Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
40 years of a Blondie bombshell
POP ICON WHO SAYS SHE’S STILL JUST A NEW YORK PUNK
WITH her tousled blonde hair, gorgeous green eyes and perfect cheekbones, Debbie Harry was the ultimate punk pin-up girl.
But, incredible as it may seem to those now middle-aged Blondie fans who worshipped her back in the day, she believes she actually looked like a transsexual in her early career.
Looking back, at the age of 74, she says: “The Blondie character I created was sort of androgynous. More and more lately I’ve been thinking that I was probably portraying some kind of transsexual creature.”
Emerging from the New York punk scene as the face and voice of the band, she scored six No 1 UK hits and sold more than 40million records globally. And it’s 40 years this month since Blondie’s song Call Me topped the charts.
Debbie admits that back in the 70s she viewed her look as more of a “visual homage” to tragic film star Marilyn Monroe.
Her signature style has been recreated many times, and she revealed years later that one famous zebra-print dress from a 1978 poster was actually made from a pillow case.
But it wasn’t easy to be the face of a rock band with four, sometimes five, other members who rarely featured in media coverage. Debbie says: “People would review the way I looked instead of how our music sounded.
“I didn’t do Blondie to become famous for my looks. When I started out, rock music didn’t want girls to be anything but window-dressing.”
Her looks are still very much talked about today. In the picture, left, showing Debbie on stage last year, she looks astonishingly youthful for a woman in her mid-70s and she doesn’t hide the fact that she’s had cosmetic surgery.
“Getting older is hard on your looks,” she says in her bestselling autobiography, Face It.
“Like everybody else I have good days and bad days, and those ‘s***, I hope nobody sees me today’ days, where you look exactly the same from the outside, but you see yourself through different eyes.
“I’ve never hidden the fact I’ve had plastic surgery. I think it’s the same as having a flu shot – just another way of looking after yourself.”
Born Angela Trimble in Miami, Florida, in 1945, Debbie was adopted into the Harry family at three months old. She began bleaching her hair at 14 and in her 20s she was hanging out with early punk band the New York Dolls while experimenting with her own music.
In 1974, she formed a female trio called the Stilettos, and when guitarist Chris Stein joined they became a couple for the next 13 years, later forming Blondie together.
In their early days, she caused a stir by posing for a publicity photograph crawling out of an upside-down wrecked car that she and photographer Bob Gruen came across on the streets of New York. “It seemed really funny and glamorous to get a shot of me crawling from the wreckage,” she explains.
When their first hit single Denis propelled
Blondie into the celebrity stratosphere, Debbie was soon rubbing shoulders with stars like Iggy Pop and the late David Bowie. She quickly discovered Bowie’s habit of showing off his manhood.
Debbie says: “David’s size was notorious of course and he loved to pull it out with both men and women. It was so funny, adorable and sexy. One time, Chris walked into the room but the show was already over. Nothing to see. Which was kind of a relief.”
Debbie delved deep into the New York music scene and became an early champion of rap music, then just emerging from the streets, and tried it herself on the band’s hit single Rapture.
With a lifestyle that often burned the candle at both ends, she began looking for other ways to stay healthy, which led her to a bizarre alternative treatment. Finding an article in Vogue on frischzellentherapie ( fresh cell therapy) she checked herself in to a Swiss clinic for injections of cells from a sheep embryo.
She says: “There were doctors and nurses and a battery of blood tests and X-rays. Then came a series of injections with embryonic cells from a black sheep – why it had to be a black sheep I’ll never know.”
For a time, both she and Chris were serious heroin addicts. And even when he was seriously ill in hospital with an autoimmune disorder that threatened his life, Debbie would still head out to score the drug for them.
“I think that doctors and nurses knew that he was high all the time but cast a blind eye because it kept him relatively pain-free and mentally less tortured,” she says. “The heroin was a great consolation. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I was most certainly indulging too, staying as numb as possible.”
In the 1970s, the couple were attacked by a burglar who broke into their flat and raped Debbie at knifepoint. But she has always insisted she was more traumatised by their instruments being stolen. She says in her book: “I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape.”
She also says she escaped an abduction attempt by notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.
Despite the band’s worldwide sales, she lost most of her fortune thanks to bad management deals and tax bills. Debbie says: “Musicians are often notoriously shambolic at taking care of business, which leaves the window wide open for the wolves to come loping in. I guarantee, anything we could have done wrong business and management-wise, we did it.”
But she says she still feels lucky. With her memoir released at the end of last year and a series of In Conversation concerts lined up for April, she is still writing and creating.
She never married or had children but is godmother to Chris Stein’s daughters. And she still lives in New York.
“New York is my pulse,” she says. “New York is my heart. I’m still a New York punk.”
I think now I was probably portraying some kind of transsexual back then
DEBBIE REFLECTS ON HER ICONIC EARLY IMAGE