BLONDE WITH BOTTLE: DEBBIE HARRY
Late fall, 1983: a borrowed flat in Manhattan’s West Village. Sprawled across from me on a sagging queensize bed is Deborah 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.”