Inventing Memory (28 page)

Q: What about your daughter, Sara?

A: The best thing I ever did, my finest creation, my arrow into eternity.

Q: What are your hopes for her?

A: That she will be as
unlike
me as possible.

Q: Can you elaborate?

A: She hates it when I talk about her in interviews. I dare not say a word.

Q: Can you talk about your relationship with Max Danzig?

A: Since it's part of my legend, I guess I
have
to.

Q: How did you meet him?

A: He sent me a fan letter. I still have it. You can imagine that I was flabbergasted. Max Danzig was a famous recluse. After his novel
A Girl Called Ginger
, he stopped publishing entirely and retreated to Vermont. He never gave interviews. He was much smarter about that than me. (Laughs)

Q: I'll let that pass. Ms. Sky, tell our younger readers why Danzig was so important to your generation.

A: Shall I translate for your lip-readers? For all your nonreaders who nevertheless want to
hear
about books? Why not? He was the writer who got adolescent angst just right. He read our hearts. He showed the interior of an adolescent's brain. I thought he was the only man on earth who could understand me.

Q: So what did you do?

A: I disappeared from my California life and drove to St. Johnsbury, Vermont. I had no idea where Danzig lived, but I figured that
someone
would know. And they did. I asked the fat, blowsy blond proprietor of an antique teddy bear shop. She wandered out to the covered bridge with me, pointed up to a ridge above the town, featuring a red barn surrounded by birches and wilderness. She gave me directions. To my amazement, I found my idol.

What I remember was how
old
he looked when I first saw him outside the barn. His book picture had been taken a long time ago. He was slight, small, with long white hair. He even had puffs of white hair curling out of his ears. That told me he was
really
old.

"I knew you'd come," he said.

"How could I not?" I said.

His barn was filled with books—stacks and cartons of books everywhere—and heated by an old-fashioned pot-bellied stove. Various cats patrolled the rafters. A husky named Nanook was top dog. Danzig made me a vegetarian nut loaf for supper. I stayed for two years. During most of that time nobody knew where I was. My mother and grandmother went crazy.
And
my stepfather and grandfather. I showed
them!

Danzig was the closest thing I ever met to an enlightened being. He knew that life was a divine comedy, not a revenge tragedy. He had the gift for passing this news along. That was why so many people worshiped him—even though he had stopped writing for publication.

Danzig felt overwhelmed by his fans. How can a mere writer heal the ills of the world? He
can't—
any more than a mere singer can. But people see you on your spiritual path, and they are so hungry for spirit that they want a piece of you. If you give away all those pieces on their terms, nothing will be left of
you
!
Your
own journey will end. But how to refuse the sincere seekers?

Instead of building up false expectations, Danzig meditated. He wrote haiku, which he taught me to copy in calligraphy.

"Only what is given as a gift can be uncontaminated," Danzig used to say.

I sang him folk songs—Appalachian ballads, Irish songs, English songs, Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek. I sang him Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Aunt Molly Jackson songs. I sang him "Union Maid" and "Bread and Roses" and "This Land Is Your Land." I sang him "Bourgeois Blues," and "Midnight Blues," and "Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine." I sang about boll weevils, unemployment compensation, and Banks of Marble. I sang "We Shall Overcome," "Follow the Drinking Gourd," and "No Irish Need Apply." And then I sang him
my
songs—
all
my songs. I even wrote him a few—like "Nobodaddy's Daughter." (Don't look so eager. I ain't gonna sing them for
you
.)

I taught him to play the guitar. For a long time we slept in the same bed and didn't become lovers. This was definitely a novelty to me after the drugged fucking that went on in the music business. He understood that by then I trusted
no one
. He wanted to win my trust. And he did. It was a long time since I had trusted anyone.

We used to talk about what was and wasn't real. He would recite Yeats to me. And Blake:

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy.

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in Eternity's sunrise.

Q: So why did you ever leave? It sounds like heaven.

A: The world was too much with us even there. Danzig was always afraid that his kids would publish his cache of manuscripts if he died. He'd given me strict instructions to burn everything if anything happened to him. But when he had that stroke, I was so traumatized that I was just 
unable
to burn his notebooks and manuscripts. I
knew
where they were.

I
knew
what to do. But I just
couldn't
. He lay there for almost a year, immobilized, unable to speak, while the vultures came and carried away his treasures, his manuscripts, his letters, his notebooks. The rest is, as they say, history.

Q: You were a major character in Danzig's last novel?

A: Are you asking me or telling me?

Q: Well, are you the folksinger in that book?

A: I never answer questions that can only be answered yes or no.

Q: All right, then, shall we discuss your marriages?

A: I never discuss my marriages. Except, of course, in the most
theoretical 
terms.

Q: What do you think gave you the confidence to become a star in the first place?

A: I
always
felt special. From the time I was a little girl, I believed I was fated for great things. This was probably because my grandfather Levitsky made it clear I
was
special. He walked me to school every single day. He dropped everything when I came home in the afternoon. Most successful women are daddy's—or granddaddy's—girls. My daddy was dead, my daddy was nobodaddy, but Levitsky was like a double daddy—he was
that
powerful. I also knew I was special because there were portraits of me (painted by my grandmother) at every stage of my life. But most of all I knew I was special because my mother wanted me and my grandmother wanted me and my grandfather wanted me.

There was a black smudge on this rainbow, and that was my father, who lived far away in a sort of hospital place and was whispered about. Then he killed himself, and he was
still
whispered about. I never knew if he was alive or dead. I invented a fictional father in my head. I sing about him in "The Ghost in My Life," in "Nobodaddy's Daughter." But if I didn't think of him and thought instead of my grandparents and my mother, everything seemed secure. Until, of course, my brother was born. Even Robin, my mother's husband, loved me. And Marco, her main man. Not to mention all her other lovers.

Bed, it turned out, was her favorite place to be.

Q: Many of your commentators say the same of you.

A: Fuck my commentators.

Q: There are also rumors about that. Would you like to correct them?

A: No.

Q: It seems you've lived in all the places most important to your generation: Malibu, Vermont, Venice, London, New York, but not the Hamptons.

Q: How is it you've never landed in the Hamptons?

A: How is it the Hamptons always make me feel
poor
? Even if you fly out there in your own plane, drop into misty, damp East Hampton airport like a grasshopper on a leaf (green as money), suddenly there you are surrounded by Lear jets, Queer jets, Fear jets, all the flotsam and jetsam of real wealth. And suddenly the farm in Vermont, the apartment in Venice, the co-op on the Upper East Side, all feel like
trayfe
. And the parties—from Hollywood to Broadway to Finance and back again. Washington pundits (
The Pundit Did It—
good title for a mystery, huh?) diddling 28-year-old over-the-hill supermodels, Broadway babies with their toy boys, middle-aged lady walkers and underaged boyfriends…Everyone with a multi-million-dollar house on the ocean, filled with Anglo-Indian antiques, everyone with a huge pool, a golf course, two tennis courts—of two different surfaces—everyone with Italian fountains, manmade mountains and rivers, and a Range Rover just for the nanny. How did you ever get so far
behind
? Whatever you have, wear, do, is
less, less, less
. Whichever party you go to is not quite the right party. Whichever friends you stay with are not the ones who are hottest this year. Heat is everything. And the Hamptons always make you feel like you are returning to room temperature.

Movie moguls with helicopters just for their flacks, retired investment analysts with eighty-foot sloops, novelists who publish
two
number one best-sellers a year and
kvetch
that their publishers think
they write
too much
. Hamptonitis. I have Hamptonitis. It's a lot like pericarditis—an inflammation around the heart. Not that it isn't the same in Cap Ferrat or Venice, in Martha's Vineyard or Aspen—but the rituals are slightly foreign and therefore not so galling. In Europe, the people seem
less
like us, so we are somehow less aggravated, and in Aspen, they're all so bonhomously
Western
. At the Vineyard, they're more genteel and pseudo-Wasp modest—though they're just as rich. The Hamptons are Manhattan brought to a boil and going sockless. The Hamptons are everything I hate about my generation: greed, money hunger, cynicism, display. Their parents summered in the Catskills, so they discovered the Hamptons. From Poland to polo. From Grossinger's to the Hampton Classic. It makes me puke.

Q: Wow…Tell me how you
really
feel—but seriously now—tell me about your big comeback, the new CD you're issuing next month. It's called—

A:
Sally in the Sky with Diamonds.

Q: A tribute to the Beatles? The sixties? What?

A: A tribute to my own amazing powers of survival.

Q: Tell us about it.

A: It's better listened to, of course. But let me just say that it is really my autobiography in music. Everything important in my life is in those songs.

Q: I'm looking forward to it…. Tell us about your mother, would you—she seems quite some woman.

A: When I was little, I thought she was the most amazing mother who ever lived. She seemed younger than the other mothers, and she liked to skip in the streets and ice-skate in Central Park, and she always had a vast array of admirers. But I made her crazy once I became an adolescent. And when I disappeared with Danzig and never told her where I was, I think

I took
years
off her life. She didn't deserve that.

Q: "Lullaby for My Mother" is one of the most touching songs on the new album. She should be very proud of it.

A: It's the
least
I could do for her.

Q: How old is she?

A: She's seventy-seven and still going strong, God bless her.

Q: Do you get along?

A: Finally, we do.

Q: And your father?

A: Don't you listen? My father is bloody
dead!

Q: Oh, please forgive me, Ms. Sky.

A: I've never forgiven
him—
why should I forgive you? (Laughs)

Q: There has also been the persistent rumor that you were working on a musical about your grandmother—a sort of female
Fiddler on the Roof. 
True?

A: Truish. I spent a lot of time interviewing my ancient grandmother Sarah on tape about a decade ago—inspired in part by wanting to make a family chronicle for my daughter, Sara, who was then just a baby. Now she's eleven and lives in Montana with her father. Her father has sweetly told her I am dead, so of course she doesn't know her own mother and grandmother—my mother visits her secretly and observes her from a distance, or even from up close, aided and abetted by Sandrine, who lives with my ex and is not a bad sort. Not really. I have been separated from my daughter for so long—I'm still fighting for visitation—that I wanted her to know her great-grandmother—in case she died before I got little Sara back. You see I named my Sara for
my
grandmother whom I adored.

Q: I thought Jews didn't do that.

A: Only certain Orthodox Ashkenazim don't. The point of it is to confuse the angel of death—as in so many Jewish rituals. The Sephardic Jews don't have this taboo, and most American Jews are
not
Orthodox. Odd how increasingly proud I am to be Jewish—despite my lack of Jewish education. My grandmother Sarah Solomon Levitsky was amazing. Lots of women were amazing then. Sarah was sort of
Yentl
meets
The Age of Innocence
. What a musical she would make!
Hello, Dolly!
ain't nothin' compared to my grandmama Sarah.

Q: Where is that project now?

A: In development hell. It has so far been through development at three regional theaters—the Old Globe in La Jolla, the Yale Rep, and I forget which other. Right now the director and producer don't talk to each other.

I hear that's
normal
for musicals. Now there's talk that HBO wants to develop it as a movie musical starring Bette Midler—whom I adore. "
Alivai!" 
as my grandmother would say. If I'm lucky, my granddaughter will eventually do it.

Q: Is there any question I haven't asked that you'd like to answer?

A: Yes. What are you doing for dinner?

[It must be assumed that the interviewer was just the sort of young flatterer
Sally liked. Soulful, hairy, adoring. What happened next is anyone's guess.
The Rolling Stone interview never ran, of course, because Sally changed her
mind and had her lawyers write to the magazine threatening dire consequences
if it did. She also pulled her new CD. Sally in the Sky with Diamonds became
a collectors' item after she had most of the copies destroyed. Ed.]