Cat Power

For Benjamin Chappel

On August 5, 2008, one year and seven months after I started researching
A Good Woman
, Chan Marshall's mother, who is in her sixties and lives in a tobacco shack in rural North Carolina, called me on my private cellphone number. I was at work at
Blender
magazine in Midtown Manhattan, where I am Editor at Large. An issue had just closed, so I was passing time drinking a latte and reading a blog post about Tyra Banks. I didn't recognize the number that appeared on the caller ID. “Someone wants money,” I thought, anticipating the fake friendly tone of an Environmental Defense Fund solicitor or credit-card-company rep. I give a lot to environmental defense and I owe a lot to American Express. “Hello?” I said in my most professional voice, ready to pretend to be my own secretary if it was someone really threatening. “Hi, this is Myra Lee,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

“Holy shit, Chan's mom is on the phone,” I thought. “The woman she named her debut album for. The mythical, troubled Southern gothic creature who I'd only ever fantasized about actually getting an interview with—despite my many attempts.”

I got up quickly and went into the makeshift office/conference room where people go to gossip, interview prospective interns, or cry after a bad edit or mid-workday breakup. I closed the door. The reviews editor walked by and gave me a sympathetic look.

“You called my son, Lenny?” Myra continued, her silky South Georgian drawl doing little to conceal her hostility.

“Yes, we spoke this weekend,” I said.

“He's very upset,” she continued. “Who exactly are you? We don't know anything about this.”

“Who is ‘we,’” I thought, envisioning an enraged clan of Chan's relatives armed with rifles and assembling outside on Sixth Avenue.

I explained that I was a journalist based in New York working on a book about Cat Power, and that I had spoken with Chan's younger brother, Lenny, the previous weekend. While he came across as a very frank and willing interviewee, I knew that getting Lenny on the record for the book would be a button pusher. Chan tells journalists exactly what she wants fans to know about her past, and she rarely mentions her twenty-nine-year-old brother, who has cerebral palsy, works three jobs, and lives in Atlanta.

While I understood Myra's protectiveness of her son, I became confused when she suggested that I was the latest in what was apparently a series of Chan stalkers. Myra asked if there was someone at the magazine she could call to confirm that I was who I said I was. I told her that the book was not related to my job at
Blender
, but that I would be happy to have my editor at Random House call her. “That could be anyone on the phone! I don't want someone to call me, I want to call!” she seethed.

Apparently the warmth, good humor, and eager-to-talk attitude projected by the men in Chan's family (including her father, Charlie, step-father,
Leamon, and her hidden half brother) doesn't extend to the women. “We have talons,” Myra later admitted to me.

It turns out that Chan's mother reads
Blender
. (“I read everything Chan is in,” she said with pride.) Myra had me hold the line while she located a recent issue. I felt like I'd been caught shoplifting and was waiting for the cops to arrive. Her tone softened, though, as she flipped through the pages to the masthead, where, lo and behold, she found my name. “Elizabeth Goodman, Editor at Large,” she said, surprised.

I knew, of course, that
I
was who I said I was. But Myra somehow had me feeling like an impostor or, worse, some kind of degenerate.

Once Myra accepted that she was speaking with Elizabeth Goodman, she really started talking. Like a skilled raconteur, Myra shared information about her family's roots in southern Georgia, about her days as an idealistic hippie in the late sixties on Atlanta's politicized Fourteenth Street scene, and about Chan frankly and openly. She said that though she loves her daughter, many of the details Chan told reporters about her childhood over the years were false. Especially the ones that paint Myra as a bad mother and a drunk.

She promised a full interview. “I have to speak with Chan first,” she warned, “but I'll talk to you. I'll tell it like it is. I'll tell you where I went wrong with her as a teenager and I'll tell you where she went wrong.”

We never got that far.

Two hours later, Myra called back to tell me, person to person, that we wouldn't be speaking again. Then she kept dialing. She called the main switchboard at
Blender
and demanded to speak to “my superiors.” The receptionist that day was a temp, and Myra scared the shit out of her much in the way she scared the shit out of me—only I had some context. Unsure of what to do, the girl patched the call through to a friend in the mailroom. Myra again demanded to speak with my bosses and
accused me of harassing her family and preying upon her sick son. After assurances were made that I would be told about her concerns, she calmed down and hung up.

Two years had passed since Chan Marshall began her campaign to have this book stopped, and she'd finally gotten around to telling her mother about it.

After Chan declined to be interviewed for
A Good Woman
in early 2007, it took her less than a month to tell everyone at her label, Matador Records, not to talk to me. She told a painter friend of hers and an obscure French musician who she once toured with. She called a photographer with whom she once shared a loft in New York City. She told the flamboyant, internationally famous Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld. But in a year and seven months, Chan never got around to telling even one member of her immediate family about this book. She never told her mother, whom Chan has repeatedly vilified in print as a negligent boozer. She never told her biological father, whom Chan has accused in national publications of abandonment and emotional abuse. She never told her half brother, Lenny, whom she has gone out of her way to hide from the press. She never told her sister or her stepfather or her grandmother, the person she's closest to in her family. She never told any of them. She left that to me, like a weird, passive-aggressive statement of tacit approval—or so I imagined in my more tortured moments during this writing process.

Chan may have assumed that I was a shoddy reporter who wouldn't be able to track down her family, but if that was the case, why the paranoia and terror directed at people who work for her like Matador Records staff and her lawyer, as well as random acquaintances who were unlikely to say anything but good things about her? It seemed like part of Chan wanted me, or any faceless reporter, to be the one to take her parents to task.

I don't really know why Chan didn't warn her family about the book. What I believe to be certain is that the contrast between Chan's professed virulent objection to this book and the fact that she never told those with the juiciest stories about her not to participate in it represents the irreconcilable conflict at the core of her identity. We are all studies in contrasts, but Chan is the very embodiment of diametric opposition. She is both an exhibitionist and a prude, transparent and private, friendly and cold, arrogant and insecure, generous and possessive, humble and entitled, frugal and extravagant, responsible and unaccountable, tomboy and glamour girl, homebody and transient, trusting and paranoid, sober and alcoholic, crazy and sane, light and dark, she is all of these things at once.

This core contrast, this hide-and-seek quality in Chan, is exactly what makes her personality so compelling, her music so mesmerizing, and the prospect of telling her story so challenging. It's also what makes dealing with her—directly or even indirectly—so utterly maddening.

When I started this project, I wanted to write about Chan in part because she made music that made me feel less alone. I felt close to her but I didn't really know her. Chan's surprisingly aggressive attempts to stop the book, juxtaposed with her leaving obvious opportunities for me to keep it going, made me realize that it was more important to really figure out this woman than it was to adore her. At launch point I knew Chan only as Gatsby, the finished product of an elaborate self-invention. I didn't yet know her as Jay Gatz: the real, flawed person behind the myth.

When I interviewed Chan over the telephone in 2005 for a small piece in
Spin
magazine (where I was freelancing), we talked about the blues (better to sing about them than to have them), moonshine (gets you through the long nights), and peanut-butter ice cream (gets you through the long days). It felt as if we were at a slumber party and had stayed up
all night watching Christian Slater movies and eating Lucky Charms and sour straws. I hung up the phone feeling exhausted but sugar-high.

Chan, like Morrissey, Kurt Cobain, and Conor Oberst, comes across as so inclusive that it's easy to believe she is actually your friend. No one knows you the way she knows you. That feeling stuck with me throughout the first few weeks of this project in which I listened to all the music and dreamed of what would lie ahead. The idea of spending the next year of my life over at Chan's house made me giddy. I didn't seriously consider that this woman, who documented her most private thoughts on record for public consumption, who told every journalist with a pen and paper—credentialed or not—about her deranged parents and her wild Southern-gothic childhood, would have a problem with me picking up the narrative where she left off. After all, I was a fan.

So I wrote her a letter to reassure her. In early March 2007 Nils Bernstein, Chan's publicist at Matador and a friend of mine, forwarded it to her.

I really thought this letter would take care of any potential static. Through various conversations I'd had with Matador representatives, I knew that the label wasn't opposed to this book. They figured that someone would eventually write a biography of Cat Power, and since I was as much a fan as a journalist, I was as good a candidate as they were likely to get. There are many who consider Cat Power's career to be one long marathon of unsubstantiated hype. Chan's next prospective biographer might agree. Matador knew that I did not. I would be professional but also affectionate.

I also felt confident in my reputation as a writer, even though this is my first book. When I began it, I was on staff at
Rolling Stone
. I'd written for England's esteemed weekly
NME
in the early 2000s, when the Strokes, the White Stripes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Hives made rock suddenly exciting again. I'd worked at
Spin
during the same era and I wrote for magazines like
Nylon
and
Interview
, which glorified the intersection between fashion and music and pop culture that Chan so perfectly represents.

Mostly, though, I just had faith that any threat of antagonism would disappear because it was unwarranted. Then, on Tuesday, May 8, as I was preparing to travel to Atlanta to spend some time in Chan's hometown, I received an e-mail from her lawyer.

Initially after reading this I felt ashamed, like I was five and wore muddy snow boots inside the house. That lasted for about three minutes. Then I felt angry. By the time this letter was sent, Chan had known for several months that the book was happening. She knew very well that it was not related to a magazine article. And her lawyers must have told her that as a public figure, she could be written about by any journalist, even without her approval. I realize now that this letter represented a combination of Chan's desperation and panic about this book as well as an attempt, in spite of Mr. Penachio's assurance to the contrary,
to intimidate me into giving up the project. But at the time I was still mystified by Chan's reaction, and I committed myself to proving that it was unwarranted.

This weird game of mental warfare carried over into my first and second drafts of the book, which were seriously dull. My initial writing impulse, one I now realize Chan's resistance implanted in me, was to steer clear of anything that might upset her. Even the boatload of disturbing things she's routinely said about herself felt gauche in this new world where Chan was mad at me and I had to make amends. Chan has a nervous tic where she constantly inquires, “Are you mad at me?” She has asked this of dozens of journalists during what must now be hundreds of interviews. Ironically, I found myself wanting to ask her that question.