-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,3604,821139,00.html
There's something about Harry
She was rock's original blonde, but nowadays most of her neighbours have no idea who
she is. Sabine Durrant talks to Debbie Harry, half rock-chick, half granny, all icon
Sabine Durrant
Tuesday October 29, 2002
The Guardian
Half-term, and the streets of central London are a scrabble of teenage boys,
skateboards
tied to their backs, acne loose all over their cheeks. Twenty five years ago a sight
of the
real Debbie Harry, poster-girl made incarnate, would have dropped these teenage boys to
their knees. But 25 years ago, these particular teenage boys weren't born.
"I was out earlier and I just had my little sweater and some shades on," says Harry,
"and
I'm just walking around. And then I realised it was a little cold so I put my hood up.
I looked
like the Unabomber, right? Huh." Her laugh comes out in one go, like someone being hit
in
the stomach. "I guess I wasn't recognised. I guess I got away with it."
Back home in Chelsea, her neighbourhood in New York, there are people she sees every
day who don't know who she is - who she was. "Most of the time, we know each other's
dogs' names but not our own," she says. You mean it's a kind of dog thing?
"Absolutely,"
says the owner of Chi-Chen, a pug, and Ki-Suki, a Japanese spaniel. "Absolutely."
But truly, you couldn't not recognise Deborah Harry (as, grown-ups all together, we now
call her). You'd have not to know her face in the first place. She is 58 and fashion
fascists
Trinny and Susannah would have her out of those loose black leggings - a bit baggy
around
the bottom, a bit Florida retiree - and into something more tailored before you could
say
"Rip her to Shreds". The T-shirt with its acid-green stripe would go (trying too
hard). And
the leopardskin boots? Very Theresa May. (She learns May is the Conservative party
chairwoman who wore leopardskin shoes to this year's conference and says, "Oh, and they
all thought she'd gone mad, right? She'd gone wild?")
Harry is shorter and rounder than one might remember, and the harshly dyed mop of hair
is these days more brittle than lush, but the face is still remarkable: the sleepy,
slitted pale
eyes in their cavernous sockets; the outsize Andy Warhol mouth - the cheekbones so
angular they seem to have come from another part of the body altogether, like the hip.
She
is in London to promote a Blondie reunion tour and a greatest hits CD, holed up, after
her
little walk, in a suite in the unspeakably cool St Martin's Lane Hotel. White walls,
black
clothes, white hair: like the monochrome cover of 1979's Parallel Lines.
At their height, before they fell apart in 1983, Blondie were the ultimate new wave
band.
They were the acceptable face of punk - punk with a pretty face and a catchy commercial
edge. Harry was in her 30s even then. She had a past: she had been a Playboy bunny,
worked as a waitress, serving Janis Joplin down in Greenwich Village, hanging out with
Patti
Smith and Nancy Spungeon. She was even in a long-term relationship, with Blondie's
guitarist and co-composer Chris Stein. But none of this stopped her playing rock star
to the
max. There was drink and drugs and outfits stuck together with duct tape. There were
hotel rooms bashed up. "Yeah, absolutely. We were bashing dressing rooms, hotels,
bashing each other. Why? I don't know. Zeal?"
It is an uncomfortable business interviewing a former pop icon. Harry is half
rock-chick,
half-granny. She pours you water, worries at the thinness of your sweater. She says
"little"
a lot (as in, "Oh, my little bag with its cute little badges."), is endowed with the
occasionally
pouting conversational tweeness of the childless, animal-doting older woman. Her voice
can
be Monroe-soft and cooing. She darts out her tongue to lick the top of her lip. She
looks at
you, kittenish, from under her lashes. She has self-deprecation on tap: "I've made
nothing
but mistakes."; "Which bad period? I've had quite a few."
But there is a nervy fluster about her assistant when her lunch is being ordered. And
when
the door goes and no one jumps to it, Harry pulls herself up to full icon height and
yells:
"THE DOORBELL. SOMEBODY'S KNOCKING." If a question implies she is staging a comeback;
the answer assumes she has never been away. She doesn't like to talk of herself as a
pop
star (past glories), so much as a conceptual artist, an artiste (ongoing).
She was adopted by a couple in New Jersey. Her father was a salesman; her sister runs
an
American Italian restaurant. But her birth mother was a concert pianist. "It's
genetic," she
says. "I was always going to be an artist, in one field or another, come hell or high
water."
And fields she has crossed. After Blondie collapsed, Stein became ill with pemphigus, a
near-fatal skin disease and she looked after him for three years. They split up
shortly after
he recovered. (He married; she has had "some intimacies".) There were three solo albums
for her, and, subsequently, appearances on stage and in film, and an ongoing
relationship
with the band Jazz Passengers.
But it has never been the same. There are tabloid stories about hair loss and weight
gain,
and "those bitches", as she once jokingly said, wearing the trash-blonde crown -
Madonna,
for one. "I don't think I will ever have the kind of celebrity that J-Lo has or
Madonna," she
says, "because they really don't have any privacy." (Interesting that "I will ever",
keeping
the possibility open.)
She did a photo shoot for Vanity Fair's music issue recently. She is in a line-up that
includes
Gwen Stefani, Sheryl Crow and J-Lo (J-Lo was the only one allowed an entourage: she had
three bodyguards). What was the attitude of the younger singers to her? "We were all
stars
star-struck with each other," she answers firmly. Is the new Blondie audience a sea of
pogo-ing middle-aged men? She doesn't smile. "Blondie has always had a wide age
range." But then I tell her about someone I know who, as a teenager, had her picture on
his wall and convinced himself her dress was getting shorter. She roars with laughter.
She
falls sideways on the white sofa like a tree being felled. "Oh, the old
getting-shorter-dress
in the poster trick," she hoots. "Yeah! He's seeing if he can see under it! That's
cool!"
The story seems to untap something. After that, she talks about how she didn't
appreciate
the adulation at the time. "I just sort of wandered into it. I was very wooden when I
started. I really didn't like the way I looked and I was all nghhg -" she twists her
shoulder
sideways - "all kind of creeped out. And self-conscious." She remembers meeting Joe
Strummer on a radio show. "He was so ... so ... I loved him." If it hadn't been for
Stein, you
could have been the Mrs Strummer. "One never knows, does one?"
She recounts the day she first spent some serious money. "The first thing I bought: it
cost
$300. It was a beautiful coat by Yohji [Yamamoto]. It was a cotton-quilted, square
thing,
with these big square pockets. Like a tunic. I bought it at Henry Bendel's when it
used to be
on 57th Street and I was so panicked by the time I got it home, I was ready to just
die."
She gives a slanted look. "I quickly learned to get over it. I will succumb."
She moves on to therapy ("I love my therapist. She gives me tools. Visualisation.")
and her
apartment ("It's in transition right now. It's very eclectic, it doesn't speak of any
one period
or style of furniture, and I'm honing it.") and the rings on her fingers (each one has
a story,
each one a "find", though they are bothering her at the moment, she thinks she might
have
"a little case of hives"). Actually, she hates her hands. "I think they're awful. They
are sort
of large hands which I've always sort of regretted."
She has had a little facelift - "Oh, years ago now," - and pulls in the corners of her
jaw to
show me. "It's holding up," she says. She has tried Botox. "But I don't like the
frozen look. I
like to have expression. I have lines. I guess when I start to really need it, I'll do
it again."
In the meantime, she believes in exfoliation. "I think exfoliation is a wonderful
thing," she
says. "If you're aware of it, you should do it."
And I think she could have talked another hour about her cat, Peach, and her two dogs.
Harry got the first dog to keep her company on tour, but it turns out she gets nervous
in a
strange environment, so that turned out to be impractical. But she rides in a basket
in the
front of Harry's bike: "With her long ears streaming out, looks very elegant." And the
other
one? "The other one's got to stay home, the other one's wild, the other one's much more
doggy than the old dog. It's a constant battle. But I'm hooked. It's so easy to fall
in love with
a puppy, it's frightening. It's like, ooh, ooh, ooh." She makes a noise like a little
orgasm.
There is a slightly embarrassing pause after that.
Does she ever wish her life had been different? She gives a hefty sigh. "I don't know.
You
have a bad day, what do you think? I could be just playing golf somewhere or playing
bridge with the girls. But I've done this. This is who I am."
· Blondie: Greatest Hits is out now. Their tour starts on December 5 in Glasgow.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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