Lips Unsealed: A Memoir Part 13

London was party central. I hung out with the Pet Shop Boys and a group of gay friends with whom I hit the clubs. Different clubs were hot every night of the week, and I was at most of them. I would roll into bed late at night--actually, early in the morning--and pretend to be asleep, knowing that Morgan would wake up or at least open an eye to check on me. He would usually see through my charade and fume, "I can't believe this. I can't believe this is happening."

We seemed to hit a streak of bad luck all around. On Christmas Eve, we were in Los Angeles visiting family and friends when we got a call informing us that our flat had caught fire. It didn't burn down completely, but the damage was pretty severe (I lost most of my clothing, some furniture, and some photos)--and whatever didn't burn was tinged with soot and smoke. I heard that Boy George had watched the conflagration from his bathroom.

Whatever. I was glad we weren't there. The fire had started in the clothes dryer and spread to Duke's room. I shuddered at the thought of what could have been if we had been home. I didn't want to go back and deal with it. Neither did Morgan. We surrendered ourselves to the fact that it wasn't good and there was nothing we could do to fix it. So we kept our holiday plans and continued on to Mexico.

Why not? If the fire was another omen, we didn't want to face it.

When we returned to London after New Year's, we sifted through the damage. Strangely, in spite of the losses, I wasn't upset. Our dogs had been boarded; they were safe. My pet parrot gave me the biggest scare. Though he was in the fire, he had survived, somewhat miraculously, by imitating our winter coughs, as he was wont to do. The firefighters heard him, thought it was a human, and saved him.

We sublet a small mews house owned by Richard Burton's daughter Kate. It was somewhat coincidental since Burton had lived in Morgan's parents' Hollywood home before hitting it big.

A few months later, Miles finally released A Woman and a Man in the U.S. and I returned to the U.S. to do promotion. Nearly a year had pa.s.sed since the alb.u.m had come out in Europe and Asia. I didn't have much enthusiasm for its prospects--or for anything else. I turned thirty-nine years old and didn't like the feel of where I was in my life. And it came out. In interviews, I was lackl.u.s.ter at best and blatantly negative when I was being honest.

"I can't wait to get out of here," I told a Knight Ridder reporter who met me in Beverly Hills. "I don't like it here anymore." I mentioned that I had grown up less than forty-five minutes away. "There's a lost innocence here," I mused with a faraway look, "and I think it's sad."

Without realizing it, I was talking about myself. Radio host Howard Stern all but drooled on me as he said, "G.o.dd.a.m.n, you held up well. Too many women just sour. You must be happy." I rolled my eyes and shrugged. "Happy? Yeah." A few weeks later, I sat with another reporter, a woman who seemed to see straight into my troubled soul. Before she asked the first question, I had the sense she knew too much about me without even knowing me. She had that look, X-ray eyes that saw every wound.

Indeed, she wrote a piece that described me as a lost and trouble-filled woman nearing forty years old and drifting like a boat that had come unmoored during a storm and was floating aimlessly on a gray sea. I was angry when I saw the story. I felt betrayed. I had been exposed--but not enough to stop my self-destruction.

Back in London, I was barely able to manage my addiction. The worst was when I took Duke, then five and a half years old, to school and snorted c.o.ke in the kids' bathroom. I knew I was in a nightmare as I towered above the fixtures meant for children and got high. But I couldn't stop. I had to do a line before I walked home; I couldn't deal otherwise.

I remember having to sit in the Heath and come down before I could pick my son up from school. What was I doing?

Morgan was afraid. I saw it in his eyes and wary approach to me. I don't know why--I certainly didn't understand it then--but he loved me. I've asked him numerous times why he didn't leave. He explained that he could always see the beautiful person underneath all the pain, and he couldn't let go of her.

I heard that and cried. It still makes me tear up.

I wish that I had been able to appreciate everything I had going for me. I wish that I had been able to see the things that Morgan saw in me. But I was too cut off. I was incapable of giving or receiving love. Sometimes I knew it. Other times I only knew that I was in pain. I had no idea how I had gotten to that point.

It wasn't where I had imagined myself. I was about to turn forty, a difficult pa.s.sage in time for any woman and even harder when you feel like you're at a dead end. I spent a good amount of time reflecting on where I had been and where I was going and decided I didn't have a clue. It was sad.

Encouraged by Morgan, I began seeing a therapist. It was apparent that I needed professional help in dealing with my demons and sadness. My therapist was a woman with a momlike demeanor. When she asked why I was there, I told her that I felt like my baggage was too heavy to carry around anymore. Then I burst into tears, crying, "I just can't do it. I'm cracking under the weight."

I saw her several times a week, but I didn't care enough to make it work. It was like when I had cried to Charlotte, Kathy, and Gina on the last Go-Go's tour, before we imploded, that I was in trouble and they responded that they couldn't do anything until I was ready to help myself. This was the same thing. I was still incapable of being honest with myself or anyone else around me.

In my sessions with her I would conveniently leave out information. I was afraid of what I would find if I opened up.

Nonetheless, it was a start. I inched forward a little more when I read The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield's New Age adventure novel about a man's spiritual awakening as he searches for the secrets contained in an ancient book in Peru. It was filled with an easy-to-understand blend of Eastern and New Age thought that underscored my sense that there was something more to life--and I was missing it.

I took another step forward a few weeks before my fortieth birthday. I went with a group of friends for a three-day weekend to a secret place on the west coast of Ireland, where we hooked up with a promoter who did a lot of work in Dublin. Essentially, he was a rich hippie who lived in an old farmhouse on 160 acres of lush ground. He moved with the unhurried deliberateness of someone who was either stoned or into life's more spiritual and sacred side.

I thought it was the latter.

It may have been both.

He led special, exclusive mushroom walks across his property and the neighboring landscape. I'd heard they were like therapy sessions: medicinal, healing, and spiritual. That's why I had gone there with my friends.

Our walk began with all of us sitting in a circle as our guide led us in what he described as a sacred ceremony. He spoke to us about the profound insights and connections we would likely experience as we went into the world of mushrooms. We breathed deeply and meditated to calm and clear ourselves. I had the feeling of being in an outdoor temple. Then we drank some mushroom tea, stuffed our backpacks with fruit and nuts and water, and took off for the day.

I had no idea what to expect as we hiked up into the hills. Pretty soon, as I took in the scenery, I lost track of time. I felt a rumble in my stomach, a wave of nausea sweep over me, and then all of a sudden--or maybe it wasn't all of a sudden--I saw everything around me pulsate and breathe. It was as if the trees were alive. I sat down next to one, caressed its trunk, and purred, "I love you, tree."

I felt like it loved me back, even talked to me. I'm not exaggerating; that tree and all the others spoke.

All of nature came alive as we went deeper into the forest and came upon streams, climbed hills, stared at lakes, and slid down heather-covered slopes on our b.u.t.ts. Looking up through the canopy of branches and leaves, I saw the clouds as giant crystals in a velveteen blanket of blue.

A couple times we stopped to eat fruit and nuts and have some more tea when we needed to top off. I saw nature in an altered state, one I couldn't possibly have seen unless I was in this different dimension. At one point, I laid down next to a giant mushroom I found growing beside a log. As I reached out to feel it, the mushroom shouted, "Don't touch me."

Both of us recoiled.

"Okay, I won't touch you," I said.

Afterward, we went back to the house and discussed the trip. It was dark outside. We had been gone for more than twelve hours. The thoughts, insights, and reflections people shared about the day took a very intimate yet philosophical and almost holy tone. There was also a surreal element to many of the observations that people shared. I was comforted to know that I wasn't the only one who had seen trees breathe and flowers pulsate.

People had experienced a range of visions and revelations. But the takeaway was fairly uniform--namely there were many more dimensions to life than we allowed ourselves to see, and not seeing them caused us to squander so much potential. I could attest to that.

Such insights were easier said and thought than put into practice, but I spent the rest of the weekend thinking, and wondering, about these things and how to incorporate them in my life, and how to change. Indeed, change was a big, scary word to me. I thought about it often, but avoided it like the plague, and yet in the aftermath of that hike I wanted change more than ever.

But while change might start with an aha moment, like the Big Bang, it's a process that happens slowly, and incrementally, over time. It's about evolution, not revolution. The Go-Go's were a perfect example. It may have started with three girls sitting on a curb in Venice agreeing to start a band, but it took years of hard work before it happened.

And so it was with me. At some point I began picking up books about spirituality including the Dalai Lama's primer The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, which had a profound effect on me after I read it. I don't remember how I actually ended up coming upon it, but I have a theory about books. I think they find you; you don't find them. In any event, The Art of Happiness made me realize that I'd ignored the spiritual side of my life, something I had been thinking about since my trip to Ireland.

It wasn't the only thing I'd been thinking about. The fact that I was turning forty hung over me like a dark cloud. The dark cloud metaphor is a terrible cliche, but so is getting depressed about turning forty I hated that I was upset about something that was completely unavoidable and much better than the alternative, but I didn't like it one bit. And I liked it even less when, on the day before my actual birthday, an executive from my record label called and said they were dropping me. I felt bad for having let Miles down. I knew I hadn't committed myself to the work. But the timing sucked.

On my birthday, I felt exactly as I had feared--old and washed up. All I wanted to do was get through the day. I did allow myself a nice dinner with Morgan and Duke, who was six and a half and more concerned about me than I ever considered. Many years later, he confessed that he felt like he had an almost sixth sense that caused him to worry about me even though he didn't know what he was worrying about.

Hearing that cut to the quick, though I don't know what I would have said if my son had sat at my birthday dinner and asked me if I was all right or, G.o.d forbid, something more direct. I'm sure I would have lied. Why not? I lied to Morgan and myself.

As was often the case, instead of being forced to take constructive action, I was provided with an out through work. In this case, producers Ted and Amanda Demme approached Jane, Charlotte, and me about turning the Go-Go's story into a movie. The Go-Go's were still getting over some serious infighting stemming from Gina's 1997 lawsuit against Charlotte for unpaid royalties. The suit had settled out of court, but bad feelings had lingered until the movie forced us to patch up that and other problems.

Thank goodness for email, I quipped to Rolling Stone. We could "air all of our c.r.a.p" without seeing one another. It was a joke, but was true.

The five us of got together to talk about the movie, and we enjoyed working on an outline with Ted and Amanda. As was usually the case, we laughed and cringed as we dredged up old stories, and in the process we revived bonds that were too strong to die. I envisioned Drew Barrymore or Christina Ricci playing me--girls with curves or, as I said back then, girls with "meat and potatoes." We were realistic about the odds of actually getting our movie made. In the end, it didn't happen.

Meanwhile, Miles heard that we were getting along and suggested the five of us once again reunite for a short tour the following summer. In a big surprise, everyone was game and marked their calendars. Our reunion inspired a writer to remark, "Not since the Who has a band had a harder time sticking to breakup vows."

He was right, but there was a lot of time--and several adventures--to get through before that tour. At home, my friend Amanda organized a holiday outing to Thailand for both of our families. Amanda was a free spirit and out of her mind in a great way. I realized she had an ulterior motive when she suggested the two of us go to Burma for a few days before meeting our families in Thailand.

"Burma?" I asked.

"It's supposed to be spectacular, darling," she said, and then, with a grin, she added, "and quite the dangerous place."

I don't know why, but I agreed to go. Fortunately we never made it there, but when we found ourselves in Thailand ahead of our families we hired a guide and driver to show us around. One day he took us way out into the jungle. Although we were in the middle of nowhere, I noticed we were traveling on roads that were paved and well tended. It was odd given the location. Our guide explained that the drug lords paid for them.

I heard the word "drugs" and perked up.

"Do you know where we can get something?" I asked.

He turned around and looked at me in the backseat.

"What do you want?"

I knew opium was farmed in the Golden Triangle of Burma, Thailand, and Laos and wondered if we could get some. He nodded, made a phone call, and said, "Tomorrow morning at nine." His English wasn't great, but we understood that he was going to take us into the mountains to meet the opium farmers. He advised us to bring candy and pencils for the local children.

We were waiting for him the next morning, though when I saw Amanda in the hotel lobby, I said, "You can't wear Vivienne Westwood high heels into the jungle."

"You don't think so?" she asked.

"Go back up and get some sensible shoes for the outdoors," I said.

A few minutes later, she returned wearing platform sneakers. From my expression, she knew I didn't approve of those either. But my feet were barely any better. I had on Prada sandals.

When we got up into the mountain village, we saw only old people. All the young men and women were working in the fields. After a friendly welcome, we were led into a large hut, an opium den. People were sitting or lying on the ground, puffing on pipes. We went to the center, where I noticed a grandmother nursing an infant. I was instructed to sit next to an ancient-looking woman who smiled at me, revealing a few brown teeth that were completely rotted from betel nut. They looked like dirty cars in a vacant lot. She herself looked like she had been there for years. She offered her pipe. Afraid to decline, I took a deep hit and tried to enjoy the mellow that followed.

Off to my side, Amanda, who had never done drugs, was going through a similar indoctrination. Both of us were trying to decipher lots of chatter we didn't understand. A situation like that can make you paranoid; after a couple hits of opium in a mountain jungle in Thailand, you go into a whole other level of paranoia. I did.

After I bought a small ball-sized chunk of opium, some of the regulars with whom we had been trading pipes, plus our guide and various other people who moved in on us, made it clear they wanted to sample some of our purchase. I was happy to share. But when I turned around to get Amanda's consent, I saw she was lying flat on the ground while some guy rubbed her back. From her dazed eyes, I could tell she had no idea what was going on.

We made it back to our hotel and put the two b.a.l.l.s of opium in the hotel safe. That night, we wanted to go out. We accepted our guide's offer to show us around and ended up at a karaoke bar where he met up with a friend. Our guide became too friendly for our comfort. We had no idea where we were in the city's maze of neighborhoods. As our fear grew, Amanda took out her cell phone and called her husband in London. He hung up on her, thinking it was another crazy tale of hers that would turn into a funny story the next day.

We feared there might not be a next day. The guide was behaving inappropriately with us and my survivor instincts went on red alert. Without our guide and his friend hearing, I let Amanda know that we had to get out of there. A few moments later, I screamed, "Run!" and we tore out of the bar. We ran across the parking lot and saw our car and driver. We jumped in just as our guide was racing to grab us. I slammed the car door on his arm and yelled at our driver to go, which he did, leaving our guide and his friend in a cloud of exhaust smoke. It was a scene straight from a movie--except it was real.

Once back at the hotel, I feared our guide, angry, maybe injured, and aware we had opium, was going to show up and perhaps bring friends to rob us and get even for what I did to him at the club. He never did, but we locked ourselves in the room and tried to smoke the opium. I attempted to fas.h.i.+on pipes out of various objects and pieces of fruit, all tricks I'd learned in my early days on the road with the Go-Go's. To my frustration, none of them worked. Then I remembered another bit of useless information I had picked up with the Go-Go's. You could stick opium up your b.u.t.t and get high as it was absorbed.

Indeed, a while later, I was very high. Poor Amanda, though. She got high and suffered terrible diarrhea all night.

A month later, I began 1999 with a three-month acoustic tour across the UK, with stops in Glasgow, Aberdeen, London, Birmingham, Leeds, Cambridge, and Dublin. My fourteen-song set was filled with hits and audience favorites, from the opening number, "In Too Deep," through the encore, "Heaven Is a Place on Earth." But I still found myself peeking out at the crowd beforehand in disbelief that they had come to see me. I was like, Why?

Even on this intimate little tour I went back to my dressing room and did what I had done for so many years before going onstage, and would continue to do for more years to come: I opened up a bottle of wine and drank a gla.s.s, sometimes more, and transformed myself into that person who could go onstage and have people looking at her. At this point in my life, I didn't only wonder if I was good enough. I also wondered what they could see.

You'd think that after all these years I would have come to some kind of an understanding with myself. But no, instead of coming to terms with myself, as I had hoped would happen after my mushroom-inspired epiphanies, I was still as insecure and troubled as ever--maybe more so since deep down I was more aware than ever of my failure to get myself together.

I knew a better, happier, saner, and even sober me was out there and available. I just couldn't get to her.

twenty-three.

BEHIND THE MUSIC.

BY THE END of that tour, Morgan was disgusted with the state of our relations.h.i.+p--and me. As he pointed out, London had too many temptations for me to handle. He hated going to sleep knowing that I was sitting up in the living room, doing c.o.ke and blowing cigarette smoke out the window. He was frightened knowing that I often got in my Citroen that was parked in front of the house and drove off in the middle of the night to get more drugs or cigarettes.

"We can't live like this," he said. "It's like we're back to when we first started out."

"I don't know what to say," I said, sobbing, ashamed, and praying silently that the next words out of his mouth weren't going to be about a divorce.

They weren't. We decided to move back to France, where our adventure had begun, and out of the blue we ran into Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics, an old friend of mine, who suggested we use his house in Provence. We weren't sure. He had a rambling villa in the hills between Cannes and St. Tropez. It was very rock star-like, on six gorgeous acres overlooking the Mediterranean with a guesthouse, chicken coops, and even a track for quad racing.

We looked at it and loved it. After making sure we could get our son into the international school there, we accepted Dave's offer. Without us realizing it then, the house may have saved our marriage. It was so large and rambling that it afforded Morgan and me the ability to live in our own wings. If not for that s.p.a.ce, we might have split up. But he moved into his half of the house and I moved into mine, and we lived distinctly separate lives.

It was an odd arrangement, but we had never been a conventional couple. He spent a large amount of time in Amsterdam, where he was helping to launch Europe's first New Age cable TV network, the Innergy channel, and I had my occasional meetings in London and Los Angeles, and we went through a period where we rarely knew what the other was doing. However, when we were home at the same time, we had dinner together with Duke and made sure he knew that despite our problems, he had two parents who loved him and were always there for him.

I liked this part of the South of France much better than Cap d'Antibes. But it wasn't without its drawbacks and quirks. For starters, we were half an hour from the nearest grocery store, so I tended to stockpile food and perhaps went a little overboard in that area when I got swept up in some Y2K conspiracy madness. We were also in the middle of nowhere, and old, traditional, ways still applied.

One time, soon after we had moved in, Morgan and I were on our way into town to get supplies, and as we headed out, he had to suddenly jam on the brakes. A band of Gypsies had set up their camp in front of our driveway. They were real Gypsies with wagons full of supplies, horses, chickens, and tents they had pitched at the edge of our property. Several women were doing laundry at the end of our driveway.

"What do I do?" Morgan asked. "Honk? Turn around?"

We turned around and waited a couple of days until they moved. There wasn't much we could do. There were local laws allowing Gypsies to camp wherever they wanted. Our house was off an old Roman road and there were certain ancient ways that were left in place and simply understood as they way things had always been.

It was a small price to pay for living in such an impossibly beautiful place. I knew I could never go back to living in a city full-time.

My friend Amanda was also going through a hard time with her husband, and one day she called full of excitement. She had just returned from Marrakech, where she had a villa, and where, she said, she had met a man who was like a guide to various shamans and pract.i.tioners of magic and voodoo. She said he had helped members of Led Zeppelin find the right sorts of mystics in Morocco. He could provide anything, she said.

"I don't know," I said.

"Our husbands," she said. "He can help us find someone who can fix our marriages."

"Amanda, you're nuts."

"Come with me to my villa," she said. "We'll go for a few days. Both of us are going through some things. We'll find someone who can help.

"I sighed. "All right."

I met Amanda at her home in Medina. We went out on the town, which was like a nonstop party, with streets filled with vendors and snake charmers and people dancing and singing. I heard music coming from every direction. At night, it was surreal. I had the feeling anything could happen. It was like living on the edge of a matchstick.

While out on the town, we met up with the man who had offered to introduce Amanda to shamans and sorcerers. He took us to a small house and led us inside. There an old man who I guessed was in his eighties came out and the two of them spoke in Arabic. I noticed the walls were filled with photographs of the old man with royal families from all over the Middle East. I had no idea what the two men said to each other, but our guide finally turned to me with a satisfied smile on his face.

"I told him that you are having love problems," he said. "He's going to fix you."

As the old man led me into another room, Amanda went outside again to walk around until it was her turn. Before the creaky front door slammed shut, I heard the old man call out to me to pay attention. He laid me down on a table and started to burn things around me. I tried to look around the room to see what he was doing, but I couldn't move. A fly buzzed right over my face, and I was unable to shoo it away. He had put me in a trance.

When he saw I was frozen, he stood over me, touching different points on my body, checking to see if I was really powerless. Suddenly, as I was looking into his dark eyes, wondering what he was doing to me, he reached up under my skirt and took my underwear off. I thought he was going to rape me. I saw he was aroused. Just then, I heard Amanda at the door, asking, "Darling, are you in there?"

Startled, the old man immediately stepped back from the table. I was able to call out, "Yes, I'm here. Come back here--into the room!" All of a sudden I was able to move. As I sat up, the guy handed me my underwear. Neither of us said anything. The sickest part was that before Amanda and I left, he asked for my phone number, and even though part of my brain said "No, don't do it," I still gave it to him. As I told Amanda outside, I couldn't help myself. He had put some sort of spell on me and I felt like I was in love with him.

At any rate, Amanda and I left with a bunch of potions and instructions on how to use them, which we took back home and tried to put into practice. The whole thing was ridiculous.

However, I did end up with an idea for a new solo alb.u.m, a pop opera that I called Once Upon a Time. It was a girl-meets-boy story modeled after my relations.h.i.+p with Morgan. In it, the main character fell in love and got married, believing that life was a fairy tale. Then she discovered there was no such thing as a fairy tale.

Charlotte helped write the songs and we worked up some excellent ideas until we hit a roadblock at the point where the main character was desperately trying to figure out a way to spare her husband from her own misery. As in real life, I didn't know where to go with the story beyond the fact that I knew the main character wasn't going to leave her marriage. She needed to fix herself.

In both cases, the question was, how?

The work on both the opera and myself was put on hold when the Go-Go's finally set out on the mini summer tour that Miles had organized. We kicked off the road show July 1 with a surprise warm-up at the Viper Room, the Sunset Strip club infamous as Johnny Depp's L.A. hangout and the site where actor River Phoenix had died of a drug overdose in 1993. Though it was the band's first time together in years, our show was a party-hearty frolic that showcased a reborn att.i.tude alongside old hits.