Siren Song_My Life in Music

by Gareth Murphy

  Roland had lost his lucky star along the way, but he remained a bright-eyed character who’d never lost his ears. He seemed to trust mine, so, whenever I had something special and needed cash, like when the Ramones first came out, I’d call into his office, offer him a sub-publishing deal, and usually walk out with a check. I’d done it so often, I even had a little song to warm my throat on the way to his office. By changing one word in the Dixie Cups classic, “Going to the chapel and we’re gonna get money,” I’d always arrive into Chappell Music focused and in good spirits. The only catch was that Roland was never on time, so I often found myself hanging around his reception until he returned. Nearby was New Bond Street, so instead of sitting there making his secretary feel uncomfortable, I started killing time watching the auctions at Sotheby’s.

  I found Sotheby’s fascinating. All these old eccentrics bumbled about studying beautiful antiques. It was the auctions, however, that I found absolutely thrilling. I didn’t dare buy anything for ages, nor even open my mouth, but I started reading books and collecting catalogues from the specialist dealers, and although I checked out auctions in New York, I never felt the same zeal and determination as when I was in London.

  London also had the Portobello Market where I enjoyed nothing better than to mooch around early on a Saturday morning, rummaging through the high-class junk before the crowds arrived. By late morning or early afternoon, I’d usually walk to Rough Trade to see what was happening there. Antiques seemed like a natural partner for records; you had to learn genres, meet dealers, spot details, figure out value, and above all, find the treasure. I knew I was good at turning songs into cash. Now I’d found a way of banking the cash back into art. If you were really smart, antiques even offered the best interest rates, plus, of course, waking up to all these exquisite objects sure as hell made life prettier than papering your walls with bank statements.

  I’d long been an Anglophile, but by the late seventies, London had become my other self. My flat on Gloucester Place had become more than just a second residence; it had the feel of a real home and contained most of my prettiest antiques. I was signing so many English groups and spending so much time in London, my own family were starting to poke fun at me about my Brooklyn-British accent that I’d developed over the previous decade. As anyone who’s spent any time in a foreign city will tell you, you have to adapt. The secret to traveling is to melt into your surroundings like a wildlife cameraman. Because, believe me, if you speak raw, unpasteurized Brooklynese in an old-world capital like London, you may as well be popping up out of manholes like Bugs Bunny, asking, “What’s up, Doc?”

  In New York, I’d always been absent; off on business trips, stuck in the office, at a gig, but by late 1978, I’d practically moved out of Central Park West. With all my running around, I know Linda thought I was trying to keep my distance from her, which in a way I was. Except it was more about myself. What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive. I’d been lying to myself all along. I was gay. Not bisexual, not confused, just gay. And I knew I couldn’t continue with this Mr. and Mrs. Stein charade much longer. Anytime I stepped through that door on Central Park West, I got tense and nervous like the character in the Talking Heads song. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my family; I definitely loved the girls and still felt a strange loyalty and companionship toward Linda. What was eating me up inside was that I’d created this confusion that was hurting us all. All they wanted was for me to be a regular husband and daddy. I could see it in their eyes: “Why won’t you just be normal?”

  You can keep running, but sooner or later, the truth will catch up. The late seventies was when gay culture went from being tolerated to becoming quite fashionable. Thanks to disco, it reached a point when straight people were indulging in what people jokingly termed trisexuality—you’d try anything. Linda and I spent plenty of wild nights in Studio 54, which, to be honest, was more her bag than mine. It now turns out that most of the writhing, whooping, half-naked characters on the dance floor were being paid with drink vouchers to provide entertainment for all the fat, middle-aged VIP schmucks sitting around paying for the overpriced champagne. It was all harmless fun, but if you looked around the edges, there was plenty of genuine madness going on. There were always hunky ice hockey players who weren’t gay, but they were so revered as icons of male beauty, they’d let drooling queens suck their cocks under the table in return for some coke.

  There was one afternoon when the craziness of our marriage knocked on our front door. Linda was running off to catch a plane, for once leaving me alone in the Central Park apartment. Minutes after she rolled her suitcase out the front door, the buzzer rang. I thought Linda had forgotten something—but it wasn’t Linda. Had it been anyone other than Dee Dee Ramone, you’d have thought it was just somebody in the neighborhood dropping by to say hello. But Dee Dee was the last person you’d associate with innocent coincidences. I just knew he’d been hiding on the street until Linda got into her cab. After all, she was his manager. He probably knew where she was flying, when, why, and on which airline.

  He appeared at the door with a filthy, horny face I barely recognized. He moved into the hallway and pulled a cigarette slowly from his packet. Like a diva in a 1950s movie, he placed it slowly in his pouting lips and reached his neck forward, signaling for a light. Mortified, I pulled a lighter from the hall table and flicked. He sucked on the flame and gently blew his first puff of smoke in my face. He then walked past me into the bedroom where Linda and I shared our brief, tumultuous marriage. In the most improbable striptease I’ve ever witnessed, Dee Dee peeled off his hallmark Ramones uniform. First the little T-shirt and then the sneakers and shredded jeans. He then lay on the bed naked like some eunuch in a Renaissance painting. His eyes and body position said it all: Take me whatever way you want. I’m your bitch.

  Dee Dee was a long story of drugs and delinquency. He was more insane than any of us, so far gone in fact that he’d already reached the point of no return where you don’t even care what anyone thinks. I’d heard he did some prostitution on the side, but I’d never quite believed it. I’d met all his girlfriends. I thought I knew Dee Dee. I’d watched him onstage a hundred times, thrashing his bass like a good little Ramone. What bothered me wasn’t that I happened to be his label boss; I just couldn’t stomach how feminine he’d become. I like my men masculine. For a prostitute, Dee Dee obviously hadn’t progressed very far up from public toilets. Had he just been himself, he’d maybe have gotten whatever he was looking for, which I can only guess was money.

  “Just a second. I’ll fix us a drink,” I told him and made a dash for the kitchen, wondering what the fuck I was going to do. While making noise with ice cubes, I picked up the phone and dialed a special number that would make the phone ring back. I placed the receiver gently back on the cradle, which set off every phone in the apartment. I ran into the living room, where Dee Dee could hear me through the bedroom door. “What?” I shouted into the dead telephone line. “No. I don’t see any fog … well, there’s none here.” It was one of my finest acting performances. “Oh, okay. See you in a bit,” I said and hung up. Looking panicked, I told Dee Dee that Linda had turned back because fog had shut down the airport. He had to get dressed and go.

  A white lie got me out of a tight corner. He probably sensed he’d been fobbed off, because he never tried that stunt again. Not that Dee Dee was the type of person who wasted time on regret or shame. As for me, my little secret was obviously no longer such a secret anymore, and even I was starting not to care that everybody knew I was gay. As I was about to discover, the thing about repressed sexuality is that it’s not necessarily physical desire that’ll lure you out of the closet but something far stronger.

  There was this guy in New York, a friend of ours—I’ll spare both him and you the details—but I started having a scene with him in a hotel. It wasn’t only the most powerful sex I’d ever experienced, I felt a profound love for this man, and that love has never left me. I don’t kno
w how Linda found out, but when she did, she was like a cat cornering a mouse. It wasn’t Linda’s style to boo-hoo like a loser, “How dare you do that to my husband!” No, she lured him into another hotel and upped the ante. “If you don’t have sex with me right now,” she purred, “I’m gonna tell all New York you’re gay.” My poor lover did what he was told until my secret affair was trumped by her secret affair. Then, of course, Linda twisted the knife. “Do you know who I fucked, Seymour?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I’ll give you just one guess. Now, who do you think it could be, Seymour? One guess.”

  I don’t know if you’ve ever wound up in a situation like this, but even if Linda was insanely jealous, this seemed psychotic. It wasn’t even a ménage à trois, which implies some kind of domesticated three-way agreement. I doubt the KGB even had a name for this. It was so insane, almost comical, we just about survived, which was probably Linda’s strategy all along—to get even, to turn her victimization into a surprise attack that left me on the floor. It might have worked. The problem was, I’d fallen in love. The man, who shall remain anonymous, was the love of my life. And he’d been so sickened and damaged by the whole experience, he refused to talk to me for months. It was hard enough for him to reconcile his feelings for a man, never mind the humiliation of Linda’s sex-revenge bullying.

  I don’t consider myself an expert on marriage, but I do know that a married couple can overcome all kinds of tests, even humiliating affairs. Extramarital flings, as long as they’re only about sex, will certainly get saucepans flying, but the one thing that will capsize a marriage irreversibly is when a husband or wife falls in love with an outside party. That’s checkmate. Seeing how heartbroken I was about losing this man, Linda slid into her own inconsolable mix of self-pity and bitterness.

  She spiraled into such a state, she called up my seventy-three-year-old mother and started raving about me fooling around with a guy. Luckily, Linda was so incoherent and my mother so innocent and hard of hearing, nothing was understood. Linda had always blamed my mother for me turning out gay. Apparently, I’d been spoiled and pampered into a mommy’s boy. We were back to Mabel’s “mocky” theory; it was all Dora’s fault for not making a real man out of me. For all her temperamental faults, I’d like to think that Linda was too smart to believe such bullshit; she just wanted to stab me in the heart, as heartbroken people generally do. Telling my dear old mother was of course the ultimate act of war, the nuclear button.

  The closing act of a marriage is when the combat turns financial. I knew our separate lives were costing me a lot of money, but I just ignored away the problem down the corridor to Sire’s bookkeeper, a little middle-aged Jewish lady named Lynette. I ran away from all this chaos for as long as I could, but I was eventually confronted with a pile of bank statements left on my desk. Linda wasn’t just spending heavily; the more she hated me, the more she spent like a Saudi princess. And I mean irresponsible, pathological spending, like dollar bills were being plucked from some magic beanstalk we had growing up through the floorboards of Sire Records. Who the fuck did she think she was? I raged home like a bull, found her sitting on the toilet, and shoved the statements so hard in her face, she fell on the floor with her knickers around her ankles. She looked so terrified, I started breaking stuff all over the bathroom.

  I’d finally lost it, I was so out of control, I almost wanted to hurt myself. The nastiness, the years of suppressed sexuality, the man I loved who wouldn’t talk to me, the coke, the jet lag, the hatred of what I was doing to myself, the money it was now costing me, the money it was going to cost me, everything erupted into an ugly outpour of uncontrollable rage. We’d slapped each other before, but usually it was her throwing ashtrays or whacking me in the face. Linda was a tough fighter who not only scared me, but I know Danny Fields had heavy objects thrown at him, too. This time, however, my physical superiority showed in a way I’m still embarrassed about. If there’s two things you’ll regret in life, it’s fights over money and slapping a woman, and on that fateful New York afternoon, I plead guilty on both counts.

  This wasn’t our first fight over money, of course. We’d had hundreds. “Ya cheap bastard!” was always her answer any time I complained about her spending. She was half joking but only half, because Linda possessed all the hang-ups of the textbook nouveau riche Jewish Bronx caricature. I’d always let it pass, because deep down I felt sorry for all her insecurities. At the time, Linda had no idea how wealth was made or how money had to be treated with extreme caution. She’d only been a society player for, what, the seven years she’d been married to me? And it wasn’t just her. All the people who’d ever accused me of being a cheapskate were the same. There’s no greater expert on how you should be enjoying your riches than a good-timer who hasn’t a pot to piss in.

  I knew the true value of money, because I’d been shown the ropes by real characters who’d lived through the Great Depression and World War II, the generation who beat Hitler and rebuilt the record business. They never wasted hard earned cash on Yves Saint Laurent or luxury shampoo; they invested in businesses and buildings. Nothing ruined people faster than easy cash and addictions. Last time I saw George Goldner, he came begging me for ten grand to help his kids through college. Like a fool, I gave it to him, and then heard he’d squandered it all at the track. Next thing I know, he was a funeral announcement in The New York Times. Addictions come in many masks, and since I’d known Linda, she’d gone from being a hardworking teacher to a hard-partying socialite who couldn’t function without my credit cards.

  She went crying to Danny Fields, telling him I’d gone psycho over a bottle of expensive shampoo. Maybe that’s how she wanted it to look. Truth was, I’d snapped over years of dysfunction and tens of thousands of dollars. The girls never even ate at home. Linda was sending them out to restaurants every night. It may have been a bottle of shampoo that got thrown against the bathroom mirror, but that’s not the point—Linda was driving me insane. Maybe I was insane to begin with. Maybe I really had ruined her life. Who knew and who even cared anymore? It had to stop, and it had to change. We had to get divorced. We’d hurled this threat at each other so many times, but now the house lights seemed to flash on like closing time. No more sticking around: exit, cloakroom, two cabs, please.

  It wasn’t even like we were staying together for Samantha and Mandy’s sake. Every morning, when our nanny, Teresa, took the girls to school, our bedroom door would be closed—whether I was there or not, and I usually wasn’t. With the Ramones touring, even Linda wasn’t there for weeks on end. It didn’t make much of a difference if she stayed at home and watched TV; she’d smoke a joint, sip a vodka, and fall into bed late, where she’d remain zonked for hours. When the girls got home from school, she’d be gone, either working or living the high life. As for me, I was far worse. At least Linda managed the nannies. As Samantha and Mandy would tell me years later, the only sign of my existence was a perfect brown circle left on the kitchen table by my cup of coffee. They’d find it after school, like a halo only they could recognize as proof their elusive daddy was in New York.

  In the bitter end, I got a call from the greatest ever music business attorney, Paul Marshall. For a lawyer, he was an old-school gentleman who’d seen so much mutually destructive courtroom combat since the late fifties, he knew everyone in the business and always tried to resolve feuds humanely. “Your wife was just here to see me,” he announced. “She wanted to hire me as her divorce lawyer. Don’t worry, Seymour, I’d never handle this, and anyway, I don’t do divorces. However, I gave her the name of a really good divorce lawyer who’s been around for years. He must be in his eighties now. He’s tough, but he’ll want to get this over with quickly. Now, Seymour, I care about you, and I know how this could really affect your business, and I know how much your business means to you. So, listen to me carefully. Here’s what he’s going to do: his wife is a marriage counselor, so he’ll send you and Linda to her. I’m sure counseling will reso
lve nothing, but it will make him and his wife happy. If you can get yourself a good lawyer, he’ll do nothing other than make as fair a deal as possible.”

  Everything happened exactly as Paul Marshall predicted. After some counseling sessions, Linda and I began to discuss calmly how she was going to survive on her own. I’d leave her the Kenilworth apartment and pay child support, but to make her own dough and separate our common business interests, she was going to have to set up a management company with Danny Fields. I knew my staffers couldn’t handle Linda coming into Sire and barking at everyone. On one occasion, she got them all making birthday party invitations for one of the girls. The bigger problem was her telephone torture. If I didn’t want to answer her incessant calls, she’d call every other desk and intimidate staffers until they begged me to face her. All these crossed wires had to be untangled and the roles clearly defined. So, Linda and Danny found an office on Fifty-Seventh Street and baptized their management agency Coconut. Most divorcees fight over children; we shared custody of the Ramones.

  Dividing up the bits and pieces, we both felt a mixture of sadness and relief, because as soon as we were working on a plan, we got along okay. The day we signed our divorce agreement, Linda insisted on popping open a bottle of champagne. We raised our half-full glasses to the future and wished each other luck. It wasn’t that we were happy. I can think of far happier moments we spent together. For Linda especially, it was not easy adapting to life with much less cash than what she’d gotten used to. Subconsciously, I think we both knew we’d be joined for life in a way that went beyond our daughters. I genuinely wanted Linda to do well, and deep down, I think she still admired me as an adventurer, irrespective of what a disaster I’d been as a husband and father. We knew we never should have got married in the first place, and yet neither of us regretted that we had. How many divorcing men and women can both look at each other and honestly say that?