LAUGHING OUT LOUD AT ONE IN THE MORNING WITH MISS PAMELA'S WRITING GROUP and the SOBERING REALITIES OF TEENAGE GIRLS WITH ADULT MEN WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER
by Christine Trzyna C 2022
It seems in the last few days I've spent an inexcusable amount of time on the internet - especially YouTube - looking for something interesting to read or listen to. Especially inexcusable because I've also been making my way through a long audio- book. I've been listening to the newish bio of Led Zeppelin by Bob Spitz that's bringing up the controversy of rock stars having sex with "Baby Groupies," girls well below the age of consent. This latest bio about one of the rock and roll bands I didn't grow up with but have come to consider a favorite, is the best I've read about that band.
I was feeling exhausted. I just wanted to lay in bed and kid myself that I was being productive since the day had been a bust and I was feeling a bit angry, frustrated, and helpless. I'd retreated for a bit to the Daily Mail UK habit I need to give up but there it was - an article that mentioned Bob Spitz's book. Then articles about the accusations against Warren Beatty.
The actor Warren Beatty has now been accused of grooming and having sex with a girl under the age of consent, a fourteen year old, which she says took place in the 1970's. The now sixty-something woman has been vocal while the eighty-something Beatty has been silent. Beatty the famous lothario, now long married, will probably pay up, is my guess, or say he has senile memory loss and can't remember her. It's a new California law that allows people to sue all these years later and she and Beatty both live in California. It is unlikely he will be prosecuted like director Roman Polansky, who ran for it and spent his life living in France, after having sex with a thirteen year old girl in 1977, one he had drugged first.
I can't help myself. I'm wondering if Lori Maddox/Mattox/Lightning will try to sue Jimmy Page, the studio musician who became the Guitar God of Led Zeppelin, who seems firmly rooted in England and who once, in Los Angeles, dumped the over-the-age-of-consent Pamela des Barres for the under-the-age-of-consent Lori. But then, Lori would also want to sue the estate of David Bowie because he got her first.
The Led Zeppelin bio and the Beatty news made me think of Pamela des Barres (maiden name Pamela Miller) of Reseda, California, called The Queen Of The Groupies, a title she has tried to own as a Brand but which she is not in agreement with exactly. Pamela, whose every book I've read at some point in the past. She's working on two or three other books right now that I can't wait to read and, bless her, has turned what she knows/ experienced and who she knows into a 'cottage industry.' I admire that she is doing so, being independent and self-supporting. She's not the only woman I know or have known who had to find some way to make it on her own, and she has lots of true stories to tell.
For all that, I'd never listened to her podcasts. I decided to treat myself to one in which her "dolls' the all female members of her long time writer's group, read their stuff. At about one in the morning I laughed till I cried as one member read about her encounter with Axl Rose of Guns and Roses, Axl walking around wearing cowboy chaps with his bare butt showing.
The entire podcast might rightly be called a 'hen party' due to the cackling and the laughter. It seemed as if these women had a lot of love for each other, at least in context of the group podcast. Was every Sunday afternoon meet-up in the San Fernando Valley that much fun? How much does Miss Pamela charge for her class?
(Rather than allow this post to be an advert for the group of Pamela's other enterprises such as Hollywood tours, clothing and jewelry sales, and so on, I'll let you search the internet or YouTube, which will easily bring up her offerings.)
It seems that, like my old in-person writing workshop and my Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop that appears on this blog for readers to enjoy, Pamela gives prompts and maintains a supportive rather than non-judgmental atmosphere for her students. No doubt some of her students were or are music business associated and might qualify to have been groupies, at least for one group or one particular musician.
I've never been a groupie. I just love music, especially rock and roll. I've been collecting lyrics as poetry since I was a teenager. I love some of the singer-songwriters music too. That's why I post so many music videos here.
My meeting or sighting celebrities has happened by just living life, but I've never conjured meeting anyone, targeted anyone, or had intent. I'm not overly awed. And that has served me well.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a woman "chasing" men but I can't remember having ever done so. Some women have had a better experience of this, but I've come to think that even letting someone know I'm interested is a mistake. I also don't like being chased.
Recently I stopped in at a coffee house where I had not been in about four months. I would have kept on walking but I saw a man I'm friendly with who's interesting to talk with sitting outside. I sat with him over a tall and a refill. While sitting there a car pulled up. My friend, in general a humble and honest person, tossed his head the other way and muttered, "He's gotten away with some things here he never should. I no longer talk to him."
He had told me months ago that one of the regulars there, the man in the car, a man who is at least 50, but might be closer to 60, had gotten a teenager pregnant. He said that everyone knew about it because this obviously pregnant girl had shown up there looking for him to talk to him and he had threatened her that she was never to come there looking for him. The word Kill had been used as in "If you show up here again I will Kill you."
I could just imagine the girl, maybe love-sick and wondering why her 'boyfriend' was nowhere to be found, the quickening inside her, confused and perhaps desperate, being verbally abused and devastated and going away wondering how she would get through the birth. If she went to social services for help and told the truth, who the father was, they'd go after him for support and maybe have him arrested. Was she going to lie? Would some man who is not the father step up to the responsibility? Was the baby going to be put up for adoption?
A lot of people had overheard the threats and well, I don't know who she is or how far along she was or if her parents know he's the father. I don't know if she has parents, is a foster kid, or is perhaps homeless. I don't know if she uses drugs or is addicted, if she's got prenatal care, or if she had thought about abortion. I don't know if he chased her or she chased him or one enchanting evening it just happened. I don't know if she's gang affiliated and tough from downtown or if she's a classic good girl from the local extremely expensive Catholic high school uptown, where they still wear stiff plaid uniforms, kept innocent and not fully aware of what was happening to her. I don't know if she's 17 and a half or just turned 14 or if she was a virgin: She's a 'teenager' pregnant by a man old enough to be her father or her grandfather. She's in trouble and the man is no good. He should have known better.
The man, unmarried, said to be an apartment manager or repairman, living alone, is also said to already have four or five children; I have no idea if he contributes to their lives in any way or if he is the worst of men, what I call a "sperminator," who might as well be a fish and might have done himself and a lot of other people - including We The People - a favor and had himself fixed. Has he been married? Is he divorced? How many times? How many children with how many women?
Shit, he's no Mick Jagger.
I'd seen this man around but had never once had a conversation with him. He seemed tightly wound and had once let out a growl at the sight of me sitting at a table I suppose he wanted. I got there first and was all set up and was not about to move, so I ignored him and he went away. I was almost always gone from there before nightfall, usually home to make dinner and walk my dog, so I had never been there late enough. I heard some men, some always dateless men, say open mic night was good for "girl-watching." Had she been one of those girls who was watched? Did he chase her and "get" her just to prove he could to the other men?
I can't say he "cavorted" - ah that word, from Carly Simon's song "You're So Vain," which, after decades of demuring, she finally admitted was about Warren Beatty...
But that girl's bringing a life into this world and I remember the girls who were pregnant in my high school.
The man who threatened the pregnant girl when I wasn't there is in good shape, some evidence of weight lifting, tattooed, and long haired. I peeked at him when he got out of his parked car. It seemed to me he had aged a decade since I last saw him around, face extremely wrinkled, fast like a character on Twilight Zone who might just turn to dust.
He's usually shows up in a sports car blaring rock and roll. If asked to say something good about him I'd say, "He has great taste in music." But he was pulling up in larger, older car, no music.
I heard he played guitar but did not perform for the open mic's. It's doubtful he was ever in a band that made a demo to pitch to a record company or that got picked up by one. But, was he honing the effect of being a rock star in order to pick up girls, under-age girls? He would not be the first or last to do that. For some men, it was the way they operated.
I find myself in a quandary about statutory rape, because it's true that some girls do sometimes quite deliberately seek out and place themselves to meet and have sex with real rock stars (and other celebrities). Some girls will target the wanna-be's and or even the mere boy next door. We cannot assume female sexual passivity or lack of desire. Groupies haunt clubs and rock star hang outs. They go to hotels where they've learned a band is staying. There are very likely 14 year old groupies doing so right now, who do not care about the Me-Too Movement. Some of them will do whatever it takes to get past security. They can be goal oriented and aggressive. Some of these girls could be stalkers. Or if desired by a musician or a band, a girl can simply be selected from an audience or invited to fly. I suspect they are not parented girls. One or both parents are missing or not responsible or weak.
I happen to know that the film Almost Famous, one of my favorites, is fairly accurate, though romanticized; that wonderful bus scene where all passengers get out of their funk by singing Tiny Dancer. But it's beyond, like in the movie, the boys trading groupie Penny for a case of beer.
As in the Led Zeppelin book by Bob Spitz, there's a truism (that does not need to be true because some band members on tour do manage to not get involved in it), that mayhem including violence and outrage are how rock stars on tour are, supposedly to let off steam, release pent up feelings, emit energy. Most of the problems on tour with Led Zeppelin, according the book I listened to thus far, seemed to be caused by their manager/enforcer, Peter Grant, and the drummer John Bonham. They're depicted as out of control, violent, abusive, seriously alcoholic and hard drug addicts. I think quite likely they were also mentally ill and criminal.
(It made me wonder why the group had been awarded the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012, during the President Obama administration. They are not Americans and there were also back in the day concerns that Page was into the dark aspects of the Occult because of his Aleister Crowley collection. That's fascinating and wanting to know more about that is one of my reasons for getting the audio-book. I just don't think it's All American.)
It's true that historically in Colonial America and in Europe girls as young as 14 were considered marriage-ready, though 16 was more common, and waiting until the man could prove he could support a family and the girl had reached 18 was more common. And then there were the vows of marriage intended to confer financial support as well as a family until death. People were aware that females who were not fully mature could be especially vulnerable to death while giving birth. Very many women did die because of maternity, leaving orphans behind or a baby without milk who followed them to the grave soon after.
It's also true that some parents, some mothers in the more recent past, have been the ones grooming their daughters to have sex with men who are far from boyhood, to become the girlfriend of this one or another because he's rich or famous. If not actively grooming, then giving permission.
Hey, Elvis and Priscilla come to mind. Her parents said OK so she was skipping school and hanging out with Elvis in Germany at fourteen. She's said he waited till they married and then, after she became a mother, was rejecting.
Rumors persist and are published that a number of mothers who pushed their teenage daughters towards older adult men, or at least didn't object, include actor Natalie Wood's mother, actor Angelina Jolie's mother, and groupie Lori Mattox's mother. Jimmy Page called Lori's mom to ask her if he'd be sued if he dated her daughter, according to Spitz. Even if everyone around these people knows there's a too young girl in there with an adult man who should know better, and there are many people in service of the stars or dependent on them for their income who are enablers and procurers, that girl is going to have a memory.
We can hope it's as good and wonderful and funny as those that caused such riotous laughter at Miss Pamela's writing salon podcast. We can hope that any grief as a result of the experience is about loosing at the game of love, bad enough at sixteen, but not about being used and abused or left with psychological problems for life.
But are these girls left with psychological problems for life really, or is this the whole psychology profession looking for more business?
These days teens in America are having sex way earlier than ever before, if you read the statistical reports, and well, it seems like you have to be in a Christian cult if you expect to wait until you're married in the States. So, sex before the age of 18 or before you've completed high school and found contraception, may not be smart but it's not criminal if you willingly partner with someone who is age appropriate. So at what age difference is having sex with a girl most certainly criminal?
The answer to that is that it's cultural and the groupie scene is a sub-culture. It comes down to our concepts of what consent is and how it takes place, even what male and female is, the roles we are playing.
Frankly, it also comes down to if an adult can get away with having sex with a teen too young to give consent, perhaps only because the victim is intimidated, or because the girl, now a woman, really was having a good time, has no regrets, and is not going to press charges. And if she presses charges, that has a lot to do with the fact that it's a myth that there are lawyers out there salivating for pro-bono cases. If you do not have money to pay a lawyer for a civil case forget justice, that is unless the person who had sex with you has money, like Warren Beatty, so there's the potential of a big payout and win. So not pressing charges does not mean she was not hurt.
***
"There's music and then there's the music business." So said my one friend, from my teenage years, who was not labeled a groupie, though she was, because she was also a song writer and musician and in bands. She'd modeled a little and designed clothes and sewed and also made jewelry, which was how we met, in a metalcrafts and jewelry class. Like Pamela des Barres, my friend met, had herself photographed, and made some life-long friends of the upcoming and the famous musicians. She wanted success and fame. I wanted that for her too. I was conned by her charisma. She promoted herself to me in all those letters she wrote me, signed Dazed and Confused. I was, and still am, proud of her for attempting, as a woman, to be part of the testosterone-fueled world of rock and roll, but she played at it as a "chick" too.
***
There are a great many men who have alter egos that have little to do with the reality of their day to day life.
I once had a male friend who I thought of last night as I listened to the "dolls' read their short stories, those stories written in 12 minutes in flow, when one of them mentioned going to a club called Power Tool. That club was located in a downtown Los Angeles hotel, the Park Plaza, that had seen better days but still had a ballroom set up for disco. Though it was supposed to be something of a secret, underground club, it was advertised in the LA Weekly.
This writer who read her work at Miss Pamela's writing salon, a different one than the one who had her moment with Axl, had been scammed by a couple wanna be rockstars (who did have some later success) when they stuck her for their dinner bill at Cantor's deli. She'd met them at Power Tool where it all started with them begging her to ride them home in her car that was so old it could not go in reverse and had to be pushed out of parking spaces. It turned out this was a scam they had pulled off a number of times. They were opportunists and users and had taken advantage of a poor and trusting young woman, but all these years later it was funny because they had not harmed her worse.
One time I agreed to go to Power Tool with this man friend of mine. We also agreed that once there we would split up as he felt that he didn't want any of the women he was bound to meet to think I was a girlfriend. (In 2022 I think this was bullshit.)
It was a bad night. The place was not well attended, there was no band, and there was, overwhelmingly, men who didn't really want to dance and were around the walls watching the dance ball throw some light on the carpet. They just wanted to hold themselves back and cruise, maybe thinking the beauty of their dreams was going to show up and fall in love with them at first sight, which was their fantasy. (In 2022 I think maybe these men were escapees from one of those seminars on how to be tricky to pick up women, dolts who were socially awkward.) It was about 5% women and yet not one was on the dance floor with a man. A couple women decided to dance with each other. I did my usual jiggle to show I was willing to dance but no one had approached me. After about a half hour I was bored and wanted to leave. I asked a man standing near me who also seemed to be giving a jiggle if he wanted to dance and he yelled NO! (Maybe so I could hear him over the blaring house music?)
After walking around the lobby and investigating to see if there were more interesting spaces in the old hotel open to the public, the music blasting too loud to have any conversation anyway, I went looking for my friend, who had not been on the dance floor.
I found him posing, sitting atop a picnic bench in an outdoor area, posing as if he was a male model awaiting an important photographer who would put him on the cover of Rolling Stone. There he sat, his left leg folded up, his right leg down straight on the table-top, his shoe pointed, his head held up as if he was looking in the distance towards an unmentionable goal, a big solid smile on his face, aware but not making eye contact with anyone. His cheekbones gleamed in the dull light. My friend had the sinewy look of a long distance runner and long hair to his shoulders. He was wearing black jeans, a red long sleeved T-shirt, and important tennis shoes, the kind musicians wore on stage with rubber soles that might prevent an accidental electrocution. There were four or five young girls sitting there on the bench of the picnic table looking up at him, adoring him. He was letting them.
Maybe they were trying to figure out who he was. (Maybe he was trying to figure out who he was.)
He didn't break his pose. I came back twenty minutes later and the same thing.
I spoke up.
"Let's go! There's nothing happening here!"
For him there was.
It took over an hour to get out of there and by then I'm sure I'd become a pain in the ass about it. I've got no idea if these girls all forked over their phone numbers or he asked any one of them or all of them for phone numbers. I walked around and came back again and again to see what progress he might be making. Did any one of them think how weird it was? As if he were the Virgin Mary and it was Fatima!
I don't know what he said to them, but I'm sure to this day they all thought they were close to the glow of a soon to be rock star, and if not that, then a producer. I knew he had told some women he was a producer. It wasn't true or not true. He had written songs, all as long as Stairway to Heaven, he did play the guitar, not real well. He did have a little equipment but nothing close to state of the art.
Don't imagine a secret studio with press board walls lined with egg cartons hidden in a San Fernando Valley garage though. He did live in a garage apartment which he didn't pay rent for, in back his parent's house. He was playing at being a producer while he kept his day job and if some youngish starlet who got stage fright claimed she was actually a rock star he would go see her plink some strings and offer to produce her music while she found herself a lawyer, preferably an entertainment lawyer, to marry. (One of these lied to him that someday she was going to have a band and he was going to be in it. Bla bla bla.)
I know we do all have to start somewhere, and in life sometimes we have to re-start again and again, but his day job did not produce the steady and reliable income required to say, rent an apartment even when you could still find one for $500 or less a month. By not paying rent he could afford $200 faux lizard skin tennis shoes and black leather jackets with custom air-brushed fan art painted on the back and tickets to a lot of concerts at a lot of clubs.
I never went back to PowerTool again. I thought it was just one more so called "underground" place that got mentioned in the LA Weekly, maybe in the L A Doo Da (?!) column which frequently dropped certain people's names as if their going and doing defined what was fun in LA.
There were people on the scene who seemed desperate for attention. They wanted to be considered special because they dressed to be noticed, such as wearing their underwear to the club, or wearing their underwear over their clothes, or not wearing underwear. They did 'outrageous' things to provoke. I don't think any of them held full time jobs or slept.
I was not cool. I didn't care if I wasn't.
Youthful adventures on the Sunset Strip, at the Hyatt Riot House, at the Rainbow Bar and Grill, and other legendary places, can't go on and on, especially not for those who are being accepted or rejected for their looks.
The boys get off the road and/or off the drugs and go home, where they sometimes have a wife and children waiting or they finally get some perspective, get honest, and mature. There they attempt to have what so many are escaping, a 'normal' life. But, just about everyone wishes, at least secretly, at least at some time in their lives, to run away with the Band.
C 2022 Christine Trzyna
