Chapter 1 Star, Fucker!
ONE
STAR, FUCKER!
I wasn’t alone. Occasionally I’d look up at my mom and smile at her.
She’d smile back (her blissful grin was then brought to you by Valium).
My mother was, and is, a beautiful woman.
She always smelled of rose perfume, and in the evenings, I loved lying in her lap, safe in the scent of her, listening to the house finches and mockingbirds and a distant great horned owl hooting out there in the dark of Laurel Canyon, where we lived.
“Mama, what are all those stars for?” I asked.
“They’re for famous performers,” my mom, herself a singer, said.
“What did they do? Was it good or was it bad? Who are these people, Mama?”
As my mother tried to explain, I could feel something sparking in me, indistinctly at first, and then, catching hold, like a wildfire.
My mom and I had slowly inched to the front of Grauman’s, to the spot where you can reach down and put your hands in handprints and your feet in footprints of famous performers, and I reached down to put my little five-and-a-half-year-old hands into Jack Nicholson’s imprint, which he’d made in June 1974.
(I had no idea that one day I’d be ineffectually flirting with him in an audition for a movie role.)
I distinctly remember thinking, even at five years old, This is magic! These people will be here forever.
A child’s mind can conceive of the beauty of forever. Especially when the present presses hard, like a burden.
That child’s mind had already had to come to terms with too many burdens.
I was raised in Laurel Canyon, which, though once the epicenter of a legendary arts scene, had become, by the time I showed up, at least, a different kind of place.
The original Laurel Canyon scene had developed in the mid- to late sixties—back then, houses in the Canyon had been both affordable and gratifyingly hidden away above the thrum of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood, and a host of musicians and artists and actors had made the place their creative home.
Even today when you turn off Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard and head north into Laurel Canyon, whispers of something ethereal and magical and inspiring seem to drift from the laurels and the eucalyptus.
The streets are narrow and winding, perched on the side of steep hills, which are themselves discreet, peaceful, cool, and shaded.
Back in the late sixties, this was the land of Joni Mitchell’s Trina and her wampum beads, where music poured down the Canyon, “cats and babies” all around the women’s feet, characters wrapped “in songs and gypsy shawls.” Mitchell lived here for a while, as did Neil Young, Carole King, Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Mama Cass, and James Taylor, and so did Frank Zappa and his Girls Together Outrageously (GTOs) cohort, who all lived together for a time at 2401 Laurel Canyon Boulevard, opposite Houdini’s house.
Mitchell and Nash, the ultimate Canyon couple, famously bought a vase on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley one morning and by the afternoon Nash had written “Our House” about the vase and the house the two artists shared on Lookout Mountain, half a mile from where I would grow up.
The power of the Canyon’s creative inspiration could foster a classic song and some attendant wild behavior, but it could also cause these artists to lose their minds—Jackson Browne is on the record as saying, “What was happening in Laurel Canyon was the universe cracking open and revealing its secrets.”
But by the late sixties something else was cracking open—a darker edge to the Canyon was appearing.
The Manson murders had taken place in August 1969 a couple of canyons over, at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, about three miles as the raven flies from Laurel.
After that, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas said she started carrying a gun in her purse when she walked the winding Laurel Canyon streets.
Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash broke up. Folk music stalwarts became mega pop superstars and moved away to places with gates and security.
The drugs were maturing from weed to cocaine and heroin.
Murders would come to our part of Laurel Canyon, too.
And into this dying scene moved Nancy Priddy and Bob Applegate.
Nancy Priddy was born in South Bend, Indiana, on January 22, 1941, the very day the Andrews Sisters recorded “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and the Americans captured the Libyan stronghold of Tobruk.
Later, when the war was over, and when my mother had graduated (from Northwestern with a degree in English), she moved on her own—like so many hippie-folkies—to New York City’s version of Laurel Canyon, Greenwich Village, where, unlike many of the other transplants who barely bathed, she turned into a stunning hippie sexpot.
She sang with the house band at the historic Greenwich Village folk club the Bitter End (there she is, her hair dyed black and in a chic bob, bottom right, on the cover of a Bitter End Singers’ album from 1964) and with Leonard Cohen (you can hear her backing vocals on classics like “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne”), among others.
In 1968, my mother released a beautiful album of her own called You’ve Come This Way Before, produced by the legendary Phil Ramone.
On that record’s cover she’s sitting on cobblestones and looking wistfully over her right shoulder, her long ginger hair cascading just so.
She might well be thinking about Stephen Stills in that photo—the title song is about him.
In the late sixties he and my mom had fallen into a passionate relationship.
They lived together for a while in New York at around the time one of Stephen’s bands, Buffalo Springfield, was recording his seminal song “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound),” which he wrote about the L.A.
Sunset Strip curfew riots of late 1966. Stephen would come back to the house he shared with my mother and complain that he was singing flat, or say ridiculous things like “This song’s horrible,” even though it would become one of the greatest songs of the 1960s counterculture scene.
Stephen would later become my godfather.
I call him Uncle Dadu (Uncle Daddy), but that comes later.
At about the same time, there was a guy named Bob Applegate hanging around, a music promoter who would eventually become a producer at Casablanca Records.
In the pictures of him from back then, a wide, smiling, warm face peers out, usually above a wide-lapelled, open-necked shirt, gaudy chain, and three-piece suit, as he hobnobs with music industry people or leans over a mixing board in a studio.
This obviously charming man desperately wanted to date the enchanting Nancy Priddy.
One weekend, Stephen Stills was supposed to call my mom and didn’t.
Nancy Priddy was so pissed off that she went on a revenge date with Bob Applegate.
As the story goes, Stephen hadn’t called my mother because he was deep in a secret affair with Judy Collins, a relationship that birthed yet another classic track, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” one of the best songs that was ever recorded.
So it all worked out right in the end, I guess: the world got “Judy Blue Eyes,” and my dad got my mom, and thereafter, moi.
After that date my mom and dad fell super crazy in love, moved west, and lived together in Laurel Canyon on Lookout Mountain, where all the doors were still open, where musicians wandered up and down the streets in their bathrobes, went in and out of each other’s homes to play music, write classic songs, smoke pot, all in that free-love, happy-happy, goody-goody kind of way—a place where everybody had their legs spread, including the men.
The 1960s gave way to the 1970s, and it seemed like everybody was still doing everybody.
And then sometime early in 1971, Nancy Priddy fell pregnant.
With the jasmine night-blooming across the Canyon, my mother bloomed, too, until spring became summer became fall, and it was Thursday, November 25—actual swear-to-God Thanksgiving Day—and instead of gobbling down turkey and gravy, my parents were rushing to a hospital in the Little Armenia section of Los Angeles.
I was born at 5:45 p.m., in what is now a huge Scientology building (its address is 1403 North L.
Ron Hubbard Way), but which at the time was the Cedars of Lebanon medical building.
As an aside, my dear friend was born the day before Thanksgiving, and her parents gave her the middle name Cranberry.
I guess I dodged a bullet with Christina—lord knows I could have been Turkey Gravy Applegate, or worse, Stuffing Applegate.
My mother was thirty years old when I showed up. Thanksgiving Day had delivered her a child, a girl she did indeed name Christina, after her favorite painting, Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 masterpiece, Christina’s World.
It’s almost too strange a coincidence, given everything that’s happened to me in the past few years, that Christina’s World depicts a neighbor of Wyeth, one Anna Christina Olson, who suffered from some kind of degenerative muscle condition.
Ms. Olson always refused a wheelchair, choosing instead to crawl.
Wyeth once said of the painting, “The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.”
And here I am, with MS, some days feeling hopeless, but still crawling my way forward, still in my own extraordinary conquest of a life. My mother called me Christina—nothing is an accident—after a girl who couldn’t walk.
Now, five decades later, some days I can’t walk either. But no wheelchair for me. Instead, here I am, crawling around through my weeds. Back then, too, my mother was about to fall into deep weeds, weeds it would take her decades to crawl through until she made her own kind of escape.