Dancing With Myself

by Billy Idol

  Life happens in front of you, and you have to react to the stimulus. The stress and pressure built up because I cared. I cared about the music. First and foremost, I wanted to satisfy my own creative drive, but I also cared whether the critics and the fans would like the album. I did not feel that I had given my best on Whiplash Smile and I knew that I had to step up my game. But I didn’t have my trusted partner Steve Stevens to lean on and I battled fears of mediocrity and failure by dancing with Mr. Death. At least that’s what I told myself. I was about to reach the pinnacle of success, but also plummet at the same time through overindulgence and leading a deranged life. I had been living as if there were no tomorrow, and had nearly made that a reality.

  THE FEBRUARY 6, 1990, MOTORCYCLE accident left me severely injured and helpless in the confines of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, just a few months before I would have a number 2 single with “Cradle of Love” and a hit video directed by David Fincher. We had a world tour booked to start in the summer and an album to promote, but here I was in February, not knowing when I would be able to leave the hospital, or even if I would have a leg beneath my right knee when I did.

  In fact, the press in Britain initially reported after the accident that I’d been killed. My sister heard this on a London radio station, and even though the story was later corrected, I feel awful that she had to hear about my accident in this way. Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d been reported deceased: an article in the New York Daily News in the mid-’80s also prematurely reported my demise. As Mark Twain once put it, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

  Luckily, in my previous visits to Cedars, I had struck up a relationship with a Dr. Michael Smolens. The other nurses were aware of this and immediately sent for him. At the time of the accident, he had just left his night shift in the emergency room, and he graciously returned to the hospital to help organize and oversee my treatment. When the police were considering charges, he also reasoned with the cop on duty that I would likely lose my leg, and wasn’t that punishment enough?

  Dr. Smolens organized a specialist team of doctors to work on the various aspects of my injury, meaning I had a single group working on me from the start. Friends and fans from around the world sent flowers, cards, and their best wishes. Ron Wood sent me a case of Guinness.

  I very nearly lost my leg, but the stellar team of doctors managed to see me through, intact. I would need a series of operations to correct the butterfly break in my right leg, along with some plastic surgery. The doctors would have to move a muscle from my calf to do the job of the one that had been blown apart by the impact of the car that broadsided me. Essentially, I was slammed on the right side, and as the car impacted my leg, the pieces of bone exploded through the skin where my shin had been, creating a hole the size of a baseball. My leg broke in three places in the center of the lower leg bone. As my orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Jack Moshein, put it, “If you’re going to break a leg, this was the best location to break it.” If it was nearer to the ankle, he said, “we wouldn’t be able to reconstruct all those little bones.”

  Dr. Moshein was a nice, ruddy-faced man who always gave me hope that I could return to normal. Dr. Robin Yuan was the plastic surgeon who told me that moving the muscle to cover the hole would be “very complicated, but not impossible.” If grafting skin on top of the transplanted muscle didn’t work the first time, it might not be feasible to try a second time, but we forged on anyway. “Ten years ago, we would have just cut off your leg,” he said. Shit, this was serious, but through the dreamy glow of the morphine, I remained confident they would fix me up.

  The morphine drip and the toot of the pain medication became an every-twelve-minute occurrence. I was in heaven. I had never taken morphine before, and it was incredible. I could see the hole in my leg, the size of a baseball, a bloody gap, and not give a shit about it, as I was floating in Never-Never land.

  Getting hit by a car was a drastic way to get wildly out of my mind, but in the cushion of morphine, the womb felt more hospitable than ever. Outside my body, I was in a world of hurt; inside, an unborn baby safe inside my bubble. And don’t fucking burst it, either! I floated weightless, spinning in space, one with the universe. I was trancing with myself.

  I HAD MY OWN ROOM on the eighth floor of Cedars-Sinai. Next door to me were Sammy Davis Jr. and the jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, who were both dying of cancer. Sometimes, Sarah’s beautiful daughter, Paris, would visit, and after she saw her mother, she would drop in on me, which was incredibly kind of her. It helped me pass the time. A doctor told me Sammy had asked him how much one of the pain medication delivery boxes cost, and when the doctor wondered why, the Candy Man answered, “I want to strap one to the dashboard of my car!” It got me thinking.

  * * *

  OLIVER STONE CAME TO VISIT me one day, accompanied by The Doors producer A. Kitman Ho, and I was very glad to get their best wishes. As I was expecting their arrival, for a laugh I pulled myself out of bed, dressed, and posed in a chair on the other side of the hospital room, holding an open bottle of red wine, like I was still having a grand time—which, on all that morphine, I was. He asked me if I ever thought I’d walk properly again. I told him yes, as I was determined that somehow or other I was going to make a full recovery.

  I also spoke to Val Kilmer about my recovery; I asked him to do what he could to help me keep the part. He was really understanding and caring, but what could he say? It soon became apparent that I would not be physically able to take on the role I’d been cast in, as my accident and injuries meant I would be recovering throughout the entire shoot. Keeping the part was impossible.

  I acquired some music equipment for the room, along with a TV and videos. I also asked to have posters put up on the wall, to liven the place up. I had a coterie of people working for me who brought me whatever I needed. My trainer visited and we worked out the top half of my body. My son, Willem, would lie with me on the hospital bed watching cartoons in the afternoons. But I still had the constant visits from my doctors and the sight of my disfigured leg and a very open wound to remind me of my plight. I broke my forearm, clavicle, and a couple of ribs too, so I quickly underwent surgeries to start the mending process. After each operation I was back in my room, high as a kite.

  I would often listen to albums while stoned. Free’s Fire and Water was a big one, especially “Heavy Load.” “Oh, I’m carrying a heavy load / Can’t go no further down this long road.” Their music was at its height on that album, extending those blues jams into classic songs, especially the slow-rising funk bass surrounded by ringing guitars on “Mr. Big”: “Mr. Big / You better watch out . . . Oh for you now / I will dig / A great big hole in the ground.”

  I found myself alternatively laughing and very sad, leaning toward despondent, as I felt around inside my emotions, pondering my condition, not quite knowing what I’d done to myself as I lay motionless, confined to my living coffin. Friends brought me David Bowie’s Hunky Dory. I love “Quicksand” and “The Bewlay Brothers.” I certainly was sinking into quicksand myself, seeing everything and everyone through morphine eyes.

  In my altered state, Elvis performed solo concerts for me as I watched his whole career stretch out in front of my hospital bed, each fold of the linen bouncing back a rock ’n’ roll tale of success, excess, and distress. “Just take a walk down lonely street / To Heartbreak Hotel.” Brother Elvis sang the blues, and the emotional content he could bring to a song elevated the nursery rhyme southern slang into an art form. He may not have written a song himself, but does that really matter? Only music snobs worry about shit like that. Just look at his effect on the Beatles, and that’s all the argument needed. His early Sun Records stuff was my favorite, but he had a musical journey to take, and I was riding along, strapped to IV lines and surrounded by blinking monitors.

  The nineteen-year-old young man who blew out of the South like a tornado, creating rock ’n’ roll along the way as one of the four pioneers along with Little Richard, C
huck Berry, and Fats Domino, seemed like a staggeringly tragic dream. Yet Elvis had this golden voice, and all who heard it fell under his sway. For a time in the ’50s he was untouchable. The number one records fell like rain and it took the Beatles to unseat him. The world knelt at his feet and he spent the rest of his life deeply wondering what benevolent force had bestowed it. His celebrity was unfathomable, a mystery to him. When fans would shout, “Elvis, you’re the king,” he would smile and answer, “There’s only one king and that’s Jesus.” Missing the point of their adulation, he spoke his mind, even while in Colonel Tom’s fetters.

  From my hospital bed, I also watched the Marlon Brando movie The Wild One. I recently saw a documentary about Brando that showed how he, after a certain point in his career, avoided emotional, gut-wrenching performances like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront in favor of lighter fare like Sayonara or The Teahouse of the August Moon. He found it difficult to keep reaching down so deep, as it stirred up disruption in his soul. His last real attempt at artistic control was One-Eyed Jacks, a western he was directing before he was pulled off by the studio, who grumbled as he held up production by spending a fortune on retakes due to his perfectionism. Even after that, Brando had a number of groundbreaking turns, among them The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, and Apocalypse Now.

  Sometimes it takes a crazy do-or-die attitude to get to the heart of a piece. It would be simpler if it was easy, but it’s not. Even the greats struggle with this. “That’s All Right” was a song Elvis, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black were just foolin’ around with in the tiny Memphis Sun Studios in 1954, and after hours of trying every other style, it was only then that Sam Phillips heard the magic.

  Tortured by my own actions and the pain they caused me, I knew only that I could and would make the long haul to recovery. At least I had rock ’n’ roll music to get me there—in fact, I had a whole album in the can to release and a projected summer tour to get better for! Could I do it? Would I be healed in time? Would I even be able to walk across a stage, let alone “wiggle about a bit and fuck off,” as the director David Mallet once described my live act? Somehow I would make it, wouldn’t I? The pulsing IV seemed to gurgle an indistinct reply—Charmed Life, indeed.

  Today I don’t like to think about the motorcycle crash. While I was in the hospital I couldn’t wait to be twenty-plus years away from it, and that is exactly where I am as I write these words. I only think about it today in terms of its having made me a better rider. I’ve been down and I don’t want to go down like that again, all big-time pain and hospital madness. I was a victim of my own hubris. I had been willing something to happen because it was all getting to be too much for me. Life became complicated and I had a date with disaster, a need to test the boundaries, whatever the cost, whatever the price, forever rushing toward death. The Grim Reaper rides today on a Harley made of human bones and skulls, looking for victims. He tried to take me, poured all of his will into making me embrace an early death. I smiled, as if I sought a pass into both dimensions.

  While lying there in the street, I had an “other realm” experience I can’t quite explain, though it happened to me once before in a spiritualist ceremony I attended when I was sixteen. Then I was sitting in a circle of people who channeled voices of others, speaking through them. My friend’s girlfriend was particularly gifted as a medium, with many spirits coming through her, fielding questions posed by the circle. We meditated, each sitting in a chair, head bowed in a silent, respectful prayer. The séance lasted twenty minutes before the spirits could be contacted. This period of quiet concentration was needed to calm the room and allow the spirits access to their chosen vessels. Nothing took place my first two times, but on the third, I rose above myself into the red dimension of love and warmth, the spirits surrounding me. I stayed there for an instant, or a lifetime, and came down to find the circle awakening to begin their conversations with the other side.

  I went through seven operations in a month before I was back limping around. Though not for everyone, for me it’s an insane rush, riding the edge between life and death. I experienced morphine for the first time, the king of downers, the Big M. It was murder to detox, especially in a hospital bed with a broken leg. The nurse had to change my bedclothes once an hour for several weeks, as I was sweating profusely during sleep. But I got off the stuff. That is quite the accomplishment, according to my doctor. “Mister Broad . . . How can I say this to you? You are ‘drinking’ the pain medication in. Is there anything you want to tell me?” I confessed to being a massive junkie but promised to get off the gear when the time came. And I kept my promise.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  HOLLYWOOD PROMISES

  Tinseltown, Los Angeles

  ONCE HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL, my mum came to help nurse me to health. Mum was a nurse by trade, so in addition to having her moral support, it was great to have her professional aid. As I sat in my chair in the front room, she would skillfully clean my leg wound using a long cotton swab coated with hospital-strength Betadine antiseptic. One day, Mum remembers little Will got into the cotton buds and started to touch my leg with one, and when Mum asked him what he was doing, he said, “Cleaning Daddy’s boo boo!”

  It was great to have her there, as she could care for my injuries properly, which meant I could dispense with the expensive professional help. But more than that, it was a special bonding time for us, as we were alone together for long periods, the most in fact since I was a very young child, when my mother first got her driver’s license in America and the two of us took long road trips together. She is an excellent nurse and has a very loving but deliberate way about her that is both full of concern as well as she won’t allow you to dwell on the negative.

  At night, we would often read from the bible together—I still had a long road to recovery ahead of me, and I wanted everything possible on my side. Besides, how could I say no to my mum? It’s not like I could get up and walk away.

  Once Mum returned home, reporters questioned her about my rehabilitation, and she mentioned innocently that we had been reading the bible together nearly every night, saying that the accident had “certainly changed my life.” The UK press ran with the story, saying I was “born again.” Devilish Billy Idol becomes an angel!

  And so when it came time to do press for Charmed Life, in a satellite interview with journalists from UK and Europe all gathered in one room, I knew the first question asked me would be, “Billy, so is it true, born again??”

  I came prepared, thrilled to hear the question first out of the gate. I responded, “I think everybody heard it wrong. When people were saying I was born again, it was actually that I’ve got back into porn again . . . I think there’s just a little bit of a mistake there, when my mother was telling everybody. Because I mean, my church is still the dirty bookstore.” Yes, it was worth a good laugh, but the real purpose of the statement was fulfilled; it put a swift end to those questions before they’d begun.

  * * *

  FILMING OF THE DOORS BEGAN the same month I was released from Cedars-Sinai, with a newly implanted steel rod in my leg, a long road of rehab still ahead of me. I was feeling very down, when Oliver kindly reached out to offer me a less rigorous role, and I gratefully accepted. Oliver was extremely generous in offering me the part, as neither he nor I knew whether I would be able to walk by the time my scenes were to be filmed. I was given the smaller part of Cat, a film director and hanger-on to Jim’s entourage, and I would be playing across from Dennis Burkley, a character actor appearing as Dog, whose large size meant he usually played bikers.

  Once I was feeling well enough, I first went down to the production offices and met up with some of the other actors, but I found it difficult being in a wheelchair. Eventually I was able to go to the set on crutches with a cast on my leg, and tried to execute my role as Cat. It wasn’t easy.

  I was extremely impressed with Val’s commitment to his role. He did everything he could to stay in character
, such that he had given instructions that no one speak to him when he arrived on the set, among a number of other stipulations. Some thought this was excessive, but I thought there was a complete validity.

  One location was in a house off Laurel Canyon where they shot the now-infamous “the duck is dead” scene, in which Val’s Jim Morrison struggles with a knife-wielding Meg Ryan’s Pamela Courson. The scene ends with Val’s Jim stomping on the duck he’d burned to a crisp, exclaiming, “And I’m still killing your fucking duck!”

  The house was down about 150 steep steps that I had to negotiate from the trailers. I spent the majority of the time that afternoon getting up and down those fucking steps. I got just one line in that day: “Fuck you, Ray.” I said it with venom, pissed at my own stupidity that had led to losing my original part. The late Dennis Burkley steals the scene when he picks up the flattened duck carcass from the floor and says to no one in particular, “Fuck it, man, let’s eat this thing.”

  It was really interesting to see all the props in the house. They were all of the period, down to the Marlboro cigarette packets lying on the table, featuring the vintage design. Occasionally Oliver would ask me if I thought the film’s concert scenes were true to the era, as he had spent a lot of that time as a grunt in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and had not witnessed the Doors’ gigs firsthand. As far as I could see they were accurate, although sometimes the Doors’ concerts in the film would show the audience in a modern standing-on-their-feet way of watching a band perform, whereas I remember everyone sat on the floor at concerts in the ’60s. But in my opinion, the audience being involved and on their feet made the gigs in the film seem rebellious or wild in a way that was important. It showed Jim’s ability to stir an audience to action.