Nobody Ever Asked Me about the Girls: Women, Music and Fame

Prologue

Nobody ever asked me about the girls.

Until now.

Over my four-decade career interviewing and writing about musicians, I was most often asked what Mick Jagger or Michael Jackson or David Bowie or Jay-Z were really like.

For the most part, women were dismissed.

Women didn’t really count in this world.

But with the recent domination of female stars—which seems to happen once a decade—this, to some degree, has changed.

In the more than one thousand interviews I’ve done with women, I’ve heard all their stories. The paths they took were different. The level of talent was different. Their luck was different. The effects of success or failure on their lives was different. But their goals and struggles were often similar. To be heard. To be seen. To be loved. To be famous. To be rich was probably part of it, but no one really owns up to it. Not at first. If ever. These women had obsessions that were often limitless, hopes that were unrealistic and ambitions that might have been unachievable. Like all women, life has not been easy for the women in music.

HOPES, DREAMS & AMBITIONS

"Can I tell you how many lives Life magazine ruined? Bette Midler said to me in 2018 about the weekly picture magazine that was always in her house—and in millions of others’—when she was a girl growing up in the 1950s in Hawaii. It was such a strong magazine. People who were out in the hinterlands were so caught up in it. It exposed you to a lot of things you did not know existed. Even if you went to the movies, you knew it was a movie—they were actors. In Life magazine, those were real people in wonderful clothes and wonderful cars, living fabulous lives and you thought, ‘Wow, what am I doing in this backwater?’"

Bette Midler was sitting in her fabulous New York apartment with spectacular views of Central Park. We were sipping champagne. She had just come back from some fabulous vacation somewhere in Europe, and she was preparing to do forty-two more shows on Broadway in Hello, Dolly!, following her starring, sellout, Tony Award winning performance the year before. Bette and I have known each other since the 1970s, when she first got major attention singing in the gay baths in New York City’s Ansonia Hotel basement. Without question, considering the longevity of her career, her continued popularity and success, and everything she’s been through—underground theater on the Lower East Side, cabaret, a Broadway chorus, the music business, the movie business, back to Broadway—she’s handled fame and success better than anyone I’ve interviewed in over four decades. It never went to my head, she said. If it had gone to my head, I would have been either a drug addict or dead by now. Or something terrible would have happened. I said to myself, ‘This is how it is, I know I’m well known,’ it’s in the back of my mind and I tamp it down because I think it’s unhealthy. I never let it go to my head, never.

As Bette and I continued our talk that summer day, I remarked that she isn’t at all showy: she doesn’t flaunt houses, cars, jewelry. None of the material trappings of success that so many female stars—or just rich people in general—parade all over Instagram. Why would I? she said. "Why make people feel bad or angry or jealous that they don’t have what you have? It’s like Life magazine. And now, it’s like Life magazine times 150,000. Bette told me she wanted to get out of her childhood hometown in Hawaii, because she knew she had a talent, and she was poor, and she didn’t want to be poor. She didn’t want to be famous, she said, she didn’t even want to be rich—she just didn’t want to be poor. I was poor for a long time, she said. For nineteen years. I shoplifted, I filched money from my mother, I walked two and a half miles to school and two and a half miles back because we didn’t have fifteen cents for the bus. I would watch The Ed Sullivan Show or other TV variety shows and I would think, ‘I can do that.’ And they all looked like they were having so much fun. That’s what they were selling. Who knew?"

But, she continued, real life is real. And when you get caught up in the fantasy of it, it takes years—years and years—to realize that you’ve been had. And that’s big. To realize that you fell for something that’s incorrect, that’s a lie. It took me fifty years to realize it.

At 9 years old, Joni Mitchell had polio, and because of the effects of the disease on her hands, she eventually had to figure out her own weird guitar tunings. She had a baby, gave it up for adoption, and sang in coffeehouses in her native Canada and in New York City, until she was discovered in a Greenwich Village folk club by Byrds guitarist (and later Crosby, Stills and Nash’s) David Crosby.

Donna Summer sang in her Boston church and performed in school musicals. She left Boston for New York City, joined a rock band, then got a job in the German production of the rock musical Hair. She sang background vocals for producer Giorgio Moroder in Munich until he convinced her, as a joke, to sing the orgasmic vocals of Love to Love You Baby.

As a teenager, Sheryl Crow was an athlete, a majorette, a member of the Pep Club and a winner of the Paperdoll Queen beauty contest. She was a music teacher before she got into her car by herself to drive from her native Missouri to Los Angeles, where she started a career that began by singing background vocals for Michael Jackson.

Courtney Love was expelled from school, put in foster care, and was legally emancipated at 16. She was a topless dancer in Portland, a stripper in Los Angeles, and a founding member of several bands in the Pacific Northwest before forming Hole in 1989.

Raised in Kansas, Janelle Monáe worked as a maid in order to get to New York City to learn how to act, how to perform. It was in my DNA, she said. This is why I’m here. I developed myself behind closed doors before anybody knew me.

Growing up in Queens, New York, Cyndi Lauper said she’d do anything to get noticed. She said she always felt like an outcast, but it was what made her feel like an artist.

Years before she was discovered singing in a California coffeehouse, Jewel sang as a child at open mic nights in Alaska with her father, lived in a van with her mother, washed her hair in Kmart sinks and lived on food stamps.

Cher had so little money as a child of divorced parents that she tied rubber bands around her shoes to hold them together. After she acted, directed and choreographed school plays when she was 9 years old, she knew she wanted to be famous, and ultimately went to Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip to introduce herself to anyone and everyone she thought could give her a break.

Debbie Harry was born in Miami, moved to Hawthorne, New Jersey, with her adoptive parents, then moved to New York City. She worked as a go-go dancer, a waitress at Max’s Kansas City and a Playboy bunny before joining several bands, and then, with her partner Chris Stein, formed Blondie—which they thought of as a pop art project.

Janet Jackson initially wanted to be a racehorse jockey or an entertainment lawyer, but she didn’t have a chance in the family that spawned the Jackson 5, and was eventually pushed into showbiz by her father, Joseph Jackson.

In July 2005, Beyoncé sat in the living room of her cousin/assistant Angie Beyincé’s apartment overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. This was several years before she moved in with, and then married, Jay-Z in his Tribeca penthouse. She talked about her Houston, Texas, childhood, her family and her obsession with music. I wasn’t doing this to support my family or get out of a bad situation, she said. This just was what I dreamed of. I was so determined; this is what I wanted to do so bad.

Her mother, Tina Knowles—still known to everyone in showbiz as Miss Tina—put Beyoncé and her sister Solange in dance classes, and when Beyoncé was 6, her teacher, Miss Darlette, had her perform in front of everybody in a talent show. She sang John Lennon’s Imagine, and, because she was shy and quiet around other kids, she said she was terrified. I didn’t want to go out there, but Miss Darlette said, ‘You can do it, you do it all the time.’ She always would say, ‘This little girl is different, this little girl is special.’ She would always have me sing for everyone in class—I was like her little baby. My parents—who had never seen me perform before, were shocked; it was like ‘Is that my child?’

The young Beyoncé entered talent shows like the Texas Sweetheart pageant, but eventually her mother said no more of those, and Beyoncé started performing at a bunch of local award shows. She was asked to join a girls’ group, and, she said, That’s when I fell in love with being in a group. There were around fifty girls; some could dance, some could sing, and it was, according to her, "a big mess. So I got Kelly [Rowland] and my father started helping us get a record deal. I did Star Search when I was nine and we did everything—we rapped, we danced, we sang. It’s embarrassing, but it was cute. I hear those demos now and it’s like, oh my god, it’s like hearing another person." When that first incarnation of Destiny’s Child lost Star Search, We were devastated, she said. We were kids—we were crying, sobbing … but our mothers were there and they were like, ‘Get over it, we’re going to Disney World.’ Still, we thought the group was over, we had a producer who quit, I was so sad. But then my dad started trying to find producers for us and shopping us a deal.

When Beyoncé was thirteen, the then four-member Destiny’s Child did a showcase for Columbia Records, signed to Elektra Records, got dropped by Elektra, signed to Columbia and moved to Atlanta to work with a producer. They lived with one member’s mother in one room in a basement. It sounds crazy, Beyoncé said, but it was nice. We had a couch, a bed and a cot, and we had the best time. We’d get up and go to the studio, then go back home. Each time there was a showcase we would think it was the most important thing in our lives, our big break, everything we had been working for. She took singing lessons. Her father media-trained them and taped mock interviews. None of it felt like a chore. By the time they were sixteen, the girls knew how they wanted to sound, how they wanted to look. They were developed before they had their record deal. The other girls were not as obsessed as I was, Beyoncé said. I was always focused. Different things excited me. Going out did not excite me. Boys did not excite me. I had a boyfriend, I went to his prom, but I preferred to be at home in front of a stereo making songs. All I wanted to do was watch videos and write songs and perform.

Joan Jett, who always wanted to play electric guitar at a time when girls didn’t play electric guitar, told me in 1983, I just never thought that women shouldn’t be allowed to do certain things. It never occurred to me that there was some sort of protocol. There’s so much hypocrisy about what a man can do and get away with and what a woman can do. When we were in The Runaways, we took a lot of shit because we were all girls who picked up a guitar or a drumstick. We were considered a novelty act. But I have to credit my parents for always telling me I could grow up and do whatever I wanted to do.

In 1986, Chrissie Hynde said, I got into a band because I didn’t want a career. I still associated a rock and roll band with an anti-establishment, renegade sort of thing. Everybody wanted to be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones because they just had the coolest clothes and they made brilliant songs. For my twenty-first birthday, my mother wanted to give me a watch or some kind of traditional thing. And I said, ‘Well, if you’re going to give me something, there’s this Gibson Melody guitar advertised in the paper for sixty dollars. Do you think I could have that?’ I had a very colorless background in Ohio, and when I left and went to England to get into a band, nobody knew who I was and I had a real freedom to experiment and experience things.

At age 4, in Arizona, Stevie Nicks sang country duets with her grandfather. Recently, Stevie told me that when she was in sixth grade, she was in a play called The Alamo, playing the child of the only adult woman in the Alamo. I went home and told my mother I was so bad; don’t ever sign me up for any acting again. I’m a singer.

Annie Clark, who records and performs as St. Vincent, said, "In high school, I would read the New York Times Arts section and I knew I needed to see the world outside of Oklahoma and Texas—I had to be where it was happening." Instead of going out on a Friday or Saturday night, Annie said she would stay in her room, light candles, listen to John Coltrane, write and wait for magic to happen.

Brandy, who was singing at the age of 2, appeared on several TV shows as a child, and, with the help of what used to be called a stage mother manager, was a TV star at 16. I’ve always been very serious about it, she told me in 1995. It was something that was a dream for me.

In 1977, Céline Dion said, Ever since I was a baby, I wanted to be a singer. I remember watching TV when I was 8 or 9 years old in Canada, seeing all the big American stars, and I wanted to be part of it, I wanted to be onstage with them. That was a dream for me. Her first big break came when her demo tape reached René Angélil—who mortgaged his house to finance Céline’s first album, married her thirteen years later and remained her husband, manager and father of her children until his death in 2016.

According to Diana Ross, Even when I was a kid with pneumonia, they were wheeling me into the hospital room while I sang ‘Open the Door, Richard.’ The music has always been in me, the music is my life. She hung around her neighborhood Motown recording studios until Berry Gordy let her sing background vocals for other Motown acts, then built The Supremes around her, mentored her, became her lover and the father of one of her children.

Fiona Apple’s debut album made her a star at 19. She told me that for a long time, she didn’t tell anyone she wanted to be a songwriter. It was very precious, very sacred to me, she said, and I didn’t want anybody else’s incorrect judgment to influence me. I was very vulnerable to being discouraged. I didn’t want people to think it was some kind of hobby. I didn’t even really admit to myself that I wanted to do it because it was such a long shot, and if it didn’t work out and people knew I had been trying it, I would have been embarrassed. I wanted to do it on my own and have complete control of the situation.

Björk, who was on the radio and famous in her native Iceland while she was still in school, said in 1995 that she hated the celebrity aspect of stardom, so she became a drummer in a punk band. What I was obsessed with, she said, was writing the best song ever written. I know that sounds big-headed, and I haven’t done it, but that’s what turned me on.

I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my life, Tina Turner told me in the mid-1980s. I was in her dressing room at the Ritz in New York City when her album Private Dancer was in the Top 20 on the Billboard charts. Her single What’s Love Got to Do With It would eventually go to Number One. After her show that night, David Bowie, Keith Richards and Patti Hansen, John McEnroe and I celebrated her success. It had been a long, hard time coming for the woman who told me her voice had always sounded like screaming dirt.

Before the show, she talked to me about how, as Anna Mae Bullock from Nutbush, Tennesee, she lived through segregation in the 1940s and 1950s. She knew she had to call white people sir and ma’am. She was exposed to Holy Rollers and speaking in tongues by the Pentecostals—which she found more fun than her own Baptist church, where, when she sang in the church choir, her repertoire included Onward, Christian Soldiers and Amazing Grace. When she got older and moved to St. Louis, she was intrigued by the juke joints that she said evoked sex—even though at 10 years old, she didn’t exactly know what that was. She had dreams of wearing her hair differently—not in braids—and dreams of Hollywood glamour, even though she wasn’t sure of what that was either. At 16, when she saw Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm onstage at a local club, all she wanted to do was get up and sing with them. Night after night she waited, until she finally got hold of the microphone and sang. Ike paid attention, took her under his wing and, for years afterward, taught her how to perform onstage. Offstage, he beat her, cheated on her and made her consider, on multiple occasions, ending her life.

After everything Tina had gone through with her ex–musical partner and by now ex-husband Ike—the years on the road in the clubs on the chitlin’ circuit, the other women, the abuse, the breakup, her attempts at a solo career—she finally had a solo hit. She said, I’m talented. I can sing. It’s not a pretty voice but it’s a voice that can bring out emotion. But you can’t put me with Diana Ross or Olivia Newton-John. Tina doesn’t sound pretty. She makes a statement. After Ike, no one found me and made me a star. In fact, people didn’t want to touch me—because they thought the duo broke up and what would I do on my own? But I had a dream. It always was to sing. At first it was to be an actress, then my dream was to be the first black rock and roll singer to pack the places that the Stones or David Bowie or Rod Stewart did. And the competition I had to move out of the way to get up there.… Look how long I’ve been going. And I still don’t have the fans that the Rolling Stones or Michael Jackson does.

I had years of playing the small clubs on my own for no money, just to pay my rent, Tina said. Even if it was Las Vegas or the Fairmont Hotel, I did it until I realized this is not what I want to do. I don’t want to put those sequin dresses on anymore. At first, it was exciting to go to Bob Mackie and get those gowns, until I realized—I want to get into those rock halls. Janis Joplin had the credibility, the ability and the power to sing very black, and to scream. No white girls sang like her. I think if I was a white woman I would have gotten here much faster. We still have not broken that thing where man is the ruler and white people are the ruling race. I’ve said why did God make me a woman so someone could beat me up? That’s not fair. And yes, I did doubt, but I didn’t doubt that solo success would happen. It was just like—how long do I have to wait? It’s almost shameful. It’s still a slavery thing. And, she added—and remember, this was in the 1980s—We’re still niggers. I don’t care how much a woman has a claim to fame, she’s still a nigger.

Alanis Morissette was a teenage star in her native Canada, where her first album went platinum and her second one went gold. But, she said, In Canada, I was wearing high heels and low cut dresses and I wasn’t writing what I really wanted to write. I didn’t think it was what people wanted to hear and I wasn’t prepared to fight for what I thought was right. When I left Canada and came to LA, I started from scratch. The record companies had no idea who the hell I was and that gave me the opportunity to be myself.

The British singer PJ Harvey said, I got into this because of my love of performing. It had nothing to do with making money or wanting to be in the limelight.

Jennifer Lopez told me that she was so obsessed with being a great dancer that she slept in the Broadway dance studio where she took lessons. Obsessed. I was obsessed with being a great dancer—thinking that I wanted to do Broadway. I wanted to be down at that dance studio twenty-four hours a day. When I was little, I danced in front of the mirror constantly; I idolized Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Tina Turner, Madonna.

Alabama Shakes lead singer Brittany Howard endured working in the post office in her small Alabama town while she pursued her dreams of being in a rock and roll band.

In the 1980s, the beautiful and mysterious British/Nigerian singer Sade, who had hits with silky songs like Smooth Operator, told me, I never had any dreams or aspirations of being a singer. But I always sang. I auditioned for a band that turned me down, but then they came back to me. So, I just sort of fell into it.

The musician/singer/songwriter and producer King Princess grew up around her father’s Brooklyn recording studio where she learned how to play several instruments, how to write songs, how to produce records and how to navigate her way around the misogynistic music industry.

With unparalleled hopes, dreams and ambition, Madonna fled Detroit to come to New York, to Be Somebody. I thought of being everything, she told me in 1984. At first I thought about being an actress. Then I wanted to be a singer. Then I got more into dancing; I just felt that I needed a skill to go to New York. I loved to dance, I was really good at it, so I thought in New York, I could start with that and take it from there. I had to arm myself with something. When Alvin Ailey didn’t work out, she joined a band and started a singing career, and with what would mark her ever-continuing confidence, she said, I always knew this would happen. I thought once the public knew who I was, I wouldn’t have any problems because I feel that I know what the public would like.

The shy Romy Madley Croft would sing quietly in her London home so her father wouldn’t hear her. Later, she sent music back and forth to friends online, and they formed what initially was considered an underground British group, the