds of BBs, screaming and laughing ’til the neighbors call and ask Doug’s parents to bring us inside. “And can they grow up, for Chrissakes?”

  Then Doug’s older sister, Diana, arrives. She has been a model in New York and has come home to rest from the pressures of the business. She is also a gifted actress who began her career, at twelve years old, with a role in Disney’s The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit (you might have missed it). She is also (uh-oh) really beautiful, with huge blue eyes and high cheekbones, and she has a warped sense of humor. She starts taking acting classes at Vince’s with us and is fascinated by my heavy English/Aussie accent, which she has great trouble understanding. We eventually hook up romantically, though it’s more her doing than mine. Because of my relationship with Doug, there’s a slight “sister” quality to her that I can’t completely shake, and the sexual side of our relationship never truly lifts off the ground for me.

  Diana is striking looking but (by her own admission) has had an odd array of boyfriends. One paramour, hooked on heroin, admits to her one day that he is a “junkie.” “Oh, I love horses!” she replies. Diana, in her innocence, thinks he’s said “jockey.” Another is an antisocial one-eyed bird keeper at a zoo. Even with all my idiosyncrasies, I must seem like a “regular guy” by comparison. She is a soft girl, and it’s easy for me to get my way. So I continue to see other girls whenever I can.

  Diana, Doug, and I are the Three Musketeers, and we hang out and go everywhere together. Doug, although a handsome, hetero guy, is a late bloomer and at twenty, is still a virgin, and there are no girlfriends in the picture yet. Sorry, Dougie. You have the right to strike this fact from the book before publication. (If it’s still here, then he’s okay with it!) For a long time it’s just the three of us. Very tight, very similar in our views of life and art, and very committed to the time-honored (yeah, right!) craft of acting. They also like some of the songs I’m writing. Doug still has cassette tapes of every home demo I’ve made tucked away in his house—potential eBay and/or blackmail material.

  Diana moves into the apartment below me. I’ve never lived with a girlfriend up to this point (Linda spent at most a couple of weeks at a time with me), and I like my space to get away and write, to see another girl when I feel like it, and to go to the bathroom without worrying who’s in the next room. Still, on most nights the three of us are at my place or their parents’ home in Pasadena ’til the small hours of the morning.

  Believe it or not, the dreaded lawsuit Robie, the sadistic swine, has waged against me is still going on and I actually have a lawyer—Ivan Hoffman—who is working very cheaply on my behalf, God bless him, to try to counter the allegations in the 150-page legal document that Robie’s lawyer keeps updating every week. Ivan knows I’m still looking for some type of representation (Anything? Anyone?), and he says there’s a studio owner out in Van Nuys named Joe Gottfried who is interested in meeting with me. I ask Ivan if this guy knows I’m Rick Springfield and not David Cassidy, or even someone who wants to be the next David Cassidy. He says he knows, and he relays that Joe likes what he’s heard of my music. A meeting is set.

  Around this time, Doug and his father, Don, are doing work with kids through the YMCA. Doug invites me to go on camping trips as “counselor” for these young kids—a lot o
f whom are from troubled homes. I don’t know anything about kids and am not particularly interested in hanging with a bunch of twelve-year-olds, but he says I can play guitar around the campfire at night and just be a “cabin leader”—someone who makes the kids go to sleep on time and get up for breakfast. It’s actually an amazing experience, and I come to be particularly close to some of the kids in my “care.”

  One is a slight, blond boy named Chris who lives with his mother. I become something of a father figure to him (God help him), and he actually cries when it’s time to go home from a camping trip on Catalina Island. We stay in touch, and some years later he enters the Marine Corps. I can’t imagine this soft, sensitive little boy being inducted into the brutal life of the Marines. But we all grow and change—except me.

  I seem to be stuck in a sort of permanent adolescence. Even now.

  Music has always been a young man’s game, and I am one of a peculiar subspecies: I’m a songwriter. As a songwriter, it’s natural for me to stay open and receptive to everything that I and the people around me are feeling, doing, saying, and fantasizing about. It’s not a skill set that every job requires; for many people it would be a headache they don’t need. I think it’s desirable for certain careers: artists, writers, actors, therapists, dog owners (hahaha), and some rather spectacular mothers. I need to stay sympathetic and connected to the emotional roller coaster that most “grown-ups” have become desensitized to—but that they still want to hear about and be reminded of in the songs they listen to and the books they read. One consequence of this openness is that I remain pretty naïve and gullible, despite the things I’ve gone through. The result: I am frequently deceived (which is probably only fair since I’ve done my share of deceiving). To this day, I’m still surprised at some people’s ulterior motives when they are revealed to me.