Face It: A Memoir. Debbie Harry
us with all these wild stories about the places he had been to. He talked about the Playboy Clubs and painted this wonderful picture of the bunnies and how exotic it was. It sounded so showbizzy. That’s when it was implanted in my mind. So I decided to try out to be a bunny. It was quite a procedure. First you met with the Bunny Mother—she was a Chinese woman named J. D., very businesslike; she’d been there for a long time. After you were interviewed you came back for another interview with the executives and you did a series of meetings. You didn’t ever have to put on the costume; they looked at you and they could see immediately if you were going to make it or not. Then you went into a training period for a couple of weeks—and there was a lot of training involved. You had to learn about all the drinks, all of the cocktails, how to carry the tray, exactly how to do the service. Their whole thing was very involved.
Being a bunny was not at all like what you might think. It was hard work, harder than at Max’s, and the clients were mainly businessmen, suits. The club members had to behave themselves and there was always staff to put a stop to anything inappropriate. You got treated well, but really it was just another job and not as much fun as the last one. I didn’t meet many famous people except for one. I was working downstairs in the cocktail lounge—I hadn’t gotten up into the show rooms, where the entertainment was. Two men came in and sat at a table in my section. I kept looking at this one man thinking, How do I know him? Finally I just said to him, “I feel like I know your face.” And he said, “Oh, I’m Gorgeous George.” The wrestler! As I mentioned earlier on, I was a passionate wrestling fan as a kid and Gorgeous George was one of my favorites. I told him it was wonderful to meet him and that I had watched him on TV many, many times. And that was that; he went back to his conversation. But it really was such a pleasure to meet Gorgeous George.
I lasted eight or nine months at the Playboy Club, about the same as I did at Max’s, and then I turned in my corset, collar, ears, and tail. They don’t let you keep your costume. And that was that. Gil had been working with a Latin bandleader named Larry Harlow and along with Jerry Weiss, of Blood, Sweat and Tears fame, they started a band called Ambergris. Paramount Records gave them a budget and put them up in a house in Fleischmanns, New York, outside of Woodstock. They hung out there for months, writing, practicing, and getting ready to record their album. The cover art was cool with its regal-looking, bright red rooster head. In the back of my mind I was thinking, Oh, maybe I’ll get to sing on it. Secretly, I had been practicing. I would put headphones on and practice how to change my voice and expression. But it wasn’t happening. It was all guys. In fact, the singing was handled by Jimmy Maelen, who is best known for his first-call percussion work with everyone from Madonna, to John Lennon, to David Bowie, to Alice Cooper, to Mick Jagger, to Michael Jackson, and the list goes on and on . . .
I’d been in New York almost five years now and it felt like I had come to a dead end. Or something had. The same thing seemed to be happening to a lot of people at that time. Somewhere around that time I found myself out of kilter with everything and with myself, unsettled, losing my temper, crying for no reason. And I was so tired of having to connect. A girlfriend of mine, Virginia Lust (the star of Yoko Ono’s movie Fly), was now living upstate in Phoenicia, New York. She was then pregnant with her first child and I went to stay with her for four months. Then I went back to my parents’ house in New Jersey. They were moving upstate to Cooperstown, New York. I told you my mother was a rabid baseball fan so it wasn’t surprising that she would choose to live near the Baseball Hall of Fame, but it did give me a laugh. So, I helped them move and stayed with them a couple of months. After helping them, I headed back down to New Jersey and moved into a rooming house. I got a job working at a health club and I started dating a guy who was a painting contractor. The normal life.
House Lights
Mick Rock, 1978.
AFTER ROB ROTH HAD SENT ME ALL THE SCANS OF MY FAN ART collection, he drove off back to NYC in his white pickup truck. Rather him than me that day—I’d been tiring of my constant commutes to the city. We had been working on how best to reproduce and organize the drawings and paintings I’ve accumulated over all the years, while being Blondie or being in Blondie. I didn’t have a strong reason to save everything, but I couldn’t just abandon them. Mostly, I kept them all because I just like them. The sweet and insightful drawings, paintings, mosaics, dolls, and hand-drawn T-shirts (of which only one remains) have traveled with me on tours around the world, suffering flight delays and bad weather and surviving just like me, a bit frayed at the edges, but still intact.
I’ve moved about ten or eleven times over the years and am amazed that I’ve managed to hold on to my fan art collection for all that time. For a while, my files were stored in Chris’s basement studio down in Tribeca where they managed to survive a major flood of the Hudson River, followed by the destruction of the Twin Towers, which were only two blocks away. Now that I’ve written a memoir starting with my childhood, progressing through the years of Blondie almost to the present, I’m even more amazed.
I know some of the artwork is MIA and I’m hoping that more of it will emerge as I go through rediscovered boxes and files and whatever. My methods of preservation were at times pretty much catch-as-catch-can, so things turn up in unexpected places, like a series of surprise parties—which are always good for a little laugh. For many years I didn’t travel with a road or wardrobe case, which in later years has been the most useful way to keep these artifacts intact and safe. Sometimes I even wondered why I was doing what I was doing except that I just did it. Now the fan art collection is giving an added meaning to the title of my book, Face It . . .
Childhood and family photos, courtesy of the Harry family
Coincidence . . . Coincidence came calling for me big-time in the early seventies. Coincidence: it’s supposed to mean just these random, disconnected events that concur or collide. But coincidence is not that at all. It’s the stuff that’s meant to be. Things that are supposed to be drawn together, as if by some extra-earthly magnetic force. Things that connect and become woven and then shoot off to form previously unimagined combinations. Small changes that tumble into a fresh dynamic—as coincidence and chaos give birth to a new creation. Coincidence: the “divine intervener” that pushes us to make happen what was always supposed to happen . . .
Nineteen seventy-two. Well, I was still in New Jersey and living with house painter Mr. C, but I’d drive into the city for my social life. I missed the downtown scene that I had