Face It Read online

  Brian Aris

  Jody Morlock

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

  FIRST EDITION

  © Debbie Harry 2019

  Cover layout design by Rob Roth

  Cover photograph © Chris Stein; illustration by Jody Morlock

  Creative Direction by Rob Roth

  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  Debbie Harry asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  Source ISBN: 9780008229429

  Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008229450

  Version: 2019-09-27

  Dedication

  DEDICATED TO

  THE GIRLS OF THE

  UNDERWORLD

  Bob Gruen

  Courtesy of Debbie Harry’s personal collection

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1.Love Child

  2.Pretty Baby, You Look So Heavenly

  3.Click Click

  House Lights

  4.Singing to a Silhouette

  5.Born to Be Punk

  6.Close Calls

  Curtain Up

  7.Liftoff, Payoff

  8.Mother Cabrini and the Electric Firestorm

  9.Back Track

  10.Blame It on Vogue

  Peekaboo

  11.Wrestling and Parts Unknown

  12.The Perfect Taste

  13.Routines

  Evidence of Love

  14.Obsession/Compulsion

  15.Opposable Thumbs

  Photo and Art Credits

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  BY CHRIS STEIN

  Courtesy of Debbie Harry’s personal collection

  I don’t know if I ever related this story to Debbie . . . or anyone for that matter. In 1969 after traveling around, driving twice cross-country, I was staying with my mom at her apartment in Brooklyn. This was a tumultuous year for me. Psychedelics—and my delayed reaction to my father’s death—caused breaks and disassociations in my already fractured psyche.

  In the midst of heightened states, I had a dream that stayed with me. The apartment was on Ocean Avenue, a very long urban boulevard. In the dream, in a scene that referenced The Graduate, I was chasing the Ocean Avenue bus as it pulled away from our big old building. I was pursuing the bus—yet inside it simultaneously. Standing in the bus was a blond girl who said, “I’ll see you in the city.” The bus pulled away and I was left alone on the street . . .

  By 1977, Debbie and I were traveling extensively with Blondie. Far and away our most exotic stop was Bangkok, Thailand. The city then wasn’t covered with cement and metal but was fairly bucolic, with parks all around and even dirt roads near our upscale hotel. Everything smelled of jasmine and decay.

  Debbie developed a touch of “la tourista” and stayed behind one night in the hotel while the guys from the band and I went to the house of some British expatriate whom we’d met in some bar or other. His old Thai maid prepared a banana cake for us into which she had chopped fifty Thai sticks—the seventies equivalent of modern super-strong “kush” or other intense strains of weed. We’d also just come from a long stretch in Australia, where pot was strictly policed and forbidden at the time. We all got well stoned and somehow led each other back to the hotel.

  Our room was also very exotic, with decorative rattan elements and two separate cotlike beds equipped with hard cylindrical pillows. Debbie had fallen into a fitful half sleep and eventually I drifted into a foggy blackness. Somewhere toward morning, my unconscious dream self became clearer and began an internal dialogue. “Where are we?” asked this internal voice—whereupon Debbie, still in a half sleep on her cot, said aloud, “We’re in bed, right?” I sat up, suddenly wide awake.

  Did I actually speak and produce a response from her even though we both were in semi-asleep states? To this day, all these years later, I am convinced that I only thought the question.

  And another story that’s even more subtle and weird and difficult to convey . . . Getting high was just a part of the music and band culture that we came up in. It didn’t seem like anything extraordinary. Everyone at all the clubs drank or got stoned with almost no exception. I wasted a tremendous amount of time and energy dealing with substance abuse and self-medication. It’s impossible to say if what I’d like to see as psychic events were merely induced delusions. Perhaps it’s like any religious faith—you believe what you want to believe. Certainly, consciousness extends beyond oneself, one’s body.

  Anyway, Debbie and I were once again in some state of advanced intoxication at a very elaborate party downtown. Small events and views were sharply defined. I remember a spiral staircase and fancy chandeliers. Some fellow showed us his Salvador Dalí Cartier watch—and that fleeting glimpse has stayed with me forever. It was an amazing object, a standard tear-shaped Cartier design but with a bend that mimicked the melting watches in The Persistence of Memory. The crystal face was broken and the owner complained of having to spend thousands of dollars to replace it. To me, though, the cracked glass was a perfect Dadaist commentary on the original. I loved that.

  The event—whatever it was—was very crowded. I remember being on a balcony when we were approached by an older man in a very fancy suit. He had a slight accent, maybe Creole. He introduced himself as Tiger. And that’s it for my specific memories, except for the extravagant sense of connection that Debbie and I felt with this guy. It was as if we had known him forever—a person we’d known in past lives. Do I believe in that stuff? Maybe. I don’t recall how much Debbie and I discussed this meeting afterward, but it was enough to compare notes and similar reactions.

  Pretty early on—maybe 1975—Debbie found this person, Ethel Myers, who was a clairvoyant, a psychic. She’d likely come as a recommendation, but we might have simply found her through an ad in the Village Voice or Soho News. She worked out of an amazing ground-floor apartment that was on a side street uptown, right around the Beacon Theatre. Ethel’s environment was beautiful. It probably looked the same as it had when her building was built near the turn of the century. Her sitting area was an atrium that was like a greenhouse taken up with furniture. Decorative plants and herbs hung all around. Yellowing books about ectoplasm and tarot lay on dusty end tables. The whole place was well worn and reminded me of the apartment in Rosemary’s Baby when Mia Farrow and Cassavetes are first shown it.

  We sat down with Ethel and she encouraged us to use a cassette machine we’d brought to record the session. She didn’t have any idea of who we were but proceeded to do a great cold reading. She told Debbie tha
t she saw her on a stage and that Debbie would be fulfilled and travel a great deal. At one point she said that a man, presumably my father, was watching and that this man sarcastically said of me, “I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.” I derive a lot of my sense of humor from my father—and the “ten-foot pole” bit was something he actually said all the time. Was she just in touch with the vernacular of the fifties that the old man used or was it more?

  Debbie still has the cassette in her archives but I remember us listening to it years after and Ethel’s voice being very faint, as if it had somehow faded in the way of a ghost deteriorating over time.

  Just now I called Debbie to ask what, if any, of this she remembered. She said, “You know, Chris, it was different back then, there was a lot more acid in the air.”

  We still have a connection.

  CHRIS STEIN

  New York City, June 2018

  Courtesy of Debbie Harry’s personal collection

  1

  Love Child

  Childhood and family photos, courtesy of the Harry family

  Sean Pryor

  They must have met around 1930, in high school, I figure. Childhood sweethearts. She was a middle-class girl, Scots-Irish, and he was a farm boy, French, living somewhere around Neptune and Lakewood, New Jersey. Her family was musical. She and her sisters would play together, all day long. The sisters sang while she played on a battered old piano. His family was artistic too and musical as well. However, his mom was in a psych ward, for depression—or some kind of recurring nervous condition. Unseen, but a powerful presence. It sounds contrived to me but it is what I have been told by the adoption agency.

  Her mom ruled that he was the wrong kind for her daughter. She nixed the relationship and their love was axed. To further kill any contact, they banished her to music school and from there, she supposedly began touring concert halls in Europe and North America.

  Many years go by. He’s married now, with lots of children. He works at a fuel company, repairing oil burners. One day, he heads out on a service call and boom, there she is. She’s leaning against the door frame, hair down, and she’s looking at him with that look. It’s her heater that’s broken . . . Well, that’s quite a picture, isn’t it, but I feel certain they were happy to see each other.

  All those years, maybe they never stopped loving each other. Well, it must have been a wonderful reunion. She gets pregnant. He finally tells her that he’s married with kids. She’s pissed and heartbroken and she ends it, but she wants to keep the baby. She bears it all the way and at Miami-Dade hospital on Sunday, July 1, 1945, little Angela Trimble forced her way into the world.

  She and the baby made their way back to New Jersey, where her mother was dying of breast cancer. She nursed them both. But her mom persuaded her to put Angela up for adoption. And so, she did. She gave her Angela away. Six months later, her mother was dead and her baby daughter was living with a childless couple also from New Jersey. Richard and Cathy Harry, from Paterson, had met socially after high school. Angela’s new parents, also known as Caggie and Dick, gave her a new name: Deborah.

  And that’s it. I am a love child.

  They claim it’s unusual to have memories of your earliest moments, but I have tons. My first memory is at the three-month mark. Same day that my mother and father got me from the adoption agency. They decided on a little jaunt to celebrate at a small resort with a petting zoo. I remember being carried around and I have a very strong visual memory of gigantic creatures looming at me out of the pasture. I told my mother the recollection once and she was shocked. “My God, that was the day we got you, you can’t remember that.” It was just ducks and geese and a goat, she said, maybe a pony. But at three months, I didn’t have much to filter with. Well, I’d already lived with two different mothers, in two different houses, under two different names. Thinking about it now, I was probably in an extreme state of panic. The world was not a safe place and I should keep my eyes wide open.

  For the first five years of my life we lived in a little house on Cedar Avenue in Hawthorne, New Jersey, by Goffle Brook Park. The park ran the whole length of the little town. When they’d cleared the land to build the park they built these temporary migrant worker houses—think two little railroad flats with no heating except for a potbelly stove. We had the migrant workers’ boss’s house, which by then had its own heating system and sat on the edge of the park’s big wooded area.

  These days, kids are organized into activities. But I would be told, “Go out and play,” and I would go. I really didn’t have many playmates there, so some days I would play with my mind. I was a dreamy kind of kid. But I was also a tomboy. Dad hung a swing and a trapeze on the big maple tree in the yard and I’d play on them, pretending to be in the circus. Or I’d play with a few sticks, dig a hole, poke at an anthill, make something, or roller-skate.

  Oak place.

  Childhood and family photos, courtesy of the Harry family

  What I really liked most was to fool around in the woods. To me it was magical, a real-life enchanted forest. My parents were always warning, “Don’t go in the woods, you don’t know who’s in there or what might happen,” like they do in fairy tales. And fairy tales—all the great, terrifying stories by the Brothers Grimm—were a big part of my growing up.

  I have to admit, there were some scary folk skulking around in those bushes, probably migrants. They were genuine hobos who rode through on the train and would hunker down in the woods. They’d maybe get some work from the parks department cutting grass or something, then jump back on the train and keep on going. There were foxes and raccoons, sometimes snakes, and a little stream with tributaries and frogs and toads.

  Along the brooks where nobody went, the abandoned shacks had crumbled to their foundations. I used to clomp around there, in the swampy, old, overgrown, moldy piles of brick that stuck up out of the ground. I would sit there forever and daydream. I’d get that real creepy kid feeling that you get. Squatting on my haunches in the underbrush, I would have fantasies about running away with a wild Indian and eating sumac berries. My dad would wag his finger at me and say, “Stay out of the sumac, it’s poison,” and I would chew that incredibly bitter-sour sumac right up, thinking, dramatically, I’m going to die! I was so lucky to have all that kind of creepy kid stuff—a huge fantasy life that has led me to be a creative thinker—along with TV and sex offenders.

  I had a dog named Pal. Some kind of terrier, brownish red, completely scruffy, with wiry hair, floppy ears, whiskers and a beard, and the most disgusting body. He was my dad’s dog really, but he was very independent. And wild—a real male dog that hadn’t been fixed. Pal was a stud. He would wander off and slink back after being gone for a week, completely exhausted from all these flings he’d had.

  There were also hundreds of rats infesting the woods. As the town became less rural and more populated, the rats started swarming into the yards and gnawing through the garbage. So, the local powers put poison in areas of the park. Such a suburban-mentality thing—and let’s face it, they were poisoning everything back then. Well, Pal ate the poison. He was so sick that my dad had to put him down. That was just awful.

  But really, it was the sweetest place to grow up: real American small-town living. It was back before they had strip malls, thank God. All it had was a little main street and a cinema where it cost a quarter to go to the Saturday matinee. All the kids would go. I loved the movies. There was still a lot of farmland then—rolling hills for grazing, small farms that grew produce, everything fresh and cheap. But finally the small farms faded away. And in their place housing developments sprang up.

  The town was in transition, but I was too young to know what “transition” meant or have an overview or even care. We were part of the bedroom community, because my father didn’t work in the town; he commuted to New York. Which wasn’t that far away, but God, at the time it seemed so far away. It was magical. It was another kind of enchanted forest, teeming with people and noise and
tall buildings instead of trees. Very different.

  My dad went there to work, but I went there for fun. Once a year, my maternal grandmother would take me to the city to buy me a winter coat at Best & Co., a famous, conservative, old-style department store. Afterward we’d go to Schrafft’s on Fifty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue. This old-fashioned restaurant was almost like a British tearoom, where well-dressed old ladies sat primly sipping from china cups. Very proper—and a refuge from the city bustle.

  At Christmastime my family would go to see the tree in Rockefeller Center. We’d watch the skaters at the skating rink and look at the department store windows. We weren’t sophisticated city-goers, coming to see a show on Broadway; we were suburbanites. If we did go to a show it would be at Radio City Music Hall, although we did go to the ballet a couple of times. That’s probably what fostered my dream of being a ballerina—which didn’t last. But what did last was how excited and intrigued I was about performance and the whole thing of being onstage. Though I loved the movies, my reaction to those live shows was physical—very sensual. I had the same reaction to New York City and its smells and sights and sounds.

  One of my favorite things as a kid was heading down to Paterson, where both my grandmothers lived. My father liked to take the back roads, winding through all the little streets in the slum areas. And much of Paterson was very old and neglected at that time, pre-gentrification, full of migrant workers who’d come to find jobs in the factories and the silk-weaving mills. Paterson had earned the title “Silk City.” The Great Falls of the Passaic River drove the turbines that drove the looms. Those falls had stared me in the face throughout my childhood, thanks to the Paterson Morning Call. On its masthead at the top of its front page sat a pen-and-ink drawing of the billowing waters.