1986–Present
“I think I’m pregnant.”
Anthony looked across the table at me, hesitated for a moment, and then stretched his mouth into a baby whine. “Waaahhhh!”
I wasn’t sure what that meant. A moment passed before he reached across the table and held my hand. “Are you sure, old bean?”
“I think so,” I said, suddenly feeling nervous about the whole thing. Anthony didn’t seem to be taking this too well, but then again it must have been a shock as we’d only been married two months. He smiled, squeezing my hand, and changed the subject.
I hadn’t planned on getting pregnant, but now that I was, I desperately wanted this child. I’d discovered soon enough that marriage wasn’t going to change me from the inside out. We were still having lots of fun, but the newness was fading a bit—so now I had a new fantasy, the hope that being a mother would change the direction of my life and help me become the person I’d always wanted to be. But who was that person? I was thirty-eight years old but still felt at times like a child. I did a pretty good job of convincing other people that I was self-assured and self-sufficient, but inside I felt uprooted and disconnected even from myself. I longed for stability, security, serenity. I yearned to belong to something, to feel part of something. I wanted to find a place that I could call home.
I stopped using alcohol and all other drugs, including cigarettes (I was so proud of myself), and Anthony actually joined me for a while. When he started using again, I continued to abstain. I felt an intense and overwhelming gratitude that I’d been able to get pregnant at my age, and I was not going to lose this child.
Telling Pattie was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. For years she had wanted to have a child, first with George and later with Eric. With Eric she went through two bouts of in vitro fertilization treatments and all the while Eric refused to cut down on his drinking and smoking, both of which can affect sperm count. When Eric told her about his infatuation with a beautiful Italian woman, Pattie was devastated, but when he told her his mistress was pregnant, she said she thought her heart would disintegrate. For twenty-one years she had tried to have a baby and now her husband was having a child with another woman. In private she told me she was “disgusted” with his behavior. That was the ugly beginning of the terrible end of their great love affair.
That was also the very first time I felt I had something that Pattie wanted desperately but couldn’t have. I didn’t like that feeling. For all the years we had been friends, we shared everything with each other, but I could not share this with her. I felt I had betrayed her somehow, and I didn’t know how to console her. I knew she was suffering, but as always she kept her feelings locked up deep inside her, showing only happiness for me and joy in my good fortune. That’s the kind of friend she’s always been.
On May 10, 1986, Anthony’s thirty-fourth birthday, and not quite eleven months from the first anniversary of our wedding day, our son was born. His hair was silky white and his eyes, barely open, were almost transparent blue. I looked in his eyes and felt a shock of recognition. He felt so—familiar.
I know you, I thought. I think I might have said the words out loud.
“Have you decided on a name?” the nurse asked.
“William Odo Alexander,” Anthony said, looking with pride at his son. Odo was a family name, dating all the way back to Odo William Leopold Russell, the first Baron Ampthill also known as Lord Odo Russell, born in 1829 and the first British ambassador to the German Empire. I listened as if in a dream, knowing that of all the magical moments in my life, William’s birth was the one true miracle.
We hired a nanny to help us out for the first month or so. When William cried in the middle of the night, she’d bundle him up and bring him to me. I felt guilty having someone else take care of him all the time, and I even found myself wishing that I could have my baby to myself. But after she was gone, I didn’t know what to do with him when he wouldn’t stop crying or refused to sleep. I felt so horribly inept.
I’ll never forget the first night after the nanny left. William woke up in the middle of the night and he was inconsolable. Anthony and I took turns walking with him in the upstairs hallways, back and forth, back and forth, both of us feeling completely helpless. How do you stop a baby from crying? I looked down at the infant in my arms, his face bright red, his tiny body rigid with frustration or hunger or whatever emotion he was feeling, and I realized I had no idea what to do with him. Within a few weeks we hired an au pair to help us out.
I loved Will with all my heart, but I was not the kind of mother I had dreamed of being. I knew that too well. I knew it when I slept in until noon and depended on the au pair to take care of my son. I knew it when I had hangovers that lasted three days and felt so sick in body and soul, so full of guilt and shame and self-loathing, that I could barely get out of bed. I knew it when Anthony and I would get into drunken shouting matches in the middle of the night. I knew it when the au pair would give me a sympathetic but almost fearful look when I finally made it downstairs the day after those awful fights, which had undoubtedly disturbed her sleep. I knew it when I held William with trembling hands and feared that I might drop him. I knew it when I looked in the mirror and saw a face that I didn’t recognize staring back at me.
I started drinking again three weeks after Will was born. I never really intended to quit forever, and Anthony wanted his drinking partner back. I also began using cocaine again and I’d wake up with the most excruciating migraine that would last for days. I didn’t want to let Anthony down by not partying with him, and yet I wanted to be there with my son. I felt so torn. I tried to quit on numerous occasions, but Anthony and our friends would say, “But, Chris, you’re much more fun when you’re drinking.” Those words kept me going for months.
When William was six weeks old we had our first real social outing together as a family. With our baby strapped into the child carrier in the backseat, Anthony and I chatted excitedly as we drove in our Mercedes station wagon to Ringo and Barbara’s house in the country. Ringo was one of Will’s godparents; he and Barbara visited us at the hospital right after William was born.
We spent the entire day and evening drinking and drugging and finally left the party around 8:00 p.m. The fog had rolled in, and we drove along the unfamiliar country roads to the motorway, unable to see more than a few feet in front of us. Frightened, I turned to look at William, this precious, beautiful little baby with his white hair and delicate features, sleeping soundly, oblivious to the fact that his life was in the hands of his drunk, cocaine-addled parents.
What the hell are we doing? I thought. I was almost forty years old and I knew that William would be my only child. What would I do, how would I live if anything ever happened to him? I looked over at Anthony, his hands clenching the wheel, his neck strained forward, and realized he was even drunker than I was. At that moment I realized that Anthony and I didn’t have a clue how to be parents.
Chris, you need to stop, I told myself for the millionth time. I even made a promise to myself, but I broke it the very next day.
One morning when William was about eighteen months old, I realized I was done. I couldn’t get out of bed. My head pounded, my stomach heaved, my insides felt twisted up, my hands shook. Memories of the night before flashed through my mind. Anthony and I had been partying and when we came home, we had another of our drunken fights. We yelled at each other, he pushed me, I pushed back, I started to cry, he kept yelling, we continued drinking, and finally we both passed out.
I forced myself to get up and walk to the study, where I stared at the phone for the longest time. I was just so desperately sick, so terribly ashamed, so completely helpless. I dialed Astrid’s number. She had been clean and sober for almost four years.
“Hi, it’s me,” I said in a weak, helpless voice. “Would you go to a meeting with me today?”
“I’ll meet you at the one in Chelsea, off the King’s Road,” Astrid said. That day, the first day of what is now twenty-one years of sobriety, marked the beginning of a long journey back home to myself.
I was powerless, however, to control Anthony’s drinking. Fearing for our marriage and our child, hoping to escape the heavy drinking and drugging going on all around us, I talked Anthony into moving to LA. He tried so hard to quit, and once he even stayed clean and sober for a month. But at the end of those long, difficult weeks, he got drunker than ever. “I’m celebrating my month of not drinking,” he said, trying to break the tension with laughter.
After a year we moved to Tucson because I wanted to be close to my family. Wherever we went, Anthony’s addiction followed. I could tell when he was going to get drunk before he did. I saw the look in his eyes, the energy beginning to build up, the mood change, and the distance beginning to form between us. And the music—always the music, blaring at all hours of the night. I had spent half my life loving music and now something that I had always looked to for solace and inspiration became a daily dread, almost an evil presence in my life. I began to prefer the sound of silence.
One morning, three years after we moved to Tucson, the truth hit me. I don’t have to do this anymore, I realized. Anthony and I separated and eventually divorced. I grieved for a long, long time. He was my best friend. We had a child. We were a family. But addiction tore us apart.
I went back to school, and over the next ten years earned a college degree and a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Those degrees are proudly displayed on my office wall, along with a framed photo that shows me, Ken Mansfield, Maureen, and Yoko sitting on the Savile Row roof, huddled up against that massive chimney with its four red chimney pipes. I think of that photo as a degree in and of itself—the official certification of my involvement with the Beatles in the years before they broke up. Framed photographs of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ringo, Bob Dylan, Pattie, and Maureen complete the picture. I think of them as my degrees of Good Luck, Great Friends, and Being in the Right Place at the Right Time. They are, in truth, my degrees of Life.
A few months ago, Will stopped by and we spent a few hours going through my photo albums and scrapbooks.
“Mom, it must have been cool to be in that crowd and know that they trusted you,” he said.
I looked at my son, now twenty-two years old, and almost the exact age I was when I flew to England and started working for Apple, his hair still blond, his easygoing personality so like mine.
“It was cool,” I said, smiling at the way he used the same word I loved to use so many years ago.
“Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, just to see what it was like,” he said. I smiled, remembering when he was seven years old and we were watching a black-and-white film. “Was life in black and white back then?” he asked.
He flipped through the pages of the scrapbook and stopped at a photo of him and Ringo sitting together at a table on the patio of a Tucson hotel. The photograph was taken in 1992, when Will was six years old.
“People can’t believe that he’s my godfather.” William had never known Ringo as a Beatle, of course. The first time he remembers seeing Ringo was on television, when Ringo was the station master on Shining Time Station and appeared to be just a few inches tall. When Ringo and Barbara visited us in Tucson, Will was terrified to see him as a normalsize person, and he hid behind my legs.
Will picked up another album, flipped through the pages, and pointed to a faded newspaper photograph of me and George. “When was that taken?” he asked.
“In 1969,” I said. “It’s from an article in a Dublin newspaper about how the Beatles’ popularity was slipping.”
Will laughed. “They’re still pretty popular,” he said.
I thought, then, about what George had said, more than three decades ago, as he stared out the window on a frosty December morning at Friar Park, just before he confessed to Ringo that he was in love with Maureen. “You’re the lucky one, Chris,” George said.
And I remembered something Ringo had said to me, just a few years ago, when a reporter kept questioning him about the past and what life was like being one of the Beatles. “Don’t they understand I’ve had a whole life since then?”
“You know, when I was young, I thought you were famous,” Will said.
“No, I was not famous,” I said, laughing softly at the idea.
He stared out the window for a moment, looking at the desert sunset with the mountains in the distance and the clouds all pink and gold crossing the sky.
“Why did you come back to Tucson, Mom?” he asked.
“To be with my family,” I said without even a moment’s hesitation. “To get back where I belonged.”