Authors: Belinda Carlisle
“Then you’re the only one,” I said. “No labels want me.”
I couldn’t have felt any sorrier for myself. And Miles, as crazy and fierce as he can be, couldn’t have been kinder.
“I want you to make an album,” he said.
“I’m flattered,” I said. “But I don’t have any plans. I don’t see any options for me.”
“I’ll figure it out,” he said.
And he did. I signed with Chrysalis Records in the UK and Miles’s own Ark21 label in the United States. Later that year, I began working with Rick Nowels in Los Angeles on what would become
A Woman and a Man
. For some reason I still didn’t understand, Miles didn’t like Rick. He had expressed that opinion when I made my second album,
Heaven on Earth
, and he hadn’t changed his mind. It may have cost us a hit.
One day Rick played me “Falling into You,” a song that he had written with Billy Steinberg and Argentinean singer-writer Marie Claire D’Ubaldo, who recorded it on her 1994 album. I loved it on my first listen. I had the same feeling I did when Rick and Ellen Shipley had played me “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” It was beautiful.
We recorded a demo and played it for Miles, who thought it was terrible. I’m pretty sure that he said, “This is shit.” After a heated debate, I quit insisting it be put on the album. It was the first time I had ever gone against my instincts when they were speaking that loudly to me, and I was heartbroken. Many months later, I was filling up my car at a gas station in France and I heard a familiar song coming from the speaker near the pumps. I realized it was “Falling into You.” Celine Dion was singing it, and my heart sank.
I looked into it and found out that Celine had heard the demo with my voice on it and said yes to the song. Of course, it ended up being the
title track of her mega-smash 1996 album,
Falling into You
, which won two Grammys, sold more than thirty million copies, and spent more than a year in the top 10.
In the meantime, Miles installed David Tickle as my producer. David, who had worked with Split Enz and engineered for U2 and Prince, was also a very talented man. He had a studio in Malibu, which appealed to me for obvious reasons. But I relinquished too much control over the crucial elements that commit an artist to an album, starting with the songs. Basically, I checked my instincts at the door. I didn’t fight when the record company insisted on using two songs from Roxette’s Per Gessle that may not have been perfect for me. Nor did I point out that Rick, whom the executives didn’t want to produce me, wrote or cowrote five of the album’s eleven cuts, including “In Too Deep,” “Love in the Key of C,” and “California.” Why not go all the way with his vision?
There were some magical moments, though. We asked Brian Wilson to provide background vocals on “California.” As a lifelong Beach Boys fan, I was amazed, thrilled, and honored when he said yes. I greeted him at the studio when he and his assistant David Leaf arrived and introduced them to David, Rick, and everyone else who was there to meet the legend. You could feel the excitement in the studio. Everyone there was accomplished, but Brian was one of the extraordinary geniuses of pop music.
Our excitement, however, quickly turned to discomfort. A few weeks earlier, Brian had been given a cassette tape with my vocals. He had used that to come up with his part. As he stood in front of David, Rick, and me and half-explained and half-sang what he intended to do, we traded secret worried glances with one another. It sounded awful. We huddled afterward and talked about our problem. We were going to have to tell Brian that we weren’t going to be able to use his part.
“How awful is that?” I said.
“How’s he going to take it?” David asked.
I volunteered to tell him. But I didn’t do a good job. I went back into the studio and hemmed and hawed, and then lost both my nerve and train of thought as Brian began to burp and fart up whatever he had eaten earlier in the day. Epitomizing the disheveled, scattered genius,
he was oblivious to the noises coming out of him. Before I burst into laughter, I gave up and said we were almost ready for him.
Moments later, we watched and listened in complete and utter awe of this man’s inexplicable gifts. He went in the booth, cued the track, and between burps and farts began to layer in his vocals. It was achingly beautiful, like a Santa Ana wind lifting my voice, and it made this plaintive, semiautobiographical song with a dark Mamas-and-Papas undertone come alive.
All of us sat at the soundboard and looked at one another incredulously as Brian sang. We didn’t speak. What could we say?
I was crying when Brian finished. During the playback, my tears kept coming. I felt like we had watched Mozart at work. It was a privileged experience. To this day, I get chills when I hear that song and think about Brian in that booth.
If only the album itself had lived up to that same standard. I didn’t have focus, and the album lacked the same. I think when all was said and sung, I was more into the idea of being in Malibu than making an album.
One morning at the end of June, days before the release of the new album’s first single, “In Too Deep,” I was at home and making breakfast for Morgan, Duke, and my friend and sometime assistant Jack when I heard a tap-tap-tap on a window. Our kitchen windows in Cap d’Antibes were extra large to let in big shafts of soft morning light. Except on this particular day the sky was gray and dull. I saw a little black bird with yellow eyes tapping on the thick glass.
It was strange. I wondered what it was trying to do. It wasn’t a cute bird either. Its beady little eyes gave it a frantic look. It seemed like it was determined to get inside the house. Morgan was reading the paper at the table. He hadn’t noticed the bird.
“Come take a look at this,” I said.
He got up and saw the bird continuing to tap away. He put his face closer to the window; the bird didn’t seem to notice or care.
“It’s not a cute bird, is it?” he said.
“No.”
“Don’t let it in,” he said.
My friend Jack hurried over and looked, too. He was horrified and freaked out, claiming it was an omen. It was as if I was twelve years old again and browsing through books on black magic. I was intrigued. I quickly got a handful of millet we had in the closet, put it on the shelf, and opened the window. Before Morgan or Jack could react, the bird flew in the house and fluttered in the kitchen, its yellow eyes pointed directly at my husband. A second later, the bird flew back out. Unnerved, Morgan begged to know why I had let the bird in.
“That was not a good sign,” he said. “Now something bad is going to happen.”
The very next day, June 29, we received a call informing us that Morgan’s mother, Pamela, had died at home in Beverly Hills. She was eighty years old. The official cause of death was heart disease. As far as I was concerned, though, she had died from too many parties and too much fun. She was a remarkable, one-of-a-kind woman.
Eerily, Morgan’s sister, Portland, said that in the hours before Pamela had passed away, a black bird had tried to fly into her bedroom window. Porty said she had made eye contact with the bird, which, according to her description, sounded exactly like the one we had seen at our window. She said it had looked creepy. She hadn’t let it in.
“It finally just flew into the window and dropped dead right outside the glass,” she said.
About a year later, Morgan and I were at a party with Rupert Sheldrake, a noted British biologist who did research on morphic resonance—or the mysterious way different organisms, including birds, communicate telepathically. We told him our story about the black bird. He brought out a large encyclopedia of birds and showed us a picture of a black bird.
“Was that the one you saw?” he asked.
We said yes.
“The jackdaw!” he said. “It’s a favorite throughout folklore—and most commonly a bird of ill omen.”
And so it was with us. I was unable to accompany Morgan when he
went to Los Angeles to help his sister deal with Pamela’s affairs. The first single off my album was about to come out and I had a full calendar of promotion lined up. With my career seeming to be on the line, and the record company, though sympathetic to our loss, letting me know they were counting on me, I couldn’t cancel. I felt awful about not being able to be with Morgan during this difficult personal time, and yet, sadly, it was typical of the trouble we were having connecting with each other.
Just two days after Morgan left, I was running through the Nice airport, catching a plane for London, where I was launching my PR campaign with an in-studio radio interview. I was feeling pretty good and had even gone water-skiing with a friend the day before. But that afternoon, right before I did the interview, I began to feel odd. I described it to a friend as tingly. My right arm hurt and I felt like something was wrong.
During the interview, I got worse and took myself straight to the hospital as soon as I was finished. Tests came back negative and the doctor assumed I had slept on my arm wrong. I returned to the hotel and woke up the next morning with my arm swollen and purple. My fingers were also discolored and the size of small cigars. Alarmed, I hurried back to the hospital and this time was diagnosed with a double thrombosis, or blood clots, in my armpit and forearm.
I was immediately set up in a room, given blood thinners, and told not to move while doctors waited for the clots to dissolve. I was told the condition was extremely dangerous. If one of the clots were to break off, I could die instantly. The nurse said she had never seen a case this severe.
I spent twelve fretful, boring, frustrating days in the hospital before getting the okay to go home. By then I had canceled numerous promotional dates and missed an important window. Although “In Too Deep” cracked the top 10 in the UK, as did the second single, “Always Breaking My Heart,” the album itself, after being released at the end of September, got as high as number 12 in England and then began a downward spiral that eventually made it the worst-selling record of my career.
In November and December, I opened for Tina Turner on her relatively brief trek across the UK. While she was a dynamo onstage, I was not at my best. A writer for
The Independent
was dead-on when he noted, “[Carlisle] seemed unsure of why she had accepted the job.” Later in the piece, he described me as “stiff and disengaged.” He was absolutely right.
I had always defined myself by what I did. Now I was completely and utterly lost.
I told Morgan that I was fed up with France and insisted on moving to London. He agreed, in part because he loved that city but mostly because he desperately wanted to appease me. He knew that I was floundering, but as a former agent and natural diplomat he was more about negotiating settlements than delivering ultimatums. In hindsight, he should have come down hard on me.
I had purposely never sought a drug dealer in the South of France. I knew it would be over for me if I had one there. I wouldn’t have been able to control my addiction, and in that small, cloistered world, Morgan would have quickly found out about my secret life of getting high and behaving inappropriately. In London, all the temptations were right in front of me. It was a recipe for disaster.
WE MOVED INTO a beautiful, three-story Victorian flat across from Hampstead Heath, better known as the Heath, a 790-acre respite from urban life featuring endless parkland with forests, ponds, and hills from which you could see across London. Boy George lived behind us, actors Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson were nearby, Nick Mason of Pink Floyd was next door, and Tracey Thorn from Everything but the Girl was down the street.
I was obsessed with the talented female singer. I loved her voice, but I was equally if not more intrigued by her quirky personality. After finding out she was in the neighborhood, I became a borderline stalker. I found excuses to walk past her house and peek through the Venetian blinds. I saw Tracy’s partner, but never her. I hope she never saw me.
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 passed since the album 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 lackluster at best and blatantly negative when I was being honest.