Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up

by Des Barres, Pamela

  When we arrived back home from the neon desert, sated and dizzy with King-itis, I found potential good news in the mailbox. One of the acting photos I sent out landed on the desk of a corny ex-TV actor, and he wanted me to call him right away! He seemed to take a serious shine to me after our first hour-long meeting at the house of his famous girlfriend, and I had cloud-capped Hollywood hopes.

  In his high-pitched, squealy voice, he told me I “had something,” he was going to “discover” me, and give me a “coming-out” party on a fancy yacht, but alas, he turned out to be a pig with a capital P. I had had a few run-ins with power-mad, horny would-be movie moguls, but this one took the fucking cake. He took me to an intimate dinner with one of his once-upon-a-time-star pals, had professional shots done for me by an old-timey photog who raved about my presence in front of the camera and sat with me for hours promising to make me famous. My already weak self-esteem had been flattened by the nobody slob acting coach, so my naive and humbled ego was assuaged by these flattering tidbits.

  One lovely afternoon the actor and I were brainstorming about my important career when his girlfriend’s teen movie idol son walked through the room and spotted me. I had met him a couple of times, so I said hello and he gave me a very curious look, complete with warning signal, like “What the fuck are you doing here? Watch out.” My blundering heart turned over and sure enough, that very day after asking what I was going to do for him in return for his generous promotional favors, the actor gave me the single most putrid line ever uttered by someone with a penis: “A man has needs.” He wanted sex. He wanted head. He wanted a hand job in return for making me a star.

  I saw the party yacht sailing off into the sunset as I stumbled out of the clean-cut Beverly Hills house with white shutters like on The Partridge Family. I had even asked the eager has-been, “But what about your girlfriend?,” and he shook his head and said again, “She’s out of town right now and, honey, a man has needs.” I didn’t have enough balls (fallopian tubes?) to tell him what I thought that day, but I would certainly love to bump into him right now. Yes, indeed. I wish I could divulge the name of the cheesy Hollywood throwback, but he’s the type who would probably sue me for telling the truth.

  II

  Needless to say this typical, pathetic Hollywood incident made me question just about everything I was doing and what it all meant. Michael was enraged and wanted to have one of his menacing roadies do some serious harm to the actor’s needy male area, which didn’t happen but made me feel loved. I took stock of myself every once in a while, and since I was pushing thirty and still found myself in these questionable situations, it was time for a serious review:

  The statistics are as follows—I’m five feet three and a half inches tall, but I always write five feet four inches on my acting résumés, which I send out constantly despite my insecurity problems. I fluctuate between 110 and 117 pounds. I’m 114 right now, which is a bit too heavy, so I go to the Beverly Hills Health Club for toning up the tummy. I have bluish eyes—not extremely blue so that people comment on them very often—they are also pretty small and nearsighted, and I have a turned-up nose that I got from my mom and a full, pretty mouth that I got from Daddy. It all fits well together, but I’ve always had a lousy complexion, small tits as well, which agonized me in teen years. I live with a stunning, talented, beautiful, and crazy man, whom I met three and a half years ago, and we plan on getting married this year. We live right in the heart of Hollywood in a totally gay building. He sings rock and roll, and I call myself an actress. I’m a lazy person most of the time, and I have silly, negative thoughts even though I’m aware how destructive they can be. I’m also sickeningly naive. My career has flopped out, so at times my confidence aches, but I get up and do it anyway. I get migraine headaches for an unknown reason, but my health is fine otherwise. I haven’t eaten meat in over five years. I’m in the most professional acting workshop so far, and I pray they don’t throw me out after I do my first scene on Tuesday. (See! My confidence is in agony!) I write songs—so far the only ones recorded have been on Detective’s albums. I read one or two books a week and relish it and someday want to write the story of my nutty life. I worry about Michael because he drinks so much and gets so manic and self-destructive—but I also know he’s following the dots and I have no control.

  I was wallowing in confusion and needed a spot of spirituality to jolt me out of the constant inner nattering that clogged up my head. So I got up real early one Sunday morning and drove our new ’73 Toyota, bought with Michael’s Detective money, up into the glorious hills of Ojai to hear Krishnamurti speak the solemn truth to a hushed pack of soul searchers. I listened so hard that my eardrums throbbed, still only grasping part of his profound life-altering message. He sat up on the platform, an eighty-year-old white-haired Indian man wearing some pretty classy duds—no orange robes for him, no cloud of camouflaging incense—and reminded us that “the speaker is only up on this platform for practical purposes,” just so he could be seen and heard. He didn’t consider himself above anybody. We were all one. Hmm. When he said, “The thinker is the thought,” did he mean, we are what we think? Or we create the world around us and what happens to us by thinking certain thoughts? “The observer is the observed,” he said. Did that mean we are what we see? We create what we see? Or we see what we are if we look real hard? I was a sincere seeker under the oak trees and wanted to transform myself instantaneously.

  My heart was full of cosmic hope when Michael said he would go with me to see Krishnamurti the following weekend. I just knew that with his awesome brain power he would grasp the message totally and take the first joyous step on his spiritual path. We sat cross-legged in the beautiful oak grove together, blissing out, and after Krishnamurti’s talk, consumed lots of brown rice and broccoli with other hungry, humble seekers in perfect tranquility. We bought tapes of the lectures and some deep inspirational books: You Are the World, Think on These Things.

  The next night Michael went out to see Bad Company at the Forum and didn’t come home for two days. I dried my puffy eyes and wrote another song about the pain of loving an escape artist.

  He takes you to the edge

  But he leaves you standing there

  How can you follow a shadow

  Through the exit door to nowhere?

  I felt alone, I felt betrayed. I was so concerned about the rotting of Michael’s liver, I never thought too much about other women, even though there was this one horrible, scrawny public-relations bitch who hung around, condescending to me like I was just another airy-fairy, girly-girl. She had short, manlike hair, paper-thin slit-lips, and—scariest to me—piles of cocaine. In my lowest white-powder nightmares I pictured Michael teetering, dancing gleefully in the darkness, with jibbering ghouls all around him, leading him to his final resting place, three sheets to the wind.

  III

  Screw the slit-lipped PR dog!! Glory of ultimate glories, I was finally going to get married! Michael’s transatlantic divorce came through, and we started making wedding plans. My parents were relieved and ecstatic. Even though they had been supportive and loving, it had been hard for them to accept that their daughter was living openly in sin.

  My daddy was on oxygen most of the time, and his weight kept climbing up and plunging down due to the monstrous selection of pills he had to drop all day long. My mom even had to set the alarm in the dead of night to slip him a couple of capsules. But despite his gnawing discomfort, he wanted to give me away on the big day. He rented a deluxe cream-colored tux with flared trousers and invited his best pal Ruben in from Mexico.

  Nobody had the dough to toss a sock-’em-rock-’em wingding, so I asked my friend Catherine if we could do the deed in the glorious green of her Laurel Canyon backyard. As soon as she said yes, Mom started making her special teriyaki chicken wings for two-hundred freaks. My parents also bought the champagne and a vast array of fresh flowers that my dear friend Michele Myer picked up downtown at 4 A.M. Punch bowls, chairs, tables, a
nd an actual bower to stand under during the ceremony were rented. Catherine recommended a Unitarian preacher that we hired for fifty bucks, and I rewrote the marriage dialogue to suit a modern couple. I kept “love and honor” but deleted the word “obey”—and no man and wife for us! The nerve! After looking at some artless new gowns, I came to my senses and found my wedding dress for six dollars at the Aardvark on Melrose Avenue, a little girl’s antique communion frock from the twenties that I embellished with peach and ivory satin ribbons and tiny velvet flowers. I made my own veil, spending many hours winding ivory ribbons round and round the headpiece for a (Romeo and) Juliet effect, “The Wedding March” running round and round my love-soaked head. Here comes the bride, all dressed in white, here comes the groom. Here comes the groom. Here comes the groom! After the necessary nuptials, my darling groom would get his precious green card and wouldn’t even have to take a ballpoint to Peter Grant’s shiny pate.

  I’m getting married in the morning, ding-dong the bells are going to chime! The Moment was set for 1 P.M. and everybody had arrived all dressed up and were already stuffing their faces full of chicken wings and tricolor health dip, downing the potent punch I had concocted. Peach-colored crepe paper fluttered in the breeze, aunties and uncles decked out in polyester mingled with Misses Mercy and Sparkie in full-throttle GTO regalia, Zappa children were everywhere, cameras were poised, Tony Kaye sat by the record player, waiting to start “The Wedding March,” the odd-duck, rail-thin minister wandered around under the bower studying the new script, even the lowbrow public-relations girl had the nerve to show up, looking uncannily like Scrooge McDuck in her ill-fitting white suit. An astounding bouquet of white roses arrived with a sweet telegram from Percy, Pagey, Bonzo, and John Paul Jones, and everyone was impressed. Several members of local poufy-haired rock bands admired the bride-to-be, who was smiling wide on the outside.

  But where was the groom? Bobby Pickett, the bass player who had thrown Michael’s bachelor party the night before, was there already, looking slightly chagrined. I looked pointedly at him, but he just shrugged with wide, questioning eyes. My daddy was resting in a fold-up chair, taking a few quick whiffs of oxygen for his short walk down the aisle. Mom, of course, was looking at me, her face full of loving mom-concern because she read me just like a book and never missed a page, to quote my old friend Gram Parsons.

  I was coming to the conclusion that Michael’s feet had frozen solid, when here he came up the steps, looking sheepish in the fancy ivory suit he bought from our chic hairdresser, Peter Vizer. No sleep had come between Michael and his revelry; bloodshot bourbon eyes betrayed his last all-night bender as a single man, but I was too relieved to let it bust the major moment. Before he could even adjust to Catherine’s decked-out backyard and all the dolled-up wedding guests, Michael Philip Des Barres was standing in front of the zany preacher and saying “I do.” Daddy had walked me proudly down the imaginary aisle while a scratchy, ancient rendition of “The Wedding March” trumpeted from Catherine’s bedroom window and I stood next to my unwieldy Prince Charming, trying to catch up with my love-scorched heart, which was beating a thousand miles a minute. Michael’s hand trembled, and his eyes teared up as he slipped the gold band onto my finger, where it remained for over a decade.

  The treasured ring is now in a soft, quiet place in my antique jewelry box. I thought sure it would be all that was left of me after my ashes were scattered to the four winds, but as I said, life is full of surprises. Expect the best, expect the worst. And always expect a blankety-blank miracle.

  We were supposed to leave for Palm Springs directly after the ceremony, but my darling husband could hardly see straight, so we went home and opened our presents. Mario, the Whisky a Go Go manager, had put fifty bucks in our wedding card, and we wound up with three blenders, two toaster ovens, lot of objets d’art (ha!) and seven hundred-dollar Tiffany coins from Sharon Arden, who is now Mrs. Ozzy Osbourne. At the time she worked for her father, Don Arden, an ominous rock manager who even scared Peter Grant out of his size-fifteen shoes. My mom got us a whole case of maple syrup for our coffee and tea, which was my favorite gift.

  We stayed at our fave little joint in Palm Springs, the Pepper Tree Inn, where we basked in the steaming hot tub and the realization that the two of us were now One. I had zero doubt that I had found my life partner—through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, etc., etc., so help me, God. As we walked down the on-fire, palmtreed sidewalks, Michael stopped bermuda-shorted strangers to show them my wedding band. “I’d like you to meet Mrs. Pamela Des Barres,” he said proudly to gray-haired couples. If I admired some touristy trinket in a store window, I found it later under my pillow. Late in the hundred-degree night, after a lazy day smearing Bain de Soleil on each other, we wondered aloud about our future Des Barres offspring. “I need a boy,” Michael said wistfully, cradling me in the spoon position, “to carry on my mad family name.” Life was sweet.

  Detective got a gig in Hawaii playing at the site of some famous volcano, and we had another honeymoon under the big, round ball of sun. Michael and I had an exquisite time roaming through the blatantly colorful, fragrant flowers and watching gorgeous postcard-perfect Hawaiian men dive a hundred feet straight down into the turquoise waterfalls. We drank gigantic scooped-out pineapple shells full of dangerous rum and posed in front of tacky tiki gods until we used up a dozen rolls of film. The rest of the band went out in search of mayhem every night, but Michael stayed in the hotel with me. The wife. We lounged around and ate a lot of papayas and fancy fruit pancakes with tropical syrup, watched TV, cooed, cuddled, and got real nasty late at night. One balmy morning as we ate fluffy mango waffles on the terrace, Michael reached for my hand. I guess I was gleaming. “I’m never going to forget how you look right now, baby, so beautiful, so happy with your big Hawaiian breakfast.” My only moment of mortification came when the sound went out during the Detective show and Michael mimed drinking, smoking, snorting, and shooting to keep the crowd amused. Ha ha ha.

  IV

  The brief, sweet escape behind me, I went back to pounding the sticky Hollyweird pavement, seeking fame. Masochism, anyone?

  The word was out that the amazing guy who had pulled off Rocky was going to direct a movie about wrestling and a love interest was needed. Could that be me? My agent finagled an audition, milking my soap credentials for way more than they were worth, and after finally deciding on a short, sexy black dress, I drove to Universal Studios to meet Sylvester Stallone.

  Waiting in those Hollywood offices when your heart is a yammering hopefest, an unknown nobody aching to be somebody, is enough to liquify your insides. The secretaries treat you like parakeet poop, and you have to handle it with devil-don’t-give-a-shit nonchalance. I picked up Variety and gave it a practiced once-over, waiting to be announced. The double door opened, and I made my entrance. Gonna fly now.

  I took in the scene: Stallone behind a massive desk, picture window behind him with a view of the lot, a couple slick-looking guys lounging around, drinking coffee, soft, muted lighting, thick beige carpeting . . . “It’s you!!” he shouted. I looked behind me to see if anyone else had come into the room. “The Real Don Steeler!!” he raved. “I’ve wanted to meet you for years!!” I actually pointed at myself, just like in the movies. “Me?”

  It was true, I had danced on The Real Don Steele Show, wiggling around in a flashy go-go ensemble while different bands lip-synced to their Top Forty tunes. I had to hang all over host Don Steele and tell him how handsome he was before the cameras rolled, but I never dreamed a future superstar might be watching. Somebody who could make me a star myself!! Sly (ha!) and I had a fine chat, then I read cold from the script he handed me, just the way I learned in Charles Conrad’s acting class. When I got home, Michael told me I had a screen test the following Monday. I couldn’t breathe. The movie was called Paradise Alley, and the part I was up for was Stallone’s love interest, a hooker with a heart of twenty-four-carat you-know-what.

  I studied th
e lines until I was shouting them out in my sleep. I went to Frederick’s of Hollywood and bought a lacy negligee for my screen test with Stallone that was going to take place in bed!! I had Peter Vizer streak my hair with shimmering golden highlights that would gleam just right, had a pearlized pink pedicure, since I was going to be barefooted, and bought a bottle of fruity white wine to calm my sizzling nerves. I felt like sparks were shooting off me. Ping! They gave me a trailer on the Universal lot with my name on the door, and I drank three glasses of fruity confidence while I waited my turn. Six girls were testing, and I was third on the list. Time was given a sleeping pill. It seemed like hours crawled by, and I tried not to get too tipsy as I paced shreds into the mini—motor home carpeting. I looked in the mirror and found fault with my entire being, powdering and repowdering my nose to matte perfection. The second girl, Joyce Ingalls, had been “testing” for over an hour and it worried me.

  When I finally got under the covers in front of a bunch of bored guys behind cameras and Stallone climbed in with me, I was ready. I remembered all the lines and did a really good, choked-up reading, almost coming to tears as the scene closed. My final line was “The clock’s runnin’ ” because I had decided to charge him for the time in bed with me. I loved the big lug, but he didn’t love me, so he could just pay for my services. So there. As I got dressed in the trailer, I was so full of hope that my heart seemed pumped with helium. I sang Dave Clark Five songs at the top of my lungs all the way home. Glad all over, yes I am—glad all over, baby, I’m glad all over, so glad you’re mi—i-i—i-ine.