26th April 2014
‘SOME DAYS I LOOK AT MYSELF AND THINK, DON’T LOOK, GIVE IT UP’
Debbie Harry – pop star, heroin user, peroxide blonde – has spent a lifetime being judged on her appearance. Now 68, she has to ‘make sure there’s something else apart from the looks’. By William Leith
PORTRAIT: Greta Ilieva
STYLING: Jane Taylor-Hayhurst
She’s not in a good mood. She shakes my hand with her manicured hand. Her hair is blonde at the front, with a lot of dark roots and whole hanks of dark hair at the back. This is how she likes it – it tells you that she’s a blonde bombshell, but also not exactly a blonde bombshell. She’s showing signs of age, but her face, with the skin stretched tight over her angular cheekbones, still looks dramatic, still beautiful. The smile, when it happens, is really quite something. But behind the pouting lips, the fetching overbite and the dainty nose, she seems unhappy. “It’s amazing how quickly people forget,” she says. “You can have your anonymity back again… You have to try harder to be famous these days.”
That was 1987. We were in a suite at the Savoy hotel. I could see that Debbie Harry was in a bad place, but I had no idea quite how bad. After a few years at the top, her band, Blondie, had fallen apart. Contractual issues had left them practically broke. Chris Stein, her lover, life partner and bandmate, had been seriously ill with pemphigus, a rare autoimmune disease. Now that he was recovering, their relationship, by far the most important in her life, had hit the rocks.
Harry and Stein were splitting up. She’d started to take heroin again. She’d quit before, and now she was trying to quit again. She was 41. She had no children. Having been adopted herself, she knew she would soon have to make a big, scary decision – whether or not to find out who her real parents were – before it was too late. On top 
of all that, the only thing people wanted to talk about was how beautiful she was – or, worse, how she wasn’t quite as beautiful as she had been. Meanwhile, Madonna was riding high. Lady Gaga was just approaching her first birthday.
What I saw, sitting on that sofa, looking at her flat, mistrustful eyes, was that Debbie Harry’s career seemed to be evaporating fast. Her fame was dying. How does that make you feel, I asked. “I feel like a disposable lighter.”
Twenty-seven years later, we meet again. This time, checking her out, I’m aware that I shouldn’t be judging her on her looks, that, for good or ill, she’s spent a lifetime being judged on her looks. She sits down. She has the same mistrustful eyes. Blondie have just got back together again, for the fourth – or is it fifth? – time. There’s a new album, Ghosts of Download. Great title. It’s dreamy and experimental. Rather good, I think. Not the scratchy punk-pop of Blondie’s first incarnation, or that pulsating TK Disco thing they did for a while, overlaid with Harry’s nasal, and somehow perfect, voice that got them big hits. Now, these new tracks…
But really, I know you want to know what she looks like. Well, she’s 68. She’s had work done (“getting rid of sags” is how she has put it). She looks somehow otherworldly. But that’s how she looked in 1987, up close. With photogenic people, it’s the photographs that look real. I sit opposite her, fiddling with my recorder. Her nerves make me nervous. She’s wearing a floaty blouse and fashiony brothel-creeper shoes.
We make small talk. “I’m all prettied up,” she says. I talk about our last meeting when Stein came into the room, blurted out lots of interesting stuff and rushed out again. “Oh, that’s Chris,” says Harry. He’d seemed manic and talked about a man shooting himself on camera and about bodies in news footage. Then he put a scarf on, kissed Harry on the cheek, and disappeared. “See ya, honey,” he said. This was the time when, they said later their relationship was becoming less sexual.
Together they reformed Blondie in 1996, and have been in a working relationship ever since. They are, Harry has said, “simpatico”. Stein, 63, is now married with two daughters; Harry is single and childless.
When she was 4, her parents, Catherine and Richard Harry, told her she was adopted, which meant that there was always something for the young Harry to wonder about. For a time, in her teens, she fantasised that she was the lost daughter of Marilyn Monroe.
“They explained it to me in a really nice way,” says Harry. “It made me feel quite special somehow. I sometimes attribute my, uh, adventurous nature to that. I’m the kind of person who’s looking. I have an open mind about things. It didn’t present me with any borders, like I’m just like my mother and I’m going to be like her. I always felt like I really was a different person, and I didn’t feel that was the most comfortable place for me to be.”
“That” – her parents’ world – was a suburban house in Hawthorne, New Jersey. Respectable, safe, careful, not 
quite poor. Richard was a salesman of woven labels. He caught the train every morning. Catherine was a housewife. She was conventional, always trying to get her daughter to wear modest clothes and subscribe to her suburban ideal.
“That was what she knew,” says Harry. “She thought it was safe.” Catherine wanted Harry to find a man, settle down, have a family. Harry wanted to wear black. She liked looking “tough”. She was rebellious, an early adopter of sex, had lots of flings. She wanted to be a beatnik, an identity she has, I think, never stopped striving for.
Born in 1945, just four years younger than Bob Dylan, she wanted to join the family of refuseniks that was forming all over America, particularly in New York. “The dream was to be a performer,” she says. “An artist of some sort. Basically, what I wanted was to be a part of… to lead an artistic life. I didn’t want to stay in a small town.”
She didn’t. After high school, Harry went to Centenary College, a small liberal arts school in Hackettstown, New Jersey, then headed for New York after she graduated. She was 20. Now, she thought, she had a chance to hit the folk scene, to find her creative self, maybe as a painter or a singer. And it might have worked. But it didn’t. It turned into a disaster.
I ask her about that time. “I guess it was pretty… free,” she says, taking her time over the answer. “I had a lot of jobs. Getting my s*** together, as it were. I lived in the East Village. I had a nice little apartment, $75 a month. I managed to pay the rent, hung out with my friends, went to see bands, had boyfriends.” She was in a folk group called the Wind in the Willows – 23 years old, long brown hair, centre parting, kaftan. It was 1968.
Harry went to Woodstock. She also worked as a waitress in Max’s Kansas City, where a lot of creative types washed up, including artists Robert Rauschenberg, Willem De Kooning and Andy Warhol, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, poet Allen Ginsberg, novelist William Burroughs, musician Lou Reed and a very camp band called the New York Dolls, whose lead singer, David Johansen, was Harry’s boyfriend. But oh, the drugs! “Well, the whole period was very druggy,” she says. “I think the Sixties were very druggy, don’t you?”
I was too young, I say.
“Well, I’m sure that, historically, you’re aware of that,” she says.
Different from now?
“Yes. Primarily because nobody really knew exactly how toxic these drugs were. And how dangerous they were. I don’t even know if people really understood about alcoholism, what addictions were.”
Was she addicted?
“I think I had an addiction, but I don’t think I had a major addiction.”
This was heroin?
“You name it. Drugs were social. So there you go; I was a social person. I guess I was a part of that world. I don’t know. Um. I don’t know. I never really had enough money to become seriously addicted. I mean, we just lost a fantastic actor [Philip Seymour Hoffman] to heroin. So tragic. What a brilliant guy. I had no idea. No idea. Now, see, that’s an addiction. I was never shooting up then.”
Did you never shoot up at all?
“No, no. I mean, I have shot up. But not then. Not back then.”
We enter a conversational cue-de-sac. I try to work out if she was shooting up when I interviewed her in 1987, and she tries to change the subject. “Why is it so important?” she asks. Then she says that, during the Blondie period, she wasn’t doing drugs. “I tried to do cocaine, and it really made me sick. I hated it. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t smoke pot because it made me paranoid and I’d forget all the lyrics. I was pathetic. I was a pathetic, uninteresting rock’n’roll person. You’re expected to run rampant and be crazy. And I think that my crazy periods were really nothing to do with my career.”
Back to 1969, the first crazy period. Harry did drugs. She went to Woodstock. She did drugs. She worked as a bunny girl at the Playboy mansion. She did drugs. Then she went back to her parents’ house in the suburbs to clean up. Months later, she headed back to New York, where she sang in a not very successful girl band called the Stilettos. Still she pressed on, beyond her mid-twenties into her late twenties.
One night, a slightly nerdy Jewish guy with long hair and eye make-up turned up to see her band. This was Chris Stein. The son of two political activists from Brooklyn, he really was a beatnik. They became friends, then lovers. They formed a band, Angel and the Snake. Then they formed another band, which they called Blondie, because guys used to shout, “Hey, Blondie!” at Harry in the street.
Blondie, the band, weren’t taken seriously at first. Then they had some hit in the late Seventies, and a few mega-hits in the early Eighties. It was Harry and Stein, drummer Clem Burke and usually two other guys who kept changing. There was a lot of tension in the band, because everybody wanted to be a serious musician, but the world at large was only interested in Harry.
From the beginning, it was about Harry, and how gorgeous she was. Stein took a publicity shot of her in 1976 for Punk magazine. She was “Punkmate of the month”. She was naked apart from a guitar. That was the start. She was always at the front. It was always about her face – in the magazines, on the album covers. Andy Warhol made one of his famous screen prints of Harry’s face. “Certainly,” she has said, “50 per cent of my success is based on my looks. Maybe more.”
Of course, there’s the attitude. This was specific and unique to the times. She was beautiful, but not girlie, like lots of female singers. But she wasn’t mannish either, like, say, Patti Smith. Maybe, as some people have said, she “ironised” or even “deconstructed” the concept of glamorous blonde singer. Or maybe…
As I’m thinking this, something happens, and it’s something I remember from all those years ago. Her lips part, she bares her teeth, her face lights up, the years fall away. It’s an awesome smile, not far from the fierce look you see her doing in videos, at her height, the expressions in her eyes slightly zonked; a smile that says, “I’m definitely not a victim.” So yes, it was the attitude. But what made people buy into that attitude – and buy 40 million albums – was, on some level, the looks.
“Some days,” she says now, “I look at myself and think, ‘Huh, don’t look, don’t look, give it up.’ As I get older, I sort of think, ‘Oh God, you know, you’ve been relying on your looks now for a while. And you have to make sure there’s something else.'”
Did she rely on her looks?
“I think to some degree, sure, because it’s part of showbiz. It’s part of what I do. Obviously, I use what I’ve got.”
I take her back to the scene, in New York, and the bands that came out of lower Manhattan in the mid-Seventies, the American New Wave. She was the beautiful one; some people didn’t like it at first, but there it was. You really stood out, I say.
“I thought Johnny Thunders was great looking. And Richard Hell. David Byrne.”
Well, sort of.
Looking like she does is, she says, “very advantageous. But sometimes it can be a detriment. I think down through history, when women were considered property, beauty was a commodity. Men are judged on power. And women are usually discriminated against in the area of having any brains at all.”
In 1987, she said, “At my age, it’s more practical to be… diversified.” She was trying to break into acting. She’d had a part in an episode of a TV show called Tales from the Dark Side, and another one called Crime Story. “I play a bimbette,” she said. She had high hopes. Later, she was in John Waters’ Hairspray, and played a waitress in James Mangold’s excellent indie movie Heavy. Other stuff, too. She’s not bad. But her acting career never quite took off; there are not many supporting roles for beautiful women.
She never found her birth parents in the end, but she did try. “I found out a small bit of information,” she says. “I don’t know how much of it is credible. Today, it’s much better. You get to know exactly who your parents were, what they were like, medical history. After a certain point, you have to let it go. What’s the point?
“I looked into reaching out to my mother, but it didn’t work out. It wasn’t possible.”
She found out that her biological father had died. Which must have been a shock, I say. Harry says it wasn’t. She hadn’t known him. She can be very frank.
“It was like hearing that, you know, you read an obituary in a paper of some person and you say, ‘Oh well.’ You know. It’s just like that. A name. And I didn’t even have a name.”
Thinking about this, she says, “I think there was a physical cloud left when I was parted from my mother. I was with her for three months, something like that. So I think that, as an infant, that must have been very traumatic. And I think that I’ve dealt with that. I think that there was some kind of core thing that was in my mind that I, as a child, you can’t articulate any of this. And it took a while for me to really sort of get to it.”
Did she never want children herself? “I don’t know what the term for it is, but I don’t think I ever really had the yearning that a lot of women have to have children. I think I might have been a good mother. But I might have been a terrible mother, too.”
And now she must carry on with what she does: making records, performing Ghosts of Download, and all the old hits – Heart of Glass, Atomic, Call Me – enacting the big smile, the bared teeth, being the woman who paved the way for Madonna and Lady Gaga, standing still while people bounce light off her cheekbones. I tell her I’ll see her in another 27 years. I’ll be getting on by then, I say.
“And I’ll be dead,” she says.
Blondie’s double album, Blondie 4(0) Ever, which includes their greatest hits and the new album Ghost of Download, is release on May 12.
