Lips Unsealed (25 page)

A month later, my sister Hope brought our menagerie of dogs from Los Angeles. I had a good laugh seeing her with all those doggie crates at the Nice airport. It wasn’t the way she had imagined arriving in the South of France. I loved seeing my pets again, though the reunion was frustratingly brief and then they were quarantined for a month. Since our furniture wasn’t scheduled to arrive for four more months, we sat in lawn chairs and used boxes as tables. The humor of roughing it in a beautiful home wore thin pretty quickly.

The reality of life there was a trying adjustment. Everything closed for three hours each afternoon, including the local supermarket. The French lessons I had taken were no use, and no one in the area spoke English—or if they did, they didn’t want to speak it around me. The French people can be nice and helpful, but back then I found them surly and difficult. Shopkeepers scoffed at my bad French. We had housekeepers who didn’t want to work. Then four of our six dogs died
suddenly from various causes—poisoning, old age, hit by a car, and a dog fight.

I finally had a meltdown one day when I couldn’t figure out how to use the washing machine and couldn’t find anyone to help. I pulled at my hair, then covered my eyes as if to wish myself away, and then slowly crumbled to the ground and cried.

Ugh. I figured we had made a terrible mistake. We were supposed to be living our fantasy. But this was crazy.

Homesick, we returned to Los Angeles and stayed with Morgan’s mother for several weeks. We celebrated Duke’s second birthday there. I saw friends and family, went to a few meetings, and came to my senses. I didn’t need to sever all ties to life in L.A. I didn’t need to go to such an extreme. I realized that life abroad could be more manageable if I knew I could return to L.A. every so often for business or a fix of friends.

I had reason to come back. In the fall, IRS was planning to release a special collection of old Go-Go’s material. Though Miles had the right to put out a boxed set of our material, the idea of him gathering our B-sides, rarities, and outtakes, along with the hits, without our input, upset all of us girls. Miles may have owned the songs legally, but they were our lives. We couldn’t just let him open the vaults without being there. Or could we?

We talked about our options. As we saw it, we had three—fight him and lose, ignore him, or get involved and try to add some new luster to the old gems. We chose the last, and the end result was that we decided to write and record some new songs and make our reunion permanent.

The idea of getting back together, as far-fetched as it might have sounded a couple years earlier, felt strangely right. Timing is everything. The five of us were having fun together. Why not?

Personally, I wanted to have a reason to return to Los Angeles. When I was there, as became my routine starting that summer, I slipped back into party mode without Morgan knowing, and without the day-to-day responsibility or guilt of being a mom. I thought of it as a vacation from my life. Without hurting the two people I loved, I could be naughty—and I was.

Work was good. To prepare for
Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s
, I
listened to tons of old tapes and soaked up the memories of an era that bright, fun, and full of youthful enthusiasm. I knew not everything had been golden, but there was a spark and spirit on those tapes that was magic and couldn’t ever be duplicated. In the studio, Jane and Charlotte were in reflective moods; Charlotte was pregnant and looked wonderful, Jane was mellow and mature.

I was the only one who didn’t appear to have grown up and learned the requisite lessons from past mistakes. Instead I was still making the same old mistakes. Charlotte may have had my behavior in mind one day in the studio when she and Jane sat back and reflected on the disappointments of our second and third albums, saying each of us had been responsible in some way for various problems.

I knew that I hadn’t been much of a presence on those albums because I was partying too much, and in retrospect I wished I had been there to help write and offer my opinions. I said as much to Jane and Charlotte without admitting that I had slipped into the same pattern of behavior a decade later. I couldn’t face the truth. It would have been too painful.

I had a hard enough time leaving home. I flew to Los Angeles so often that Duke said, “Mama lives at the airport.” I cried when I heard him say that. I felt incredible guilt for the way I treated my family, and even more shame for the secrets I kept from them. And yet it didn’t stop me.

In November, I blocked out the sadness in lieu of celebrating the release of the 36-song, two-CD boxed set and a new Go-Go’s tour, albeit a relatively short one. Since Charlotte was close to her due date, we enlisted Vicki Peterson from the Bangles to substitute on lead guitar, and she did a fantastic job. She fit right in, starting with gigs at the Coach House and the Troubadour.

Music was very different in the mid-nineties, with flannel-shirt-wearing rockers popularizing a grungy rock that spoke to kids the way punk had once been our salvation. However, the
Los Angeles Times
still found merit in our live shows and said the Go-Go’s “made a persuasive, celebratory case for their curious mix of punky drive and bittersweet pop confection.”

By the time we finished a six-night stint at Las Vegas’s MGM Grand hotel and played New York’s Academy Theater, I’m sure my partying
left Vicki surprised and shocked. I was pretty messed up when we did two weeks of Christmas-themed acoustic dates, and I slipped even further when we traveled to the UK for dates in February. In London, I went on an all-night coke binge prior to our appearance on the iconic morning show
The Big Breakfast
, and I showed up at the studio sweating and unable to string together two sentences.

Embarrassed and frightened, I broke down afterward to Kathy and Charlotte and for the first time confessed that I had a problem. They were sympathetic and consoling, but they were also honest. They said they couldn’t do anything to help me until I was ready to help myself.

“Are you ready to help yourself?” Kathy asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Then you aren’t ready,” she said.

What was it about being on the road that made the five of us have such trouble getting along? I didn’t know. But we had once again broken down into bitter factions by the time we played the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London at the end of February. We were barely able to get onstage together for the two nights. Drugs were usually the biggest problem, plus egos, and this time there were also squabbles about royalties. A critic noted that onstage I was “detached from the others, swearing and bitching.” Lovely, right? It was a perfect storm of problems, and we left England saying the Go-Go’s were done forever.

Jane was furious with everyone—and rightfully so. She felt we were a great band, with new songs that were excellent and not being given their due because of problems that were a decade old, and thus boring and pathetic. She flat out said we were blowing a big opportunity.

She put us on notice, saying that this time she wasn’t the only one walking away from the band. The rest of us were screwing up. She may have looked directly at me when she said that. I didn’t know for sure.

Nor did I care. The band’s reunion had been an excuse for me to run away from home and indulge my addiction without sneaking around, but following the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire debacle I gave up and went
home, telling myself that I was going resume normal life, whatever that was. But how normal was life when I found myself at a party talking to Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, who suggested we get together?

Deep down I was still a Valley girl. I had a hard time reconciling that anyone connected with the British royal family wanted to socialize with me, but Fergie and I got together. She was renting a house in the South of France. Her marriage to Prince Andrew was over in every way other than an official divorce, but that was coming. In the meantime, from what I could see, she was really struggling to make a life for herself. In a way, I understood.

We had lunch several times, and Fergie impressed me as a nice, funny woman who seemed lonely. We were a pair. She was lonely, and I was lost, and there we were, reaching out to each other, though she did much more reaching than me. I was surprised, in fact, by how much she opened up to me, a relative stranger in her life, but it revealed how desperate she was for someone to talk to about Andrew and the press, her life as a royal, and various other intimacies she shared about the Queen Mother, Prince Charles, and even Princess Diana. Basically, I was amazed by what and how much she told me.

As I said, she barely knew me. If she was telling me that stuff, she must not have had anyone else in whom she could safely confide. I knew what that was like, to keep secrets and not feel like you could talk to anyone.

One day I invited Fergie to go to the beach with Morgan and me, which she thought would be great fun. I remember her lighting up at the thought of a relaxing day on the water. I had the same thought. As she had to do, she sent her secret service to scout the area and somehow word leaked, as seemed to always happen around her. When we got to the beach the next day, the water was full of paparazzi in motorboats. We went water-skiing and had a blast. However, as we walked back to the beach from the boat, Fergie shook her head at the way we were grouped. She stopped and told Morgan to move into the front and me to stand closer to her.

“The tabloids,” she explained. “They’ll get the pictures, crop you out, and distort the photos to make it seem like I’m with Morgan.”

We listened to her, though I didn’t understand and even thought she was being a tad extreme if not paranoid or alarmist. But a few days later I was at the Nice airport, on my way to Los Angeles, when I stopped at the newsstand and saw the new
Voici
magazine. There was a small picture of Fergie on the cover and mention of her new love. I was both surprised and curious since she hadn’t said anything to me. From what she had told me, the opposite was true.

I bought the magazine and opened it up on the plane. Luckily I was wearing my seat belt. Inside, there was a photo of Fergie and Morgan, who was identified as her new boyfriend, along with an accompanying story about how she had rubbed sunscreen on his back. The funny part was, even though I knew every word was false, I found myself getting jealous—and even asking myself, “Is he her new love?”

Morgan didn’t have a new love. He was busy producing movies and working on projects. But I worried if only because for the first time in our married life we were seriously out of sync. After I returned from Los Angeles, we hit a new low point when he found my secret stash of pharmaceuticals and confronted me about them. Instead of admitting I had a problem, I blew up at him for invading my privacy and then went out and started another stash. I was an ass.

Morgan tried to get through to me. Perhaps he had no idea of my behavior on the road, though chances are he did and overlooked it because he didn’t know what to do.

I wanted him to do
something
. I think I wanted to push to the point where he would leave, where he would have no choice but to walk out, just as my father had done when I was five years old. Then I would be able to say that all the men I loved in my life left me. And then I would be miserable—as miserable as I felt. Or else I wanted him to bring the hammer down on me. He didn’t do either.

I was left to flounder. As expected, my record label dropped me. I was confused to say the least. I didn’t know whether I wanted to continue in music or leave the business. If I had been happier living in France, I probably would have chosen to put my career on hold. I don’t know what I would have done. I would have made a good gypsy, though no gypsies traveled the countryside in the comfort to which I was accustomed. Of
course, if I had been happier in France, I wouldn’t have felt the constant need to run away from my marriage and my child.

Actually, France wasn’t the problem either. I saw the problem every day in the mirror. No matter how fast or far I ran, I couldn’t get away from it.

WITH WOMEN, hair can often reflect the way they feel about themselves, and so it was with me in early summer 1995.

I was opening for Rod Stewart in Europe and playing festivals. It was a convenient way to keep my solo career alive without much effort and an even more convenient way to avoid problems at home. I had a solid set of songs, and my shows were well received, but every time I looked at myself in the mirror I hated my short cut. I wanted to go back to long, red hair. I tried extensions, but they looked awful.

I told people that I wanted
my
hair.

But that wasn’t really the story. What I wanted but couldn’t say was a better, happier me.

I had no idea what to do or how to even start when I returned home from touring exhausted, confused, and depressed. I figured I was done when Miles Copeland came to see me. The South of France was a long way to come for lunch, even from his home in England, but Miles wasn’t just showing up to spend the afternoon catching up. Unbeknownst to me, he had a plan.

The funny thing was that I couldn’t remember if Miles was furious with me and the Go-Go’s or if I was on the outs with him. I realized it didn’t matter. He was someone who was always going to be in my life as a mentor, a protector, an antagonist, maybe a plaintiff, and ultimately a friend. We sat down in the living room, and for a long while I stared out the window as he caught me up on various projects with which he was involved. My mind was elsewhere when he asked about me.

I snapped out of my reverie and told him that I wasn’t sure I wanted
to stay in music. My tour had gone well, I said, but I wasn’t feeling it. I could’ve added that I wasn’t feeling
anything
, but that would have been too much information—too much for me to have revealed.

Miles focused his glacier blue eyes on me as if I was missing something obvious.

“You aren’t going to leave music,” he said. “You’re an artist. I want you to make another album.”