High On Arrival (9 page)

Classes took place from 8:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. so kids could go on auditions in the afternoon. The teachers were old and crazy. Mrs. Anderson, the creative writing teacher, regularly went off on tangents about her personal life in the middle of class. She’d say, “That reminds me of when I was in Mexico, there was a young man, he was beautiful …” and for the rest of the class we were hearing about rum drinks and coconuts. Meanwhile she criticized my stories for being too hard to believe. So much for “creative” writing.

Our civics teacher was even worse. She had white-blond hair and wore more makeup than a showgirl. Her face shone as if she had a coating of Vaseline on her face. Her idea of teaching us civics was to require us to copy the entire glossary of the textbook verbatim. While we wrote away, she played belly-dancing music and walked around with finger cymbals on. Eventually she was arrested for prostitution in front of the school. For all my absences, hitchhiking, acid-influenced attendance, and hippie schooling, I’d always managed to be a good student. But Hollywood Professional School was a joke. I was like, “Are you kidding me, this is
school
?”

Nobody, including me, was about to complain. Not that it would have mattered if we did. The school’s principal, Mrs. Mann, had a beautiful house in Beachwood Canyon. She liked to have big parties for all the students where we’d play kissing games.

It was tricky to make friends at Hollywood Professional—we were all coming and going—but I did have a boyfriend. Two of my classmates were Andy and David Williams, identical twins who were nephews of the singer Andy Williams. They were lanky, with long, thick blond hair in matching shag cuts and strong noses. They were built like aristocrats. The twins wore turtlenecks with gabardine slacks, perfectly shined loafers, and matching Cartier watches with gold chains. They were musicians, trying to launch a twin-brother pop act that I don’t think ever went anywhere. Andy was my boyfriend the whole first year that
One Day at a Time
was on the air, but it must have been one of those early, token relationships where we spent most of our time socializing in groups and hanging out together at parties. My only surviving memory of the relationship is how spectacularly elegant Andy was and what he would one day say to me when it came to an end.

Not long after I started working on
One Day at a Time,
I was invited to appear on the game show
Hollywood Squares
. I sat in the square next to the brilliant Paul Lynde. At
Hollywood Squares
they shot five episodes in a single day. The first time I did it everything went smoothly. Being a Square was fun—all the challenge of a game show but none of the pressure. When they invited me back again … and again, I was delighted. But before one of my subsequent appearances I ran into a little trouble.

I may have been a professional all day long, but I was still a kid when I hung out with my brother. Jeffrey and I liked to play a game we called Bicycle. We’d lie down on the floor, put our feet up against each other’s feet, and bicycle as fast as we could. On this particular occasion—the night before I was due to tape
Hollywood Squares
—Jeffrey was over at our house and we had a Bicycle session that got a little rambunctious. Jeffrey’s foot slipped and he kicked me in the eye. I had a shiner the size of California.

There was no way I could show up to
Hollywood Squares
with a black eye. Patty took one look at me and said, “Dr. Feelgood is your only hope.” Our own Dr. Feelgood was the family resource for speed prescriptions. Family, friends, and associates went to him every week. The girls would hide rolls of quarters in their underwear to make sure they “made weight” for stronger drugs. Dr. Feelgood was the next best thing to a miracle worker, so Patty brought me to him. I don’t know what he gave me, but the next day I was as good as new. Not exactly the life lesson I needed: it wouldn’t be the first time Dr. Feelgood gave me something to get me through another day.

By day I was a prematurely employed young girl, throwing myself into the role of teen-dream Julie Cooper or going to school with my cute, clean boyfriend. On weekends I was living out Ann Romano’s worst nightmare. I smoked pot, drank wine, and took Quaaludes (and maybe some barbiturates). But Aunt Rosie carefully supervised the part of my life that took place within her field of vision. I went to work every day. On hiatus, I went to school every day. I didn’t party every night. Many a night Patty and I curled up next to each other in bed to read. For the most part I was doing what I thought most teenagers did— stretching the rules, experimenting, living through experience. It was fun, and I had no desire for the partying to escalate, no instinct that it was dangerous, no sense that it might lead to disaster.

8

After the first season of
One Day at a Time
aired, my father mentioned that I could spend the summer in London with him and Genevieve. Dad had a flat off Kings Road on Glebe Place. I leapt at the invitation—wherever Dad’s party was, I would follow.

For the first couple days Dad and I sat around, mostly singing and doing coke. Then one afternoon Dad and Keith Richards (the Rolling Stone with a known heroin habit) came home and started crawling around on the floor looking for bits of heroin or cocaine. I helped. Still that same little girl who wanted to roll joints for Daddy’s friends. Finally, disappointed, they said they were going to go score. As they hurried out the door, they told me they’d meet me at Redlands, Keith’s house in the country, that night. A driver would soon arrive to pick me up. Then they left.

I packed a small bag and waited. And waited. Nobody came. Hours passed and night fell and nobody came. I was a confident sixteen-year-old, but it was my first time in London. I hadn’t been there long and wasn’t remotely oriented to being in another country, alone, without cash or friends or keys or food in the refrigerator. Late that night I went to sleep with all the lights on, expecting Dad and Keith to walk through the door any minute.

At three in the morning I woke up with a start. The power was out. The phone was dead. I was still alone in the flat. I found a single candle and lit it. I sat in front of my stepmother’s vanity table, and when I looked in the mirror I saw the distorted, spooky shadow of my face, lit by the candle below. It reminded me of the slumber-party game where you turn out the lights, hold a candle up to your chin, and chant “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” waiting for the ghost of a woman who murdered her children to appear. But different specters appeared to me that night.

Here I was, waiting for Dad, again. He had abandoned me, I had found him, and now he had disappeared again. I knew full well that there was no guarantee that a driver would ever arrive or that Dad would walk back in that door. Why was he that way? What was it about me that made it so easy for him to leave? What was wrong with me? Was I invisible? Did I exist? I started writing in my diary, a thick blank book with a shiny silver cover. I wrote and wrote, in red ink by candlelight. Hours passed. So often my father had left me to fend for myself, but when I was younger it was an adventure. Now, in my melodramatic teenage mind, it was terrifying. I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life. Nobody was coming to get me. I had been abandoned. Was I even there in the first place? Was I real or someone else’s dream? Was there anyone outside this flat? I was in a void, having lost everything but myself. It was like being dead.

That night I took measure of my life for the first time, and it seemed to be nothing but a series of random events that dropped me into a hole. Dad was gone again, in pursuit of personal nirvana, but the pure hedonism he envisioned doesn’t exist. You always take others down with you. I try not to blame my father for being who he was, but he should have known or learned this. I think about my own son and I can’t imagine how anyone could desert a sixteen-year-old like that. And in the same instant I think about what I did to my son, and the deep regrets I have, and I know how someone can.

I had been left, for the millionth time, told by my father’s actions that I was worthless and inconsequential, that I couldn’t count on anyone, that nobody cared what became of me, that I had to fend for myself and if I didn’t, well, that was my tough shit. If ever there was a potential turning point, a moment in my youth when I might have been angry at my father, blamed him for forgetting me time and time again, dismantled his power over me, this was the moment. But I loved—or, more accurately, yearned—for him too intensely to be angry or to dismiss him. Instead, I turned my anger inward, self-destructing.
What was it about me that made it so easy for him to disappear?
I looked at myself in the mirror and cried and cried.

Days passed. I wrote in my journal, contemplating my own existence, page after page of distraught teenage fear and fury that would one day burn to ashes in a house fire. I ate some old bread and Marmite. I wept.

Waiting for Dad: It happened a lot. When I was growing up in Virginia he hardly ever visited. He became an untouchable, unattainable figure. I’d watch him on TV and say, “That’s my Dad,” but he wasn’t a reality.

My sixth Thanksgiving: Dad was coming. Jeffrey and I were all dressed up, sitting on the couch, waiting for my father. My legs stuck straight out—they weren’t long enough to dangle over the edge of the couch. I stared at my Mary Janes and ruffled socks, clicking my toes together. Click, click, click. We waited and waited. Then the phone call: “I can’t come. I just took acid with Donovan.”

My father was frequently four or five hours late, but this time stood out because when she heard he wouldn’t make it to Thanksgiving, my mother lost it. She screamed, “That bastard,” and started crying and yelling, storming around and slamming doors. Jeffrey and I sat there stunned. We weren’t shocked that he wasn’t coming. That was already a familiar disappointment. But my mom went off the wall. What followed was a quiet, terse Thanksgiving meal with the three of us, throughout which my mother drank buckets and buckets of whatever she drank.

An amusement park outing: Michelle and Dad promised they’d take me, six, and Jeffrey, eight, to an amusement park called Pacific Ocean Park. Like any kids would be, we were dying to go. Finally, the big day arrived. They drove us to the park, handed us a hundred-dollar bill, and told us to meet them in the parking lot at the end of the day. Then they left.

The trip to the Virgin Islands: Once Dad called in the middle of the night and asked Mom to bring me to the airport immediately. I was five years old. I flew by myself to Philadelphia, then boarded a Learjet with the Mamas & the Papas. They took me with them and a couple friends to the Virgin Islands for a trip that was to last until the money ran out. We camped out in tents on the beach for months. My dad and Michelle had a huge tent with an Oriental rug on the floor and candles everywhere. I had my own little pup tent nearby, where I got eaten alive by the bugs. I remember waking up one night with a spider crawling on my arm and realizing that if I didn’t want the spider on me, I would have to be the one to get rid of it.

The whole group was on acid or speed all the time, from the moment they woke up. An unpredictable point in time that ranged from late morning to late afternoon. I remember walking through the forest with a bunch of them, including Duffy, the owner of the club in Saint Thomas where the Mamas & the Papas got their start. All the grown-ups were freaking out about the forest for some reason. I took Duffy’s hand and said, “Don’t worry, Duffy, I promise the sun will rise again tomorrow.” There I was, a five-year-old, talking adults down from bad acid trips.

I couldn’t afford to be shy—I was hungry. Literally. With all the partying and sleeping in and writing the songs that would make the Mamas & the Papas a world-famous vocal group, feeding the little kid wasn’t top priority. I was a tough little survivor. I’d walk into town all by myself and go to church. I convinced some sailors to buy me breakfast and one man to buy me a new pair of shoes. (I could have used that boldness when my dad deserted me in London.) When I told my father and his friends what I’d done, they thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard and sent me to other camps to steal food for them—apparently we’d run out of money. I was happy to have a mission.

I don’t want these stories to sound self-pitying. For the most part I was perfectly well cared for, and all the waiting added up to only a small part of my life. But those moments created a dynamic that forever dominated my relationship with my father. My dad was so tall. I was a tiny girl. I was always pulling on his pants leg, saying, “Hey, hey, hey,” trying to get his attention like a little puppy, hoping someone would throw the ball for me. Dad would keep talking, oblivious to the tugging sensation around his knee. I so longed to be cherished.

I waited at his mansions for my guardian to show up. I waited in the mornings for someone to drive me to school. I waited on Friday nights for my father to watch me tape
One Day at a Time.
And now it was still happening: my trip to London.

Three days later Dad and Keith finally showed up in a Lamborghini. They announced, “We’re here!” I didn’t say, “Where the fuck have you been?” I was just relieved that I hadn’t been completely forgotten. My gratitude for that eclipsed the rest.

Dad and Keith had my little brother, Tam, who was five, and Keith’s son Marlon, seven, in tow. I deduced that they had already been to Redlands and now had used picking me up as an excuse to drive into the city and score more drugs.

On the way to Redlands Keith drove 125 miles per hour. Tam, Marlon, and I were in the backseat sliding back and forth and laughing hysterically. My dad, parent for the moment, said, “You can’t drive that way—the children are in the car.” He insisted that Keith pull over so he could take the wheel. In his head, he was a great parent.

Redlands was a gorgeous castle in Chichester, with big gates at the entry and rolling lawns. When we walked in, Keith’s girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, doyenne of rock ’n’ roll wivery, turned to me and snarled, “Who invited you?”

I was thrown. I said, “Um, my dad?” The guy who drove me here? The guy I walked in with? First I’d been abandoned for several days, now I was apparently unwelcome. But I’d learned not to take what the grown-ups said at face value. The rudeness was random and meaningless. Indeed, eventually Anita and I would play dress-up together, with me trying on all of her seventies finery.

Not everything at Redlands was so innocent. The adults were partying. Tam and Marlon, little rug rats, ran around unsupervised. There were syringes in the cups in the bathrooms. Drugs were just another part of the posh rural retreat. Later, on another family trip to Redlands, my grandmother Dini came with us. Dini was a drunk, but when it came to drugs she was oblivious. Keith would come downstairs after doing a shot of heroin and nod out. Dini would say, “He’s on drugs now, right?” And I’d say, “Yes, Dini, Keith is on heroin.” She’d nod, and we’d go back to eating our lunch.

A couple days into the visit, Genevieve and I were sitting on the couch, enjoying the view out a vast picture window overlooking the countryside. There was a grassy hill that dropped off steeply enough that you couldn’t see what was immediately behind it. Out of the blue, Genevieve said, “Oh, look at all the lovely white balloons.” At first I didn’t look twice. Genevieve was the queen of the non sequitur. In her high-pitched Betty Boop voice she’d say, “Laurie, I love it when you smile and your gums show.” Or, “Laurie, you’re like a bottomless lake, so deep.” Then I noticed several white globes bobbing along the crest of the hill. As I watched, the white orbs rose up over the hill and I saw that they weren’t balloons. They were helmets. Helmets atop the heads of several uniformed bobbies. I said, “Those aren’t balloons. It’s the cops,” and ran to tell Keith.

Redlands had been raided before, and Keith had been tried for drug possession three times. We all panicked. As the bobbies approached, everyone scrambled around the house, flushing dope and hiding syringes.

Only a few crazed minutes passed before the doorbell rang. Keith sauntered to the door as I remembered the toothbrush holder full of syringes and hurried to hide it in a chest. The bobby-in-charge stood stick-straight in the doorway and politely said, “Mr. Richards, someone seems to have set off your burglar alarm.” The little kids had unwittingly hit a hidden panic button that set off a silent alarm. We had called the cops on ourselves. They were very civil and everything was sorted out on the threshold. They never set foot in the house.

After we returned from Redlands, I found my footing in London. First I ventured out to shop in Soho to spend some of the great stack of traveler’s checks I kept in my purse. I was walking down Kings Road in a paper minidress from Fiorucci when I got catcalls from guys. I’d gotten catcalls before, stateside, but these were different.
One Day at a Time
was a hit in the States. It was a huge show. I was completely recognizable—people called me Julie everywhere I went. Add to that my Dad’s fame and
Graffiti
—when I got catcalls back home, I always assumed the attention came from my notoriety. And when I met people, part of me always wondered,
Do you really like me? Am I really cute or fun or sexy? Do you actually like who I am?
These Kings Road catcalls—from men who didn’t know who I was—meant they actually thought I was just plain worth a whistle. It was a nice confidence boost for a self-doubting sixteen-year-old girl.

There was a heat wave in London that summer. It was humid and sticky and nasty. Restaurants notoriously skimped on ice cubes in drinks. The only way to escape the brutal heat was to find the surprisingly few bars and clubs on Kings Road that had air-conditioning. Now I was on familiar turf. At first I went with Dad and his friends. Then it happened that as I walked past a table at a club I was stopped by Lorna Luft, Judy Garland’s daughter. Lorna said, “Don’t I know you?” We’d met in L.A. I joined her table. That night Lorna introduced me to her boyfriend, Jake Hooker, and a guy named Alan Merrill. Jake and Alan were in a band called the Arrows. The Arrows were extremely hot—there was rampant Arrowmania in London that summer. Alan was the lead singer. I started hanging out with Lorna and her friends, and soon I started dating Alan. He was ten years older than I was and drop-dead gorgeous.