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

by Des Barres, Pamela

  I waited by the phone for a whole week for the call to glory, but it never came. Joyce Ingalls got the part, had a fling with Stallone, and was later almost severed from the film when the fling came to an abrupt halt. It was one of the times that Sascha almost left him, right before his fling with Susan Anton. It’s amazing how we know these silly facts about famous people, isn’t it?

  The Real Don Steeler did get a small role in Paradise Alley; as Vonnie, the naughty girlfriend of the bad guy played by Kevin Conway. I was delirious about snagging this morsel of work. Maybe I might actually infiltrate the tawdry sanctity of show business! Even though I knew the roses had zero scent, I wanted to bury my nose in two dozen long-stemmed red ones and breathe deep.

  January 8, 1978, has started off with a bang! I worked all week on Paradise Alley for Sylvester Stallone, and I was good! He put his enormous arms around me after my big scene with Armand Assante and said, “That was great—you ran the full gamut of emotions.” I know when he sees the dailies he’ll use me again in one of his upcoming movies. I had only one line, and he gave me three more. He likes me and thinks I’m talented and so does everyone there. He is so sweet and nice and self-confident and gorgeous, even though I think he has personal problems of a grand nature. (Stature? Kevin says he’s only five feet nine inches and wears lifts all the time.) The gossip is that he gets major crushes on starlets and then crushes their hearts. Oh well, it doesn’t affect me. It really makes me feel like a different person to be working! It puts other things (like my relationship) in perspective. Look out, I predict big-time stardom for Armand Assante.

  I came away from Paradise Alley with some serious high-apple-piein-the-sky-hopes. The little taste had whet my star-bitten taste buds, and I wanted more more more! The following week I had a crumb tossed at me in the form of a local car wax commercial. Wearing yet another pair of tight-ass shorts and a halter top I scrubbed and rubbed on the hood of a dull dirty car, straining to get those darn spots off! Here comes my next-door neighbor, Broderick Crawford, the fifties TV star from Highway Patrol, one of my very favorite half hours, holding a fabulously bright bottle of some sort of Turtle Wax, ready to do the neighborly thing and help me out. After expressing amazement in several different ways over the glory of the product, I was cut loose. I hung around to watch Brod’s closeups, reminiscing about my childhood when he had represented all that was strong and lawful. He leered at me and reeked of gin at eleven in the morning, but kiddy memories die hard and I wanted to have my picture taken with him. He took the opportunity to press against me without anybody noticing, but I understood. I gave the photo to my dad and he was impressed. He had my mom put it in a frame. I guess he thought his daughter was finally going places.

  Feeling high about my car wax experience, I went trotting into my commercial agency to see if the big babe, Sonia, would start sending me out on a lot more interviews. I wasn’t getting my share! Instead of the glowing reception I expected, all I got was a tongue-lashing from the elite waxlike Sonia about the way I had been dressing for these normal soap-suds interviews. She told me I had to go on a search for boring Midwestern-acceptable, straitlaced outfits. I suppose she realized my closet wasn’t brimming with shirtwaists and acceptable shoes. I remember exactly what I had on for this punifying, finger-pointing experience—a short hot-pink ensemble full of lavender flowers and Frederick’s of Hollywood sling-backs. It reminded me of the time I got expelled from Cleveland High for “looking absurd,” one of my very favorite, top-five high school memories. My humbling blush matched my painted red toes, and I promised to head straight for Sears.

  V

  Michael went to San Francisco to see the Sex Pistols and came back knowing down deep that Detective was a dinosaur that had to be stuffed, mounted, and put to rest. He was only going through the motions anyway, since the band’s second album had gone nowhere slow. He told me the Sex Pistols were about to stomp all over the leaden music industry with their gigantic punk boots, chop off the excess, and kick it to death for bad measure. It was only a matter of time before the pistol-punk shot would be heard ’round the world.

  Michael was in serious trouble with his drug and alcohol problems, spending more and more time out in the wilderness, but what good did it do to dye my brains black and envision a funeral? Despite his nightmare life away from me (I squeezed my temples impossible to keep from seeing the whole thing in sordid, florid Technicolor), I kept up the fantasy front of married perfection, trying so hard not to think about his “other life” and the possibility that it might involve “other women.” Since I took care of the money, I knew he wasn’t spending a whole lot on cocaine—how was he getting it? Things disappeared from the house, a pair of diamond studs he got from Sharon Arden, a leather jacket. “I guess I lost them somehow, honey.” Uh-huh.

  Several months before, I had stopped whining and begging with him, because I finally realized it never did a smidge of good, and my most recent form of retribution was taught me by my sweet mom—the punishing Silent Treatment. Back in Reseda the Dodgers game would blare; Vin Scully all excited about Wally Moon’s homer; the Swiss steak sizzling on the grill, the pop, crack, and sizz way too loud, like the dumb hunk of beef was cooking inside my head. My big, powerful daddy was bent low by the silence emanating from my five feet-three-inch mom. Silence directed right at him. Somehow when I did the same to Michael it wasn’t as intense. When I withheld my love it was still apparent, like I had rubbed that pheromone sparkling gold-dust lotion all over my body, mistaking it for Vaseline Intensive Care.

  But one sad dusk after Michael had gone missing for thirty-two hours following a record company cocktail bash I was burning with accusations. I had the shades drawn, wallowing around in the bleak certainty that another grotesque encounter was on the horizon. Or maybe he had OD’d somewhere? Been in a horrible accident? Waiting for his appearance after he had been missing in action was insufferable, unendurable. I couldn’t read, eat, hang out with friends, or watch TV. I just got madder and sadder until my entire being was a red-hot brick. By the time he stumbled through the door with his eyes stuck together and his mouth lined with old, destroyed chewing gum, I actually had a fever.

  This time he was even more disheveled and vacant-eyed than usual. He had blood running down his neck and ragged rips in his clothes. “I just got hit by a car.” He recited in a monotone drone, “A car just hit me.” In supreme silence I cleaned the gash on his chin, bandaged it up, and got him out of his wrecked clothes. He was a zombie, his eyes a bomb site, and even though I sat him down in a chair and could look straight at him, Michael Des Barres, my honey husband, was definitely AWOL. I slapped him in the face to wake him up. He just sat there. I slapped him again. He didn’t move. I slapped him really, really hard, tears gushing, a sound coming out of me that I didn’t know I could make. He stared straight ahead, one lone tear dripping down his chiseled, reddening cheek. Oh, Michael, I love you! I hate you! Where are you? Where have you been? I could just see him out in the wild, untamed, filthy night, squirming in the underbelly of transgression. Why are you doing this to me? To yourself? Don’t you know you are my whole life? Please, please let me make you sane, content, at peace with your anguished soul!

  I got him to bed, and he was out like a black light for the next twenty hours while I blubbered to every guru who was ever born. I still had no idea I was dealing with a disease. I saw Michael as a man who was ruining his life, ruining my life, tromping on our happiness—drinking it, snorting it, dropping it with selfish, cavalier abandon.

  I fully expected another one of those peeling, gold-plated silences to follow this miserable, wrenching altercation. I slept on the furthest edge of the bed, a mile away from his blasphemed body, my heart in two separate bloody pieces, and had been up for two or three hours when he emerged from his black-cloud coma. Usually I ignored his attempts at conversation, the observations and pleasantries he made through squinted eyes. I knew his head felt like a squashed cantaloupe, and the knowledge that he felt god-awf
ul gave me a fictitious, holier-than-thou upper hand. It was the only time I could look down on him, smugly ensconced within my pure, unravaged temple. I went to the market, cooked his meals, did his laundry, drove him places, but I temporarily withheld adoration; my only power. But something was different this time. “I’m a fucking cocaine addict,” he announced thickly, with truth clearly in the room with us. “I’m an alcoholic and a goddamned drug addict, baby.” He sort of staggered down onto his knees in supplication to me—and I went to him without hesitation, holding his head against my tummy. Our tears streamed. This was a revelation. Would he finally be delivered? Could the miracle be close at hand?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I

  When Michael went back out on the road with Detective he promised to try to stay away from the evils that hotel rooms bring: butt lickers who carry razor blades and mirrors around in hopes of hanging out with the band, tempting females with full bottles of Jack Daniels, seventeen joints, and a bong shoved in their spandex waistbands. The night of the Big Confession we made up in front of the mirror, doggie-style, and six weeks later, as I perused the calendar, I realized I hadn’t bled since. Hmm. The birth control we practiced was the old-fashioned rhythm method. It had always worked so well that I figured the tilted uterus inherited from my mom had given Michael’s tap-dancing sperm the bum’s rush, sending them wriggling off in all the wrong directions. But making up that night had been ooh-la-la. I could swear I saw the soul flutter into my middle and lodge itself there; a smidgen of smiling light within the frenzied, pent-up thrusting. I instantly recalled witnessing that Tinkerbell flicker of radiance in the mirror. Wow. Double, triple, quadruple WOW.

  I sat there in a stupor fiddling with my tits. Were they a tiny bit bigger than usual? Were they sore? Wowie zowie. The next day I went to dear, old Dr. Aaron and peed into a cup. He had been my doctor my whole life and was there the morning I was born, although he didn’t quite make it to the actual birth. Mom popped me out all by herself six weeks early while waiting for someone to give her a saddle block. Since she never got her painkilling drugs, I was born unaddled, wide awake, and squalling. She said I flew out so hard and fast that she was scared I would slide off the table and dangle by my umbilical cord.

  So I went home and waited to find out if the rabbit had died, trying to imagine how the impregnated pee could exterminate the floppy-eared mammal. I knew they had stopped murdering hares in the name of motherhood eons earlier, but it still depressed me to ponder it. Back in ’78 a pregnancy test took longer than it does now, so I had to get through an entire weekend with tornado visions of bonnets and booties, bottles and bassinets whirling round and round in my dizzy dreams.

  I wanted to skewer Michael with the possibility of Daddom in person, so I was skittish the Sunday evening he came home from entertaining jaded America, and he was, as usual, exhausted. After unpacking his ravaged wardrobe, making him a nice cup of tea, running a bath, and pulling back the covers so he could climb into our queen-size cuddle-den, I told him we were expecting an important call in the morning. He looked confused and asked hopefully if I had gotten a callback on a movie or commercial. I was touched; he was always real supportive of career endeavors and also very good at commiserating when things fell through. “No,” I said, stirred-up giddy and apprehensive at the same time. “Doctor Aaron is going to call.” Dot dot dot. “My period is late.” Dot dot dot. “Wow,” he said softly. My sentiments exactly. He then put his arms around me reassuringly and squeezed me real sweet and hard. “We would have to look for a bigger place, wouldn’t we?” he said, and it was like he sang me a lullabye.

  Michael slept and I didn’t, but when the phone rang at nine the next morning, he raised up groggily to get the big news. It was the doctor who rescued me from sliding off the stainless steel table twenty-nine years earlier, and he told me exuberantly, “Congratulations, Pamela, the rabbit died.”

  II

  My parents were ecstatic about the upcoming bundle of joy, especially Daddy, who decided it gave him the perfect reason to stick around the planet a while longer. He just knew I was having a boy. Right after the big news was announced, however, he took a scary turn for the worse and wound up hacking and choking at St. Joseph’s in Glendale, the very same hospital where his only daughter drew her first breath. The doctor told Daddy he didn’t think he would live to see his grandchild, and Daddy laughed in his face until the hoot turned into a grinding, coughing hack, and the doctor said, “See what I mean, Oren?” I like to think the doctor was using reverse psychology, because Daddy came home two weeks later swigging a six-pack, playing poker, counting the days until he could teach his grandson the finer things in life—like how to build a rotary engine and the only way to clear a stopped-up bathroom drain. I’m sure five-card stud was not out of the question, either.

  For Michael and me the joy of our blessed event was profound yet certainly more complicated. Until then, motherhood had never entered my mind. Being an only child, the rare time I spent with small people had been up at the Zappa household when I held kitchen-court as the zany nanny, making cinnamon toast, dancing half-naked around the table with Keith Moon. Somehow it hadn’t seemed like real life; it was all so dazzling and there were always shooting stars in my eyes. I had never really thought of Moon and Dweezil as children anyway, since Frank and Gail treated them as equals from day one. The munchkins even called their parents Frank and Gail. They still do. Did I want my kid to call me Pamela or Mommy? My own impending motherhood seemed so overwhelming at times that I had to sit down and put my head between my knees, until I got too round to bend over, that is.

  I never got morning sickness but had to gnaw on saltines and swig seltzer every afternoon for the first few weeks. This was before trendy, flavored sparkling water came into being. No kiwi-passion-fruit, no raspberry-vanilla bean. It was the dark ages fourteen years ago when Perrier was still bubbling under the ground somewhere outside Paris. I preferred plain seltzer to Nestea but was very willing to quaff down many glasses of the brown stuff to grab the national commercial Sonia sent me up for.

  The audition was held in a boring office full of listless execs who had already interviewed twenty-eight other perky-eyed girls by the time I arrived. I had to fiddle around, pretending I was oh-so-hot and bothered at a barbecue full of my husband’s important business associates. This stressed-out wifey needed to take the Nestea plunge! That would cool her right off! I must have been frazzled exactly right, because I got a callback and had to fall backwards into a gigantic, glistening pool, holding a nice, tall glass of cool, refreshing Nestea. I was a little late after hunting around to find the type of bathing suit that didn’t reveal my looming mound of baby, and had to start falling backwards in the slapping water before making nice to any of the grim-faced Nestea people. I fell a dozen times, keeping a satisfied, grateful grin on my face. By the tenth trip into the chlorinated depths, I felt like I was having a psychedelic experience and wondered dizzily if the baby was having a good trip. I drove home with my ears popping, my water-logged brain sloshing mindlessly, and the phone was ringing as I walked in the door. I got the job!

  I left for New Mexico two days later, envisioning all the satin booties and frilly bassinets the Nestea loot would buy the Des Barres family. I was so excited that somewhere over the Grand Canyon I made the mistake of telling the clothing person that I was pregnant, and she flipped. The whole team of commercial geeks went into a flurry of confusion, and at the last second I had to have Dr. Zeidner (my new gyno who brought Dweezil into the world) send a telegram saying I was in good enough health to fall backwards into a pool several times holding a nice, tall glass of their thirst-quenching product.

  By the time of the shoot I was so practiced at the plunge that I perfected it in only three tries. Nobody cared about me in my puffy pink dress anyway, focusing totally on the Nestea and how the sun glinted on the sparkling tumbler, how the ice cubes tinkled just so, the travels of the water driplets down the sides of the glass, and exactly
how much of the brown liquid slid down my throat before the plunge took place. I drank so much tea to get the gulps perfected that when I climbed onto the plane headed home I was tea-logged and numb, having to head for the pee pot every twenty minutes. But it was worth it: Not only would the commercial bring us a wad of needed cash, but I would make enough for my Screen Actor’s Guild insurance to cover all my maternity bills, except for the hospital phone calls.

  III

  Still, our finances were dodgy, and our apartment was too small. I had started looking around for picket-fence-Father-Knows-Best-type digs with a backyard, where Michael and I could frolic idyllically with our offspring, but soon found that an actual house was out of our teetering rock-and-roll price range. Although he had always been Mr. Privacy, Michael agreed that we needed a roommate to help pay the rent, so I got on the phone to get the word out. When I called my old traveling partner, Renee, I found out that the girl she and I visited in Wyoming a few years earlier had tired of farm life and had just arrived in Hollywood. The arid flatlands of Wyoming had been my refuge when my then-boyfriend, Don Johnson, met sweet-teen Melanie Griffith on the set of The Harrad Experiment and illicit sparks had started to fly right in my face. I wasn’t ready for romantic frost-bite, so Renee and I hitchhiked out to the wide-open spaces so I could escape the inevitable consummation. Give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, don’t fence me in. There in the Middle America brush I ate gnarly homegrown vegetables and practiced complicated yoga positions under the twinkling Big Dipper, trying hard not to think about the virginal miss and the two-timing hunka hunka burning love. Renee’s old friend Denise “Dee Dee” Della-quilla, the lady of the ranch, was a down-to-earth Italian girl who would now become the Hollywood roommate of Michael and Pamela and baby Des Barres. It’s a small world after all.