Camila said, “What’s going on?”
I stood up and I smiled at her and, in that moment, I had it under control. I said, “Nothing. I’m good.”
She gave me a glance and I said, “I promise.” And I picked up my girls in a big bear hug and I felt okay. I felt all right.
CAMILA: To be honest, that’s when I questioned my own faith. Finding him sitting at a bar. Flags went up.
I started to wonder if maybe Billy was capable of doing something that I would be incapable of forgiving.
KAREN: Camila was with us from then on. For as long as that tour lasted. She’d fly back and forth, sometimes she had all the girls with her. But she almost always had Julia there. Julia was about five, by that point, I want to say.
DAISY: Every night was starting to feel like torture. It had been one thing to sing with Billy when I was with someone else, when I didn’t know how I felt, when I had lies I could hide behind. Denial is like an old blanket. I loved to get on under that thing and curl up and sleep. But, leaving Nicky, singing that song with Billy on live TV, telling him I wanted to get clean…I’d ripped the blanket off of myself. And there was no putting it back on. And it was killing me. The vulnerability, the rawness. It was killing me to get up there on that stage. To sing with him.
When we did “Young Stars,” I was praying Billy would look at me and acknowledge what we were saying to each other. And when we did “Please,” I was begging him to pay attention to me. I was having a hard time singing “Regret Me” with any real anger because I wasn’t angry, most of the time. Not anymore. I was sad. I was so goddamn sad.
And everybody wanted to see “A Hope Like You” the way we had done it on SNL and the two of us kept trying to deliver that. It just kept slicing me in two every night.
To sit next to him and smell his aftershave. And see his big hands with his swollen knuckles playing the piano in front of me and to be singing, from the very bottom of my heart, that I ached for him to love me back.
I spent the hours of the day we weren’t onstage trying to repair my wounds and it was like I was pulling them back open every night.
SIMONE: I was getting a lot of phone calls from Daisy at all hours of the day. I’d say, “Let me come get you.” And she’d refuse. I thought about trying to force her into rehab. But you can’t do that. You can’t control another person. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. You can’t love someone back to health and you can’t hate someone back to health and no matter how right you are about something, it doesn’t mean they will change their mind.
I used to rehearse speeches and interventions and consider flying to where she was and dragging her off that stage—as if, if I could just get the words right, I could convince her to get sober. You drive yourself crazy, trying to put words in some magical order that will unlock their sanity. And when it doesn’t work, you think, I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t talk to her clearly enough.
But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that’s all you can do. It feels like throwing yourself to sea. Or, maybe not that. Maybe it’s more like throwing someone you love out to sea and then praying they float on their own, knowing they might well drown and you’ll have to watch.
DAISY: I’d chased this life with all of my heart. I wanted so badly to express myself and be heard and bring solace to other people with my own words. But it became a hell I’d created myself, a cage I’d built and locked myself in. I came to hate that I’d put my heart and my pain into my music because it meant that I couldn’t ever leave it behind. And I had to keep singing it to him, night after night after night, and I could no longer hide how I felt or what being next to him was doing to me.
It made for a great show. But it was my life.
BILLY: Every night, after the show was over and the girls were in bed, Camila and I would sit out on the balcony of whatever hotel we were in and we’d just talk. She’d talk about how the girls were stressing her out. She’d talk about how she really needed me to stay sober. I’d tell her how hard I was trying. I’d tell her how scared I was of just about everything the future held. Runner had started asking about a new album. The weight was on me.
At one point she said, “Do you honestly think you can’t write another good album without Teddy?”
And I said, “I’ve never written an album without Teddy, period.”
WARREN: We were on the bus heading into Chicago and Eddie seemed upset about something. I said, “Talk if you want to talk.” I don’t like it when people try to force you to ask them what’s going on.
He said, “I haven’t told anybody this but…” Pete was gonna leave the band.
EDDIE: Pete was not listening to reason. Warren said I should talk to Billy, get Billy to talk some sense into him. As if Pete was going to listen to Billy if he wasn’t going to listen to me. I was his brother.
WARREN: Graham overheard us talking.
EDDIE: So Graham gets involved and he’s already getting on everybody’s nerves lately because he’s so tightly wound about God-knows-what. Anyway, he says we should talk to Billy. And I, again, mention that Pete isn’t going to listen to Billy if he wasn’t going to listen to me, you know what I’m saying? But Graham doesn’t hear me and, instead, when we pull up to this diner outside Chicago, Billy comes to find me. He says, “What’s going on? What do we need to talk about?”
I was just looking for the john, minding my own business. I said, “It’s nothing, man. Don’t worry about it.”
Billy says, “It’s my band. I deserve to know what’s going on in my own band.”
That really pissed me off. I said, “It’s everybody’s band.”
Billy said, “You know what I meant.”
And I said, “Yeah, we all know what you mean.”
KAREN: We were outside of Chicago. Staying the night in a hotel. Camila had called ahead to this clinic. She walked me in, sat next to me. I was bouncing my knee and she put her hand on my leg and stopped the bouncing. I said, “Am I making a mistake?”
And she said, “Do you think you are?”
And I said, “I don’t know.”
And she said, “I think you do know.”
And I thought about what she meant.
And then I said, “I know I’m not making a mistake.”
And she said, “There you go.”
And I said, “I think I’m pretending to be conflicted so that everybody feels better.”
She said, “I don’t need to feel better. You don’t need to pretend anything for me.” So I stopped.