PAT BENATAR: TROPICO DANCER

Asked what the most important thing in her life is in the autumn of her fifth year of stardom, Pat(ricia Andrzejwski) Benatar (Geraldo) rapturously replies, “Neil [Geraldo, her husband, lead guitarist, and producer] and the little family that we have, our two dogs and the bambino [that is, the child they expect in March, 1985]. That’s the best thing, and the most important. It makes me real happy to keep that together.”

Actually, “real happy” doesn’t begin to describe wee Pat’s state of mind in the autumn of 1984. In fact, “I’m delirious. I’m trying not to be that happy, because people just sort of go, ‘Whaaaat?’ Maybe it’s that my hormones are all balanced because of the baby. Getting pregnant’s the best thing that ever happened to me, the most female thing.” Which isn’t to imply that she’s all goose-pimply with delight at the thought of childbirth’s exquisite agony. “I can’t take pain,” she admits. “But I tell myself, ‘People have been having babies for thousands of years, so quit being an asshole.’

The first thing a frightful old bore who’s come to a recording studio within braying distance of the Los Angeles Zoo to try to trick wee Pat into admitting shocking things about herself notices how few nouns she fails to add ”’n’ stuff” to. Noting this, he muses that this biggest little woman in American rock ’n’ roll would surely have been nicknamed Chip or Skipper if she’d been a boy. But then, as she warms to him, “’n’ stuff” turns into “’n’ shit,” ’n’ he muses no more, but instead thinks, “What an earthy person!”

“It’s so boring you won’t want to hear about it,” she says of her and her husband’s home life. “Neil and I are two of the straightest people in rock. We got all the drinking and drugs and shit out of our systems when we were younger. I don’t want to sound like Mary Poppins, but we’re really simple people who like simple things, like being left alone. It really makes no sense that we do what we do for our living, except that we really love to play.” They like nothing better, she says, than to "stay home and watch rented movies and play backgammon.”

Attentive Kiss and Tell readers’ll recall that the Geraldos broke up for a year before their union. “I don’t know what the hell we were trying to do,” Benatar marvels. “I guess it was that last let’smake-sure-before-we-make-the-leap. It was awful. And stupid, since neither of us ever went out with anybody else, and we either talked on the phone or went over to each other’s house every day. Everybody knew that we were mad for each other and let us go through that little stupidity. So when it was over, neither of us had to be sorry about anything.”

Her celebrated fondness for domestic chores hasn’t waned. “I’m a really great cook,” she claims. “I do it all the time ’cause I really like it.” She says she’s greatest at Italian food, but doesn’t invite the frightful old bore to come over with his own terrifying pregnant missus to see for themselves how great she art. She does her and Neil’s laundry because “I can’t stand the way anybody else does it.” She’d like to do more of her own marketing, but “it always takes me 40 minutes longer than I want it to. Housewives are always coming over to me, ‘Oh, my son has you all over his walls!’ People just go into shock over the fact that you’re there buying Rice Krispies. They absolutely have to stop you and talk to you about it.” (More about this sort of thing in a minute!)

The Geraldos’ choice of the utrasuburban San Fernando Valley (albeit the post part, that in which Michael Jackson resides) to relocate to from their native East Coast turns out to have been a function of what frightful old bores they are. “I was worried about getting too far away from normal life,” Benatar explains, “The Valley was kind of like where I grew up, except a little more affluent, so we thought we’d be comfortable there. We were for a while, but now it’s too normal—and too crowded. It’s too hot and there are too many damned kids everywhere, teenagers on every corner and in every store.”

The multi-Grammy winner’s a great deal prettier in real life, without make-up, than in her videos, in which her features often look painted on. Her complexion, in fact, is like that part of an infant on which the little dickens would sit if he or she had the physical wherewithal. The frightful old bore finds her the second nicest American in rock ’n’ roll today, after Terry Bozzio of Missing Persons, whose margin of victory might owe to his having Missing Persons to answer for. At about 60 inches high, she is almost certainly the shortest. And now back to our interview.

“Singing’s my absolute favorite thing, and I could do it 100 hours a day,” she says, “but songwriting makes me crazy. I’m not real prolific and it just takes me eons to write songs. Neil will sit in a room for hours and hours when he has to have a song finished, but I write in the car, on planes, while I wash the dishes— anywhere that I don’t feel like I’m having to sit down and do it.

“If I had to do a term paper or something, I could sit there for years,” the former high school honor student claims. “I could write poetry ’til my hands fall off. And if I had to write a book, I’m sure I could do that for a really long time too. It’s a process of trying to condense things into something palatable like a song that’s so frustrating.”

When the frightful old bore wonders what wee Pat’s reaction would be if she discovered her videos being exhibited as silent films, she asserts, “I wouldn’t allow it.” And soon discovers that she’s been hoodwinked, as the old bore asks how, then, she could have been a party to Giorgio Moroder’s recent disco-ization of Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece, Metropolis. “It’s different!” she protests. “You make a video to go with a song—it isn’t meant to stand by itself, but a movie is.” You figure it out! “And I felt that the ballad I sang fits, although I’m not sure that all the other music does. I’ve always loved that movie.”

Asked what befell her in childhood that she’s intent on not allowing to befall the forthcoming fruit of her womb, she replies, “with their who-do-you-think-you-are? attitudes, the people in the small town I come from always made me feel that my talent was a bad thing. We lived in a town—Lindenhurst [on Long Island]—that was literally divided by railroad tracks. All the professionals’ kids, the ones with the bitchin’ wallpaper that matched their bedspreads, lived on one side. We lived on the other. I think I always worried about that, about our being so poor. I was always on the defensive in school. I was real proud of what I could do, but real ashamed too because it made me stick out.”

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Encouraged to reminisce about her maiden name, she reveals that “I cried my first day of kindergarten because I couldn’t spell it. I could spell ‘homogenized,’ because I’d seen it on milk containers, but I couldn’t spell Andrzejwski. It would have worked really good if I’d sung opera.”

Having grown up the daughter of a sheet metal worker and sometimehairdresser/sometime-bank-teller of limited means, Benatar “always threw up when I had to write those huge checks for big purchases at first. I’m not so sure that you ever get it through your head that you’re rich, especially when you’re overhead’s so gigantic. Somewhere in the back of my mind I know I am, though. But we’re not extravagant—we don’t go out and buy 50 Jaguars and shit like that. It’s just nice never to have to look at price tags and to know that you can do what you want when you want.” Oh, thinks the frightful old bore, shut up.

Even if her records stop selling tomorrow, and no one ever pays another dime to hear her sing, wee Pat’ll never have to revert to being a bank teller herself. “I know people think it’s a bunch of shit,” she claims, “but security really doesn’t affect how you work. You don’t ever sit back and think, ‘Fuck, I don’t care what I sound like—I’ve got enough money for the rest of my life.’ You still work like you were starving. Except you take longer!”

But back to her years of poverty and operasinging lessons, which commenced in the fourth grade. “Both my parents worked, so I was never made to feel that there was a big difference between men and women. When I got out into the real world and people started saying shit like, ‘You can’t do this—you’re just a dumb girl,’ I thought back to what my mother taught me—that you can do whatever you fucking want. Growing up so small and being female when it wasn’t the greatest thing to be—that was probably the biggest thing that motivated me.”

That, the frightful old bore is delighted to learn, and “having worms squashed all over my legs so that I could get into boys’ clubs. That made me fearless—when you’ve had enough worms squashed on your legs, you don’t give a shit anymore.”

If the frightful old bore had been Benatar, he’d have gnashed his teeth and contemplated homicide frequently during the approximately 15 minute heyday of Quarterflash, whose Rindy Ross (the worst-dressed most appallingly unEleganza woman in show business) seemed to be aping her shamelessly. But the aggrieved gamin herself thought no such stuff. “I just thought it was kind of funny,” she says. “I’m sure that it wasn’t their exact intention to copy. There’s a lot of people who sound alike, and somebody has to be heard first. I’m sure she must have been real insulted when people made that connection, and I don’t blame her. They used to compare me to everybody under the sun too—like Blondie and even Linda Ronstadt, if you can imagine. So I don’t care. If she had a good time doing it, go ahead.”

When it comes to explaining why the sight of her character wiggling her shoulders so intimidated the gold-toothed sleazeball overseer of the taxi dancers whom cruel circumstance compelled her to join in her hilarious "Love Is A Battlefield” video, she can only giggle and admit, “I don’t know. Maybe I have intimidating shoulders.” She pauses to giggle, and to savor a handful of little chocolate-like candies she bought from a vending machine. “The great thing about these conceptual videos is that they’re like those ridiculous old musicals where all the sailors swabbing a deck would suddenly start singing.”

She’s perceived a backlash against such Short Film-ish videos. “You don’t,” she cautions, "want to keep leading people in their interpretations of songs. After you’ve done epics, you just want to go back to straight performance, and the videos we’ve done this time [for the Tropico album] aren’t conceptual.” She herself most enjoys “the funnier ones, like Lauper’s. I think she’s nuts!"

Not for a millisecond does she begrudge silly Cyndi’s having replaced her as the most ravedabout woman in rock. "Four years ago,” she recalls, “/ was the one getting all the hoopla. You can't have that continue, and I don’t think many people would want it to. It’s very exhausting and it isn’t that much fun. It may look like fun to everybody else, but it really isn’t. I think it was Elvis Costello who said that you have a lifetime to get ready for your first record, but from then on all you do is run to catch up. It's true. The last thing anybody seemed to care about was my music. All anyone wanted to know was how many interviews and photo sessions I could do. I never want to go through that shit again.

"So I’m glad for Cyndi Lauper. Go ahead! In a couple of years, it’ll be somebody else’s turn.”

Deliriously happy as Benatar is these days, the frightful old bore despairs of getting her to speak ill of anything—but only until they begin talking about her superstardom. "I hate all the shit that comes with becoming famous," she says emphatically. “I didn't like it in the beginning and I don't like it now. I see all these movie stars and shit going to parties and I ask myself, ‘Why don’t you have a better time?’ But I just don’t enjoy being so visible.”

Nonetheless, "I always try to be polite because I know it must have taken a lot of courage to come over and ask me for my autograph. I’m always reminded of the school dance, and of that one poor little guy who walks all that way back again when she says no."

No superstar himself, the frightful old bore wonders why Benatar doesn’t simply disguise her little self. "Because it doesn’t work," she explains. "Every time I try a wig or a hat or something, someone goes, ‘Nice try, Pat. How you doin’?" She points to her enormous chompers. “As long as these are sticking out,” she says disconsolately, “they know it’s either me or Marie Osmond. Nobody has teeth like this.”

She concedes that "there are great advantages. You get to see a lot more of the world and to experience things that most people don’t get to. Like for me, seeing Madison Square Garden when it was closed was a great thing. But not everything you see is good, and sometimes you wish you didn’t have to see everything. Still, if I had to choose between this and being a normal person with a nowhere job, someone who lives their lives just to live it, I’d pick this."