ROCK ’N’ ROLL!
Suddenly I am twenty-eight,
Suddenly everything seems late.
I have to make it big and make it quick,
Shit-a-brick . . .
Su-u-u-ck a dick . . .
Off to LA to be a rock star.
15
The East-West Shuffle
Rockin’ it with David Pack.
Photograph by Peter Cunningham / http://www.petercunninghamphotography.com
It was happening. It was all going to happen. And it was going to happen fast. Because it was already happening fast. My record deal was just around the corner from that demo tape that David Pack and I would toss off upon my arrival in LA.
For the first few months, I lived in a briny beach bungalow at the foot of the Santa Monica palisades, where every time I drove anywhere I had to accomplish the hair-raising maneuver of backing out, rear bumper first, into the Pacific Coast Highway. My tiny dwelling had a built-in bed, a minikitchen, and a front room, where my guitar case served as my dining table. I possessed two tape cassettes that I played over and over on my portable player: Ry Cooder’s Bop till You Drop and Steely Dan’s Gaucho. I reveled in my sparse new existence. And that weather.
David Pack, together with his bubbly, irreverent wife, Gale, became my surrogate parents—even though we were all the same age. They lived in the upper-right-hand corner of the San Fernando Valley, in a development carved out of a citrus farm. I used to fill trash bags with the clementines off their trees, pack them into my suitcase, and take them home to Julia.
Best of all was the Packs’ persimmon tree. Mummy had grown up eating persimmons in Chile, and passed down her love of them to us. In the winter months, the Packs’ persimmon tree lost all its leaves, while some of the fruit remained attached, growing ever wrinklier. David and Gale, who had not grown up eating persimmons, made a wide berth around that Martian Christmas tree with its scrotal ornaments.
It was liberating to live in an environment where Leonard Bernstein was as mysterious as a persimmon. The most recognition I could expect from the average Californian was: “Oh, he wrote West Side Story? I love that movie.” How refreshing! Here, I could reinvent myself, just like people moving to California had done since time immemorial.
But I’d barely been in LA a month when I got my first of several irresistible tugs back into the East Coast net. I was invited to write a song—and sing it on camera—for an upcoming film directed by Franco Zeffirelli. Franco and my father had been friends for years. They enjoyed each other’s wit and flamboyance, and their mutual love of opera had led to acclaimed collaborations on both sides of the Atlantic—including that Cavalleria Rusticana my father was conducting at the Met when Mummy held her Black Panther fund-raiser.
I’d devoured the book Endless Love by Scott Spencer, and now here I was, invited to play a small role in the film adaptation, singing a song of my very own. If only this exciting opportunity weren’t coming my way through a Daddy connection . . . but how could I say no? I wrote a song called “We Are the Hands,” recorded it in New York, then went out to the set on Long Island every day for a week, waiting to shoot the “party scene” where I’d lip-synch to my recording, backed up by a quartet of wriggly high school boys that called themselves the TouchTones. All that week on the set, the five of us shared a Winnebago where we did a lot of sitting around, in a veritable blizzard of cocaine.
The star of the film, sixteen-year-old Brooke Shields, was always kept separate from the rest of the cast, in the company of her protective mother. But we received many visits to our Winnebago from James Spader, the actor who played her brother. I played his girlfriend, Susan, in the film. Jimmy Spader and I took a shine to each other, and we would “rehearse” our making-out scene every chance we got. (There was no making-out scene.)
With Jimmy Spader on the set of Endless Love.
Later, back in LA, I was informed that “We Are the Hands” was being cut from the film entirely. I would now be filming an insert of me singing a brand-new song by R&B star Lionel Richie. First, I was summoned to Devonshire Studios to record the audio of his song titled, like the film, “Endless Love.” The lyrics they’d sent me the night before struck me as insipid—so I’d helpfully rewritten them. But as I stood in the sound booth the next day with my headphones on, and saw Lionel Richie staring at me through the control room window, a little voice in my head suggested that perhaps I should refrain from springing my “improved” lyrics on the songwriter, midsession.
A few weeks later, when I was summoned to film the insert, I discovered that my own recording from Devonshire Studios had been dumped. Now, my lip synch was to some other, forever unknown singer’s rendition of Lionel Richie’s song. Five seconds of my face from that insert is what ended up in the “party scene” of the movie. Richie’s song comes back under the end credits, in his duet with Diana Ross. (It was the first time a pop “duet” was recorded in separate sessions, on separate coasts.)
The film was a turkey, but the song “Endless Love” was a big hit. I thought it was the worst song I’d ever heard. It dawned on me that for all my sniffing about inferior pop songs, I didn’t really have a clue about what a hit was, much less how to write one myself.
Right on the heels of my big nonbreak in film came my big non-break in television. In December, my father was to receive a Kennedy Center Honor, and I was invited to write a song for him that I would perform at the grand event, which would subsequently be broadcast nationally on CBS.
If only this promotional bonanza were not so thoroughly tethered to my father. In fact, the whole thing was yet another Harry Kraut Special: he’d arranged with the Kennedy Center folks to invite me to write and sing a song with David Pack backing me up. Harry’s thought process undoubtedly went thus: Lenny will love it, and the show will give Jamie’s career a boost, while reinforcing her collaboration with Pack, who is going to make her a star. Everybody wins.
The old conundrum: Would I ever catch a Daddy-free break as a musician? And yet who in their right mind would say no to such a gig?
Moreover, wasn’t it a shame that I didn’t even have a record to promote yet? Launching my career was looking more and more like starting with the World Series and tacking on the baseball season afterward.
David Pack was crushed that he couldn’t perform at the Kennedy Center Honors with me; his band, Ambrosia, had a European tour. I wound up putting the performance together with a local band in DC. But Pack and I cowrote the song, called “Thank You for the Big Heart.” Writing that song with Pack turned out to be a good way to express the love I truly felt for the Daddy I truly knew existed within that outer shell of erratic behavior. This was a most satisfying triangulation: My father, after all, had introduced me to David Pack, while Pack, in his turn, was thrilled to be helping his idol’s daughter with her rock ’n’ roll career. And although I resisted a romantic entanglement (for once), the truth was that I had some strong feelings about Pack. Maybe he was having feelings, too. Maybe all three of us—Daddy, Pack, and myself—were triangulating here.
On the day of the Kennedy Center Honors, President and Mrs. Carter hosted a preshow reception at the White House for the honorees and their guests. Leonard Bernstein’s retinue was even larger than usual. Not only did he bring along his two siblings, his three children, his secretary, and his manager; he’d also brought down his mother, Jennie, and her two sisters: the vivacious Aunt Dorothy and sweet but slow-moving Aunt Bertha. The trio from Brookline, “the Three Fates,” made quite an impression, with their rhinestone-spangled glasses and dubious attire from Loehmann’s in the Chestnut Hill mall.
It was the first night of Hanukkah. My father had requested of President and Mrs. Carter that there be some place in the White House where he and his family could go to light the menorah. He sure had a nerve, I thought, making such demands during a very complicated evening, but incredibly, adorably, Rosalynn Carter arranged for all of us to be escorted to the Lincoln Bedroom, no less, where w
e placed our little portable menorah on the fireplace mantel and stuck in the two swirled candles: the leader candle, plus one for the first night. We sang the prayers, suppressing giggles over our extraordinary circumstances—and then an aide informed us at the door that it was time to go to the Kennedy Center for the performance.
The Bernstein family arrives for the Kennedy Center Honors—LB, Nina, Alexander, Jamie, and Shirley.
Photo by Ron Galella / Ron Galella Collection / Getty Images
But what about the menorah? You’re not supposed to blow out the Hanukkah candles! Carefully, Alexander carried the menorah to the bathroom, placed it and its two flickering candles inside the sink—and away we went.
At least we didn’t burn down the White House that night.
Once down the stairs, we were swept into a mad crush of people, all leaving for the Kennedy Center. Suddenly the Secret Service men were shooing everyone to the side, clearing a path from the elevator to the exit: the president was coming, the president was coming! The band began playing “Hail to the Chief ”; the light came on indicating the elevator car was arriving; everyone held their breath. The elevator doors parted to reveal . . . the Three Fates! Aunt Dorothy, Aunt Bertha, and Grandma, beaming at the crowd in all their Loehmann’s sublimity.
Performing my song at the Kennedy Center was exponentially less fun than that moment. As I went on stage, brimful of terror, I experienced a buzzing numbness in my extremities that caused my fingers to curl inward—a phenomenon I later dubbed “dead-chicken-itis.” This condition did nothing good for my guitar-playing abilities, while my voice came out in a strangled quaver. But Daddy loved it and wept up in his box—all of which looked very nice on TV a few weeks later.
The morning after the performance, Daddy and I took the Shuffle back to New York. As we got out of the limo in front of the Dakota, we walked past the gaggle of groupies who always hung out by the gate in hopes of glimpsing John Lennon.
I was upstairs in apartment 92 that evening, working out a new song. I liked the Steinway piano up there that Helen Coates had passed along to her former pupil to relieve him somewhat of his Baldwin shackles. As I played, I faintly heard something outside that sounded like gunshots. My hands froze over the keys: What was that? A gun going off on Central Park West seemed like a preposterously melodramatic explanation. It must be a truck backfiring, I told myself, and resumed playing the piano. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. Bart said, “Turn on WNEW! Someone just shot John Lennon.”
So, on the very same radio station where I’d listened to Beatles music in the late ’60s, I now listened to the announcer I knew so well, Scott Muni, delivering bulletins from the hospital until the final report came in: John Lennon was dead. The shooter was one of those fans outside the Dakota gates; I had walked right past him that morning. John Lennon: my deity, my polestar, my schoolgirl pulse—whose almond-shaped eyes I’d stared into on all those album covers, whose bluesy screams had electrified me, whose lyrics and poetry I’d obsessed over with Daddy . . . I had to see Daddy.
I ran down the back stairs, howling in circles for the seven flights down to the kitchen door. I found Julia inside, very upset; she’d run down to the front of the building when she heard the commotion, and had seen the blood, the ambulance, the inconsolable Cuban doorman, everything. My father took me into his studio and offered me scotch; it was the only time I ever accepted his awful Ballantine’s. I sat there remembering how, all those years ago, the grownups cried and drank when horrible stuff happened; now here I was, finally one of them.
* * *
Months trundled by as I waited for David Pack to free up his schedule so we could go into the studio and make that demo that would snag me my record deal. But Ambrosia had rehearsals, tours, an upcoming album; it was always something. Maybe this record-deal thing was going to take longer than I thought.
Still, I saw a lot of the Packs. They initiated me into their Southern California Mexican food rituals: the margaritas, the fajitas, the tostadas—all new to me. Then we’d go back to their house, sit on their sectional couch, and smoke pot till we were silly—and then I would get in my rickety little Fiat and drive back, stoned as hell, over the mountain pass and down to the beach. Gale always made me promise to call them when I got safely home. Sometimes I remembered. Sometimes they remembered that I’d forgotten to call.
The Packs invited me to their New Year’s Eve party. When I told one of their friends that I lived alone on the Pacific Coast Highway, he asked me if I carried a piece. “A piece of what?” I asked. Another Pack friend, beyond blasted on coke, expounded to me for twenty minutes on the meaning of the universe. That was the night I started to weary in earnest of cocaine: the drug that made people feel oh so smart, but sound oh so dumb.
In the spring, I moved a couple of miles south to Venice, to live with my New York pals Marjorie and Elliott in a friendly yellow house on a wide, palm-lined street. My new neighborhood was delightfully funky, populated by an expatriate community of East Coasters all trying to make it in the movie business. They were people my age who were writers, actors, producers, mostly Jewish, all college graduates.
In California, my fancy education had often felt like a useless appendage. What good did it do me, anyway, in that perky, sun-bronzed environment, to have impeccable grammar and orthography? To wince when I heard “Beaujolais” pronounced “Boo-jolay”? It did me absolutely no good at all.
So it was a guilty pleasure to talk with the Venice gang about books and lefty politics, and be able to sling around my beloved Yiddish vocabulary—despite my ambivalence over finding myself back in an environment where Leonard Bernstein had the recognizability more of a peach than a persimmon.
I set up my TEAC four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder in the spare bedroom, and got to work writing new songs. I was making progress, but the pullings-away continued. In New York I met Brian, a songwriter and a columnist for Spin magazine. He seemed to know every note, and everyone of note, in the New York music scene—and he knew all about world music, too, long before it became a fad. Brian wore only black. He was mystical and soft-spoken—so different, I felt, from my silly, garrulous self. His guitar playing was free-roaming (not clenched like mine), his songs intriguingly cryptic. One day we stood under a tree in the park after a rainstorm, and he rustled a branch and kissed me as the droplets fell all over my face.
And so the bicoastal romance began. It was complicated for me that Brian and I were essentially in the same business. He, too, was a singer-songwriter making demo tapes, pursuing managers, courting record companies. On the one hand, it was gratifying to have a cohort in the trenches. On the other hand, I was jealous and competitive—and disgusted with myself for being so. Whenever I caught myself acting overly ambitious, I was horrified. I was acting like my father! What would Mummy have said?
It was an added complication to be a woman in what was still essentially a man’s world. When Brian and I went to a music club, he would schmooze with every musician and music journalist in the room, while I stood there, engulfed in a grease fire of rage at being reduced to the role of insignificant girlfriend. Oh, how I hated that—above all because I feared that maybe that’s all I was, all I could ever hope to be: a Stupid Idiot who had no business consorting with that high-powered crowd. Elf’s thread: you tyrant, you.
There was another complication: Brian was musically the polar opposite of David Pack. Brian was New York–born, Ivy-educated, a voracious reader. His musical tastes leaned more toward Lou Reed and Talking Heads, as well as the exotic sounds emanating from Nigeria, Bulgaria, India. He had little time for the comparatively stolid, mainstream music that came out of LA. I felt caught in the middle. Brian’s edgy musical world fascinated me—even if the coolness quotient was way over my head. But I’d moved to LA and had wed myself, as it were, to David Pack and his pop-flavored, hit-driven musical world. Had I made a mistake . . . ? I fretted and fretted.
This morass of confusion was obviously not enough for me, so I
added more, by succumbing to yet another Lenny-connected, soul-compromising career opportunity.
For the tenth anniversary of the Kennedy Center, Mass was to be remounted there, in a new production directed by Tom O’Horgan, who had brought the musical Hair to Broadway a decade earlier. I was invited to audition for a role in the Street Chorus. (Harry probably engineered that audition, too.) I went to O’Horgan’s loft in SoHo and played a few songs on my guitar.
My performance left me feeling uneasy, but I got the part. It reminded me of my murky feelings about getting into Harvard. I would never know for sure whether I’d still have been cast in Mass had I been the daughter of, say, Herman Shumlin.
But I loved living and working with my fellow castmates in Washington: being accepted as part of the team. It was actually a relief not to be plugging away on behalf of my own wearisome self. This heartfelt music of my father’s sounded better than ever to me. Even the parts that bothered me ten years ago felt less annoying now. Once again, I’d inadvertently found a way to love the most authentic, uncompromised part of Daddy.
My birthday on September 8 brought sweet attentions from my fellow Street Chorus members: funny cards, a cake, a get-together after rehearsal. But things were about to get difficult: the composer was coming to town.
I found LB in an extra-manic mood when I went to visit him in his suite at the Watergate. He was reveling in the fact that now, ten years later, he wasn’t feverishly finishing the score of Mass for the premiere. This time around, he could enjoy the fruits of his earlier labors and bask in all the attention. The hotel suite was filled with people: cast members, the usual assortment of young men and hangers-on, and Harry Kraut masterminding it all behind his yellow-tinted aviator glasses.
My father was so on, and very much aware of the surrounding admirers, the men who breathed in his eroticism like a scent. It was impossible to have a real conversation with him, but I did manage to recount the dream I’d had, in which there was something desperately important I had to tell him, but he was too busy posing in the sun on a cushion tied by a rope to the back of his limousine.
Famous Father Girl Page 20
