I met Peter Asher at the American Music Awards in 1978, shortly before I turned nineteen. A few dates after Peter and I met, we were at my house in Laurel Canyon and I put on some music. I knew he was a record producer, and I didn’t know what he’d produced, but I had plenty of opinions about music and production. So we were listening to a Linda Ronstadt album and I told him what I thought of it. He said, “You know, I produced that.” I said, “Oh. Well. That doesn’t change the fact that the vocal is too far behind the mix.”
Whatever was missing in Robby Benson and the boys before him was there in Peter. I fell for him hard. He was intelligent and well educated. We’d lie in bed and he’d explain the Doppler effect or parabolic reflectors. He wasn’t classically handsome, but I thought he was really cute with his English accent. He was serious and stern, but also playful and irreverent. He was endlessly patient with me. In many ways Peter would be one of the great loves of my life.
Peter and I led a pretty sensational life. We went in limos everywhere, to parties and events, from hip hotel villa to Malibu mansion. We drove his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud to a drive-through for burgers. I went to the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys. At heart I was still the eighteen-year-old in skintight jeans with a Newcastle T-shirt and a baseball cap, but when I went to events I had to present myself in a certain way. I made sure to wear the right clothes and to carry the right bag. I wasn’t the Kid anymore.
Peter was recently separated. He had left his wife, his house, and the life they had built together and was living in a villa behind the Chateau Marmont on Marmont Lane. It was a serious rock ’n’ roll scene. The musicians Peter produced and managed—James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, J. D. Souther, Andrew Gold, Bonnie Raitt, you name it—hung around that villa, as did some of the powerful music executives my dad had known when I was a child. They may have been a little uncomfortable partying with me since they knew my Dad, but I was trying as hard as I could to live up to my dad’s bad reputation. If being a Phillips meant getting high and running fast and being a star, I did my best.
When Linda Ronstadt went on tour, Peter went as her producer and manager and I tagged along as her pal. I’d perch side-stage on a road case, sauntering backstage to refresh my drink. I got spoiled—who wanted to go to a concert if you had to sit in the audience? Rolling Stone did a story on Linda. Jimmy Carter was president, and the magazine referred to me as the Amy Carter of rock ’n’ roll.
After the concerts, back at the hotel, there was always plenty of coke around. Linda’s guitar player, Waddy Wachtel, slept a lot, and the only way to rouse him was to tick a razor blade against a mirror. The tinny sound of the possibility of cocaine woke him every time.
We had vast financial resources, Peter’s more endless than mine, and my partying was at an all-time high. Boy, did we have the life.
But there was a flip side. In the midst of our wildness, I found myself pregnant. It was the first time I’d ever been pregnant, and I was scared and upset.
Peter was angry at the news, and not at all nice. He said, “How dare you? How could you do this to me?” Our relationship was steamy and salacious. It involved lots of Quaaludes, cocaine, and kinky sex. I didn’t always want the wild sex—I was kind of like, Can’t we just make love? Why all the bells and whistles?—but I followed his lead. Attaching those acts to the idea of conception was hard for me, but apparently it was more upsetting to him.
I couldn’t conceive of having a child at that age and time, but I felt the weight of having an abortion. I hadn’t spoken to my mother for a year, but I went to her. I lay down on her couch with my head in the pillows, sobbing. Mom rubbed my back, telling me everything was going to be okay, that she was going to help me. She arranged an abortion.
The day after the procedure, Peter and I flew to Tahiti.
Tahiti was idyllic. It was the first time I’d gone on a vacation with a boyfriend, staying in a hotel, eating meals together. It felt so grown up. The Kia Ora Village had little bungalows right on the beach. We spent whole days sitting on the porch of our bungalow, getting up to swim, snorkel, or take long walks down the beach. I walked around topless and we swam in the ocean. There was a little fly in our bungalow that I adopted and named Wings, and I called the feral cat that howled for food Legs. I couldn’t have sex right away because of the abortion, but Peter had novel solutions to that dilemma. I thought, Do we really have to do this? But I loved him.
Evenings, we’d walk a long stretch of beach, up to a restaurant at the top of a hill. I fell in love with pomelos, a fruit that tastes like a grapefruit-orange hybrid. I ate as many pomelos as I wanted and let the sweet taste cleanse the memory of the abortion and what it implied about my relationship and how I was living my life.
After that, Peter and I went to Tahiti every few months for a week. We liked it, so we did more of it. That was pretty much how things went. I could go anywhere, do anything.
At the same time, I had an adult job that came with adult responsibilities, and it was getting more and more difficult for me to make it to work on time every day. Along with the villa at the Chateau, Peter also had a beautiful house in Malibu Colony, right next to one of the houses that my father had rented when I was a child. In fact, the master bedroom overlooked the Pacific … and the courtyard of my father’s place.
Staying in Malibu meant a longer drive to work, which meant I was later than ever. It wasn’t a convenient commute, but who wouldn’t want to live in Malibu? Before I knew it I was going to my house only to pick up clothes. We walked on the beach, listened to music, and drank champagne or Stoli. It was the early days of remote controls and I thought it was very fancy that there was a garage door opener to draw the curtains in the morning. The TV was on a hydraulic lift at the foot of the bed.
For my nineteenth birthday, Peter gave me roller skates and I skated exuberantly around the living room. Then, later, we were sitting on the bed and he tossed a brown paper bag at me. I opened it up and found beautiful diamond studs. I squealed and started jumping on the bed. Peter played it cool. He said, “You like ’em?” with no smile on his face, but I knew he was putting on his professor airs. He got me—both sides of me—the sophisticated young woman who could behave appropriately at events, and the silly kid who bounced on the bed for joy. It was the perfect pair of presents, recognizing and honoring the child and woman in me.
One Day at a Time was now, amazingly, in its fourth season. The episode that aired on Christmas Day of that year, 1978, was one of my favorites. In “Girl Talk,” Julie, Barbara, and Ann go to a cabin for the holidays and get snowed in. Of course. And then the heat fails. Naturally. It’s cold, and the three of us are sleeping on a foldout sofa, cuddled up and talking about boys, and mom’s divorce, and Barbara and Julie’s relationship as sisters. I loved the way it played. It was one of the purest, sweetest moments that we had on-screen. Watching it, you can tell that we are family, that the feelings between us are real. My family has always made a big deal out of Christmas, and now I was sharing that spirit with my onstage family.
But that warmth belied the increasing stress that my life was putting on my work. Peter was the third party who had entered the tug-of-war between my grown-up job and my freestyle high living, and he had added his figurative weight to the high-living side of the rope. I was always crashing around, trying to get out the door to work after being up half the night. Every day I drove from Malibu to Hollywood, and every day I was late.
One morning I was running as late as ever and my eyes were burning from a night of partying. I said to Peter, “Babe, where are the eyedrops?”
He said, “In the bathroom cabinet.” In a rush, I grabbed the eyedrops, put some in my eyes, and got in my car to drive to work. Ten minutes later my vision went blurry. I could not see. Each time I came to a stop sign or a traffic light, I rear-ended the car in front of me—gentle vision-impaired taps that incited honks and obscene hand gestures but no exchange of insurance information. It took me an hour to get to work. When I finally arrived, the producers saw me feeling my way down the hall and assumed I was completely fucked up. They were used to me being late, but they weren’t used to me being blind. I called Peter and said, “What the fuck?”
He said, “Oh, no. You didn’t use the eyedrops in the brown bottle, did you?”
Oh yes I did. It turned out that those particular eyedrops were from when one of our houseguests had gonorrhea of the eye, a disease I sincerely hoped wasn’t caused by some sexual act that I couldn’t even conceptualize. My vision was blurry for the rest of the day. I couldn’t see to read the script. I couldn’t work. My rock ’n’ roll lifestyle already made me look like a big enough fuckup at work—the last thing I needed was gonorrhea eyedrops compounding my already compromised reputation at One Day at a Time.
The tide of trouble on the set was slowly creeping toward the flood line, but the dam that held my mother’s life together had already broken. Now that my mom and I were speaking again, I had to face the reality of her situation. She was drinking a lot, taking Quaaludes, and doing coke. I was scoring for her, which wasn’t exactly helpful, but that was the least of my concerns. Lenny, never a lamb, had turned brutal. He called me up one night at Peter’s and said, “Listen to this.” I heard a stomping sound.
He said, “This is the sound of my foot on your mother’s chest and I’m not going to stop until you get here.” Why did he call me? Why did he want to bring me into their domestic strife? Maybe in some way he was trying to stop himself, but all I knew was that he was crazy, my mother needed help, and I’d just taken two Quaaludes and was too fucked up to rescue her.
I called Melanie Griffith, who was a close friend at the time, and asked her to go to my mother’s house. Then I called the police and had them meet Melanie there. But when they all arrived, my mother sent them away.
There were more midnight phone calls, more injuries, more threats, but finally I persuaded her to divorce him. I hired a lawyer for her, she came to live at my house in the canyon, and I moved what belongings I still had in my house to Peter’s place in the Colony.
It was the right thing to do, but my mother went really crazy in that Laurel Canyon house, all alone. The house had large picture windows looking out on the woods of the canyon. Lenny would hide in those woods, watching her through the windows, stalking her. That was enough to freak anyone out, but my mom was more fragile than most. She had been beaten within an inch of her life. The abuse and drugs did a number on her. She tells a story of how she got out of bed in the middle of the night, put on Genevieve’s five-hundred-year-old wedding jacket and cowboy boots, and walked around the house otherwise naked. She came across a giant rat, which she chased around the living room, attacking it with hairspray until it died. Sometimes I’d come home late at night and find her surrounded by candles. She’d call me Mom. She was on the edge of insanity until the divorce was finalized, Lenny moved out and backed off, and she was able to move back into her condo.
I was parenting my mother, I had an adult job, and I had an adult social life. But I still hadn’t finished high school. Most kids remember graduating from high school as a major milestone, one that the whole family notices and celebrates, but my father was off on a drug rampage and my mother had sunk into a boozy depression. Both my parents had spun far away, vague constellations of worry and fear. Then again, when it came to my high school graduation, they didn’t miss much. Actually, they didn’t miss anything.
I’d done well at Hollywood Professional. I worked with a tutor on the set when the show was shooting, so I didn’t spend much time on the campus, but my senior year I was the Bank of America Scholar of the Year and was on the honor roll or something like that. So I expected to graduate with some kind of honors and recognition. But then I did an interview for People magazine. There was a glamorous picture of me sitting on my couch in a strapless black evening gown and beautiful high heels. In the article I said that the Hollywood Professional School was ugly, boring, and a firetrap. I was immediately expelled. Can you be expelled for being an entitled teenage TV star? What did I care? I was like, Well, fine, I don’t need a high school diploma.
The school later offered to give me my diploma for $750, but I declined. Fuck that.
Sacrificing my diploma for an obnoxious quote didn’t faze me, but the People interview wasn’t the only time I got myself in trouble doing press. My appearance later that year on The Tonight Show was an embarrassment that lingered for a long time. David Letterman was guest hosting. I don’t remember why I was invited to be on the show, probably for being Julie, but I was very excited. So excited that I celebrated my appearance in advance by doing a ton of coke. By the time I got on the show I wasn’t in ideal form. My nose was running. I was wearing a low-cut dress that kept flapping open. I got nervous and panicky. David Letterman had been told that I was a good speller, so the first thing he did was give me a little spelling test. I’m not sure what words he gave me, but I got every one wrong. You can misspell words with charm and grace, or you can do it as I did, with overblown enthusiasm and awkward jokes. I was completely off my game.
After the spelling debacle, Letterman and I sat down to chat. I nervously babbled on about being in a relationship with a married man. I was obviously fucked up, I had no media training, I said all the wrong things, and I was a perfect target for Letter-man’s teasing. I can spell “abysmal.” And afterward there was no comfort from Peter. His primary concern was how his wife would react to what I’d said about my relationship with him. He gave me shit about my performance, more like a father lecturing his daughter than a lover comforting his mate. Our age difference wasn’t so spicy that night.
I wasn’t oblivious or self-centered. I completely dug how hard it was for Peter’s wife, Betsy. When the well-known, fast-living, eighteen-year-old star of a hit sitcom starts dating a thirty-four-year-old separated-but-still-married mega music producer, it’s big news. Betsy, a thirty-seven-year-old, had to watch her not-yet-ex-husband conduct a very public relationship with a teenager. I’d seen my mother go through the same thing with Michelle. Plus Peter and Betsy had been together for a very long time, and now I was hanging out with all their musician buddies—people who must have felt to Betsy like part of the marital property they were still dividing. Betsy wanted to attend Linda Ronstadt’s shows, as she always had, and under no circumstances did she want to run into me. But the way Peter handled it showed no care or respect for me. We’d be backstage at a show or at the studio and Peter would get a call from Betsy saying she wanted to come by. He’d dismiss me and I’d leave to wait for him at home alone. Or a distraught Betsy would call and he’d leave me to go to her house. It happened over and over again. I felt confident that he wasn’t having sex with her, but it still made me feel like a piece of furniture, moved out of the way when necessary. I understood it, from all sides, but I didn’t like waiting for my boyfriend in empty houses the way I’d waited for my father for all my childhood.
For all my frustration, I never complained. I had no idea how to stand up for myself. I didn’t like to make a fuss. I was developing a less confrontational method for dealing with my emotions. It worked for my parents, and it would work for me: drugs and disappearance.