Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up by Pamela Des Barres, Michael Des Barres Page A

just outside my loft room, and every night I had to put a pillow over my head because their thrilling goings-on made me miss Michael sooooo much. Melanie Griffith was still only seventeen years old, but—thank God—had ceased to be a nubile thorn in my side. She was in New York doing publicity for her early spate of films, in which she played the innocent, Lolita-like danger-angel, torturing the likes of Gene Hackman and Paul Newman with those long legs and turned-up nose full of freckles. She and I shopped up the Village, and every time I oohed over something, she ran in and bought it for me. The only way I found to smoosh her generous nature was to keep quiet, but she must have seen the covetous shimmer in my eyes when I spotted some dangly heart earrings. As I took out the groceries to prepare the evening wad of vegetables, I found the heart-shaped sparklers nestled in the broccoli florets.
May 6 —
Feeling very warm and content, having just come back from the Russian Tea Room with Melanie, also a hoity-toit club where she’s a member. We talked our buns off and danced and had a great time. I feel very sisterly toward her
—
almost motherly. She and Don are having problems, and I hope they’ll make it. It’s amazing how things turn out. Life is such a learning experience, I feel so opened up and twinkling, even though we found an actual rat in the living room today. D.J. came to the rescue
.
    Donnie chased the rodent around, swinging a curtain rod while Melanie and I stood on various pieces of furniture, squealing like we were in a nincompoop cartoon. We begged him not to flatten the frightened creature, and he finally coaxed it into a brown paper bag and hurled it out the window, back onto the scummy streets of Manhattan from whence it came.
    Hard as it was to be strict with the Johnsons around, due to their lust for life and everything in it, I started a severe health regimen, which severely limited my evening fun options. Who wants to go out to dinner and watch someone starve? I even had to give up the Pink Teacup, the cool, old soul food joint directly next door to the bakery under my pad. The greasy odor of fried chicken livers and scrambled eggs with onions wafted through my window while Icrunched granola, wheat germ, and lecithin with raw milk. I dropped alcohol, gave up caffeine, used pure maple syrup instead of sugar in my herb tea (the only thing that has stuck, except now I use it in my coffee), and took all the fat out of my extremely boring diet. I had stopped red meat three years earlier with Donnie at the first Hollywood health food restaurant, Help, and now added dairy products to the growing list of no-nos. The big jolt of excitement came when once a week I went down to Christopher Street to cheat heavy with a cone of goat milk ice cream. Whoopee. I lost many, many pounds and paid a solemn nutritionist a hefty hunk of my soap salary to deprive me of the yummy things in life. At least I was skinny and looked good. It didn’t seem to make much difference. On top of Bebe Buell’s wide-eyed backstage comment, I got one more gigantic rusty nail slammed into my jumbled self-esteem. One rainy afternoon, after my two measly lines had been severed from the student lounge scene, I was fired from
Search for Tomorrow
.
    The soft-eyed producer, Bernie Sofronski, who is now married to Susan (Partridge) Dey, could hardly look at me as he explained how I had been replaced by a big, clean-looking blond girl who understood the character better than I did. He said my heart wasn’t in it and I didn’t trust my own talent. Truer words had never been spoken. They had actually been holding auditions for the new Amy right in my face, and I hadn’t noticed. “Does the rest of the cast know?” my ego bawled at him when reality sunk in. Yes, Bernie said, they had even participated in the auditions. “I told them they couldn’t tell you,” he wimped at me, looking down at a pile of dumb, corny
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scripts. I was