Composed (4 page)

It soon became clear that my job in artist relations would involve little more than deciding which seats various people in the company would be given for concerts by CBS artists performing in London, and then doling out the tickets when they came to David’s and my office to retrieve them. At one point, when several artists were playing in London at the same time, David and I posted a sign on our door that read CBS BOX OFFICE. QUEUE HERE. (By the end of my London stay, a few Anglicisms had seeded themselves into my mind, forever to remain: the proper use and spelling of the word “queue,” the reversal of month and day when writing a date, and an obsessive and unrelenting adherence to teatime, with proper tea brewed in a pot.) When we strategized seat placements for concerts, we began with the given that Obie always got center orchestra, six to eight rows back from the stage, depending on the venue. After Obie and his wife, there was a strict hierarchy for bestowing seats, with the heads of each department at the top and with secretaries at the very bottom. This pecking order was taken with utmost seriousness, and it was an unspeakable breach of protocol to give a mediocre seat to a self-inflated A&R guy. When I inadvertently made such assignments in my early days at the job, I would get a personal visit from the offended party, which would leave me withered, shaking, and in tears. I felt sorry for the secretaries, who were mostly relegated to the balconies, and even sorrier for the occasional member of the cleaning staff who ventured to ask for a ticket to see a favorite artist, to whom I was ordered to give back-of-the-balcony seats. I sometimes managed to elude David’s observant eye to give one of these lower-echelon workers a center orchestra seat.

The CBS office building was in Soho Square, just off Oxford Street. I took the tube to work every morning from Hampstead and got off at the Tottenham Court Road station. My office was on the sixth floor, and I strove, with utmost diligence and gut-churning dread, to stay away from The Third Floor, which housed A&R and promotion. No woman was safe there; the taunts and come-ons were urgent, and not friendly. The men in those two departments were notorious: loud, predatory, debauched, and dependably drunk by four in the afternoon. They started drinking, as well as ingesting other substances, early in the afternoon, and most of the women I knew in the company absolutely refused to go to the third floor anytime after lunch. In the mornings, when they were still hungover, it was relatively safe if you got in and out quickly; if it was essential to go there in the afternoon, you took a friend. Whenever I had to deliver tickets or a memo there, I would step out of the elevator and stand frozen in terror for several minutes, sweating and trying to calm myself, nearly coming out of my skin in fear, before I could work up the courage to push open the double doors to their offices. Sometimes, going down in the elevator to the lobby, I could hear a muffled roar as we passed The Floor, and I would shudder in relief as I glided past in a silent, sealed box.

The staff of the art department was equally crazy but without the misogyny and maliciousness of the promotion guys, and I became friends with several of them. They teased me mercilessly about my American ignorance. I was told that corgis were the queen’s favorite breakfast cereal, that the town Slough was pronounced “sloff,” and that black pudding was made of cherries. I was the source of a tremendous amount of amusement for the lads who did up the album covers, and, actually, I was glad to oblige.

I loved Hampstead, and I loved the image of myself there, as a young and slightly starving albeit plump artist in formation, alone but comfortably taken care of in a nice flat in an expensive part of town, with the rent paid by my dad. I tried to live on the forty pounds a week, but it was not easy, given the proximity of the antique markets at the top of Hampstead High Street. I had developed a serious penchant for antiques at the age of eighteen, a love which has stayed with me throughout my life, and I spent most of my money on old teacups and plates and ivory-handled fish knives. Whenever I was at home in my flat, I began listening to four records on continuous rotation: Bob Dylan’s
Desire
, Tammy Wynette and David Houston’s album of duets, James Taylor’s
Gorilla
, and Janis Ian’s
Society’s Child.
These four records wore grooves in my personality, I listened to them so much. They held the entire content of my experience and my hopes. I had no interest in going to the Heath, the nearby park that everyone went on about as being so beautiful and peaceful. I did not care about peace and nature in the least; what I cared about was music, men, food, antiques, excitement, and being pretty.

I quickly became very close to a girl named Sandra Cooper, who was a couple of years younger than me and worked on the artist relations floor as a temp. Sandra had an identical twin sister, Brenda, who also occasionally worked on the same floor and who lived with one of the lighting directors for the band Yes. Although Sandy was initially suspicious of me and avoided me, I was attracted to her, mostly because she had a bracingly caustic attitude and a fierce, musical laugh. One day I passed her desk on the way to my crammed office and made a joke to her about having to go to the third floor, and she opened up immediately. She and Brenda were both very fashionable, very thin, perfectly made up, and always tottering on extremely high heels. I took their lead and bought a pair of six-inch wedged heels, which I wore constantly (except for days it snowed), and a brown velvet blazer. I also invested in a pair of Fiorucci jeans, very tight, to try to look more like them, but my size 32’s did not have quite the same effect as their size 28’s. Sandy and Brenda and I started going to lunch together every day, usually to a Greek restaurant near Soho Square that served grilled grapefruit as an appetizer followed by souvlaki or kebabs. As Sandy and I were constantly broke, Brenda, who was nicely taken care of by her music business boyfriend and who had her own income from different sources, mostly relating to fashion, paid for our meals. Brenda wore a red baseball cap every day of her life due to a chronic displeasure with her hair. One day, a couple of months into our friendship, she showed up at lunch panicked, because she had to attend a black-tie event and could not figure out how to make the baseball cap go with her evening gown. I never saw the top of her head during my entire stay in England. I loved the twins’ energy, their toughness, and their good-natured, and sometimes vicious, sniping at each other. They showed me how to thicken my own skin, how to dry up some of my cloying natural sentimentality and cultivate a more urbane sense of humor. I would never have had the courage to become the person I was turning into without both Anthea’s template for intellectual and musical depth and the wild influence of the Cooper twins.

I was, I began to notice, gaining weight. The year before I had had a tumor removed from my left ovary, and had begun to develop another before I left for England. My doctor at home had started me on an injectable hormone that I had to receive every three months, which tended to make me fat. Soon after my arrival I found a private doctor in Belgravia who consented to administer the injections. The first time I visited him, I was led into his inner office, superbly appointed with mahogany and leather, and was shown to a seat in front of his polished desk. He smiled in greeting and said, “Well, first thing, let’s see your figure.” I had to stand and remove my brown velvet blazer, and turned slowly around in front of him in a state of increasing mortification. My figure was by this point dumpy and broad in the hips, and I could see by his curt nod that he thought so as well. He gave me the shot every couple of months, for an extraordinary fee, and I just continued to grow heavier.

Early in my stay in London, the second day of my friendship with Sandy, we went to the Hard Rock Cafe, which in 1976 was brand new and outrageously trendy. It was cold, so we walked quickly from the Portman, and every man who walked by us turned to stare frankly at Sandy. She suggested we join arms so that they would think we were lovers, and we linked together. The male stares now became embarrassed glances, and Sandy played the routine up, squeezing me and whispering in my ear. We entered the Hard Rock, and again all the male eyes in the place turned toward Sandy. As soon as we sat down, a young man came directly over to her and asked her to join him and his friends. She responded with a withering comment, which I can no longer recall, and he recoiled and walked away silently. The few seconds that passed between his invitation and her reply were torture for me. Not knowing the rules, I was terrified that she would leave me sitting alone at this very prominent table, swathed in brown velvet, with my lackluster hair-cut, swollen body, dearth of makeup, and Dubonnet on ice. I was inexpressibly grateful and loved her for her loyalty.

It was at the Hard Rock, on a subsequent visit with Sandy, maybe a week or two later, that I heard Bruce Springsteen for the first time. Everyone had been talking about him. I had read about him in
Melody Maker
, like everyone else in the music business in London, but I had not yet heard his music. I was sitting at the bar at the Hard Rock, Dubonnet in hand, when “Born to Run” came on the sound system. Sandy was talking to me, but I could not hear a word she was saying, so riveted was I to the music. The combination of urgency, poetry, testosterone-fueled guitars, and the relentless backbeat made me literally weak in the knees. It was as if William Blake had put on black leather and climbed a motorcycle. I was enraptured. I couldn’t begin to conceive that, thirty-three years later, I would do a duet with Bruce Springsteen on my album
The List
. That concept belonged to someone else’s life in 1976, not the shy, round girl sitting at the bar of the Hard Rock Cafe in London.

I turned twenty-one while I was in London but thought it cool and grown-up not to let anyone know. For that weekend I arranged to go to Scotland with some of the people from CBS to stay at the huge manor house of one of our artists, a country singer who also worked the oil rigs in the North Sea. His wife, who was from the American South, made cornbread and black-eyed peas for dinner, dished out with a thick regional accent. Beginning to miss my mother, with whom I had not lived since the day after I graduated from high school, I decided to tell a few people it was my birthday, and they came up with a cake for me. I lay awake a long time in a small guest bedroom that night, thinking of my mother, my sisters, my father, and the fact that no one in my family was there to witness my turning into an adult.

I saw a lot of bands play in London, including a reunion concert of the Small Faces, which I went to alone. Some sort of reception was held after the show, which I attended mostly because a free buffet was promised. (Under normal circumstances, an evening meal was nonexistent for me unless someone took me out.) At around one a.m. I suddenly found myself in a near-deserted basement room with a pillaged buffet table and not a soul I knew anywhere around. I had counted on getting a ride home from David or Anthea, as I thought they would surely be at the show and the reception, or from someone else I knew who had a car or a bit of money, as I did not have a penny on me. I panicked for a moment, not knowing how I would get home, and I realized that I had no choice but to walk the few miles to Hampstead in the freezing early hours. I gathered my thoughts into a singular point. I banished my fear of being alone on the streets in the middle of the night. I did not allow any other possibility to enter my mind other than a long trudge and a safe arrival. I set out in my very high-heeled boots and marched myself up through Piccadilly, on through Camden Town and Mornington Crescent, up Hampstead Road and along to No. 3 Carlingford Road. It was bitterly cold, and I was tortured by my ill-advised footwear. My entire body screaming in protest, I kept my eyes forward and my anxiety under wraps, and arrived home at around four a.m., where I fell immediately into bed. That walk was the dividing line in my life, marking the boundary between my former unformed, raw, swollen personality and the more emotionally sinuous, urbane girl I became. There would be periods in my future when the old girl would take possession of me for a few weeks or months, but from then on I had the blueprint, devised on the long walk, and the determination, also inaugurated in those few hours, to escape from the inundation of her dark, turgid spirit.

In the early summer of 1976 I went home to Nashville for a brief visit. The first thing my dad announced after greeting me was, “That’s enough. You need to stay home now. You need to move back to the United States.” I was stunned. He did not say this in a pleading or coercive way, but simply delivered it as an edict. I did not even think to argue with him, his effect was so forceful, but I made a feeble remark about having to go back and pick up my belongings. He dismissed this instantly. He told me to have my girlfriends pack my trunk, and to deal with terminating my sublease by long distance. I called Brenda, who I had gradually grown closer to than Sandy over the past few months, and she and Sandy packed up my trunk with my clothes and records and antique dishes, and shipped it to Nashville. I called Derek and told him I wasn’t coming back. I called the real estate agent and told him I was vacating the flat. I applied to Vanderbilt University for the coming September, found out I was lacking a math credit, and hired a private tutor to teach me trigonometry. I realized much later that Dad was afraid I would disappear from his life; that I would become a permanent expatriate and lose touch with my family and my roots. He told me years later that he had a fear that I would be lost to them forever if I stayed in Europe any longer. He was probably right.