Cherry on Top: Flirty, Forty-Something, and Funny as F**k

Life’s a Gas

It was around midnight on a Tuesday and moonlight crept over Arleta, the quiet LA suburb I call home. These days, I sleep alone in my four-poster bed—unless you count Nupa, my ten-year-old Chihuahua. After years of sharing me with various male interlopers, Nupa was pleased to finally have me to herself. She lay on the bed, watching me as I gathered clothes from around my bedroom, a little snaggletooth protruding from her lower jaw. During quiet days at home like this one, I’d catch myself thinking about Josh, the musician sixteen years younger than myself with whom I’d spent the last five years of my life.

An ex-Mormon who worked in construction, Josh had a band whose goals, according to their social media pages, included waking up in the van covered in glitter in front of a church on Easter morning after a long night of swimming in Jack Daniel’s and getting some strange. Marriage material, if you’re me. My daughter, Taylar, who is an excellent judge of character, loathed Josh so much she sent him a bag of dirt for Christmas one year. Yes, Josh had more red flags than a Communist parade, but I was blinded by his long brown hair, lazy smile, and slender body, which took me back to a different time in my life. A time when the Sunset Strip still had a pulse. A time when life was a beautiful mess of music, love, and hairspray.

I stuffed my dirty laundry in the basket and stomped down the beige-carpeted stairs, scolding myself for missing Josh and swearing I would never again date anyone who is a fan of Mötley Crüe. In a Mötley fan’s mind, you see, sleeping with me takes them one step closer to being Tommy Lee, to whom I was engaged many moons ago. Well, guess what, you’ll never be Tommy Lee, I fumed. And if you were, I sure as hell wouldn’t date you.

Distracted by my thoughts, I misjudged a step. My slipper flew off my foot and I tumbled down the stairs, headfirst into the corner of a marble side table. Laundry went flying and there was a thud as I hit the floor, and for one terrifying moment, the whole world turned black. Slowly, I opened my eyes. Psychedelic globes bounced lazily about my field of vision like an old screensaver. Whimpering, I felt for my cell phone in the back pocket of my jeans and dialed my younger brother, Adam, who lived a few blocks away with his wife, Laura, and their baby, Ollie.

Adam, help, I whispered, as Nupa hopped down the stairs and gave me a look of concern.

When Adam arrived at my condo, he gasped; I looked like Rocky Balboa after twelve rounds with a meat grinder. He helped me into his car and drove me to the emergency room, urging me to stay awake, promising me that everything was going to be okay. Adam was my lifeline, my only family in Los Angeles, though I worried that he and his wife were growing weary of Lonely Aunt Bobbie visiting every day, clinging to their newborn infant with tears in her eyes for reasons no one quite understood.

At the hospital, the neurologist told me that fifty percent of people who hit their heads as hard as I did wind up in the morgue. Had the marble side table impacted my head just three millimeters to the left, it would have ruptured some vital vein whose name escapes me, resulting in instant death. I was lucky to be alive, even though my skull ached with indescribable pain and a bump the size of a softball began taking shape on my forehead.

Off topic, said the doctor, but…are you the ‘Cherry Pie’ girl?

I nodded, trying not to rattle my tenderized brain.

I thought so! he exclaimed. Wow, you really were an It Girl back then. I had the biggest crush on you!

I was an It Girl, once. Miss Bobbie Jean Brown, Southern pageant queen, runner-up in Miss Teen USA 1987, and for a minute, the hottest girl on the Sunset Strip. Helter skelter in a summer swelter, I was built for stonewashed jeans and stadium rock, with my long legs, sun-kissed hair, and a smile that lit up rooms. Secretly, I always wished I looked like one of those waifish brunettes, the kind you see on the Paris runway, but the reflection in the mirror confirmed that, in the words of Raymond Chandler, it was a blonde. And in LA, people want blondes. Casting agents want them. Bands want them. Men want them.

For fifteen years, during the peak of my good fortune, I had my pick of rich and famous lovers. When I met Rod Stewart at the Roxbury, he asked me what I wanted—I told him a cranberry vodka, and he laughed, No, I meant Ferrari, Porsche, or Jaguar? Strangers would approach me in clubs, offer me $100,000 to spend the night with them—and if only I hadn’t been so principled, I might have moved up the property ladder by now.

Romance came thick and fast. I spent several coked-up months with Rob from Milli Vanilli, enjoyed dance-floor flirtations with Prince, shared intimate moments with a Chippendale in a broom closet, brushed off overtures from O. J. Simpson, spent dreamy nights on ecstasy with Dave Navarro, shared kisses at the Chateau Marmont with Ethan Hawke, and experienced a titanic roll in the hay with Leonardo DiCaprio. We mustn’t forget the night I set Kevin Costner’s bedroom on fire. Literally. Nor the strange, chaotic year I spent engaged to my teen idol, Tommy Lee, drummer of the most notorious rock band on the Strip: Mötley Crüe.

But it was my marriage to blond, blue-eyed singer Jani Lane of the hair band Warrant that caused middle-aged neurologists to recognize me in hospitals. You see, in 1990, Jani handpicked me to star in the video for one of the biggest songs of the decade, Cherry Pie, which placed my all-American body on heavy rotation on MTV, VH1, and television screens all over the world.

Overnight, Jani and I became sweetheart darlings of rock ’n’ roll, on- and off-screen. We were the perfect match—I was the fun-loving, bubblegum-chewing girl of his melancholic dreams, the bombshell who could shock him into laughter. That’s the thing: beautiful blondes are everywhere in Hollywood, but try finding one who can make you laugh.

On The Howard Stern Show, Jani announced to the world that he was going to marry me. His public devotion and chivalry won me over, and after making love on the bullet train in Tokyo, I became pregnant with our baby girl, Taylar Jayne Lane. Four months later, on July 15, 1991, we married on the rooftop of the Wyndham Bel Age Hotel, the air heavy with the scent of five hundred pink roses and several dozen cans of Elnett. All our friends came to the wedding—Guns n’ Roses’s Duff McKagan, Def Leppard’s Rick Allen, and my dance-floor buddy, R&B singer Bobby Brown. Our wedding was a fitting climax to the perfect Sunset Strip fairytale—even though behind the scenes, the cracks in my relationship with Jani were already starting to show, and the Sunset Strip was inching closer and closer to implosion. It didn’t matter what the future held, though, because from that day on, my fate was sealed.

I would forever be the Cherry Pie Girl.

•••

When I came home from the hospital after my tumble down the stairs, I cried like a baby, and not just because I looked like the Elephant Man. It was a slap in the face, a reminder of how unraveled my life had become. I was that old Hollywood cliché—the small-town blonde, fallen from grace, her fifteen minutes long behind her. Hollywood had made me pay the price for the hubris of my youth. Over and over again I’d been knocked down, passed over, and dismissed as too old, too fat, too loud, too Bobbie. Blonde hair and a quick wit no longer opened doors for me. In the past five years alone my TV show had been canceled, my agent had dropped me, my body ached because of a traumatic car accident, and I’d endured the most humiliating breakup of my life with Josh, who, it turned out, was secretly sending high-resolution photographs of his dick to every girl in LA with a cell phone and data plan. On top of all this, wildfires were circling the city, temperatures were rising, the ice caps were melting, and so were my breast implants. Then I heard someone say rock ’n’ roll was over—bye, bye, Miss American Pie, might as well throw yourself down the stairs.

For weeks, the bruise bulged out of my head, protruding like a unicorn’s horn, a reminder of how alone I was in the world. What if my brother hadn’t been there to take me to the hospital? Who could I count on? Most of my immediate family lived far away in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I had no husband, no boyfriend. Yes, I had friends, but friends got busy. My home seemed unsafe, a place where bad things might happen. I trod carefully down the stairs, stopped doing laundry at midnight, and installed a Nest Cam. Mentally, I felt like a senior citizen with brittle bones and one foot in the grave even though I hadn’t even turned fifty.

Then came yet another blow, one that hit even harder than my fall: my brother told me he was moving. Not to another neighborhood, to another planet. Planet Minnesota. I understood the sane, pragmatic reasons why my sane, pragmatic brother was leaving Hollywood; it was expensive now, prohibitively so, and there was no way he could afford to buy or even rent a home fit for raising his family here. Adam, like so many others, was about to become an unwilling economic exile of Los Angeles, whose blushing sunsets have been marred by the shadows of wage stagnation, rent hikes, and social inequality. The American Dream was out of reach for Adam in this town, but it could still happen for him in the Midwest.

The day before they left, I promised to entertain my nephew while Adam and his wife supervised the movers who were loading their stuff into trucks. Watching them, I grew emotional. I couldn’t stand the thought that this might be the last time in months I’d get to hold my little nephew. I couldn’t stop the tears, so I asked my brother if I could go home for an hour to calm myself down.

Of course, Bobbie, he said.

I fell asleep crying in my bed and woke up two hours later to messages from Adam’s wife, Laura. They’d had to leave already and were checking in to a hotel by the airport. I begged for one last dinner together with them like we did every Sunday. But it was too late; Ollie was asleep. They promised to text me in the morning and arrange to meet so we could say goodbye in person. But in the end there was no time, and I didn’t get to hug my brother, or Laura, or worst of all, my nephew. I so wanted to tell him that his auntie loved him very much, that he brought joy to my world, that I felt alive playing with him, enjoying his perfect little soul. I didn’t get to say any of that.

After they left, I looked at myself in the mirror, at the dent in my forehead, a permanent reminder of the night I fell. That incident had felt like a fork in the road, yet months later, here I was, still lingering at the crossroads, unsure of which way to go. My brother’s departure felt like another prod from above. Why are you still in Los Angeles, Bobbie Brown? What are you doing here? What’s your purpose? Should I go back to Baton Rouge? Follow my brother to Minnesota? Should I just remain a widowed bride of Los Angeles until the day I die?

This city had once felt so full of promise to me. At twenty-one, I walked the Strip like it was my own personal catwalk. At forty-eight, with a dent in my head and enough baggage to fill a cross-country freight train, it seemed like maybe it was finally time to pack up my hair extensions and call it a day.

Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I hated what I saw: a fallen starlet whose life looked like one huge, long joke. I was a promising career littered with fumbled opportunities, a love life where each lapse of judgement was grander and more ridiculous than the last. It was bad punchline after bad punchline, and I’d had enough. You’re not a joke, Bobbie, you’re not a joke, I told my reflection firmly.

Then it hit me. I’d been seeing it all wrong. I am a joke. A really, really