BLONDE WITH BOTTLE: DEBBIE HARRY

They couldn’t help but notice her She was fatally beautiful;

Ever since she was a girl,

She was fatally beau-ti-ful.

T-Bone Burnett, “Fatally Beautiful”, 1983

Late fall, 1983: a borrowed flat in Manhattan’s West Village. Sprawled across from me on a sagging queensize bed is Deborah Harry. The Face of the ’70s and— although somewhat elusive of late after an abortive Broadway debut as female wrestler “Teaneck Tana”—as luminescently lovely as ever.

At this moment, the girl born of “unlisted parents” in Miami, Florida, is regaling me with a tape of “Rush Rush,” the single she wrote for Brian de Palma’s Scarface. Like American Gigolo’s “Call Me,” it’s a coproduction with Giorgio Moroder. “We were gonna do ‘The Hunter’ together but that didn’t work out. Then Giorgio called me up out of the blue about this—and he just sent over the music and the script.”

“It’s a modernization of the old Scarface, ” she continues, “in which A1 Pacino decides to take over the coke-dealing mafia. He succeeds, but at the same time he starts taking so many drugs himself he ends up burning out—the end is like total meltdown.” Debbie smiles wryly. “Of course this all takes place in Miami.”

She was born in the back of a ’34 Ford Her guardian made sexual connection with her Before she was even grown.

The infant Debbie never lingered near the Cuban coast; as her offscreen accent indicates, she was adopted by loving parents based in Hawthorne, New jersey. Deb’s new Mom, however, was kidded by the adoption agency about her tiny daughter’s “bedroom eyes”. And by adolescence, Debbie was fond of fantasizing that she might be Marilyn Monroe’s illegitimate daughter. “I felt physically related to her long before I knew she had been adopted herself.. .maybe it was Marilyn’s need for love in immense doses that’s the common denominator between us.”

“Way back in Biondie, Chris always used to wonder if it was enough just to entertain people But I always it was

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What kept Debbie from collapsing beneath the adulation experienced by the likes of Marilyn, or Jackie O when Blondie brought it crashing down around her?

“Well,” she says decisively, “Marilyn was basically just alone with her looks—and alone with the female energies she had. Also, alone with her image. Chris has always given me a lot of support—although I still have to fight a lot, and I still find that the worst pressures come from places I least expect them to. The real key for me has always been that I tried to approach things with a sense of humor. I mean.. .it takes time and experience to decode the media. And you learn a lot about that the hard way. But once you do learn, you realize you couldn’t possibly approach it from an entirely serious point of view.

“You’d get terminally debilitated and depressed—and far too bogged down to make artistic progress.” (Debbie laughs) “My realizations in that area go so much against the prevailing trains of thought that I’m always afraid I’m gonna get locked up! Literally.

Well, how did you deal with a film about the manipulations of the media: Videodrome?

“Um. You know, Cronenberg never really told me why he cast me; he was very private about a lot of things. A lot of directors seem to be like that—some of the best ones are the most manipulative people you could ever find...Because they set up a situation where you HAVE to respond, they guarantee the performance.

“Realizing the reality of rock or acting as a commercial reality, you know, is a horrible shock. I mean, you’re trying to deliver something spiritual, something emotional, from a stage. Way back in Blondie, Chris always used to worry if it was enough just to entertain people. But I always argued that it was, it was enough to take someone out of their particular mundane reality for five minutes, even five seconds. But to him that wasn’t always important enough. I think he thought it was frivolous.”

But one of the most important things about early Blondie was the lack of artistic pretension about what was basically your extension of Pop Art into pop.

“Oh yeah, and it was supposed to be totally humorous, totally satirical. It was just that people got very serious about when we started to become successful—and we couldn’t control that. People even got scared. (Pause) I mean: There were so many people who were scared of me!

“Some of the early Blondie fans were really into that shared countercultural humor though. CREEM magazine, for instance, they understood the humor. To a certain extent, anyway—except that (laughs) they were really serious about seeming like real

jerk-off guys, you know? (Debbie bursts out giggling) Like, ‘I wanna-fuck-everythingthat-walks’ macho.

“In Britain there was a lot of misunderstanding, because there people are very serious about this love-hate relationship they have with American culture—everything, from blue jeans to girl groups. It’s like they have to hate it. They need it so much, but they’re also aware it’s something they can never really have, really own. It must be a very basic response, because the British are so locked into their verbalizations of politics and their symbols and their fashions—I mean, that is IT over there.”

Let’s get back to America for a minute, though. It seems to me that when America really was pretty normal, back in the early ’60s, she set out to go crazy. But we’re now saddled with the worst remnants of that era’s legacy: now everybody thinks they’re a “freak” when in fact, socially and artistically, everyone’s now up against a very strong new wave of conservatism.

(Long pause). “That’s a major feeling, actually, and I think more than anything else it has to do with environments. It’s like— the feeling of what astrologers and astronomers and geologists all know, but everyone else just suspects instinctively. For a long time, though, I think people have been sensing the sort of fears this ‘greenhouse effect’ debate is making explicit. “I really think that—don’t laugh— everyone’s totally schizophrenic, but that it’s a disease we’ve acquired from our environmental and planetary conditions in a growing way ever since the Industrial Revolution. (Smiles) I always tell that to my crazy friends now: ‘Listen, it’s OK, we’re all more or less nuts, it’s not your fault!’

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Well, I don’t know exactly what sort of schizophrenia you mean, but the mass depiction of reality has hit an all-time separation from what reality IS. Take the depiction of relations between men and women; take soap opera, take advertising!

“Absolutely. I think kids who are growing up now—in a sense they feel thoroughly hopeless and helpless to do anything; to change anything. And they insulate themselves by putting on these acts or roles or guises of being conservative or preppie or whatever you want to call it.”

So you think the return to preppie-dom is an instinctual gravitation towards something that seems to symbolize stability?

“Yes. But I think it’s also an illusion which has been merchandized to people. It would be nice if there could be say six months when there was NO ADVERTISING. Just imagine—a lot of people would just go nuts. They wouldn’t know what to think, what to do. 1 think those weird clubs and movements would spring up (laughs) and you would get, like, guerilla shopping groups!”

In the meantime, however, what do you think people want to read pages and pages of quotes from you on, eh?

“Oh, sex. ‘Sex’, of course. It’s always the easiest approach to sales; particularly for a woman. I’m not putting down my own sexuality, but neither am I about to throw into some cheap film slot as ‘the Bad Girl.’ That’s why when I had the script for Videodrome I was concerned that Nicki should at least end up on some sort of positive note.”

Women in Cronenberg’s films are certainly not noted for subtlety or complexity!

“Well, he doesn’t usually pay much attention to them. But I did like David’s original shooting script very much. It’s just

that the ending turned out different from that in a major way. My character, you see, was originally much meaner and totally involved with the conspiracy to set up poor old Max. But then she was supposed to have a change of heart—because she was going to fall in love with Max. And that ending—I think it was just too traditional for Cronenberg. So, 'he made her more of a dream character. Now you don’t even know if she’s alive or if she’s just another scam from the video syndicate.”

He imagines her robe as it drops to the floor He imagines her skin soft to touch

He imagines her naked on silk sheets The morning she never woke up.

Cause we couldn’t help but notice her, She was fatally beautiful; ever since she was a girl,

She was fatally beautiful.

Do you think Cronenberg took advantage of you as a “media icon” when he “killed” Nicki as a real person and reduced her to an image; when he withdrew her chance of taking any decision that might affect the plot?

“Well. The change was confusing, but I think 1 would have been prepared to do it either way. Actually, I saw Nicki as an aspirant, rather than a real media personality. That’s what she’s aiming at, but she hasn’t got it. She’s a real user, though, so that hunger for attention dictates how she conducts her radio show, and explains how she behaves on TV with Max. But it’s this passive celebrity she’s after, the idea of the icon, the image. That’s the whole point about the S&M scenes—to show that passivity itself is destructive, whether it’s between men and women or between a people and their media. Unfortunately, that point never got brought out enough in the finished film. The S&M looks like it’s just there to get people crazy. And the snuff video sequences look like a replacement for the outrages that don’t shock anymore— like blowing people’s insides out. (Debbie looks up) The way those sequences are shot, of course, is a total Warhol ripoff.”

Did you have similar problems of control when you set out to adapt Trafford Tanzi into Teaneck Tanzi for Broadway?

“God, yes! I mean, the ‘feminist’ principle in the British script—it’s really old hat. So when I first talked about doing it here, I envisioned a lot of re-writes. I had a lot of ideas. I gained weight, I trained, 1 really wanted to work. Because it could have, you know; wrestling is so popular now, and I really wanted this to be like fuckin’ Ralph and Alice! That’s how it should have been!

“But I tricked myself there. Because when push came to shove, the people were just NOT going to change anything.. .only a few words, a few expressions. It was quite a shock, to be going into rehearsals every day knowing that your ideas would be rejected out of hand and that the end product was being prevented from becoming as exciting as you know it could be. Still—I had to go through it to find that out, and it was very good experience.”

What’s the main thing you’ve learned during the past year, then?

“To appreciate the freedoms rock ’n’ roll offers, that’s what. The performance freedoms, particularly. I mean, most people in the performing arts, films and

everything—they really do envy rock ’n’ roll performers. Now I’m back at work on a new album, even though I’ve barely started, it comes flooding back how much freer the basis of rock can be.” Debbie smiles. “Even for women.

“I mean, the very best thing about rock ■is its intuitive nature. To me, it’s very tribal and it goes to the deepest instincts. It’s like having one of those Teddy-bears with a heartbeat inside.

“And maybe Marilyn could have used one of those.”