Pretty Mess

by Erika Jayne

  Every summer, my son would go to Tom Sawyer Day Camp in Altadena, California. It’s right near our house. When that was finished, he would work in the law firm for the rest of the summer. He would carry Tom’s briefcase, get coffee, run errands, and sometimes go to court with Tom. That’s why he is so comfortable in court as a police officer. He was practically raised there.

  When my son was in his probationary year at LAPD, he was stationed downtown. He patrolled the area near Tom’s office. One day, something happened on the sidewalk in front of the office. Lynn, the firm’s receptionist, is a tough broad from New Jersey. She spotted my son in his uniform handling the incident. She gathered a small crowd of lawyers, pressing their noses against the glass, to watch him in action. They had known him since he was six, and now he was a grown man policing their street.

  When we first got married, I was busy being a mother and a wife. But I had other things to do as well. Tom loves to golf, so I decided that I would learn how to play. I started going to the Wilshire Country Club to take lessons with the pro a couple of times a week. I’d also play with my old friend Randy, who worked with me at Chasen’s. He and I played on the public course, where we used to get chased by coyotes.

  When I figured out that golf is a lot like dancing, I started to get pretty good. It’s about precise movement, shifting your body at the right time, and being fluid in your movement. One day, Tom and I were playing at Bel Air Country Club. We both put our balls up on the first tee and hit them out into the fairway. We pulled up to the ball farthest from the hole, the lesser shot. Tom said, “This is yours.”

  I got out of the cart and looked at the ball. “No, honey,” I said. “This is Titleist 2. I’m Titleist 3. This is your ball.” I had outdriven Tom on the first hole. That was the last time we ever played golf together. I can’t say that I mind. While I loved being out on the beautiful courses and driving the cart, I never had the patience to play a full round the way he does it.

  About eight years after moving in to Tom’s partially furnished home, we decided it was time to redo the whole house. This would include all the furniture. Tom had been living there since he bought it in the seventies, and it had been redecorated about ten years before I got there. It looked a lot like the steakhouse Houston’s, with dark, imposing woods and low lighting.

  In the previous remodel, the 1920s-era house had been stripped of all its character. Thank God the interior designer left the important parts like the bronze front door that allegedly came off a Spanish galleon, the bronze central staircase, the travertine floors, and Colombian crotch grain mahogany walls. Upstairs were bedrooms—which would be considered small by modern HGTV standards—for the owners of the house, along with servants’ quarters. We redid the upstairs to make the bedrooms larger and added bathrooms. I firmly believe in the saying that the secret to a happy marriage is having separate closets and bathrooms, so those were a must in our house.

  When I restored the house, I reintroduced all the great woods, moldings, and Venetian plasters. I imported some really beautiful antique fireplaces and ridiculously gorgeous tiles. I’ve looked at a lot of fucking houses, and you’re going to have to search high and low to beat my finished carpentry. I wasn’t fortunate enough to get the original plans for the house, so I couldn’t restore it fully to the way the architect intended. I had to go with what I thought was best, keeping with the time period and then adding my own signature to it.

  It took about a year and a half to renovate the whole house. While construction was taking place, we moved into our Malibu beach house. Now that it’s finished, the house is huge, but it only has three bedrooms: one for me and Tom, one for my son, and one for guests.

  That guest room doesn’t get used very often, because I don’t like to have guests. I’ve never been the kind of person to invite a lot of people over to my home. We always entertain at a restaurant, a lounge, or somewhere outside of the house. If someone is invited to my home, it’s a big deal.

  My home is a place where I recharge and escape. It’s best when it’s calm and serene, and I can enjoy peace and solitude. I didn’t grow up with siblings or a big family. I get stressed out if a place is too noisy, even if it’s just for a few hours to host a cocktail party. I’d rather do that somewhere else. I know this is all ironic, because the crew of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills comes to the house all the time. At least this way, people can just see the house on television, and I can still have it quiet most of the time.

  For the first decade that I was married to Tom, I worked on projects like that. But let’s be honest, I was really well known on Rodeo Drive, too. My closet was full of every kind of dress, shoe, and bauble imaginable. My son was getting older and needing me less. The house was restored and redecorated. I wanted something more. That’s when I started to think about performance again.

  For a while, I put my career aspirations on hold to tend to Tom. But I needed that time to grow as well. To really come into my own and learn a few things about myself. Only then did I feel ready to get back out there, into the grind of showbiz.

  Tom has given me many things. But the sweetest thing he’s ever done in my life is believe in me. Renee was my cheerleader and made sure that I got to class. She ensured I had everything I needed growing up. But my husband was the one who really and truly made me feel like I was okay as a human. That I was bright, and my opinions and knowledge mattered. He is the foundation of my strength, confidence, and tenacity.

  I watched him for so long. I would watch the way he treats others, the way he leads, and the way he loves his firm and the law. He is very sure of himself. It’s like he taught me just by example how to do all those things myself. He made me feel comfortable in my own skin. Now that I was finally comfortable in it, the time had come to shed that skin. To let a whole different version of myself be born. Her name, of course, is Erika Jayne.

  10

  FANTASY, LOVE, ESCAPE

  Erika Jayne is an escape artist. She’s not here to cure cancer or create world peace. She’s here to offer people a bit of fun. She exists so people who are pressed flesh to flesh on the dance floor can think about her huge blond hair, her conspicuous consumption, and her zero-fucks attitude rather than their own troubles, if only for a minute. But Erika Jayne helped Erika Girardi escape as well.

  I married Tom in 2000 and immediately started living his life for the next seven or eight years. I traveled with him, attended his professional events, and watched him get awards. During that time, all I had to worry about was helping Tom and taking care of my boy.

  It’s easy to lose yourself in the shadow of a powerful man, which I said on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion. It’s something I learned from personal experience. There will be plenty of people who say, “Oh, that would never happen to me.” If you say that, then you’ve probably never met a really powerful man.

  My feelings about being in Tom’s shadow changed when I got a simple piece of mail. It was a postcard featuring a picture of a woman Tom and I both knew. At the time, she was married to one of Tom’s colleagues who owns his own firm and does very well for himself. I had heard that she started a singing career and thought, Oh, that’s cool. This was an invitation to her first concert.

  I can still clearly see the image. This woman is a tall, blond European, and in the photo she was wearing a red satin slip dress and standing at a microphone. Her cascade of hair was styled to cover her left eye. It was as if Veronica Lake was doing a cabaret show. The card had her name, the place of the performance, and the date. Then, at the bottom, in small type, it said Directed by Travis Payne.

  This might not mean a lot to somebody else, but Travis was like a brother to me. We went to Northside High in Atlanta together, and we were in the same performing arts program. We traveled the world as members of the school’s tour show, and he starred in the production of Pippin that I got suckered into our senior year. Immediately after graduation, Travis was catapulted into the big leagues. He was dancing on tour
with Janet Jackson when he was nineteen.

  Travis has had an amazing career, choreographing for everyone like Madonna, En Vogue, TLC, Lady Gaga, and all the greats. He has four MTV Video Music Awards for best choreography. He worked extensively with Michael Jackson and was working on the This Is It tour when the King of Pop died. I thought this lady must be taking it seriously if she can afford Travis Payne.

  Travis and I had kept in touch after school, and we were friends in LA. I would attend his shows, and he would invite me to his epic house parties. I hadn’t talked to him in about a year, but I decided this postcard was a good enough reason to pick up the phone and say hi.

  “Hey, I got this invitation at my house,” I told him when he answered. “This is fucking crazy!”

  “Yeah, it was kind of a cool project,” he said.

  I was curious how he got involved with this particular woman, because I’d never known him to work for anyone of her level, to be perfectly honest.

  “Well, what are you up to? This is all possible for you, too,” he said. “Ask anyone.”

  “Well, if she can do it, I can do it,” I said to him, bratty as usual.

  “You absolutely should,” he said. “Let me show you what’s possible. You need to be performing again.”

  Travis really took me off the bench and saved me. When people are not being their true selves, there’s that level of disappointment that turns into anger, resentment, and misery. You see it everywhere in the world, the weight of unrealized dreams. I wasn’t going down like that.

  Starting the Erika Jayne project was an act of rebellion against everything society told me I should be doing. I should be thankful, pretty, soft, appreciative, quiet, and excited someone rescued me. I had all the things you could have in life when you’re thirty-five: a beautiful home, a black AmEx, and a Gulfstream. My kid goes to a great private school with the best tutors and has the best orthodontist. That should be enough. It should be enough to be married to someone who is famous in his career and is influential and changes laws. It should be enough to go to the White House to meet the president. But it wasn’t. None of it was enough. I had never realized my own dream.

  I looked at those people at the White House and the highbrow functions I would attend with Tom. Then I looked at myself, and I saw no difference. Why not me? Why can’t I have success? My husband also gave me a great gift, in that he showed me old ways of thinking are just that. He told me things can happen, but you have to make them happen. I am never afraid to be a hard worker. There is a trick to life, and Tom knows it. When you are with someone as smart and aggressive—and some would say Machiavellian—as he is, it’s impossible not to become a student. And I am his best fucking protégée.

  This is what I was thinking about when Travis set up a meeting with the two of us and Peter Rafelson. Peter is a music producer who helped the woman on the invitation create her project. He also cowrote Madonna’s “Open Your Heart,” along with dozens of other hit records for Stevie Nicks, Britney Spears, and all sorts of other artists.

  At the meeting, Peter explained, “We can create a project. We can create records, and they can be distributed digitally. This is how things work these days.”

  I kept saying to him, “How is this possible?” I didn’t think it actually could be real. I was under no illusions about the music industry. I was a thirty-five-year-old woman. There was no way I was going to walk arms swinging into Capitol Records and walk out with a record contract. They’re looking for the next teenager they can mold into a machine that mints money.

  What Peter and Travis were offering was something else. I could carve out my own lane, creating my own project, putting it out there ourselves over the internet and directly into the hands of DJs and consumers, and hoping that it caught on. But it was more than that to me. It was a return to a part of myself that I loved but had allowed to languish, which is being a performer. When I created Erika Jayne, it was with no expectations other than reawakening the dragon inside.

  I told them that this sounded great, but I’d need to go home and talk to Tom about it. I brought it up that very night. “Tom, I have what I think might be a very interesting opportunity to create again, and I’d really like to do it,” I said. “I think that this is a good time for me, and I feel that in my heart. I feel like I need to do this. It’s what I know how to do.”

  Tom being Tom, he wanted to see something on paper. So I went back to Peter, and we put together a document outlining a production budget, including songs, timeline, studio sessions, and everything. I brought that back to Tom so he could see what it looked like.

  “This sounds great,” he told me. “This is going to be fun.” He was a billion percent supportive. You know the reason I believe he was supportive? Because I am one billion percent supportive of him. I’ve never involved myself in his business. I’ve never offered unsolicited advice. I’ve never gotten involved in office politics. I’ve never done anything other than cheerlead, believe in him, and be present for him. And when the time came for him to be present for me, he was.

  The truth is—and I don’t think he’d ever admit it now—I don’t think he thought we’d be seeing any number one singles on the dance club charts. I don’t think he really believed that this was going to lead to everything that it has. Boy, did I show him.

  The whole Erika Jayne project was only possible because I’m self-funded. Now, the haters are always going to say, “All you do is spend your husband’s money.” First of all, it’s our money. Know how I know? Because the IRS tells us that it is. My name is on that tax return, too.

  Second, yes, I have the advantage of a strong checkbook. But I’ll tell you what: you can write all the fucking checks you want, but that doesn’t guarantee success. That’s been proven many times. A record label could write as many checks as it wants, and certain acts aren’t getting off the ground. Look at all the checks the losing candidate in an election writes every year. Look at the checks people put into their businesses that don’t get off the ground. Does money help everything? Of course. Is it a guarantee of success? No.

  Tom gives me two gifts a year: a birthday present and a Christmas present. When this project started, I said to him, “No Christmas present and no birthday present. My project is my present. That is the gift you can give to me.”

  He agreed. He kept his word, but every now and then he will say at Christmas, “Well, sweetheart, I can’t give you nothing.” Now admittedly it is small, but it’s still fabulous.

  So I started working eight hours a day, four days a week with Peter in the studio. He was always asking me all of these questions: “What do you like? Who inspires you? What are your goals?” He showed me the way to express myself through song and writing music. He was never critical of any of my ideas. Instead he would ask, “Could you flesh that out? What’s a better way to say that? How do we translate that into a song?”

  I would bring in phrases, poems, and pictures—the things that were inspiring me and were going through my head—and we would make those into song ideas. That’s how we created the song “Pretty Mess,” which became the name of the album (and the record label, and my Instagram account, and this book, and probably the inscription on my tombstone).

  We were writing one day in the studio, and Peter was seated at his keyboard underneath his massive monitors. I was standing next to him, leaning over, and we were both looking at the words on the monitor. We were writing words like “princess” and “temptress” and I said, “Pretty mess.”

  Peter said, “Hey, wait. What is that?”

  “Oh, it’s stupid,” I said, still a little unsure.

  “No. It’s actually kind of cool,” he said. “Let’s keep it.”

  So we just wrote it down. Then I was thinking about all the different roles you have to play as a woman. Sometimes you’re a temptress. Sometimes you’re a princess. Sometimes you’re a pretty mess. I wrote it out first as a poem: “Everything you see you want. Everything I am I bought.” It speaks to t
he facade of Erika Jayne as a character, something that was still in its infancy when I was thinking about it, but it always had that notion of fantasy, love, and escape.

  Those are the three words that really guided her birth: “fantasy, love, escape.” I wrote them down one day, and everything that we did had to go back to that mission statement. Later I would add “glitz, glamour, fun.” Those six words are the set pieces that support the illusion of Erika Jayne. In every song, every performance, every video, and every costume, it all comes back to those six concepts.

  The name Erika Jayne was kind of a mistake. I wanted to just be “Erika,” but then it’s too close to Madonna or Cher. I hadn’t earned one-name status quite yet. Peter finally said, “The only thing that goes with Erika is Jayne.”

  “Fine, whatever,” I said, giving up and hating it a little. Then I read that Joan Crawford hated her stage name because it sounded like “Joan Crawfish,” and then I started to equate Jayne with Jayne Mansfield, whom I loved. It started to grow on me.

  This period of creation was really special for me, because it was pure expression. There was no corporate executive saying, “This other artist has a hit single, you need to sound like her.” There were no expectations. Nobody else knew I was doing this except Tom and Renee. Even if people knew, no one would have cared what the final outcome would have been. No one expected this to go anywhere, so Peter and I could just create exactly what we wanted without any interference.

  The first song we recorded was “Give You Everything.” Peter was still trying to figure out how well I could sing. “If I sing this, can you sing it back?” he asked.

  I was there in the booth with the headphones on, and I opened up my mouth for the first time in a decade. I sang it back to him exactly as he’d sung it to me: “You make me want to give you everything.”