Authors: Belinda Carlisle
Once the tour started, I fell into a bad state of mind. Publicly, I told people that either it was impossible to eat healthy on the road or I told them that I was on a health kick and exercising regularly. In reality, I was obsessed with eating and exercising, to the point where I weighed myself ten to fifteen times a day. And my day was ruined if I gained a pound. If I got dressed in the morning and the waistband to my trousers felt a little tight, I got hysterical.
All the self-doubt and insecurity I never dealt with during my so-called recovery bubbled up to the surface, making it so nothing I did made me feel good enough. I should have been ecstatic as “I Get Weak” rocketed up the charts in early 1988 to number two and was then followed into the top 10 by the next single, “Circle in the Sand.” My tour sold out, too. However, I wasn’t able to celebrate or enjoy the achievements. Instead I stood in front of the mirror when I was on the road or in front of Morgan after I returned home and asked, “Do I look fat? Am I fatter today than yesterday? Okay, forget that. Do I look fatter than I did this morning?”
It was all about holding on, and holding myself together, when inside, without such insane resolve, I could have easily fallen to pieces. Morgan wanted no part of such craziness and was somehow able to detach himself from it. He turned his attention to producing and spent most of 1988 working on
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
, a low-budget independent movie that his young discovery, Steven Soderbergh, had written and was set to direct about the effect a voyeuristic guy has on his former college roommate and the roommate’s wife.
Morgan had given me the script and asked for my opinion. After reading the opening dozen pages, I told him it was fantastic. After I finished reading it, I was unsettled by Steven’s take on sexuality and fidelity, but, as I told Steven at some of the dinners we had together, getting a strong reaction from me was a good thing.
I liked the freshness of his work, and I liked Steven even more. He was a brilliant nerd. He reminded me of a lot of artists I had met in the punk world—guys with talent, vision, a strong, unique voice, and a need to work in their own unconventional way.
Morgan was wrapped up in production when I went into the studio to make my next album,
Runaway Horses
. Though a number of major producers inquired about working with me, I teamed up with Rick Nowels again. For a second time I was in the studio trying not to think about the pressure and high expectations. Yet the industry’s reigning A&R guru John Kalodner laid it right out there by saying, “If Belinda gets this album right, she’s going to be the biggest star in the world.” I tried not to think about it, but I knew the opportunity was there.
Rick, who immediately brought in some amazing songs, like “La Luna” and “Summer Rain,” wanted to record part of the album in the South of France, and after the label gave permission, we set up camp outside Aix-en-Provence in the massive Château Miraval, the same thirty-five-bedroom estate Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie lived in twenty years later.
Although the château was beautiful and on first getting there I imagined myself a princess arriving at her castle, I found it to be a depressing place in the middle of nowhere. I got a boost when Charlotte and Jeannine arrived. At first, they thought they’d gone to rock-and-roll heaven. We went on long morning hikes across the countryside, ate rich lunches prepared by a private chef, recorded, took naps, and then ate dinner in the nearby village.
It was ideal—for a week. Then they were as bored as me and the three of us took off to watch a Formula One race.
For me, the highlight came during work on “Leave a Light On,” another gorgeous Rick and Ellen Shipley song. Rick said we should try to get someone cool and with a distinctive style to play the lead guitar part. I thought for a moment and said, “What about George Harrison?” I had met George briefly a few years earlier in San Remo, Italy, and Morgan, through his work on
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
, knew someone who was close to the former Beatle and able to get word to him. George responded right away, saying he’d love to help out.
He had worked with very few artists, so I was honored. I absolutely loved the work he eventually did. After he passed away, his widow, Olivia, told a mutual friend that she had found an old
Runaway Horses
cassette as she went through some of his stuff. She said, “Please tell Belinda that George really loved her voice.”
Overall, we worked on the album as if money didn’t matter. We took a year and spent close to $1 million. That may have sounded great in the press, but now when I hear something like that I know, because it was the case with my album, that it signals trouble. We second-guessed ourselves right and left and lost touch with the basics and ended up with an expensive album, not the
great
one we had hoped to make.
In January I was with Morgan at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah when
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
debuted and captured the Audience Award. Four months later, we went with the film to the Cannes Film Festival. We stayed at the Hotel du Cap and partied on yachts, and I bought a pink Chanel suit for the premiere. The film was awarded the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. It was an unbelievable time.
Morgan was pegged as Hollywood’s hottest, most imaginative young producer. There was no doubt he had a Midas touch. I stared at him admiringly as he chatted with stars on the red carpet and spoke with reporters after the awards. He handled the attention with graceful appreciation. I could not have been prouder.
But my smile was pretend. As I did press in preparation for my upcoming album, I knew I wasn’t telling the truth when reporters focused even more on my looks. Each time they asked about my transformation from the cute, chubby Go-Go to the glamorous pop siren with the chic, skinny body and long, red hair, I felt my skin crawl. I gave them the answer they wanted, but the truth was different.
Privately, my eating disorder had a stranglehold on me. I was either a good girl or a bad girl. I would go five days in a row where I was a “good girl,” eating lettuce leaves with vinegar, a couple vegetables, and not allowing myself anything else. I was always on a severe diet. It was like holding a ball underwater, because I’m not built to be skinny. Then I would wake up starving, “allow” myself a bite of chocolate chip cookie, and immediately spiral into a depression.
As far as I was concerned, at that point my day was ruined. I used it as an excuse to go on a disgusting, all-day binge. All I could think about was food and putting something in my mouth. I would eat until I went
to bed, obsessively counting the calories I consumed. Sometimes I got up to five or six thousand in one day.
If I didn’t punish myself, I picked fights with Morgan. I wasn’t any good at feeling happy. I attended Overeaters Anonymous meetings and called my sponsor every day to tell her what I planned to eat the next day. But those calls made me feel like my food obsession got worse, not better. All I thought about was what I was going to eat.
I found reasons OA wasn’t for me. First I didn’t like the people, and then I said I couldn’t connect with my sponsor. Obviously I wasn’t ready to make it work. As with any twelve-step program, you have to invest in the system and work the steps, and I didn’t. I wasn’t willing to acknowledge the first step: admitting I was powerless over my problem and my life was unmanageable.
I thought I was managing.
In September, “Leave a Light On” came out and was a hit everywhere in the world except the U.S., where it failed to crack the top 10, an indication that times and the music-buying public’s taste had changed. When
Runaway Horses
hit the stores a month later, it opened well overseas but struggled here at home, needing six months to creep its way to a very disappointing peak of 37.
Although I put on a positive face for the press, I was deeply hurt by the album’s failure to live up to expectations. In many ways, it was my favorite collection of songs. Morgan counseled me to work at the things I could influence and let go of everything else. I tried. Some days I managed. Other days I was filled with anxiety and struggled with all of my issues.
On the bright side, I crossed paths with Gina one day. After a fun catch-up, the two of us on a whim arranged for a reunion with the other Go-Go’s. Without telling anyone, we met for dinner at an Italian restaurant in West Hollywood. It was the first time the five of us had been together since Jane left and our subsequent breakup. All of us were nervous. Jane held up her palms and said, “They’re sweaty!”
We agreed to one ground rule: none of us would say anything that
would piss off someone else. Then we had a great time. We reminisced about the crazy times we’d had in the early days, offered apologies for things said in the latter days, worked through some hard feelings, and, as we told a local reporter who got wind of the reunion, we realized “even the bad times we’ve gone through didn’t seem so bad.”
I left dinner appreciating the special camaraderie the five of us shared—and that it had survived. But all was not rosy. As I later confessed to Morgan, I felt uncomfortable about having a successful solo career when some of the other girls were struggling in their endeavors. While Jane and Charlotte were both working on albums, Gina’s label had dropped her and Kathy didn’t have a deal.
I realized everyone might benefit from a Go-Go’s reunion. I mentioned it to my manager, Danny Goldberg, who had a lengthy background as a political activist. A former
Village Voice
journalist, he had coproduced and codirected the 1980 documentary
No Nukes
and was involved with the ACLU, all in addition to managing Bonnie Raitt, Rickie Lee Jones, and other artists.
He loved the idea of a Go-Go’s reunion. But it sat a few months until Danny found the right event, a fund-raiser Jane Fonda was spearheading for California’s environmental ballot initiative. It sounded good to me. I called the girls. Everyone was game.
In January 1990, we announced our reunion show at a press conference with Jane Fonda. Two and a half months later, we got together for rehearsals at SIR, where I was also in rehearsals for my
Runaway Horses
tour. I felt self-conscious running back and forth between rehearsals and maybe some resentment from the other girls, who I sensed—and it could have been me being overly sensitive—looked at me as Miss High and Mighty with her rock band, getting ready for her world tour. At the end of the day, I was left feeling like I should apologize.
But I was able to set that aside and enjoy stepping back into the Go-Go’s. It wasn’t hard for me to switch gears. The band was part of my DNA. On March 27, we played a surprise warm-up show as the KLAMMS at the Whisky, a stage that was like a second home in our punk days. We still looked like an odd collection: Jane wore short-shorts, Kathy was in
a polka-dot negligee, Charlotte radiated laid-back L.A. rock chic in a long, embroidered shirt, Gina had on her trademark jeans and T-shirt, and I was in a fancy black gown that a girlfriend of mine laughingly said made me look like I had dressed to go to Harry’s Bar in London.
The fun we had carried over into the next night at the Universal Amphitheater when we performed a set of the band’s hits to a crowd of L.A. politicos and celebrities that included Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal, and Sandra Bernhard. Afterward, all of us were agreeable to doing more shows and maybe even a tour later in the year when IRS released a greatest-hits package.
There was one downside. Obviously I didn’t tell anyone about my eating issues, but I felt a clutch of anxiety when I read the reviews of our one-off and saw that all of them talked about my weight. The
Los Angeles Times
, while noting my “untouchable supermodel look,” said I had formerly been “the most roly-poly and tomboyish-looking member,” and the
Orange County Register
called me “the Oprah Winfrey of pop,” a reference to my up-and-down weight.
If I wasn’t obsessing about my weight, others were.
I should’ve known I was going to get in trouble. Shortly after the May kickoff of my world tour in the UK, I was in my hotel reading through the latest press clippings. I came across a recent review that described me as looking like a singing secretary onstage. He had taken exception to the Chanel-inspired suits I’d had custom-made for the tour. I took offense, but in retrospect he was right.
I looked like shit. I was way too skinny, wore too much makeup, my bobbed hair was wrong, and the suits—well, they were a different issue. They reflected the trouble I’d had at the outset deciding on a look for the tour. If you have to think too much about those things, it’s a sign of confusion and uncertainty—and that was me.
One thing I wasn’t confused about was my birth father. He had started writing me letters again before I left home and continued sending entreaties through my management after I started my tour. I had
spoken to him a few times on the phone out of the guilt I still felt from having not seen him on my
Heaven
tour, but I had no intention of letting him back in my life at the level he wanted.
I also found something slightly creepy about the way he professed such strong affection for me in his letters. How can you love someone you don’t know?
Finally, I came straight out and told him that I didn’t want to have a relationship with him. Considering how much I had adored him as a little girl, I agonized about sending him that message. He responded by sending me letters saying that I was going to burn in hell unless I found forgiveness in my heart. I ignored him, hoping and praying he would go away—and he did for a while.
Morgan was such a rock. So were my friends Jeannine and Jack and my makeup artist Pearlie Whirly, who kept me company on the tour. But I struggled to keep my emotions in check. Although still coke-free, I was drinking more. I also started keeping a secret stash of pills, including Valium, Halcion, and Rohypnol. I never thought I might be traveling back down the road to addiction. As long as I wasn’t doing coke, I thought I was fine, no big deal.