Women, Rock Stars and Obsession: A True Story

When I was 16, I began working as a rock-music journalist. My cousin worked for a big music promoter in San Francisco, a man who had a monopoly on the music business in Northern California -- a most lucrative location. She obtained my backstage entrance to concerts and private parties, and watched over me so I never became personally immersed in this world, as so many other girls my age attempted to do. But I never felt the pull of "fandom."

I knew a lot of groupies, and girls who hung out with rock people in order to be close to the stars, but contrary to popular opinion, most weren't 'obsessed' with the objects of their desire. I was involved in the rock music scene for over ten years, and the most extreme and pathetic examples of obsessive behavior I've ever seen were in grown women -- two of them over forty years of age and one my dear friend and business partner, who nearly destroyed both of us through her determination to have one particular star...a man she had never met.

Having a good time has nothing to do with obsession. Obsession is a lonely emotion, fostered in private and often hidden. It is fed by an intrusive media that makes people appear larger than life, and far larger than they are. A media that feeds the notion of ideal love and the ideal love partner. This isn't a new concept -- Dante was obsessed with Beatrice, a woman he had never known. But it is much easier in this world of stars and their hangers-on for a woman to believe she is the exception, the one he could love -- if only he would look her way, even once. I was seventeen when I first came across a legitimate case of obsessive love.

Murielle* was in her mid-thirties in 1977, the assistant of an internationally famous British rock star. She went everywhere with him, and many people said (his ex-wife included) that she had broken up his marriage. She was universally disliked, but even a casual observer such as myself could see that she was madly in love with Darrell*, her boss.

When I went to London to live in 1986, Murielle was still Darrell's assistant. She had surrounded him with an entourage that fed her fantasy, and allowed her to direct his life. She now lived with him in a chateau near Gstaad, Switzerland, a Central Park flat in Manhattan and a house in St. John's Wood, a trendy section of London. Darrell denied that they had anything other than a platonic relationship, and said they had never been lovers.

My own interaction with the two of them, given the age difference, wasn't what great, but while I was living in London Darrell became interested in optioning a film script I had written. I was still confused about their relationship -- when I first Darrell I was seventeen, and though they would surely marry one day. Now, nine years later, it didn't seem likely. Darrell was still as promiscuous as ever, and the word on the London club scene was that Murielle was one of the few women who had crossed the rock star's path he hadn't taken as a lover. He knew Murielle was in love with him -- I had known that in 1977, even after seeing them together only a few times. It was clear what Darrell got out of the relationship, but what could Murielle possibly gain? Being close to the man she loved, but at what cost?

In 1992 Darrell remarried, an ex-Supermodel considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. Ebony is about six years younger than Darrell, and they seem to be a very happy couple. I wonder, sometimes, what happened to Murielle, who gave up so many years of her life to be near him.

Murielle had the dubious pleasure of being near Darrell for fifteen years, but most women obsessed with rock stars never meet them; if they do, they are quickly forgotten by men who have their own obsession -- themselves. No one chooses to be obsessed, or to demonstrate obsessive behavior. And in my experience, the person who suffers most is the one under the obsession, despite media portrayals such as Fatal Obsession.

When I met Margaret* in 1979, she was working for Winterland Productions in San Francisco -- part of rock music entrepreneur Bill Graham's entertainment empire. She was the coordinator of the Ted Peterson* fan club. I never discovered how Margaret had gotten the job -- I suspected Ted arranged it for her himself. She was hardly a typical example of obsessive love, but love Ted Peterson she did -- to the detriment of her life and that of her two children. She had the largest collection of memorabilia in the world -- memorabilia of Ted and his band; and she had achieved notoriety by being photographed with him everywhere and giving interviews about him. If that doesn't sound so unusual to you, all this occurred when Margaret was forty-eight years old, the mother of four children (two living with her at the time, two grown and married), and grandmother of two. Ted Peterson was twenty-six, and from what I've read about their relationship, he seemed to regard the whole thing as a joke. When he was tired of the joke, however, Margaret was fired from Winterland Productions, and ordered by Ted's manager to leave the singer alone -- he even obtained a court order to make her do so.

Margaret continued to run Ted's fan club, using her own money and dues from the members. Eventually, she sold her collection of memorabilia on MTV and moved to Oregon with her two school-aged children. But when I saw her last, in 1980, she was still in love with Ted Peterson. It wasn't his fault, she insisted, that she had been ousted from his life. It was the manipulations and machinations of his evil management. He probably knew nothing about it...I'd heard that story before, and hearing it again in nearly the same words made a shiver run down my spine.

In 1986 I was too busy and excited over the prospect of moving to London to notice that Christine, the photographer who was going with me, had become fixated on Marc Hasler*, the lead singer of a Norwegian rock group about whom we had the chance to write a biography. The group had taken up permanent residence in London, and looked as if they were going to be big stars. Christine began to have strange dreams about Marc and his girlfriend, that turned out to be real indicators of future events. She was convinced that she and Hasler were soul-mates, and had been in contact on the astral plane. I had seen enough cases of obsessive love by this time that I should have realized she was indulging in a dangerous fantasy.

After we arrived in London in June of 1986, our subject group's popularity began to plummet. I had relocated to write three books for a British publisher, Columbus/Harrap, the first of which was my retrospective on punk and new wave music, Punk Retro. VALHALLA's* second album was nowhere near as successful as their first had been, and my British agent and publisher balked at going ahead with their biography. For the last six months of 1986 I tried desperately in every way possible to put Marc Hasler together with Christine. This proved to be an impossible task, one I was never able to accomplish.

We later learned that Christine did have a high degree of psychic ability, but it was as if her obsession was reaching Hasler somehow, and warning him away. We would miss him by hours, sometimes minutes -- and the one time she came face to face with him, even though he stared at her as if he knew her, Christine was unable to summon the courage to speak to him.

When I returned to California for a visit during the summer of 1987, everything fell apart in Christine's world. Marc Hasler announced his engagement to a Finnish model, and Christine moved to West Hampstead, entering the strange underworld that her friend Ned* inhabited. A member of a street gang, Ned was unable to hold a legitimate job because he had a criminal record -- he had been convicted, at the age of sixteen, of credit-card fraud. He survived by dealing cocaine and stealing, most car stereos and computer equipment. During my absence Christine worked as a call-girl for an escort service in north London. At the same time she was telling people she met that she was Marc Hasler's girlfriend (his engagement to the model had been short-lived) including one of her clients at the escort service -- at top male model who happened to be a friend of Hasler's. She was still convinced that, one day, she would meet her Norwegian prince charming -- but by this time I realized he had already heard a lot about her, and none of it good.

Margaret moved to Oregon, but what happened to Murielle and Christine? No word of Murielle after Darrell's marriage to Ebony, but Christine married Ned. He had no job, and until she became pregnant with their first child, she worked as a secretary during the day and a barmaid at night to support them. She had her first baby in 1988, and in the summer of 1990 became pregnant again. In September, after dropping acid, Ned kicked her in the stomach in an attempt to force a miscarriage. Christine escaped with her little boy, and returned to California. She gave birth to a girl, and lives with her parents; her mother cares for her children while she answers telephones for a telemarketing service. She never met Marc Hasler.

You may regard the above stories as extreme, and you would be correct -- to a certain extent. Not only is obsessive behavior in women much more common than anyone realizes, it exists in nearly every sphere of our society. This leaves me with a decidedly cold, apprehensive feeling. It means that hundreds (thousands?) of women who have everything going for them are very likely pining away for the love of men who are, for the most part, shallow, selfish and spoiled; and will very likely marry a woman in the same mold. Ever wonder why so many rock stars marry models? Because they're the perfect media machine, generating attention every way they turn, like a juggernaut -- a pop Barbie and Ken for our narcissistic society. So ladies, don't be sucked-in by the prospect of glamour and physical perfection. Take it from someone who has seen a thousand idols with feet of clay...the reality isn't worth the effort. In fact, it isn't even a reality...