My Last Addiction

About the Book

1 Call this an act of love. Call it my memorial to Lily Strang. Call it the liner notes that will never be printed to accompany the box set of her compact discs that will certainly be released after her death, after the vultures at Sony Records decide to capitalize on her demise. Death is the best career move you can make in the music industry. Just look at Elvis or Jim Morrison, both infi nitely bigger stars today than they would be alive, fat, disheveled, playing Vegas along with Wayne Newton. I once swore to Lily would she never burn out and now she never will. I know what will happen when that box set gets shipped, when the units, as we say in the Industry, hit the stores. The critics will start to reappraise Lily Strang. ROLLING STONE, which had a love-hate relationship with Lily from the start, will run a two-page spread of photographs, some unfl attering, some shot by Annie Leibovitz, along with one of their gushing eulogies that sound like they were written in marshmallow. The highbrow critics who turned on Lily after her fi rst album, the NEW YORK TIMES and THE VILLAGE VOICE, will declare her a blazing genius once she is safely dead. I know what the TIMES is going to say because a friend there once swiped Lily’s obituary for me. I assume the VOICE will be equally sanctimonious. But I can’t forgive the bastards who savaged her best work for years. They made Lily cry, and there’s no greater sin. Lawrence Richette 10 A lot of people wondered why Lily moved to London after her third album. She gave a lot of lying answers to the question, like saying she preferred English TV or Englishmen, when the simple truth was she was sick of feeling gang-raped every time she put out a record in America. She thought living in London would protect her from all that. In a way it did, because in London she met Nicky Mandrake and fell in love with him, and for a time the two of them lived in a yellow submarine. But eventually Lily had to record another album, which meant working with me, which meant that even if she recorded in London she had to tour in America, which meant facing the lions all over again. And she was scared. When I fi rst met Lily, she wasn’t scared of anything. The fi rst time I ever laid eyes on Lily Strang was a hot, airless July night outside Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia. I was waiting for David Bowie whose album I was assistant-producing. Bowie was late, very late, but stars always make you wait. One defi nition of a star is that they are people whose intolerable behavior you tolerate, in fact come to expect as routine. I was standing on the sidewalk smoking my fi fth cigarette of the hour when a tall redhead in a white sundress walked up to me. Even in my uncarnal mood I couldn’t help noticing how fi ne her fi gure was, her breasts, her lissome legs. “I saw your picture in ROLLING STONE,” she smiled. “You’re Tony Orfeo, aren’t you?” I admitted that I was. Her smile widened, making her look younger and more innocent. “You’re working with Bowie, aren’t you?” “Offi cially, Bowie isn’t even here.” “You can tell me. I can keep a secret.”

About the Author

Lawrence Richette was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, the Episcopal Academy, Yale College, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has published nonfiction in many newspapers and magazines, including PREMIERE, CHRISTOPHER STREET, MEN’S HEALTH, PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER where he served as Politics Editor, the ANGELIKA FILM VIEW, THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, THE DAILY NEWS and the WASHINGTON POST. Richette has written a column for the Rodale Press Internet web site and has had his plays produced professionally, notably his one-woman show about Georgia O’Keefe, “A Pure Desire”, which was performed on educational TV. PRIVATE SCREENINGS is his sixth novel to be published.