Breathing Out - Hardcover

Lipton, Peggy; Dalton, David; Dalton, Coco

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312324138 ISBN 13: 9780312324131

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2005

Synopsis

Peggy Lipton's overnight success as Julie Barnes on television's hit The Mod Squad made her an instant fashion icon and the "it" girl everyone-from Elvis to Paul McCartney-wanted to date. She was the original and ultimate California girl of the early seventies, complete with stick-straight hair, a laid-back style, and a red convertible. But Lipton was much more: smart and determined to not be just another leggy blonde, she struggled for a way to stay connected to her childhood roots, though her coming of age had not been an easy one. And when she fell in love with Quincy Jones, that wasn't easy, either: their biracial marriage made headlines and changed her life.

Lipton's passionate and complicated seventeen-year marriage to Jones plunged her into motherhood and also into periods of confusion and difficulty. Her struggle to keep moving forward in the world while maintaining a rich inner life informed many of her decisions as an adult. When Lipton's marriage to Jones ended, she returned to television, appearing in David Lynch's Twin Peaks as well as in The Vagina Monologues and other stage productions. But her most recent triumph has been her overcoming a surprising diagnosis of colon cancer in 2003.

Breathing Out is full of fresh stories of life with the pop culture icons of our times, but is also a much more thoughtful book about life in the limelight, work, motherhood, and marriage. It's a refreshing and real look at the life of an actress who became, in many senses, a woman of her times.

About this title

About the Author

Peggy Lipton has most recently appeared onstage in The Guys and The Vagina Monologues and on television in Alias and the WB's Popular. She lives in New York and Los Angeles. This is her first book.

David Dalton has written a number of books, including Piece of My Heart: A Portrait of Janis Joplin and Faithfull: An Autobiography. Coco Pekelis Dalton is the author of Everything I Know I Learned on Acid. The Daltons live in upstate New York.

Reviews

Lipton's story is clichéd, and her writing's clunky to boot. But that's no matter, because the main reason readers will pick this book up is for its pages on the sexual encounters Lipton—who played the hip chick of TV's undercover Mod Squad in the late 1960s and early '70s—had with Paul McCartney and Elvis. Born in 1947 and raised on Long Island, Lipton was a model at 15 and had started acting classes by the time her family moved to California a few years later. Hanging out in Hollywood, Lipton soon became a mod version of the "it" girl. After ridding herself of her virginity, her first goal was to seduce McCartney. That accomplished, she slept with a series of alcoholic or abusive married men, meanwhile experimenting with a variety of drugs. Her psychedelic adventures with actor Terence Stamp were quintessential Haight-Ashbury; she even had a fling with Elvis: "He was a great kisser," she allows, "but that was about it." In 1974, she married musician Quincy Jones, who didn't want her to work. A full-time mom until their marriage fell apart, Lipton then struggled with depression and debilitating fatigue, finding strength from her guru, Gurumayi, from acting work and from her two beloved daughters. There's a lot of '60s and '70s color—joints smoked in the bathroom, an interracial marriage, a trip to an Indian ashram—but it all boils down to an old-fashioned kiss-and-tell. 16 b&w photos. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

What do Paul McCartney, Sammy Davis Jr., and Elvis Presley have in common? Peggy Lipton had sex with all of them. Well, Elvis was a little too pumped with drugs to really close the deal. Other high (and low) lights for this nice blond Jewish girl? Stardom on The Mod Squad, marriage to Quincy Jones, motherhood, spiritual journeys, and a return to television after the marriage broke up. Lipton is a virtual Zelig, in the background whenever stars gather from the 1970s on. But in this surprisingly readable memoir, she and her cowriters have managed to make her various encounters into more than mere name-dropping, with each short chapter becoming a small slice of her life. Alternating between tough and neurotic postures, Lipton describes her childhood sexual abuse, her drug use, the experience of raising biracial children, and in an extremely abrupt ending, her recent bout with colon cancer. Many readers will not have thought about Lipton for years, yet her story holds our attention both for the life it chronicles and the changing times it encompasses. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Breathing Out

Childhood

1.

Changeling

In folklore, a child who is secretly substituted for another by fairies.

As a child I would often make myself lie absolutely still before falling asleep. Once there, fantasy would overtake me. It was a world that I alone owned, a place I had dominion over. I chose the thoughts and the desires. I played my own game and always came out the winner. No one and nothing could rein me in.

In the way that changelings know, I always sensed I didn't quite belong. I knew I had to find others like me--the magical helpers who would show me how to get to the other side, although I didn't know exactly what it was or how to get there. The burning desire to be free of the small-town life never left me for long, and I stoked its fire by reading poetry and tawdry novels, going to movies and Broadway plays, and listening to all kinds of music. These were my doors to the other side. But I was stuckon the wrong side of the looking glass, waiting for that Alice in Wonderland hatch to suddenly appear. One tumble could, and would, send me into the netherworld of my dreams.

In that enchanted space before falling asleep, I sometimes saw myself as the actress everyone was talking about. Or I was the possessed journalist hunkered down at her typewriter, capturing the latest big news story. At other times I imagined myself a poet like Sylvia Plath, with every nerve in my body alive and aching to tell my strange and haunted tale. I read The Bell Jar at fifteen as I was embarking on my career, worried that I had fallen into it, and that if I wasn't careful and vigilant and in some way anchored to the outside world, I could slip over the edge into a dark abyss.

I kissed and hugged my pillow nightly. It became the boy or man I wanted to love me. I imagined all my embraces being returned. Much of it was a blur of longing and I would fall asleep, blissful or sad. When I was a young teen, my sexual fantasies ran rampant. I began having these fantasies during the day at school, or at home watching TV, or spending the afternoon listening to Johnny Mathis or John Coltrane. I had yet to experience love. I still had never touched myself, not even my small, budding breasts. Oh, but the mind was having wild sex all the time: hot visions of prolonged and languorous kissing sessions and pledges of love--to Dion and all the Belmonts, James Dean, and Warren Beatty. I could wrap my long, skinny arms around them all. Spin the bottle, so popular with pre-teens, could send me into a frenzy--if I got lucky enough to get invited to one of "those" parties.

One night I was invited to a thirteen-year-old's basement party. Parents redid the basements of their suburban homes in the 1950s as recreation rooms. Kids had their own friends over to play the forty-fives in their ever-increasing record collections on a jukebox or Victrola, drink Coca-Cola, and have make-out sessions. Moms with their pageboy hairdos, dressed in billowing cocktail dresses, would swirl into the underground adolescent Mecca with a cocktail in hand to check us out. We would dance or huddle in corners, eating Wise potato chips and giggling over which boys we liked.

At one of these spin-the-bottle parties I wore a beautiful blue mohairturtleneck I had painstakingly picked out. I often got hand-me-down clothes from a friend of my mother's--all items her daughter had outgrown: checkered shirtwaist dresses, full skirts, Peter-Pan collared blouses, and sweaters. That night I chose carefully from my newly obtained wardrobe, applying blue eye shadow to match the sweater. Quite unceremoniously, during Frankie Lymon's "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," I was told by a nasty, nasal little girl from across the street, "You have body odor." Embarrassed, I surreptitiously smelled my armpits all night long.

That year at summer camp I had my first kiss on a hayride with Bobby Leon. It was a romantic, picture-perfect setting. I remember thinking: "This is it! This is what I've waited for: The beginning of life. And I'm doing it! I'm actually doing it!" He gave me a sloppy wet kiss, then pulled away. Suddenly I was an observer, oddly outside of the situation, knowing I didn't measure up: my breasts, body odor, and, by now, braces and acne.

At fifteen I fell for Allan the heartbreaker. He was twenty and engaged to a beautiful high school senior. Allan lived on what people in the Five Towns agreed was the wrong side of the tracks. This only added to his allure. I went to the Town Diner on Central Avenue looking for him, then to Juniors Diner in Hewlett, in hopes of a sighting. He drove a red Chevy. I sat at the windows of these diners anticipating that any minute he would turn the corner in his convertible--hopefully without his girlfriend. I knew he was too much of a catch for me. After all, I was young and not very popular. I felt at any moment I would be crushed. But my passion ran strong as I plotted for months for a way to get him to notice me.

Finally, I got up the nerve to invite him out under the ruse of a triple date. His two best friends with my two best friends. It was a very good plan. We went to Coney Island and rode the Cyclone rollercoaster together on a summer night in seedy Brooklyn. We picked at sticky pink cotton candy and chased it down with Nathan's hotdogs. Between the food and the ride I got sick to my stomach. I was caught in a valiant struggle: trying to appear grown up and sophisticated, while not revealing that at any moment I might barf. But it wasn't just the junk I had piled in that night. My equilibrium was teetering and panic was setting in by the time he walked me to my door and thanked me.

"Good night, Peg," he whispered and gave me a little kiss on the cheek. It was all over before it even began. My first love, and not even reciprocated. There was absolutely nothing I could do to win his love. I cried and cried and cried and looked in the mirror constantly to see what was wrong with me. Well, for one thing, I wasn't Nancy, his beautiful teen-queen fiancée. In the mirror I saw only my awkwardness.

BREATHING OUT. Copyright © 2005 by Peggy Lipton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312324138
• ISBN 13: 9780312324131
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320