Read My Lips (26 page)

I never thought a hurricane would upstage me.

The warning came: batten down the hatches, seal the shutters, tape the windows, and fill the bathtub. I waited in my hotel room, hoping that the storm would pass us by. Then the booker came up to ask if I would please go down and sing for all the tourists, who were so nervous about the hurricane. So down I went to perform for a panicked audience, trying to think of what to say to ease their fears. The words, “Don’t worry about the hurricane,” actually came out of my mouth and, needless to say, were little comfort.
Hot Lips Sings
! the posters for my shows announced. No one cared. The wind howled outside, the rain began, shingles shook loose, and traffic lights swayed like they were made of papier-mâché. In the end we all came through fine, but I put on a terrible show.

When I was leaving on tour, my then-boyfriend, producer and director Chuck Shyer, had said to me, “Fool around, but don’t fall
in love.” That wasn’t the way I wanted a man to feel about me. It was a nice offer—very freeing, as I soon discovered—but didn’t suggest the kind of committed relationship I would be interested in. However, because it was on the table, by the time I got to New Orleans I had taken Chuck up on his offer and was having a full-on affair with the gorgeous road manager.

New Orleans proved to be a lot of fun. We would wander around the French Quarter late at night after shows. One night we ended up at some house party full of spectacular drag queens. “Sally!” everyone yelled, racing up to me. I reveled in the attention until a guy nearly threw up on me.

Another night we wound up in the French Quarter, a wonderful maze of courtyards and alleys and little secret hidden nooks and crannies. Suddenly someone pulled out a ball of coke the size of my head. Never my thing, cocaine, thank God; I have enough trouble sitting still. But whether or not I was going to take it was beside the point. I was scared. I thought,
If anyone sees us with this bowling ball of drugs, we’ll all go to jail for the rest of our lives.

Music poured out of every doorway. So did drunks. One night we went to see a great horn band we’d heard about. Joe Cocker was lying on the floor of the club with a crowd of people standing over him saying, “Have another drink, Joe!” It was like a Tennessee Williams play. Happily, the last time I saw Joe perform, he was sober and brilliant.

My room in New Orleans was next to Rudi’s. He was a devil and a lot of fun. I’d drop in on him while I was wearing my trusty pink nightgown, and Rudi would stop by my room draped in just a towel. Neither of us would think twice about giving press interviews dressed that way. Then there the nights I spent smoking grass and eating pizza in bed with the road manager. I was having the time of my life.

But I was getting exhausted. So one night Rudi and I called Stuart.

“Stuart,” I said. “I can’t do three shows a night anymore. It’s too hard.”

Stuart was brief and to the point.

“Sally, if you don’t do a third show, you’ll never work in this town again.”

I did three shows.

New York City, mercifully, was a two-shows-a-night town. We were booked for two weeks at the Rainbow Grill above Rockefeller Center—a great gig. It was packed every night, mostly with foreign visitors who came to take in the fabulous city views, but I didn’t care. I loved the place.

I opened with what I now consider an unsingable song called, “Dear Friend.” It had no melody or rhythm. We had three new backup singers flown out from LA, as we’d lost Gotham. Because I knew so little about running a music tour, it hadn’t occurred to me that I needed a show director and a lighting designer for a venue as sophisticated as the Rainbow Grill. Before I left LA, Chuck had me do a show in front of Garry Marshall, Jerry Belson, and Harvey Miller. They were all brilliant and gave me some funny things to say between songs. But that was now two and a half months ago, and not much of it had stuck with me. I still hadn’t learned to take notes.

So there we were at the Rainbow Grill, me strutting around in pants, a white halter top from Holly’s Harp on Sunset that was practically falling off me, and a feather boa, backed by three new singers, performing a show with no director, no lighting design, and no writing. However, my two-week run garnered me some wonderful reviews.

The tour had been bleeding money. After New York City Stuart called to say that if I was willing to go to a couple more towns, I could possibly break even. He emphasized the word “possibly.” I banged my head against the wall, and off we went.

One of the last gigs I remember was in Pennsylvania at a place called Host Farms. The word “farms” made it sound like my kind of place: I pictured trees, meadows, horses. I called Chuck and asked my mom to bring Claire, telling them all it was a farm and we could have Thanksgiving together. No one could come.

The motel was one of the strangest I’d ever seen. It was practically underground. There was a little tiny patio and one window. There was a ping-pong table in the lobby. And we’d be there for a week, maybe two.

I was depressed and lonely. I had been on the road for three months—my own doing, of course. I called Stuart to whine; I called the shrink to sob. I begged anyone—everyone—to please come visit. Performances didn’t do much to lift my mood because the audience sat stone faced as I sang.

I spent most of my downtime in my room, miserable. When I finally opened my door, there was the band, doing laundry, goofing around, and chatting out in the hall. I felt like I’d been hibernating. I was almost amazed to see everyone alive and well. Beyond the ping-pong table and a trip to Amish country, there wasn’t much going on in that town. But today I would know better how to cope. I would make my own fun—some books, a ping-pong tournament organized by yours truly, or at least a good nap without tears.

When we got held over at Host Farms, I called Stuart to protest. “There is hardly anybody here!” I wailed. “This is so humiliating.”

“Listen,” Stuart said. “If you’re not happy doing it just for yourself and the waiters, then it’s all bullshit.”

He was right. All I hoped to accomplish from this tour was to become a singer. If it was hard—and at times it was—then so be it. Hard knocks were good for the spirit. Let’s face it: I wanted soul.

After the tour ended I went to record again, this time at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the Hit Recording Capital of the World. Everyone recorded there, from local bluegrass legends to the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin. I was thrilled. In 1974 there wasn’t much to see of Muscle Shoals except the recording studio, a motel, and a long stretch of empty highway leading to a coffee shop that served biscuits and gravy. But that was enough for me. It was a tremendously valuable experience to work with
producers Terry Woodford and Clayton Ivy. We’d record until five in the morning, then play basketball. Their support helped keep my singing ambition alive. I think about them even today as I record, nearly forty years later.

The hard knocks kept on coming: For starters, I came back to Los Angeles $50,000 in the hole. That was a lot of money in 1974 and roughly equivalent to four times that or more today. Then, with perfect timing, the IRS called and said I owed $20,000 in back taxes. Now, my own debt I could deal with, but owing the IRS did not sound like a good idea. I did what I so often did in times of crisis: I called my mother. She loaned me the money. I paid her back.

Oh yes, and there was one more little hard knock: shortly after I returned from the tour I did a show at the Backlot in Los Angeles. I invited Neil Diamond, the man who had urged me to go on the road if I wanted to “be taken seriously” as a singer, to come see it.

Granted, it wasn’t my best show, not by a long shot. But it was still me; it was still my voice. I sang. He listened. After the show Neil said he wanted to take me to lunch the next day.

At lunch Neil looked me dead in the eyes and said, in all sincerity, “You should never sing again. It’s not your thing. You really can’t do it.”

I was again on the receiving end of more advice from someone who knew better than me. And guess what? I had ignored my business manager. I had ignored Sue when she told me not to leave town for months on end. I ignored everyone who told me repeatedly to take
The Poseidon Adventure.
I ignored Stuart when he said not to bring such a large band on the road. And here and now, I was going to ignore Neil Diamond and keep on chasing my dream to sing.

Only this time I was sure I was making the right choice.

A
ROUND THE TIME OF MY MUSIC TOUR, MY HOME LIFE WAS
going through serious changes—some wonderful, some trying, and some tragic.

As luck would have it, when I left the house in Malibu where I stayed during
Lost Horizon,
I got to move back into the Cape Cod house I loved, where I had lived with Rick. One phone call and $60,000 later and I was the owner of a house and yard, pool, and badminton court in the Hollywood Hills. Buying the house was one of the happiest days of my life. I still live there today.

With a place of my own now, I kept telling Ian I wanted to help him raise Claire. By now it was clear that Ian had Parkinson’s disease. He slept all day, and he couldn’t do much when he was awake.

“Let her stay with me,” I would say.

“No,” he’d insist. “She’s all I’ve got.”

I offered to help him find a place closer to me so I could cook breakfast for them in the mornings and help out after dinner. “No,” he said. He had people in his building looking out for Claire, like the woman across the hall with agoraphobia.

I tried to help him locate a suitable nanny, placing ads with agencies and in the papers. Anyone we hired would work out
for a bit. The first one, very loving and nurturing, wanted to be a nurse. She soon became a nurse. The second one, a darling young thing, seemed perfect: she played with Claire and was sweet with Ian, but she left after a few weeks to get married. Another girl was a health food cook.
Great,
I thought. Then Claire called: “Sally, Jan’s in my bed naked.” By the time I got there, Jan was gone.

I approached the neighbor across street to watch Claire. Rita was a very sweet woman and a real character. “I don’t know if I can make it today, kid,” she said. “But my boyfriend might be able to. He needs some work. He just got out of prison.”

No, thanks.

I myself was trying to play a bigger role in Claire’s life, but I had my share of screwups too. One day when I was having lunch with my agent at Ma Maison, the hottest restaurant in town, I suddenly realized that it was Claire’s ninth birthday. I had forgotten. I dropped everything, jumped in the car with her presents, and raced right over. When I opened the door to Ian’s place, I saw Claire sitting with two of her friends in the living room, at a tiny card table covered with a colorful paper birthday tablecloth. Some candy was laid out.

“Who did this?” I asked, bewildered.

“I did, Sally,” Claire said. “I went down to Jerry’s Liquor.”

My boyfriend, Chuck, who had always been incredibly supportive of my relationship with Claire, told me that I couldn’t leave Claire at Ian’s. Either I had to take her, or we had to send her to boarding school. The night he suggested boarding school, I became so mad that I slept on the couch.

Claire would sometimes run away—who could blame her—and Ian, poor thing, couldn’t keep up, being so ill. As soon as I heard she was missing, I would dash over, but sometimes the police would find her and bring her home, or Claire herself would call me in a panic.

So I did what many frightened adults do in situations like this: I began to threaten her.

“Claire, you can’t keep running away! You have to listen to your dad. And if you don’t, I’m going to have to send you to boarding school,” I said to her one night on the phone.

“What’s boarding school?” she asked, not sounding scolded at all but instead more curious. “Would I like it?”

“Well, I don’t know. Would you like to go see? Shall we find out?” I was amazed by her reaction and so moved, because somehow she knew she needed a change in her life.

Through a friend I heard about a boarding school in Ojai, and the two of us drove up to check it out. As we drove past its split-rail white fences—there were horses—we immediately knew it would be perfect. The grounds and the buildings and the people felt real, not fancy. Claire would even have her own horse to ride and take care of. I knew I had to make this happen, to get her enrolled. I would even pay for it, though my business manager thought that would be a very bad idea. But I didn’t care.

Claire was excited, and Ian agreed to let her go. That was his compromise.

With Claire settled in her new school, I had divided my time between rehearsing for the tour and nesting in the new house. I wanted some shelves added to the den, so I asked Chuck if he knew anyone who could do the job. He recommended a friend of his who did some fine woodworking, and brought him by to meet me.

The guy was in his early thirties, tall and fit, in that carpenter’s sort of way, and very laid back. He lived nearby, drove an old beat-up truck, and had a couple of kids. With his brown hair and kind of cockeyed smile, he was so handsome—a real looker.
What a shame he’s married and a friend of Chuck’s,
I thought.

I told him I wanted a built-in couch in the den. I know: a built-in couch, but hey, it was the early seventies. There had to be enough room for two people to lie down side by side. I also wanted a couple of extra windows.