Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  All of this thinking brought me to the idea of Venus. What is the essence of that idea? Love. How could I capture in music the compassionate place that women can create for one another, which is not based just in sentimentality? Because sometimes you have to be quite ferocious to protect the cubs, whether they are real children or ideas. It goes without saying that powerful women are often called bitches simply for being powerful, when in truth some of them can be the most loving, compassionate ones. The crazy thing is, whenever I hear the word love, I think of Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in The Princess Bride in the scene where the hero, Westly, is lying on the table near death and Miracle Max says something like “What do you have that's so important to live for?” and Westly whispers, more like grunts, “True love.” I hear Miracle Max in my head saying, “To blave” and Westly's friends saying, “He said ‘true love’!” And Billy Crystal says, “He did not say ‘true love,’ he said ‘to blave.’ ” And I think ever since that day I've been searching the planet for To Blave, and once I found it I married it. So it's a wonder that the Goddess of Love could decode the nonsense that had been going on in my brain … but I was beyond ready for True Love, to blave.

  I was also attracted to the themes I explored on Venus, I think, because at that time I was waiting to get exiled. I was still not getting a lot of radio play with the Choirgirl material, though more than with Pele. I'd seen how record labels treated artists who were past their first moment of popularity. For me, making this music was a garnering of strength using the mythologies of some of these women who nurtured other women. I was learning that there was a different walk than the popular one.

  I was opening up to the role of being a port in the storm as opposed to the most desired holiday spot. Then Alanis Morissette called and asked if I would go out with her on tour. And I thought about it a lot. We were going to flip-flop every night, but then we decided that I would go first because the piano would be in place. On that tour there was graciousness on both sides, and that was a real turning point. It was important for me that that occurred. The thought form that “if one woman succeeds in the music business then one must fail” had become nails across my face, and I wanted to purge that idea from the ladies’ room at the Grammys. The sisterhood had become shit. It was as if we were all part of some modern harem, competing with each other to go down on that microphone. Go down a storm. As if there were only one microphone. The compassionate Venus had no backstage pass. The patriarchal projected Venus, consumed with the need for adoration and approval, had an Access All Areas.

  ANN: As her understanding of feminine power changed, Amos felt hersef growing stronger. This was a blissful time, despite the sorrow that had come before. Married, delighted with her band, writing exciting new material, Amos felt she could accept what life presented. Yet life, in its way, soon pushed her over the precipice again.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  On tour with Alanis, I found out I was pregnant. Again. I thought it was going well. I really believed the little one and I were out of the woods, out of harm's way. I was on tour, I was watching myself, I was strict on every level. I'd been taking my vitamins for months. Duncan was with me and I was happy. I'd walked the dark road. I was basking in the sunlight. How foolish of me—the tunnel had just opened its convertible top for a moment. I had no idea that this tunnel was going to lead me to Mordor.

  After the tour was finished I continued to travel, doing promotional appearances. I was getting more confident and felt we were blossoming. When I went to France to do promotion for Venus, alone with Natalie Caplan, who was my assistant at that time, things started to go wrong. I just told Natalie to get me out of there. I mean, this was a country where I could talk to you about wine, but that's all I could do. What was I going to do? How was I going to talk to the doctors, discuss the 1994 vintage from Château Chasse-Spleen? I just remember lying in bed in Paris and starting to bleed. And I remember that week, the second week in November, some journalist saying to me something like “How do you feel about marketing your pain?” I was so ill, I was worried, I wasn't feeling well. I was sitting there thinking, Maybe I'm just having a little bleeding, it happens. I just remember sitting through those interviews, reaching the end of my rope.

  I said to him, “How do you define Baudelaire? How do you define Rimbaud? These are your touchstones—how do you define what they did? At least I'm not marketing someone else's pain.” That was a cruel moment.

  I remember being there in the heart of Paris, and there was something kind of familiar about it all. That's all I'll say. I wasn't feeling as if I were in a place I didn't know or hadn't felt lost in before. I've always been very drawn to certain things about France. Debussy was one of my first ways in to music. But at this moment, in this life, I was lying there and it was getting worse and worse, and I knew what was happening and Mark wasn't there.

  As the realization was dawning on me that I was losing this little life, I called Beenie. She picked up the phone and as soon as I heard her voice I let out a cry so aching that I think even Paris must have shuddered. She knew in that moment what was occurring and she said, “Oh my Beenie Bean, feel me right there with you on the bed; my hand is on your tummy and the angelic Beings are there to receive this life.” Mark and I had called her Phoebe, and I think that, rightly or wrongly, this pregnancy had felt the most real somehow. Maybe I should say the healthiest. I had done everything right and in that moment I knew that I would never seek to be a mother again. I knew that as I lay there while the sheets were turning to blood and I was having stabbing pains that racked my body, as I cried like a baby. No. Babies don't cry with this kind of pain. They have different pains, but this was the cry of Demeter, whose daughter had been taken from her.

  Now that I know Natashya, I understand why I was grieving so deeply. Something in my makeup, in what holds me together—as crazy as it is sometimes—I knew that there was a presence missing from my life, and I ached for this relationship. No different from the simple truth that you cannot find your loved ones when they have died. Neither can you find a loved one when they haven't been physically born. The aching can be great on both sides, because there is an emptiness. When Kevyn Aucoin died, I felt this emptiness. When my Poppa died, and when my little girl hadn't physically been born, time and time again, I wept from the deepest part of my heart.

  I spoke with Beenie, who was able to talk about and be present with me lying in my own blood, and I can see now how she held the archetype of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, and how I, as a second-string understudy for Demeter, was mothered by Persephone's compassion and knowing. The other line rang in the room at that moment. Natalie had called L.A. to alert certain people to what was occurring. In some ways it happened, it seemed, for a thousand years—that day was a thousand years. That day was November 11, 1999. My first miscarriage was December 23, 1996. My second miscarriage … I did not choose to keep a date because it wasn't the same as the first and the third.

  I picked up the phone, and the suggestion was to go see a doctor immediately in Paris. They were getting names and told me to take a couple days to recover and then go on to Spain to continue my promotional tour. As if a couple days off was a huge boon, a gift.

  In that moment a schism happened between me and the music industry. All my shattered discordant pieces of the different Toris puzzled themselves back together with Phoebe's glue. I now understood that I was a commodity. I was a commodity through the condolences, through the “I'm so sorrys.” “I'm so worried about you, but the show must go on.” I hung up the phone and for the next two hours I talked to everyone from Dr. Rita Lynn to Mark.

  Dr. Rita has been a mentor for me for many years, along with being one of the most respected psychologists in Los Angeles, having been part of the Cedars-Sinai psychiatric ward as well as a private practitioner. She has helped me to string together the fragments of my life. She's called it “beading a necklace.” So when I called her and told her that “those who are they” wan
ted me to see a doctor immediately in Paris, take a couple days off, and continue on to Spain to do promotion for Venus, she interceded and said, “That is absolutely and positively what is not going to happen. I will call management, record companies, and whoever I need to call to instruct them on how to be humane.” Then she proceeded to lay out, very simply, what I had to do. She said to me, once she had walked me through the next ten hours of my life, “I'm calling Johnny, and we will put this plan into action and he can deal with ‘those who are they.’ ”

  After I hung up the phone, Natalie was there within minutes. I said my goodbyes to Beenie and I stared blankly at the carpet, now marked by the remains of my wishes for Phoebe and me in shapes that looked like little rosebuds, not bloodstains. I walked out of that hotel room a changed woman in many ways. So we went on the train and I was bundled up because I was really a stuck pig at this point, bleeding. I know, I know—pigs again. There was just this moment of knowing it was the end of that pregnancy. And this was the hardest loss in the end.

  Mark met me at the train station alone. He held me like I've never been held. He wouldn't let go of my hand even as I started to retreat inside myself while we were driving in silence through the streets of London with a driver to the hospital. Dr. Rita knew doctors in London, so she sent us to somebody who would be kind. We went in and, of course, the ultrasound showed it was over. They got us a cup of tea, as the British do, and Mark and I wept together. Then we went through the process with a gentle doctor and a twinkling-eyed Irish anesthesiologist who held my hand, and then Mark and I went back to the hotel that night; it was very late. It was the same hotel where, not too many weeks before, we had been talking about the possibilities. In Paris I had bought these beautiful clothes for a little child. I still have them in a box.

  In that moment we canceled everything, naturally. The label said I had to do the Christmas shows because I had “Concertina” coming out as a single and a lot of stations said that they would support it if I would do their Christmas shows. That was just the end. I went to Cornwall with Mark and for two weeks—I can't remember what I did. I sat on the steps most of the time. We mourned. And it was over for me then. I couldn't go through this again.

  So we decided that we were going to believe the label and the radio stations, that they would do what they said they were going to do. The blackmail of all this … But that's how things work everywhere. And it is looked upon as inappropriate to carry a grudge or feel leveraged if the other side does not play your music. Rather the approach should be to mitigate your way through the innuendos of “if she does this then we can possibly consider doing that.”

  So we went to do these shows. I was alone at the piano and hadn't been for a while, for two tours. I had just the sound guys and a small crew. And I started to find some strength alone with the piano.

  Around this time we went and saw a specialist, Dr. Stillman, to try to figure out where we stood. They came back with good news and bad news. It was the same news: they couldn't give me a reason for these miscarriages. So again, I'd had enough. We decided we were going to try to just live. We got a boat—not anything outrageous but just something fun to putter around in—and we got some movies, and Mark really got into cooking. He's a very good cook. Sea bass with potato latkes, that kind of thing. We had that nurturing thing going on. We had some lovely, lovely, lovely champagne; I'll never forget it. Cristal Rose 1990; it was very hard to get. We decided we were not going to talk about it. We had talked about it and talked about it. And now we were going to try to be people. This was the most disciplined thing I ever did.

  One day I went out by myself, lay down on the beach, and turned it all over. I was going through such pain and struggle, and at the same time, through the balancing force of traditional psychotherapy, asking basic questions: What is a powerful woman? What is a fertile woman? I had to redefine these things. I knew I would never understand why I could carry all these songs but not one human life. What a mess.

  I had already gone to the edge and tried to negotiate, demanded my child back, asked how much more I could do. I had been through “Spark”—where could I go? I'd grieved and turned the story into art, and I was sitting there with the same situation again. That day on the beach, I went into ceremony. I lay down on the ground my mother had chosen for me; she picked our beach house. I wept and gave tobacco to the land; I burned the sage. It was a private moment for me, saying, I just cant carry this anymore, literally.

  In the end, I got the answer. And it was through a lot of tears. I laid myself on the earth and the message came to me. The earth said, “Surrender this to me. You've lost a few babies. I lose babies every day. I understand this pain. So trust me. Give this to me.” And I almost felt as if the earth and I became blood sisters. She said, “You are a great creator, and maybe your children are not in physical form and that's what it will always be. Can you hold that? How many sonic children do you need? You have hundreds, you need thousands—when will it be enough?” I kind of stood back and she said, “You know, some people who have human children would give anything to have a sonic child.” And I realized I was beginning to know who I was. Just beginning.

  ANN: Amos had come to understand the words of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter: “We humans endure the gifts the gods give us, even as we are grieving over what has to be.” She would soon learn that the gifts that come, though always unexpected, can bring not just sorrow but delight.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  We took on a project, to do a song for the Mission Impossible II soundtrack. The good thing is, we had something to focus on. Mark and I went back to Cornwall, and that was a lifeline for me because I needed to do something and this was one of my favorite covers of all time: “Carnival,” by Luiz Bonfa, from the film Black Orpheus. I knew I had one more album to record for Atlantic Records, but I didn't even think about that. It was in the distance.

  We went back to Cornwall and the crew started coming in, and Duncan was there. I'll never forget it—the band had arrived, and one night after rehearsal I was serving the wine, Duncan was cooking a welcoming dinner for all of them. I just went into the other room and I called Mark to me and I said, “The fish is bad. There's something wrong.” And then I said, “Furthermore, this vintage is bad.” And he just looked at me. This was one of my favorite wines. I think it was the Château Pichon Longueville, Comtesse de Lalande, Pauillac, 2ème Cru Classe, 1996. He said, “Let me taste it.” And he did, and he said, “It's incredible wine.”

  I thought I had the stomach flu, which was going around. I couldn't eat or drink anything; I was just not well. I wasn't taking antibiotics. The one thing I was taking was baby aspirin. As far as my cycle went, I hadn't even gotten back to any normal sort of anything. I thought we might see the doctor again and try in six months. Then I was open to trying the fertility drugs, the big, big guns. But the doctor had said not yet. You know, you have to heal.

  So I was taking baby aspirin and I was still taking my vitamins because he'd said, “These vitamins aren't going to hurt you. They're good for you and you've just lost so much blood now you just need to do this.” So I was just minding my own little business and enjoying the Cristal Rose 1990 with Mark, and then I was so ill. And within two weeks I called my sister and she said she wanted me to go take a pregnancy test. She said to take two. And I couldn't believe the results.

  My life began to change radically—that is, I changed my life. Hans Zimmer wanted me to come and do some vocalizing throughout the Mission Impossible II score. And I've known Hans for years; I was the girl who did the demo for Maria McKee on the theme for Days of Thunder, and he composed the score. I got paid something like $150 to come in and do “Show Me Heaven.” So I like Hans, and I would have done it under any other circumstances, but I just had to say no.

  Mark and I were back on the merry-go-round again. We went to this doctor to get our ultrasound and it was the scariest moment. He gave us little candies to hold and we sat there, and they did the u
ltrasound and we saw these legs. These legs jumping up and down. I was eleven weeks pregnant. We just looked at each other and I said, “I'm going to go to the beach house. I'm not going back to work.” And that's what I did. I was with a wonderful Jamaican physician for the first few months. However, she married, sold her practice, and moved out of state during my sixth month of pregnancy, and then I was under the care of another physician in the practice. I was deemed a high-risk pregnancy, my age being the least of the factors. I had to have scans every other week due to previous medical surgeries. Because I was a high risk my doctor-sister, Marie, decided that I needed to see a physician who specialized in high-risk pregnancy. She and Dr. Marlow had found Dr. Bronsky in the DC. area.

  So that is why I settled into Georgetown. Funnily enough, I was about a block from the piano bar Mr. Smith's, where I played at fourteen. Mark had to go back to Cornwall to get some things done, but Duncan felt good about being there, first at the beach with me and then in Georgetown, D.C. We started developing this other way of taking care, which I've maintained ever since. High in protein, high in spinach, getting the vitamins from the food. Of course I took my prenatals, and DHA Omega-3 pills—I'd had a phone consultation with the renowned women's physician Christiane Northrup, author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom. She said that taking that form of Omega-3 fatty acid was the most important thing to do for Natashya's brain development. Which I did and I still do.