Between a Heart and a Rock Place (20 page)

“We Belong” was released on
Tropico,
our first full studio album in two years at the time. But that wasn't all that we produced. During the making of
Tropico,
we finally got pregnant.

 

A
FTER THE SUCCESS OF
“Love Is a Battlefield,”
Live from Earth
went platinum, and I won a Grammy for “Battlefield.” The album stayed on the charts nearly three years. Those awards, the twenty-sixth annual Grammy Awards at L.A.'s Shrine Auditorium, on February 28, 1984, marked the reign of Michael Jackson as the King of Pop. Michael won record and album awards in the overall categories for “Beat It” and
Thriller;
Best Pop Performance, Male, for
Thriller;
Best Rock Performance, Male, for “Beat It” and Best Video for “Thriller.”

In my category, Best Rock Performance, Female, I was up against Joan Armatrading for
The Key,
Kim Carnes for “Invisible Hands,” Stevie Nicks for “Stand Back,” and Bonnie Tyler for
Faster than the Speed
of Night
. “Love Is a Battlefield” became my fourth Grammy win. Ironically, we didn't attend the awards show, but they did finally televise the category and someone accepted for me. The video was nominated for an MTV Award. Those were heady days. In the midst of the awards,
Crimes of Passion
went five-times platinum and
Precious Time
was certified double platinum.

Despite everything that was going on, our break from recording emphasized that this was a time of commitment for us. Once we had made the decision to marry, everything had solidified. I was the most important person in his world, and he was the most important in mine. We shared the same goals and aspirations, the same values, and the same professional dedication. One goal in particular that we shared would have caused hysterics at our record label if they'd known about it. Spyder and I were determined to start a family.

Ever since we'd gotten married, we'd both wanted children. We actually started trying right away because we wanted more than one child, and at twenty-nine, I was not getting any younger. But it hadn't been working. Mother Nature played her cruel hand, and after two years we still didn't have a baby. By the time we went into the studio to record the material that would become our fifth studio album,
Tropico,
Spyder and I had just about given up trying to get pregnant.

Thanks in part to our prolonged break, the recording of
Tropico
began without much of the stress that had followed our earlier trips into the studio. We had cultivated some really strong songs and we both felt very optimistic about the ideas we had for “We Belong.”

Of course, Chrysalis was still pushing an intense timeline for us, in which we were recording the album and shooting the videos for the singles at the same time. The first video we shot was for the song “Painted Desert,” and not surprisingly the shoot took place in the desert outside of L.A. We hired an Italian director and began filming on June 21, which was the summer solstice—the longest day of the year.

It was also the hottest. I remember that the glue that held the soles
of my shoes together melted. We had to improvise and make it work, but the heat was making me incredibly sick that day. Normally I'm not affected by warm temperatures, but I felt awful. I stayed in my air-conditioned trailer, only coming out when they needed me in the shot. To make matters worse, my clothes were stretched tight on every part of my body. Two weeks prior to the video, the wardrobe person had done a fitting for the clothes I'd be wearing on camera, but for some reason, now the clothes no longer fit. The pair of black pants she'd fit me for, which were supposed to be tight to begin with, were now cutting off the circulation in my waist and legs.

We filmed all day, and I struggled with my concentration the entire way. I couldn't focus and felt sick. The heat was agony, and my clothes were vacuum-sealed to me. I counted the minutes until it was finally finished.

The next day we went to the post-production site. This director liked to edit on a big screen, and the images from the footage we'd shot were huge. Surprisingly they looked pretty good, considering the main character had been barely able to participate.

At one point I was in the editing room alone with the director; he leaned over and in his thick Italian accent, he quietly asked, “You are with child?”

What a crazy thing to say, out of the blue. I barely know this guy.

“Oh no, no,” I responded. “We can't have children.”

A shot of me was on the big screen, and he paused the footage, walked over to me, and looked intensely into my eyes. Then he smiled.

“Look here,” he said, walking over to the big screen and pointing at my face. “You see there in your eye—a little light. You
are
with child!”

At first, I thought to myself,
Wow, this guy spent way too much time in the sun yesterday
. But then I started thinking about how awful the shoot had been, how sick I'd felt, and how my clothes didn't fit. I didn't want to hope, but immediately I made an appointment to see my ob-gyn the
next day. The blood test confirmed what the director had seen in my eyes the day before: I was pregnant.

I couldn't believe it; two years of trying and testing, and suddenly it was a reality. Even the girls in the doctor's office cried. I didn't know how to tell Spyder. I needed something special. On my way to meet him at the MCA Whitney studio, where we were recording, I bought a pair of knitted infant booties.

“Where've you been?” he asked curiously when I finally arrived.

“Editing and the doctor's office.”

“The doctor's? How come?”

I placed the gift-wrapped box with the baby shoes inside on the recording console. He opened it and stared down at its contents. For a couple of moments, he froze. He looked up at me, stood, and went straight into the bathroom. He didn't come out for thirty minutes. When he finally came out, he headed straight for me and said, “Is it true?”

I smiled and said, “Yes.”

The atmosphere in MCA Whitney shifted immediately. Everyone was overwhelmed by the news. They'd all known how difficult it had been for Spyder and me those last two years. The announcement elicited a collective sigh of relief from everyone in our lives. Immediately all of the nerves and stress that went into recording just melted away. Who had time to fret when we'd been blessed with the seemingly impossible?

And so making
Tropico
became one of the best recording experiences either of us ever had. I was euphoric and felt completely inspired. We felt we were making a record that had been blessed with a miracle. The entire band was so relaxed, and all of us were curious to try new arrangements. Being pregnant permeated the entire process. Pregnancy makes all the long muscles in your body relax, and your vocal cords are a long muscle. Suddenly I found that I could do things vocally that I'd never been able to do before. And once I did, I was able to
re-create that sound even without the pregnancy hormones. I've never had an easier time singing than when I was pregnant. To hear Spyder tell it, it was the most cooperative I'd ever been (but it was over as soon as I gave birth).

Unfortunately, our good moods couldn't control the fact that I periodically had to deal with the realities of pregnancy. By the time we were filming the video for “We Belong,” I was a few months along and suffering from morning sickness. Throughout the shoot, when I felt sick, I'd run to the bathroom, throw up, brush my teeth, reapply lipstick, and then go back for another take. The whole time I had saltine crackers in the pocket of my jacket, and I'd eat the crackers in the hope that they would curb my queasiness.

Morning sickness aside, I found being pregnant and recording to go pretty well together—that is, until Chrysalis heard about what was going on. When Chrysalis got wind that I was pregnant, they were definitely
not
thrilled. They wanted it to be a guarded secret. They didn't want any photos taken of me once I started to show, and they didn't want me talking about babies in interviews. And of course, they made it clear that they wanted me to go right back to my vixen self as soon as that baby was born and get right back on tour. No time off. Not during the pregnancy and not afterward. I guess they thought the audiences wouldn't notice that I was pregnant and that journalists wouldn't ask about it. I told them that they could kiss my ass.

“This is my life,” I told them. And I meant it. I was all about family.

For his part, Newman was happy for us but worried about the impact this would have on my career. It meant we'd have to take time off (what a concept) and that my image would be changed in everyone's eyes.

“Why would you do something like this?”

He was an old friend. So I attempted to explain how unhappy Spyder and I had been when we thought we might never have children and how excited we were to find out that we were finally pregnant.
Newman wanted the best for us, but he was also concerned about how the pregnancy would complicate things.

For the first several months of my pregnancy, I continued to work on
Tropico,
making the video for “Ooh Ooh Song” in addition to the videos for “Painted Desert” and “We Belong.” Eventually though, Chrysalis insisted that I rest, not because they cared about my well-being but because they didn't want me to be seen. They were adamant that no one get a shot of me when I was pregnant. I wore big coats and loose clothing to hide it. At one point, I was actually chased by the paparazzi, which was unusual in those days, as I was coming out of a movie theater on Fifty-seventh Street in New York. Luckily I was with my old friend Cynthia Zimmer, who proceeded to chase away the photographers with her gigantic Louis Vuitton bag. Needless to say, no one ever saw a photo of me pregnant.

It may sound amusing, not to mention ridiculous, but it wasn't funny at the time. In fact, it was terribly upsetting. This was the 1980s and I was a married woman, yet Chrysalis treated me like some Hollywood starlet from the fifties who'd been knocked up out of wedlock. My pregnancy was something to be ashamed of instead of celebrated. It was insulting, not to mention sexist. It was discrimination in the workplace, plain and simple. I shouldn't have been shocked, but I was. They had spent years objectifying me, but somehow I thought pregnancy would be different. This was about the beauty of childbirth; this was about my life, my family. This should have been off-limits.

Of course all of these frustrations evaporated with the birth of our beautiful daughter Haley on February 16, 1985. She came into the world demurely, no crying, no purple baby skin. Just beautiful eyes shining and bright, with a full head of black hair and eyelashes that looked like caterpillars draped over her eyelids. Spyder and I were overjoyed. At last, we were a family. Everything about our lives was changed the second she drew her first breath. It was a new day. The playing field was about to be leveled, by a seven-pound infant.

 

F
OR EVERY DAY SINCE
I was old enough to think, I've considered myself a feminist. Even before I knew what that word meant, I was one. From early on, I believed that it was my job to advocate for women's rights in every context because we were equal to men in every way. I believed that if you protected the rights of one group, all groups' rights would be protected. It was simple, it was pure, and as a young girl growing up in the sixties, it was my mantra.

In my parents' house, feminism wasn't theoretical; it was being practiced every day. Everyone's paycheck counted and everyone was expected to do their share of child rearing, grocery shopping, and dish washing. My parents did this without debate or bitterness. It was simply their way of life. They loved each other and respected the contribution each of them made to the family. This was the atmosphere that I grew up in. It never occurred to me that women could be regarded as inferior.

I could have been the poster child for feminism in America. I read everything I could get my hands on, attended rallies at school, and protested discrimination against women on the railroad tracks in the middle of town. As I got older, squishing all those worms on my bare legs to prove myself to the boys paid off big-time, helping me scrape my way through high school, life as a military wife, the South, and the boys' club of rock and roll. I forged a path for myself where there wasn't one before, putting up with lecherous radio program directors, sexist record executives, and all their sleazy brethren. Now, at long last, I was someone's mother. My life—both professional and personal—would never be the same.

From the first moment I held that baby in my arms, I knew things would be different. For all my blustering and battling, I'd spent six long years being vetoed or coerced into doing things I didn't want to do. I'd made concessions because I didn't want to be a bitch or cause problems
for the band or upset Newman, or because of whatever stupid reason I used to rationalize allowing them. With Haley in my arms, I knew those days were over. I had something to protect that trumped all else: my daughter's future. Now every artistic and financial decision would impact her life. It wasn't just about Spyder and me anymore.

Of course just because Haley was born didn't mean that Chrysalis was about to change their ways. They hadn't had much regard for our personal lives before, and they sure as hell didn't after. It was difficult enough being a first-time mother without their hassling. Ask any new mom how ominous it is to suddenly be responsible for the care and well-being of an exquisite little creature whom you love more than your own life. It's terrifying. Complicating things for me was the fact that when Haley was born I knew
nothing
. I'd never even babysat when I was a young girl. I had no idea what I was doing. Not to mention that being an entertainer brought a whole new set of problems. I knew women who were married to rock stars and who had their babies with them when they traveled. But when I had Haley, I knew few female rock stars to begin with, let alone female rock stars with babies. There's no handbook for being a rocker girl with a newborn baby.