Face It

From the first time I set eyes on Marilyn, I thought she was just wonderful. On the silver screen, her lovely skin and platinum hair were luminescent and fantastic. I loved the fantasy of it. In the fifties, when I grew up. Marilyn was an enormous star, but there was such a double standard. The fact that she was such a hot number meant that many middle-class women looked down on her as a slut. And since the publicity machine behind her sold her as a sex idol, she wasn’t valued as a comedic actor or given credit for her talent. I never felt that way about her, obviously. I felt that Marilyn was also playing a character, the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body, and that there was a lot of smarts behind the act. My character in Blondie was partly a visual homage to Marilyn, and partly a statement about the good old double standard.

I wanted to be platinum blond. On our black-and-white television and at the theater where they screened technicolor movies, there was something about platinum hair that was so luminescent and exciting. In my time, Marilyn Monroe was the biggest platinum blond on the silver screen. She was so charismatic and the aura she cast was enormous. I identified with her strongly in ways I couldn’t easily articulate. As I grew up, the more I stood out physically in my family, the more I was drawn to people that I felt I related to in significant way. With Marilyn, I sensed a vulnerability and a particular kind of femaleness that I felt we shared. Marilyn struck me as someone who needed so much love. That was long before I discovered that Marilyn had been a foster child.

Coincidence: it's supposed to mean just these random, disconnected events that concur or collide. But coincidence is not that at all. It's the stuff that's meant to be. Things that are supposed to be drawn together, as if by some extra-earthly magnetic force. Things that connect and become woven and then shoot off to form previously unimagined combinations. Small changes that tumble into a fresh dynamic-as coincidence and chaos give birth to a new creation. Coincidence: the "divine intervener" that pushes us to make happen what was always supposed to happen...

he got his testosterone in a tizzy

Blondie into a highly recognizable rock band? Does a photograph steal your soul? Were the aboriginal people right? Are photographs part of some mystical image bank, a type of visual Akashic record? A source of forensic evidence to examine the hidden, darker secrets of our souls, perhaps? Now, I can tell you that I’ve had my picture taken thousands of times. That’s a lot of theft and a lot of forensics. Sometimes I read things into those pictures that no one else seems to see. Just a tiny glimpse of my soul maybe, a passing reflection on a piece of glass . . . If you were me, by now you might be wondering if you had any soul left at all. Well, I had one of those Kirlian photographs taken once at a new age fair—and there supposedly was my soul, my aura, staring back at me. Yes, maybe there is still some of my soul to go around.

I would just walk around, not looking for anything particular, looking for everything really, and ingesting and digesting it all. Art, music, theater, poetry, and the sense that everything was up for grabs, you just had to see what fit. I was desperate to live in New York and be an artist.

To this day, when the band separates at the airport and we all go our different ways, I still get that gut reaction. Separation. I hate parting with people and i hate goodbyes.

Coincidence...Coincidence came calling for me big-time in the early seventies. Coincidence: it's supposed to mean just these random, disconnected events that concur or collide. But coincidence is not that at all. It's the stuff that's meant to be.

For those times when I wanted to blank out parts of my life or when I was dealing with some depression, there was nothing better than heroin. Nothing.

It’s funny how the entertainment industry was so scared of hip-hop. Chris and I were so turned on by it. Chris was so buzzed that he talked to some people in the music industry about all these great bands. Every one of them told him that rap was a fad and it would soon go away.

We live in a disposable, transient-feeling world and usually after five years you go on to the next thing, maybe now even less than five years.