Between a Heart and a Rock Place (4 page)

With no sports, drinking, or smoking, boys and music mostly summed up high school—though there was more music than boys. Every possible minute was devoted to music. Georgia saw to that. She envisioned me becoming a classical singer or going into musical theater. Even though I loved rock music, we never even talked about it. It wasn't just Georgia Ruel's traditional outlook that caused us to avoid the topic of rock; I couldn't envision myself ever singing rock because my voice was all wrong for it.

The great thing about being in the music program at Lindenhurst was that we made trips to the city to see some musical productions and to hear the symphony and opera—trips that I never would have been able to afford were it not for the school. I sang the solo at a lot of the school programs, and we had an amazing choir. I also sang in the All-State chorus that won prizes throughout the state and kudos from big-
time critics. That was all due to Georgia and her brilliant direction. She always pushed me to be better than I was, to work harder than I thought I could, creating a strong work ethic within me. There was no coddling, no cutting me any slack. She knew better than I did what I was capable of doing. And I was lazy. Singing well came easily to me, requiring hardly any effort on my part at all. This was not something I could take credit for; it was just the gift that was given to me. But to reach my potential, I had to work—hard. God and nature had blessed me with raw talent, but it needed to be honed and refined.

And of course, I participated in the school's musical productions, including playing Queen Guinevere in
Camelot
. Because of copyright laws we couldn't always afford to do the biggest productions, and instead we put on vintage shows like
Plain and Fancy
and
Little Mary Sunshine
. We did everything, and it was a good learning experience. I had to learn an Amish accent when I played Hilda Miller, Barbara Cook's part in
Plain and Fancy
. In
West Side Story,
I played Anita, which is hilarious. Anita is the Hispanic girl who has racial insults thrown her way. I am about the whitest person you'd ever meet.

All of this was done with one clear goal: to attend Juilliard and continue my training. But while track never got in the way of my music, boys did.

One boy in particular.

I met Dennis Benatar when I was in the tenth grade, and I thought I was deliriously in love. We dated for the rest of high school, and I did believe this was the
big one,
my great love. What did we have in common? What led me to believe that this was my chance at love? Well, what does a sixteen-year-old girl know about love? I was just another girl who wasn't worldly enough to make a sound choice.

There's a misconception about me that I turned down a scholarship to Juilliard because of Dennis. The fact is, I didn't even go to the audition. To be accepted into Juilliard, you have to go through a lengthy process. You have to learn a lot of pieces, fill out tons of pa
perwork, make sure all the i's are dotted and the t's crossed. Georgia Ruel walked me through the whole thing. Months went by, and with Georgia's help I was ready. When I started my senior year, the time to audition for Juilliard drew near, but in September of our senior year, the unthinkable happened. Dennis enlisted. Remember, this was 1971, and the Vietnam War was still going on.

The Juilliard audition was coming up in November, yet all I could think of was Vietnam. I thought Dennis would be sent to war and he would be killed. It may have been Mom's old fatalistic worldview, but I know a great many young people went through those exact same emotions back then. Everything just exploded, and I didn't think I could do anything except stay with him until we got through this nightmare. Every time I brought it up, Dennis pleaded with me to stay with him, to just blow off the audition, asking me not to go. And so I didn't.

I would almost have rather done anything in the world but face Georgia Ruel with the news of my decision. She was my closest confidant, as good a friend as any I had in high school. Over the last several years, I'd spent most of my free time with her. If I wasn't in a class, I was in the choir room with Georgia. She gave me the dynamics and the fundamentals of my music, but she also had become an older sister. She was my mentor, my teacher, and my friend.

“I've decided not to audition for Juilliard.”

Georgia looked sick. “You can't mean that.”

“Yes. Dennis may have to go to Vietnam. We're going to get married.”

“You haven't thought this through,” Georgia began. She went on and on, eventually breaking down into tears and trying in vain to convince me to think over my decision. But for me that was the end of it. My mind was made up. Everything I'd worked for since I was ten years old was about to be thrown out the window. I would stick with Dennis, who might be sent to Vietnam to fight and die.

Not long after I'd made my decision, I began to second-guess why
I'd ever even thought I could make it at Juilliard in the first place. I tried to justify and rationalize my choice.
What was I thinking? How could a kid from a blue-collar family with two working parents fit in at a place like Juilliard? I probably wasn't good enough anyway. I might not have been accepted. In fact, it's almost a certainty that I wouldn't have been accepted.
Before it was over, I had convinced myself that this was the very best move I could have made. And I was being loyal to my great love.

After graduation, Dennis went to basic training and I decided to live at home and attend the State University of New York at Stony Brook. I took health education and sex-ed classes, thinking I'd become a teacher, but my attendance was short-lived and I quit during my first semester to take a job waitressing at Friendly's. I needed to save money for the wedding, which I knew my parents would not have been able to afford and I never would have asked them to pay for. Music faded into the far past, something I'd done in another life. Dennis and I had planned on getting married in November, but in September he was sent to Vietnam. That rolled the wedding date to the following summer, 1972, when he was to return.

Much to both of our surprise, he was back in three months and changed a great deal, now facing long bouts of depression. I didn't know any of the details of why he only stayed three months, but I assumed it was because of the depression and anxiety. This has been such a pattern, soldiers coming back from war suffering from post-traumatic stress. In the old days they called it shell shock. Without professional help, it does not get better. One of the most tragic aspects of PTSD is that instead of getting therapy, so many of these young men self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. And that is what Dennis did. I smoked pot a few times with him. I wanted to help him, support him, and show him that I understood what he was going through. It was an act of solidarity, but it just wasn't me. I hated being stoned, so I stopped smoking, but he did not.

But while his life had changed dramatically, mine was staying the
same. I had been at home, in our town, working to pay for the wedding. The chasm between us had widened, but I didn't see it. I was too blinded by missing him and wanting to leave my home and get out into the world. The marriage seemed like an exit. Because it was obvious that our lives had split in two different directions, I should have put the wedding on hold until we knew whether we were still suited for each other. But I didn't. The wedding was still scheduled for the end of July 1972.

I knew the day we wed that I was making a terrible mistake.

I can still remember that feeling when the church doors opened and I set my foot down on the carpet. I looked up and saw the man I thought I wanted to marry and suddenly my brain said,
Run!
But there I was putting one foot in front of the other walking down that aisle.
No, no, no!
my brain kept screaming at me.

The next thing I knew I was reciting my vows. Then he was kissing the bride. And I spent the next eight years in and out of a bad marriage.

I've told both my daughters to watch for that feeling and trust it. I don't care how many people have been invited to the wedding, or what relatives drove for half a day to get there, or what kind of wine you ordered. If you start down that aisle and something says,
Don't do this,
turn around and run.

“I'm giving you my permission right now,” I've told them. “You have my permission to stop it at any point, and I don't care about the circumstances.”

The way I figure it, the band will already be there, the food will already be there. We'll all be dressed up. Why not simply have a party and call it a big day?

I wish I'd done that.

T
HE MARRIAGE WAS OFF
and on from the beginning.

For the next few years, Dennis and I split up about once a year, and for about six months at a time. While this was happening, we also moved around quite a bit because he was still serving in the military. First we moved to Massachusetts, where he was stationed at Fort Devon. We then went on to Fort Jackson in South Carolina and Fort Lee, near Richmond, Virginia. Throughout these moves, we kept separating but always decided to “give it one more try.”

Those were tough years on both of us. There was no doubt he'd been through a trauma and it had marked him. We really struggled during our marriage, and as a result, I was essentially on my own a lot of the time. Though I worked and tried to take classes whenever I could, sadly, I stayed away from music.

It was while we were in South Carolina that I found a job at the Citizens and Southern Bank. Being so compulsive, I liked the order to the setup at a bank, with all those stacks of neatly bound packets of money and organized files. I had no experience working in a bank, but the funny thing was, the bank hired me precisely because I didn't have
any experience. They were switching over to a new check processing system, and the bank officials decided to start fresh with someone who had never worked with the old one. That way there was no “unlearning” necessary. It worked out so well that they sent me to school to be a trainer for other branches. I went from branch to branch, training lovely little blue-haired ladies on the new system while they kept telling me, “Ah don't know why Ah have to learn this, darlin', the old way was just fine.” I had the best time, and I really did love those ladies.

However, some of the older male customers weren't so sure about me.

I worked as a trainer for a couple of years before being promoted to head teller at my own branch. All those elderly men with their Confederate-flag lapel pins would raise their eyebrows at my leopard-print dresses and peer at the name tag that read
PATRICIA BENATAR, HEAD TELLER
.

“Ben-ay-ter. That's not a local name, is it?”

“No, sir, it is not.”

“Where are you from, little lady?”

“New York,” I'd say, laying on my thickest New York accent and watching them recoil in surprise.

“I think Ah'll go to the next winduh…”

In the end, I learned to love the South and appreciate it. I was comfortable there. I think one of the main reasons I related to those people was that their ways were so genteel. There was a softer edge to what they did, and they truly were the salt of the earth. These were people who got up every morning, went to work, went to church, fed their children, and tried to do the best they could. It was blue-collar, working-class, and felt incredibly comfortable for me. Even if some of the older men were taken aback by my leopard-print dresses, they were like me in so many ways, very down-to-earth. Just regular folk.

When we made the move to Virginia, my banking skills paid off, and I was hired at the F & M Bank in Hopewell. Maybe it was working
around all that money and seeing the paltry paycheck at the end of the month that did it, but I finally realized that I could not spend my life in a bank, even if I kept getting promoted. There was a limit to where I could go, and I knew it. I was aware that in too many jobs, I'd need a college degree, and I didn't have one. I often kicked myself for quitting school just to jump into the wrong marriage, but ultimately I knew I had to make a change.

Then one day in 1973, after we had moved to Virginia, something miraculous happened. Some gay friends who worked at the bank with me asked me if I wanted to go with them to see a Liza Minnelli concert at the Coliseum in Richmond. I was not a huge fan of hers, but I loved
Cabaret
and adored her mother, so I thought,
Why not?
I figured that with everything basically in the dumper, a great music spectacle would lift my spirits. I hadn't sung for two years. That's what the new life was doing to me. The thing I loved most had slipped away from me. I kept thinking that I had really messed up somewhere along the way. I knew that there were people like Georgia Ruel who had seen great things in my future. All those plans, all that promise, and what was I doing? Counting other people's money.

The Coliseum in Richmond was a great venue, comparable to the Forum in L.A. (now the Staples Center). As I sat there, watching Liza sing, loving the showmanship and taking in the entire performance, I looked around at the people in the audience, the lights, the stage, and thought:
I can do that. This is ridiculous. I'm a better singer than she is. Sure, she's a great performer, but with practice, I can definitely do this. I want to perform again, only this time, on a stage like the Coliseum.

Sound crazy? Maybe it was. And maybe we should all follow some crazy idea when our gut tells us it's right.

I did
not
mess around. The very next day I went to the bank and gave my notice. I found a little music paper—a
Village Voice
sort of thing—and started looking through it for anything that seemed like a singing opportunity. I stumbled across an advertisement for a sing
ing waitress at a dinner theater in Enon, Virginia, called the Roaring Twenties Café, where the performers doubled as the waitstaff. I applied and got the job, complete with a flapper dress and a garter.

In twelve hours I had changed my life.

The Roaring Twenties Café was a funny place. You'd be serving a baked potato one minute and have to jump on the stage the next, with or without blue cheese dressing on your costume. They didn't serve alcohol, so the customers brown-bagged it. It was a cabaret-style show, a revue. I did a lot of Judy Garland songs, sang in some ensembles, and in one portion of the show I was in a Sonny and Cher sketch. After a couple of music-free years, I began to feel like myself again, quickly becoming close friends with the other performers. We were really just Muzak live, but career-wise it was a step ahead of being a bank teller.

And the clientele who frequented the Roaring Twenties Café? Lots of traveling businessmen, but couples came too. The middle-aged men who were away from their families always behaved the worst. Most were these rotund old Southern boys with their big cigars. That was when you could still smoke everywhere. They'd be puffing those stogies and then reach out and slip a finger down around your garter.

“Why don't you sit down here, darlin'? Let's talk about a few things.”

“How about I punch your eye out?”

Once in a while that comeback didn't work and somebody would still hang on to that garter. So I'd have to say, “I don't think so, fellas. I'm from New York, and
you're
an asshole!”

They'd sit there roaring with laughter, bellies shaking, saying things like, “That little Yankee girl is cute
and
feisty.”

But they got the message, and usually, they took it fine. They were just a bunch of good old boys, and they'd back off as soon as I put them in their place. It wasn't exactly the big time, but it was something of a start.

The real beginning came when I met Phil Coxon, who played piano at the Roaring Twenties Café. I started singing with his band, Coxon's Army, and and we played at local clubs like a place called Sam Miller's. In 1974, we got to be such a famous regional act that we were the subject of a PBS special. We even had a radio hit in Richmond with “Day Gig” on Trace Records. Between Coxon's Army and singing a few local ad jingles, I was making a huge amount of money for the time, over a $1,000 a week, an enormous sum considering that the rent on the apartment I shared with Dennis was only $100 a month.

During this time, Dennis and I split up a few times, and it was becoming less and less clear where our relationship and my career were headed. Then in 1975 I had another one of those moments. One morning I read an article about open-mic club nights in the
New York Times,
saying that this was a big scene in the city, where singers and comics could build a following and possibly be discovered. Open mics were a great equalizer, a way that anyone could be heard by people who mattered in the entertainment industry. I thought about the potential for about five minutes, then decided to pack up and head to New York. The response from my Richmond friends and colleagues was across the board negative.

“What? But you're making so much money here!”

“Why would you do that? You own this town!”

“Why spoil the good thing you got goin' here?”

They were right, but I knew that Richmond was only going to take me so far. I was never going to seriously go anywhere if I couldn't do this on the biggest stage of all.

“If I really want to make it, I've gotta be in New York,” I explained to them with the air of confidence that only a twenty-two-year-old can pull off. “I'm never going to really get ahead, to do any better than I am already. Good money or not, I'm stuck.”

“You'll be back,” they all told me.

“No, I won't.”

 

I
T TOOK ME ABOUT
a day to gather my things and head for New York. I'm no fool. I didn't jump into the middle of New York City and use up all my savings renting an apartment. I moved back to North Hamilton Avenue with my parents and started singing every place I could, trying to get a break. Dennis ended up following me, and eventually we moved to the city, taking a little East Side one-bedroom apartment on Eighty-first Street. My husband decided that he was going to try to manage me, which was a ridiculous idea, but for whatever reason it made sense to him. What it really meant was that we had but one income: mine.

One of the places I started going to was considered a real star maker, a club called Catch a Rising Star on First Avenue between East Seventy-eighth Street and East Seventy-seventh Street—not too far from our apartment. Catch a Rising Star was the reason I'd come to New York in the first place—the article had mentioned it specifically as a place where upcoming talent could be discovered. People who kick-started their careers at Catch over the years include Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Crystal, Ray Romano, Ellen DeGeneres, David Brenner, Whoopie Goldberg, Eddie Murphy, and my dear friend Richard Belzer. It had only been in business since 1972 but already had legendary status in entertainment circles.

I was scared to death the first time I sang there. Early that afternoon, I'd gone to the club and waited outside with all the other hopefuls to get a number. It was first come, first served—the number you got determined when you went on. I got number 29, which meant that I wouldn't go on until nearly three
A.M
. Luckily the club had a good late-night crowd. When it was finally my turn, I sang a cover of Judy Garland's “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” I was so nervous I had to hide my shakes. After I'd sung the final note, I closed
my eyes, terrified to open them and see the crowd's reaction. The next sound I heard was everyone in the joint going absolutely crazy. I was in total shock.

While I was singing, Rick Newman, the club owner, had been drinking with some of his friends in the bar at the front of the club, not paying much attention to the contestants. When he heard the audience cheering for me he burst through the doors as I was exiting the stage.

“Who are you and where did you come from?” he asked with a smile. I don't know what reaction I was expecting from my performance, but that was not it. I laughed and told him my story. Newman was a big, tall guy—very seventies with his open shirts and gold chains. He had curly dark hair and a big mustache that made him look like he was wearing one of those fake noses with glasses. (Richard Belzer even poked fun at him about it in his act: “Hey, does that nose go with the glasses?”) My performance made Newman an instant fan, and he offered to do anything he could to help me get started. That at least meant more performances at Catch a Rising Star.

It didn't take me long to become a fixture at Catch, and hanging out there became one of my favorite things to do, whether I was performing or not. The comics weren't just funny onstage. They were “on” most of the time. We would stay up all night and then go for breakfast at a local coffee shop called the Green Kitchen. Between Richard Belzer and the other guys, I think I had coffee and milk shooting out of my nose every fifteen minutes. I finally figured out that Belzer waited until I had just taken a big gulp of my coffee to jump in with a one-liner. Then, of course, I looked like an idiot for all to see. The best part though was nobody thought you looked like an idiot.

I loved to play poker, and on some nights, I'd stay there with the comedians until five in the morning in a card game. With the exception of a few times when some girlfriend of Newman's played with us, I was the only woman in those games, but it wasn't something that ever really occurred to me. In my mind I was just laughing with the
boys—John Belushi, Chevy Chase, John DeBellis, The Untouchables. I learned everything about humor, timing, and swearing from these guys, hence my extensive collection of obscenities. The whole scene was just fun, and I fit right in.

Those became some of the happiest times of my life. Everyone was trying to make it, and in the process we were a family. We were all working toward the same end. We cheered each other's successes and stood by each other when auditions went badly. It didn't matter that you didn't have any money or that your name wasn't on any marquee yet. Everyone was more or less in the same position, with some closer to the brass ring than others but everyone trying. When you find creative people who are all trying to do similar things, so often resentment and competition overtake everything. It's so rare to find people who are confident enough in themselves and their own talents that they're able to honestly be there for one another. But that was precisely what we had. It was a close-knit community, with all of us encouraging and supporting each other. You didn't find much negativity there. It was tough in New York; Catch was a safe haven.