Lips Unsealed (24 page)

She’s an amazing writer, and I appreciated that ability even more this time around since I was more involved in the writing process. I brought in a few melodies. I wished it had been more. I frequently heard amazing tunes in my head, but unless I immediately sang them into a tape recorder, which I rarely had with me, I wouldn’t be able to capture the magic. It made me wish I played an instrument.

I was pleased with the record. I remember having a good listen to “Big Scary Animal,” “Too Much Water,” “Tell Me,” and “Lay Down Your Arms” and feeling very satisfied with that collection of songs, like I had accomplished something good. As on other recent solo albums, I wanted the cover photo to reflect my mood at that point in time. I wore a white, long-sleeve T-shirt and jeans, and looked natural.

Real
was released at the end of September 1993. I told reporters it was a frank look inside relationships, particularly the dark side. Reviews were mixed, with some refusing to acknowledge any artistic growth beyond the Go-Go’s while others understood what I was going for, including one reviewer who wrote, “Will somebody please tell me who her shrink is?”

Not only did I find that funny, I appreciated that someone took the time to think about what I was trying to say.

Commercially,
Real
followed the same pattern as my other solo albums. It charted in the top 10 in the UK and a handful of other European countries, and then lost steam. Here in the U.S. it was a disappointment out of the box after, unfortunately, getting caught up in label politics. A month before
Real
’s release, Jeff and Jordan, the two executives who had signed me, resigned amid rumors of conflict in the boardroom. Industry veteran Phil Quartararo replaced them as chief executive, but insiders said the real power at the label was wielded by Nancy Berry, the wife of Virgin’s global chairman, Ken Berry, and I heard she didn’t like me or my album.

True or not, I didn’t get the support the guys who signed me would have provided and my record died. And so did my deal.

Maybe it was for the best—even fated. Although severely disappointed and frustrated, I felt like I had my eyes open. Of course, it occurred as the result of a shock. And Morgan played his usual calm, clear, and wise role in getting me to see that life wasn’t determined or defined by hit singles, radio play, and chart position. When I focused, I saw that he was absolutely right.

It didn’t mean that I wasn’t wounded, but I saw how fortunate I was. I only had to look at my family. My parents worked extremely hard, my dad in construction and my mom as a waitress at Café California in the Broadway department store. My brother Butch, two years younger than me, worked in construction. My sister Hope became an RN and aspired to get a master’s and teach—which she went on to do. The others were still growing up.

I can’t say my notoriety helped any of them. For some of them, in fact, it may have created unnecessary pressure as they developed their own identities.

My mom didn’t feel more pressure, per se, not the way my younger brothers and sisters often did, but she was frequently introduced as “Belinda Carlisle’s mother.” People didn’t realize that negated her own individuality—or they didn’t care. One day a woman came up to her, complimented her on giving birth to such a talented daughter, and said it wasn’t a surprise since she’d heard that my mother had worked on Broadway. My mom good-naturedly corrected the mistake, explaining she had worked
at
the Broadway
department store
. At that, the other woman turned and walked away.

“I guess she was disappointed that I’m a waitress,” my mom later told me. “I wasn’t good enough for her to talk to anymore.”

I helped my parents out when possible and gave them gifts and vacations, but the reality was—and remains—that no matter what anyone’s advantages or obstacles in life, each of us must make our own way and
come to our own peace. I was constantly at war with myself over such matters, sometimes consciously, other times not.

Morgan and I frequently spoke about our lives, whether we were headed in the right direction, how we wanted to live, and where we wanted to live—which was a major theme with us following the riots. We had many discussions about this with our friend Deepak Chopra, the bestselling author, physician, and truly wise man. Morgan was working with him on projects, and we had dinner with Deepak and his lovely wife, Rita. You can’t find better counsel.

In the beginning, though, I was intimidated around Deepak. I was also skeptical. I didn’t trust people who talked about meditation, spirituality, and the mind-body connection. Basically I was ignorant and insecure. I didn’t know any better.

At the same time, Deepak was utterly fascinating and obviously a man with great insight and wisdom. Morgan knew how to access that gift. As a result, we had intimate and probing dialogues about finding your gifts and experiencing joy—the joy in the meaning of your life. I was inherently negative, albeit with an adventurous side, but Deepak was a very optimistic man. He thought we should move and change our lives if that was what we felt was right when we looked deep inside ourselves.

“And if it doesn’t work out? What’s the worst that can happen?” he asked. “You move back. It’s not that big of a deal. You just start over.”

In early January 1994, Morgan, Duke, and I traveled to Cabo San Lucas for a brief post-holiday vacation. On the beach and away from home, we were able to assess our lives with a new perspective. We talked about Deepak, and I underscored how both of us were feeling when I quoted Helen Keller: “Life is an adventure or it’s nothing.”

Morgan agreed. We were still young, both of us in our mid-thirties, and yet it felt like we had been through so much separately and together. We kept asking each other, “What next?”

I knew what I didn’t want. Earlier that summer, Morgan and I had attended a dinner celebrating William Morris chairman Norman Brokaw’s fiftieth anniversary at the agency (he had started in 1943 as the very first mailroom employee). On the beach at Cabo, I flashed back on
that night and thought, Oh my God, is that my future? I told Morgan that I didn’t want that life. I didn’t care about status in Hollywood, a big house in Brentwood, membership at the right country club, or driving a Mercedes or a Range Rover.

“That’s not what life is about,” I said. “That’s not my adventure.”

“I feel the same way,” he said.

So we sat on the beach and talked, and we agreed that it would be such a shame not to have an adventure, not to take a risk if we could afford it. We were young and healthy. We were hooked on the movies
To Catch a Thief
and
Breathless
, director Jean-Luc Godard’s influential French new wave film about a crook on the run in France. We kept watching them over and over, each time feeling the ache for our own adventure. More relevant, I read Calvin Tomkins’s enchanting book
Living Well Is the Best Revenge
, the almost unbelievable story of Gerald and Sara Murphy, an American couple who moved to the South of France in the 1920s and befriended Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and other great artists and writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald patterned Dick and Nicole Diver of
Tender Is the Night
after them.

I had Morgan read the book and he adopted my South of France fantasy, too. The two of us, though bourgeois on the outside, thought like bohemians. I could see us chucking everything familiar like the Murphys. How exciting! Much more so than the predictable life I saw unfolding if we stayed where we were.

“Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a life like that?” I said.

“Let’s do it,” Morgan replied.

My jaw nearly hit the ground. What? Morgan was serious. For the next few days, we sat on the beach with Duke and tried to figure out where to move. Australia was too far, we decided, and Mexico was too close. We mentioned a dozen spots, but none sounded right. The last place we brought up was the one that both of us knew was the only place we could possibly move—the South of France.

It was obvious. We had spent a week talking, reading, watching movies, and fantasizing about it. Maybe we had purposely avoided it out of fear that the other one would say “Yeah, let’s do it,” which was what
happened. As soon as we mentioned France, I thought, Okay, that’s it. I said something to that effect, too. And Morgan agreed.

He then did something that to this day remains one of the most romantic, risky, and amazing things I have ever seen in my life: He went downstairs—there were no phones in the room—to the phone booth off the lobby and motioned for me to step inside while he called William Morris and gave his notice.

I was in shock. So were our friends, who tracked us down at the hotel as word of Morgan’s resignation spread through the agency and then across town. “What do you mean you’re leaving?” they said, freaked out. “You can’t do that!” But we
had
done it—well, Morgan had. But I was ready to go, too. It was a movie-type moment, an unexpected plot twist in our lives. Most people fantasize about packing up and moving into a new life, but they don’t do it. We were taking the leap.

Or so we said. Other than Morgan quitting his job, obviously a huge step, we didn’t make any specific plans or set a time line.

We flew back from Mexico on Sunday, January 16, 1994. On Monday morning, I woke up just before four thirty
A
.
M
. I heard our Jack Russell terrier barking under the window. Annoyed, I got out of bed and put on my robe to let him out and see what had caught his attention. Suddenly, everything began to shake—the floor, the roof, the walls. It was violent, loud, and completely disorienting. My first instinct was to think, Oh my God, the house is exploding; a second later, I realized that it was an earthquake. It felt like the proverbial
big one
that I, like every other Southern California resident, had been warned would one day hit. Here it was—or so I thought.

Morgan woke up and tried to pull me into bed. I shook him off and ran down the hallway to get Duke. My mother instinct took over. With adrenaline racing through me, I wanted to get my baby.

The shaking from this quake, which turned out to have a magnitude of 6.7 and was centered in Northridge near where I grew up, seemed to last for a minute or two. Actually, it felt interminable. It turned out to
be only twenty seconds. But those twenty seconds changed life across the southland. Some seventy-two people died as a result of the powerful upheaval, more than nine thousand were injured, and damage was eventually estimated at $20 billion.

At first, we stood outside like everyone else, nervous, on edge, wondering about the state of our family, friends, and the city itself. It was still dark and eerily quiet. We saw occasional flashes of light in the distant sky where transformers were bursting with loud pops and blasts of white flame. After a little bit, we went back inside. Our power was out, but we listened to the news on the transistor radio we had in our emergency earthquake kit. We were shocked at reports of collapsed freeways and hospital patients being wheeled out of buildings and into the safety of outdoor parking lots.

Like many in L.A., I freaked out at aftershocks, which continued throughout the day and for days afterward. When your house shakes and the ground rumbles, you don’t feel safe. Nothing does.

Later that night, after things began to calm down and we had checked in with our loved ones, all of whom were okay, Morgan and I looked at each other with a sense of having already prepared for this moment on the beach in Cabo. He had quit his job. My career was happening only in Europe. We had agreed to restart our lives in the South of France. Our only outstanding question had been when—when would we go?

The Northridge earthquake made that decision for us. It was like a push out the door. We said to each other, “Okay, we’re out of here.”

THE EARTHQUAKE HIT on a Monday. We left on Friday. We would have gone sooner except that we had to get a visa for our Filipina nanny.

Once in the South of France, we checked into the small La Colombe d’Or Hotel in Saint Paul de Vence, Provence. It was a dreamy place to stay as we set about looking for a house, like a French fantasy. Situated up in the hills with picture-book views, the hotel’s stone walls dated back to the 1600s. There were only twenty-six guest rooms. The dining room boasted artwork by Picasso, Klee, Calder, and Dufy, all of whom had stopped at this chic outpost early in their careers when they had little or no money and traded paintings for room and board.

After a couple weeks, we found a house in Cap d’Antibes and returned to Los Angeles to pack our belongings, take care of loose ends, and put our house up for sale. Financially, we couldn’t have picked a worse time for this dramatic change, especially selling our house. The real estate market had bottomed out, and we had poured a ton of money into renovations over the years. My business manager warned me we were never going to recoup our investment. His voice was among the loudest in the chorus of our friends and associates who said, “Just stay. Take your time. There’s no need to rush.”

Morgan and I didn’t care. We wanted to get out of there. We were following our instincts. We weren’t concerned about conventional wisdom. If the house didn’t sell, we’d leave it empty and figure out what to do with it later, which was what happened.

In the meantime, before leaving, I made an appointment with my hairdresser Art Luna and asked him to cut off my long, red hair.

“Really?” he asked.

“Cut it,” I said, thinking of everything else I was cutting, too. “I want it an inch long.”

In March, we returned to France. With our nanny in tow, we piled into a black stretch limo with about eight duffel bags bursting at the seams and set out for the airport. Everything else we had was boxed up, shipped by boat, and expected to arrive six months later. We returned to Le Colombe d’Or, where Duke ran up and down the halls and Morgan and I found ourselves having afternoon cocktails and playing boules with actor Yves Montand.

A few weeks later, our house was ready. We had rented a beautiful pink villa in Cap d’Antibes. It had a guesthouse in back and a large, rolling lawn. The famous Hotel du Cap was down the street. It could not have been more gorgeous or glamorous. Every day I expected to see Noël Coward or Zelda Fitzgerald cross the lawn on their way into the house. I couldn’t believe that we lived there.