It reminded me of being a kid, maybe six or seven—I had gotten really into collecting those little Matchbox cars. I was obsessed with them. But my mom didn’t have enough money to get us very many. So I’d search for them on the sidewalk, in case any kid lost one. Found a few that way. And then when I was playing with other boys in the neighborhood, sometimes I’d palm one or two of theirs. A few times, I outright stole them from the store. My mom found my stash and sat me down and said, “How come you can’t just be happy playing with a few cars like everybody else?”
I never did have an answer for that.
It’s just not my way.
That day at the hospital, I remember looking at the lobby door and seeing this man coming outside wheeling a lady with a baby. I looked at him and…he just seemed like a man I didn’t know how to be.
I just kept thinking about walking into the hospital and looking at my kid and knowing that I was the shit deal she got.
[Chokes up] It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with [her]. I wanted to be with [her] so bad. You have no idea how bad. I just…I didn’t want my girl to have to meet me.
I didn’t want…that early into her life, I didn’t want my kid to have to look up and see this man, this drunken, strung-out, piece of shit and think, This is my dad?
That’s how I felt. I was embarrassed to be seen by my baby.
So I ran away. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the truth, I went to rehab to avoid meeting my own daughter.
CAMILA: My mom said, “Honey, I hope you know what you’re doing.” And I think I yelled at her, but inside I was thinking, I hope I do, too.
You know, I’ve thought about this for a long time. Decades. And here is what it comes down to. Here is why I did what I did.
It didn’t seem right to me that his weakest self got to decide how my life was going to turn out, what my family was going to look like.
I got to decide that. And what I wanted was a life—a family, a beautiful marriage, a home—with him. With the man I knew he truly was. And I was going to get it, hell or high water.
* * *
—
Billy entered rehab in the winter of 1974. The Six canceled the few remaining dates on the rest of their tour.
The other band members took some time off. Warren bought a boat and docked it off the shore in Marina del Rey. Eddie, Graham, and Karen stayed in the Topanga Canyon house, while Pete temporarily moved to the East Coast, to be with his girlfriend, Jenny Manes. Camila rented a house in Eagle Rock and settled into motherhood there.
After sixty days in a rehabilitation center, Billy Dunne finally met his daughter, Julia.
BILLY: I’m not sure I went to rehab for the right reasons. Shame and embarrassment and avoidance and all that. But I stayed for the right reasons.
I stayed because on my second day there, the group therapist told me to stop imagining my daughter ashamed of me. He said to start thinking of what I’d need to do to believe my daughter was proud of me. I’ll tell ya, that stuck. I couldn’t stop thinking about that one.
Slowly, it became the light that was calling to me at the end of that tunnel…imagining a daughter…[pauses, gains composure] Imagining myself as a man my daughter would feel lucky to have.
I kept working, every day, to get closer to being that man.
GRAHAM: The day Billy was coming out of rehab, I picked up Camila and the baby and we drove over together.
Now, Julia was the fattest baby you ever saw. [Laughs] It’s true! I said to Camila, “Are you feeding her milkshakes?” Biggest cheeks in the world, beer belly. Couldn’t have been cuter.
There was a tiny little picnic table and an umbrella outside the facility. So Camila sat there with Julia on her lap. I went in and got Billy. He was wearing the same thing he was wearing the last time I’d seen him, in Hartford. But he had gained some weight, his face looked healthier.
I said, “Are you ready?”
He said, “Yeah,” but he seemed kind of unsure.
I put my arm around him and I said what I figured he needed to hear. I said, “You’re gonna be a great dad.” I think I should have told him that sooner. I don’t know why I didn’t.
BILLY: Julia was sixty-three days old when I met her. It’s hard, even now, to…to not hate myself for that. But the second I met her, my God. [Smiles] Standing there at that picnic table with them, it was like someone just took an ax to me, just shattered all the crust. I felt raw. In the way where you can feel everything, feel it deep down into your nerves.
I had…I’d built a family. By accident and without thinking and without so many of the qualities that you should have to deserve a family, I think, but I had built one. And here was this tiny, new person—who had my eyes, who didn’t know who I used to be, who only cared who I was now.
I fell to my knees. I was just so grateful for Camila.
I…I couldn’t believe what I put Camila through and I couldn’t believe that she was still standing there, giving me another shot. I didn’t deserve it. And I knew it.
I told her then that I would spend the rest of our life together trying to be twice as good as she deserved. I don’t know that I’ve ever promised anyone anything as humbly and with as much gratitude in my heart as I promised her that day.
I know I technically married her almost a year before but I submitted myself to her then. Forever and always. My daughter, too. I dedicated myself to both of them, to raising this girl with my whole heart into it.
As we got in the car, Camila whispered, “It’s us, forever and always. Don’t go forgetting that again, all right?”
And I nodded and she kissed me. And Graham drove us home.
CAMILA: I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it’s not faith, right?
By 1974, Daisy Jones had refused to show up to any of her recording sessions at the Record Plant in West Hollywood and was in breach of contract with Runner Records.
Meanwhile, Simone Jackson, now signed with Supersight Records, was finding international success with her R & B dance hits, which would come to be seen as classics of the protodisco genre. With her songs “The Love Drug” and “Make Me Move,” Simone was topping the dance club charts in France and Germany.
As Simone set out to tour Europe the summer of ’74, Daisy was growing more and more restless.
DAISY: I was spending my days getting sunburns and my nights getting high. I’d stopped writing songs because I didn’t see a point to it if no one would let me record them.
Hank was checking on me every day, pretending he was doting on me but really just trying to convince me to get to the studio, like I was some sort of prize horse that wouldn’t race.