times in my life I have had to outwit con artists and every time, except for one, I have managed to outsmart them.
I once lured a crooked producer to my house in Los Angeles on the pretext of giving him a guitar lesson. I made sure he arrived with the guitar that I had generously given him in exchange for all his supposed help — help that I soon discovered was completely worthless. The guy was a smart-talking fraud, and I had fallen easily for his promises and prevarications. Upon opening the garden gate, I grabbed the guitar from his hands and handed it quickly to my houseman, Dervin, who had been primed to dash into the house and slam the door shut.
“All those police men you see across the street are watching you, Lou!” I told him. “Leave immediately and never come back here!”
The policemen were merely guarding the home of my neighbour, Ozzy Osbourne, but my bravura worked like a charm and away he fled, never to be heard from again. Jack was amazed; he had been convinced there was no way I could possibly retrieve my guitar. Ah, the wily ways we women have to get back at the men who betray us!
Another con artist was an internationally renowned classical guitarist. Supposedly my friend, he charged me a fortune to purchase a collectable guitar for me in Germany. I later discovered he had paid less than half the amount he took from me. I knew he had pocketed the rest of my cash and was determined not to let him scam me as he no doubt had others.
Returning the guitar and retrieving the money required some clever play-acting on my part, several evidence-gathering calls to Europe, assisting him with an editing session for his new album at a local studio, offering to courier his master tapes to New York, and finally a friendly expedition with Jack to his new house in Encinitas under the pretext of possibly purchasing another guitar or two that I would need to test for a few days. Once we were inside, most fortuitously his roof started to to leak. The damage would possibly endanger his instruments, so I used my best blonde charm act and casually convinced him to entrust five of his most valuable guitars to me for safekeeping in my Beverly Hills guitar closet until his ceiling had been repaired.
Driving north on the San Diego freeway with the instruments we had just kidnapped, Jack and I felt triumphant! Confronting him the next day with incriminating evidence elicited crocodile tears and indignant rants that he would never do such a thing to me, whom he considered to be “ like a sister.” But by now I had in my possession several of his forged documents, and it was clear that his attempts to cover his tracks had failed. My husband started to enjoy the game, distasteful though it was, and faxed an anonymous note from a nearby Kinkos: “Fraud plus forgery plus perjury equals jail.” Knowing we had his guitars for ransom and finally realizing he had been caught red-handed, my former friend had no choice but to capitulate. The very next morning the money was returned to my lawyer’s office, where his guitars were handed over.
Now alone in Miami, I had to draw on all my resources to extricate myself from the tangled web that had been woven. This time I fabricated some wild astrological imaginings to back up my story, and fortune smiled down upon me again as Mr. New York fell for my creative scheme.
I made a phone call explaining why we needed to delay proceeding with our relationship: “Pluto is passing through Uranus with Mercury in retrograde this week, causing a harmful alignment with the moon in Capricorn, but complementing perfectly with Mars and Venus ten days from now.…”
It was all complete balderdash, but fortunately he bought my stalling tactic. This allowed me to retrieve the ten thousand–dollar deposit that was being held in escrow by his brother-in-law, a good guy who perhaps had sensed that something was amiss and kindly helped me out.
Several other characters were on the periphery of this unsavoury scenario … a seedy old French film director, a good-hearted wheeler-dealer Israeli realtor, and my astrologer-writer friend Suzanne White, who was sending me moral support from Buenos Aires. I did not dare confess to her the nonsensical astrology I had just invented until I was free from the dangerous mess that I had unintentionally helped to create.
Added to this mix of characters was a supposed girlfriend of mine who had helped me move house and with whom I had spent a few days in Grand Cayman. She astutely helped me negotiate my way out of the sticky penthouse deal, but over time she turned delusional. While staying as a welcomed guest in my condo, without my knowledge, she had copied my contact list from the computer that she had helped me set up. She then threatened to “destroy” me and proceeded to send emails filled with untruths to several of my friends and business associates. Later she claimed to have written my songs — a complete fabrication — forcing me to hire a lawyer to stop her destructive behaviour.
I realized sadly that some of the most distasteful experiences of my life had occurred in my tropical paradise of Miami, but I had also learned a valuable lesson there: never to get involved with people of questionable ethics, for it is inevitable that eventually you too will become contaminated by their bad energy.
• • •
Perhaps it was precisely those toxic energies that gave me another scare later the same year. A routine mammogram revealed a small area of calcification in my right breast and required a lumpectomy. Four years earlier I had tripped on a couple of uneven pavement stones in Brentwood and fallen flat on my guitar case while running to one of my focal dystonia hypnotherapy appointments, and I theorized that this trauma was the most likely cause. To my great relief, everything turned out to be benign.
My experience in the outpatient clinic of the hospital served as a wake-up call, though, to beware of hospitals! While the anesthetist was preparing me for the test, the tool that the doctor was using to insert a small metal marker broke in two, and while I lay face down on a cold slab with my breast hanging through a hole, the nurse and doctor started screaming at each other in Spanish. The doctor insisted the nurse run to find a new tool, and she retorted that the hospital had run out and they would have to make do and try to retrieve the marker.
The doctor apologized to me and indicated his preference that I now be given a general anesthetic as opposed to the planned local — the operation would be too painful without. I suspected that it was a ploy to bill the insurance company more, but I was in too uncomfortable a state to argue and submitted without a fight.
To date all my subsequent mammograms have been fine, and there was no residual scar from the procedure, but that experience in Miami gave me great empathy for all those unfortunate women of my generation whose results do not turn out so well. My dear friend Olivia Newton-John, who had her own well-publicized struggles with breast cancer, is now cancer-free, and admirably opened a cancer and wellness centre in Melbourne, Australia, for which she has personally raised millions.
• • •
Looking back now, I see that my life in Miami was enriched by so many varied experiences with so many different people: the opera’s staging of Aida; a dazzling concert by Paco de Lucia; a New Year’s Eve with my girlfriend Patricia at historic Vizcaya; a picnic with a wannabe suitor at Butterfly World, an evening he had arranged so that I could play with two baby tigers; occasional Sunday mornings spent at the Agape church; strolls around Fairchild Gardens with a doctor friend from Baltimore, lectures with my Italian astronomer girlfriend, Fiorelli Terzini; tea at the Biltmore with an amorous theatre producer; and dinner with fellow Torontonian Bob Ezrin, producer for the bands Chicago and Kiss and co-producer (with Michael Kamen) of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Life in Miami was filled with interesting experiences, but my heart still ached for that elusive soul mate. As much as I adored the Latin men I kept meeting, none came close to fulfilling that role. I chose to be alone with my guitar rather than with the wrong partner.
Over the Christmas holidays Jack passed through Miami en route to catch a cruise. We were still in touch, of course, and we decided to take a day trip together to Palm Beach, where we had lunch and discussed how our post-divorce lives were playing out. Neither of us had found love, and I suppose that after three years alone he might have been hoping I would change my mind and come back to the secure life he had provided me for fourteen mostly happy years. I felt very sad for him — sad that I had broken my marriage vows and abandoned our shared life, and sad that he was going on a cruise by himself. I prayed that his future wife would soon materialize.
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