Harry's Horror
Article
Seventies icon Deborah Harry tells Barry Egan about escaping Ted Bundy, hanging out with Andy Warhol, and her new album
Deborah Harry relates a fateful summer evening when she tried, unsuccessfully, to get a cab on the Lower East Side in New York in the early 1970s. And it wasn't so much a heart of glass that the young blonde needed that terrifying night as a heart of steel. One of the most infamous serial killers in US history had stopped by the kerb and offered her a lift.
"I got into his car late at night," she says. "I was trying to get across town and I had on these wicked platform shoes. He kept circling and coming back and saying: 'I'll give you a ride! I'll give you a ride'."
Remarkably, she got in. The gates to hell had opened and Ms Harry went in. The driver was the now notorious Ted Bundy.
"I knew there was something terribly, terribly, terribly wrong," she says. How did you sense that? "He smelled really bad." Other clues: it was summer time and he had the windows rolled up. Debbie couldn't imagine why he had the windows rolled up in that long, hot summer heat.
This mystery was explained when she shot a quick glance at the door to roll the windows down. There were no door handles.
"The hackles on the back of my neck just went," she says. "I was completely alarmed." And rightly so. She squeezed her skinny arm out of a little space in the door and got out by opening the door from the outside. The serial killer with the unusually heightened psychotic disorder unsurprisingly didn't stop the car to let her alight. The woman he doubtless intended to r*pe and murder like the 30 or so others (sometimes by bludgeoning, other times by strangulation; then necrophilia) spilled out on the road, bruised but alive. (Bizarrely, Harry, years later, starred in Intimate Stranger, a film in which she played a telephone sex worker pursued by a serial killer.)
"People who have tried to debunk the story by saying Bundy wasn't in New York at that time, they have no idea," she says four decades later.
" I got a sense of very alien from him. My responses were totally instinctive, sort of like an animal reaction."
Debbie didn't think any more of it until years later after Terrible Ted had been executed on January 24, 1989 - in the electric chair with 2,000 well-placed volts - when they did a television show on him and his macabre modus operandi: that's when she realised, she says, that she had "a very, very close call. I was a real lucky girl".
These days 'Debbie' has long since been discarded for the matronly 'Deborah'. Her two-tone bottle-blonde hair is history too. Fade to grey. Her feet are tucked up under her in her chair during the interview in an Amsterdam hotel, like some curmudgeonly, former sex goddess in thick white woolly socks and flat shoes that went out with the Cultural Revolution.
She looks more like Lauren Bacall than the mesmerising blonde Venus circa 1977 that I remember from my teenage years.
After about an hour, Debbie and I realise we are currently reading the same book: Woody Allen's Mere Anarchy. She mentions her favourite lines in the new tome by the sepulchral Jewish misery guts: " What I do know about physics is that to a man standing on the shore, time passes quicker than to a man on a boat - especially if the man on the boat is with his wife." Unlike the woman with the man on the boat, Ms Harry never married.
"Is this a proposal?" she asks, her ice-blue eyes lighting up in laughter. Asked why she never married, the one-time Playboy Bunny answers that she thought the concept was " appalling, actually. The contract was not my cup of tea. I was never tempted. I think I was asked a few times." Having children never tempted her either. "I never really had time. I was so busy doing Blondie. I couldn't imagine how anyone could tour and raise a family."
Deborah Ann Harry (born July 1, 1945, in Miami, Florida) is not a woman you meet every day. In Cathy Che's biography of Harry, Platinum Blonde, designer Michael Schmidt said: "Debbie is so smart she borders on genius level." She lives in the Manhattan apartment block on which Hitchcock based his classic Rear Window. She allegedly enjoys watching the people having sex. " I don't know if that's weird," she told the New York Times, "but it's a very sexy building."
She has never written an autobiography, and doesn't intend to. I've read that Kirsten Dunst says she has agreed to play Debbie in the film of her life. Debbie laughs at this. " Kirsten keeps saying this - so I guess she really wants to do it. She is obviously pitching herself for the role. There isn't even a screenplay and I would definitely be involved."
One thing we do know about her is that Deborah was in a relationship with Blondie band member Chris Stein for 11 years. It ended in 1985. He was, she says, the love of her life. " It is as simple as that. He has married several times since we were together and now he has two children. He is a little gent, a ladies' man," she beams.
But she is reticent about whether she is in a relationship at present. "If there is romance in my life at the moment," she says, "I am not going to tell you about it. Just because. Because I am not that kind of girl."
And what kind of girl are you - the Greta Garbo of New York city? "I wish!" she chuckles. "I have a real private life. I like it that way. I marvel at how people can live their lives in the papers."
She also knew (and worked with) Andy Warhol, who befriended her and became for a time her mentor in the early 1980s. The late pop-art icon did Debbie's portrait at that time - the potent image appeared on the cover of a seminal Phaidon book, Andy Warhol Portraits.
She says that Andy would have loved Paris Hilton. " Andy wasn't judgemental, publicly at least," she says. "I think he was one of the most open-minded men I ever met. As with a lot of controversial people, I think he was a complete genius."
Between 1973 and 1982 she and her band Blondie released moment after moment of pop genius - Heart of Glass, Hanging on the Telephone, Denise, The Tide is High.
"To look back too much is totally artistic death," she says. "People want to hear what they want to hear," she says wearily, as if she wants to forget the past.
But for fans, Blondie - Ms Harry dancing like a mighty Aphrodite in knee-high boots and purposefully laddered tights - were unforgettable in so many ways. " Blondie was a characterisation," she opines, before adding, "Now I'm better at what I do. I have a more organised vision of it. There isn't a label for the vision. I just try to communicate emotion and tell stories in music," she says.
Did you see Madonna and some of the other blonde sextresses that followed you as having copied you?
" Yeah, but there are two different ways to look at that, obviously: homage or rip-off? There were a few incidences of direct ... you know ... lifts and others are just flattering references," she laughs.
She remembers the coked-out excess (in the early Seventies Ms Harry kicked a fashionable drug habit) of nightclubs like Studio 54 in New York with Warhol, et al. She wishes in hindsight that she was more organised in propelling her career into megastardom.
Then she decides that it was fine just the way it was and in the end everything in the music business gets corrupted by Mammon anyway.
"Blondie started out with a uniqueness but as soon as it became commercial then it was a routine in a way. We couldn't really escape it. The demand for the repetition of that same product was ungodly in a way. But I think that's the problem with art and commerce really."
Raised Protestant - "Roman Catholic without the Pope", she laughs - Ms Harry says she always knew that the path of an artist was the one she would follow. She described her education growing up in North Jersey as "limited. It was a small industrial city, it was my ambition to get out. I didn't have dreams. I just wanted to be part of the bigger world, I suppose".
While there were lots of girls in New Jersey in the 1970s who just wanted to get married and pregnant, Deborah had no interest in that life - despite her mother's hopes. "My mother wanted me to marry and have two children and be a grandmother," she laughs.
I say that her mother must have been horrified when she became this punk temptress. "Completely horrified, yes," she laughs. "Worried. I don't think she could really understand it at all. She cautioned me a lot. She was concerned. She grew up in a wealthy family before the big crash of 1933. They lost everything. My grandfather had a bank. He kept putting his own money in the bank to keep it open and he also had a seat in the stock exchange. All his friends jumped out of windows and killed themselves. It was on my mother's side."
Debbie never once mentions that she was adopted as a three-month-old baby by Catherine and Richard Harry and that she never met her biological mother. Nor the fact she appeared to truly believe, at one stage, that Marilyn Monroe was her natural mother. She once said that seeing Marilyn Monroe as her real mother is a fantasy a lot of adopted girls shared.
"And not knowing where I came from is a great stimulant to the imagination, and it has always meant I don't take anything for granted."
And not taking anything for granted, she talks up Necessary Evil, her first solo album in 14 years. It has more than its fair share of songs about romantic love. "Love should be the big thing in our lives," she says, adding that the subject that concentrated her mind in that regard more than anything was "suicide bombers who supposedly do what they do for love".
She says she cannot understand the mindset behind suicide bombing. She thinks it is " stupidity and ignorance".
The song that stands out among all others is Deep End, about a leap of faith and "how people stay in their little conundrum of relationships rather than taking chances. I think people get settled."
Why did you choose never to be settled?
"I'm an artist," she says. "It is not my nature."
Debbie Harry's new album, Necessary Evil, is out on September 14 on Eleven Seven Music. The single Two Times Blue is out on September 7. More details on
www.deborahharry.com
That's great!!!
How terrifying that she escaped so narrowly. I never knew that story until now; it reminds me of a Chinese proverb, which states that wishing someone an interesting life can be akin to a curse... because what an interesting story.
(Thanks for reviving this thread!)
