Storms (55 page)

Lindsey in Hawaii.

I was stunned over the loss of J.C. He'd been my friend and protector during the tours and I couldn't imagine not having him there the next time the band went on the road. But I didn't say a word. After what had happened in Australia, I knew better than to voice these sentiments to Lindsey. His shocking reaction to my praise of John Courage on my “girlfriend tape” had shown me that these were feelings I had to keep to myself.

Carol Ann in Hawaii.

Lindsey and I also left. We went to Hawaii for a month's stay at the Kahala Hilton. This time we rented a cottage right on the hotel's beach and spent the first three weeks baking in the sun, eating coconut cream pie, and sipping tropical drinks. Feeling restless, we decided to island-hop and pay a visit to John and Julie's wonderful little house in Maui. They had a houseguest I was anxious to see: Sara. Once there, we had a couple of all-nighters at the McVies', where Sara, Julie, and I spent hours talking about the two hottest gossip subjects: the breakup of Dennis Wilson and Christine, and “the Blob.”

Christine had finally ended her almost three-year love affair with Dennis. Fed up with his drug and drinking binges, his womanizing, and his penchant for spending her
money like water, she'd called their engagement off in December. Each of us had stories to tell about Dennis's bad behavior while he was living with Chris. How he'd used her credit card to buy designer clothes for teenage girls at Charles Galley and Maxfield Bleu, and the blatant affairs that he didn't even try to keep secret during the three years they were living together.

The crowning glory was, of course, the heart-shaped garden he ordered for Christine's backyard as a Valentine's Day surprise. It was huge and beautiful and cost thousands. This, too, he charged on one of Christine's cards. While we totally understood why Chris called off their engagement, we all agreed that it was a drag. Despite his reprehensible behavior, he was a total blast to hang out with and we were going to miss having him around. He was, after all, one of our “girlfriends.”

The story about “the Blob” had all of us laughing so hard that we almost choked. Right before the end of the
Tusk
tour Sara packed her bags and left Mick over a ridiculous secret “affair” that he'd pursued throughout the entire tour. He'd called Sara from the road in August and told her that he'd fallen in love with a woman whom he'd never met but had been speaking to for months—the same woman that he'd bragged to us about on the road. He'd fallen in love with a voice over a telephone.
That explains why we never saw her
, I thought, as the riddle of Mick's “mystery woman” from the tour became crystal clear. To make a long story short, Sara told him to shove it and moved out of his house. Mick, in turn, hired a private detective to find his dream girl. And he did. She was hideously overweight, plain, and more than a little wacko.

Mortified, he'd been begging Sara to come home—but she wouldn't. Right after Lindsey and I left for L.A., Mick came on bended knee to Maui to get her back, and after putting him through hell she gave in and returned to his new home in Malibu. Christened “the Blue Whale”, it would become my home away from home for the next three years.

Three months after the end of the
Tusk
tour, in January 1981, Lindsey, Bob, and I moved into our new home in one of the most exclusive areas in all of Los Angeles: Bel-Air. Our one-story home rested on a beautiful mountaintop and had a 180-degree view of the metropolis below. We'd had it extensively remodeled so that the once-conservative ranch-style house was now an eclectic mansion with glass walls.

Walls had been knocked down inside to create large and airy rooms. We'd had a “rain room” built as an extension to the kitchen. It was a huge glass dome built around a magnificent tree. Squares of glass were molded around its shape and water pipes were hidden within its branches. With a flip of a switch, gentle rain started to fall onto the glass like diamonds. Of course, the glass squares were always leaking, but nevertheless I loved to sit and look out at the newly planted “tropical forest” that surrounded the rain room. The Gothic furniture we bought for our June Street house was left in storage and we hired a new decorator named Murphy who had filled our home with wonderful white fabric couches, tapestries, and tables of green stone.

Everything in the house was the direct opposite of the dark wood and velvets of our last home and we loved it. A five-foot wooden replica of King Tut's sarcophagus that was a liquor cabinet had a place of honor in the huge living room—and I swore that Tut's Egyptian makeup resembled Lindsey's stage persona (a comparison that creeped him out).

Immediately upon moving in, Lindsey started construction on the garage. He turned it into a complete home recording studio, and once again he began to spend all of his time shut inside its doors. Just like at June Street, I began wandering through this house like a ghost as eerie, muffled music made its way down the halls. Music that would, eventually, become his first solo album,
Law and Order.

Lindsey driving in Bel-Air.

So all was well in Bel-Air—until Lindsey received a series of phone calls demanding that he direct his attention to a new project: the next Fleetwood Mac album. The sunny atmosphere in our home darkened as he was forced to stop work on his solo album and begin composing songs for a record that he didn't have a lot of interest in making. A record that the press had predicted would never be made.

In March the
New York Post
ran a story under the headline, “Looks like
the end of the line for Fleetwood Mac.” The story quoted highly placed sources within the music industry that said that “there's big trouble among members of rock's hottest group and the band is swiftly headed for the rocks.” Citing loss of income from the
Tusk
tour and creative differences as the root cause, the piece went on to say that the untimely breakup of Fleetwood Mac would cause shock waves throughout the music industry unlike any since the breakup of the Beatles.

After this story, small blurbs of speculation began to appear in music magazines and newspapers across the country hinting at the infighting, drugs, and personal problems within the world of Fleetwood Mac.
If only they knew how bad it really was—and is
, I thought as I kept track of the clippings that the band's publicist sent to our house on a regular basis.
But somehow Fleetwood Mac endures and it remains to be seen how rough it's going to be on all of us during this next record and tour. I'm almost afraid to think about it.
With a sigh I tossed the clippings into a pile and flipped the switch on the rain room to shut off the bad memories of the
Tusk
tour.

As time would prove, I had every reason to be worried. From the very first minute, the new album was like an albatross landing on a ship at sea. It was a bad omen that would make what had gone before in the lives of the Fleetwood Mac family pale in comparison. From that point on, all of our worlds would start to crumble into ruin.

This time the band insisted on doing an “updated” version of the musical sound of
Rumours.
Lindsey didn't fight them on it, but he wasn't happy. And his anger and frustration over having to quit work on his own record and start an album that he wasn't really into manifested itself in angry confrontations with me. Even though I understood that it wasn't me he was actually angry with, I couldn't help but be hurt and upset at outbursts that now seemed to occur on a weekly basis.

I did my best to let his anger roll over me and tried not to let him see my tears.
After all
, I told myself over and over,
they're just words. It's not like before, so it's not that bad.
But I cried as soon as he slammed the door and went back into his studio. Walking quietly into the rain room when I was once again alone, I stared through the artificial rain falling softly around me.

Within two months, Lindsey was finished with his songs for the band's next record. The sooner that record was completed, the sooner he could get
back to work on his own material—and that was all that mattered, he told me.
And then everything will go back to being the way it was before he had to stop working on
Law and Order, I whispered to myself.
He'll be happy again, and we'll be happy again. It's just this stupid band record, that's all.
On May 1 we headed for France and Le Château, a studio located sixty miles outside of Paris, in Hérouville.

Because of Mick's tax situation, the rest of the band had agreed to record for a month in France. Mick had declared himself a resident of Monaco and had to prove to the IRS that he wasn't liable for American taxes on his income from the record. It was always confusing, to say the least, to try to make sense of Mick's financial ups and downs and by now no one even tried. After the debacle of his firing as band manager, everyone wanted to help him out to make up for hurting his feelings.

Lindsey entertains himself on the road.

And that was why we were stuck in an old château that was beautiful—but decidedly icky. It was a damp, moldy, spider-and-ant infested building with almost no modern amenities. The bedrooms were small, the bathrooms even smaller, and to call the dormitory-style kitchen “rustic” was being kind. After American hotels with room service, it was a shock to have to pick dead flies out of the butter before we could spread it on our toast. Call us spoiled, and we surely were, but when you're among people trying to do something as intense as recording a new album, the luxuries of normal life just make everything a lot easier. But as with everything else connected to this album, “easy” just wasn't in the cards.

Lindsey and I gritted our teeth and tried to make the best of it. Some mornings we woke up in a bed full of ants and I went screaming for the insect repellant. Lindsey would shrug into yet another set of wrinkled clothes and head out to the separate building that housed the recording studio. The whole setup was like a scene from a Gothic horror story. All that was missing was a headless horseman wandering the halls.