When he was done, he got up. And I pulled my dress down. And he said, “If you want to go back down to your friends, that’s all right.” I didn’t really have any friends. But I knew he meant I needed to leave. So I did.
He never talked to me again.
Simone Jackson (disco star): I remember seeing Daisy on the dance floor one night at the Whisky. Everybody saw her. Your eye went right to her. If the rest of the world was silver, Daisy was gold.
Daisy: Simone became my best friend.
Simone: I brought Daisy out with me everywhere. I never had a sister.
I remember … It was the Sunset Strip riot, when all of us went down to Pandora’s and protested the curfew and the cops. Daisy and I went out, protested, met up with some actors and went over to Barney’s Beanery to keep partying. After that, we went back to somebody’s place. Daisy passed out on this guy’s patio. We didn’t go home until the next afternoon. She was maybe fifteen. I was probably nineteen. I just kept thinking, Doesn’t anybody care about this girl but me?
And, by the way, we were all on speed back then, even Daisy as young as she was. But if you wanted to stay skinny and be up all night, you were taking something. Mostly bennies or black beauties.
Daisy: Diet pills were an easy choice. It didn’t even feel like a choice. It didn’t even feel like we were getting high, at first. Coke, too. If it was around, you took a bump. People didn’t even consider it an addiction. It wasn’t like that.
Simone: My producer bought me a place in Laurel Canyon. He wanted to sleep with me. I told him no and he bought it for me anyway. I had Daisy move in.
We ended up sharing a bed for six months. So I can tell you firsthand that that girl never slept. I’d be trying to fall asleep at four in the morning and Daisy would want the light on so she could read.
Daisy: I had pretty bad insomnia for a long time, even when I was a kid. I’d be up at eleven o’clock, saying I wasn’t tired, and my parents would always yell at me to “just go to sleep.” So in the middle of the night I was always looking for quiet things to do. My mom had these romance novels hanging around so I would read those. It would be two in the morning and my parents would be having a party downstairs and I’d be sitting on my bed with my lamp on, reading Doctor Zhivago or Peyton Place.
And then it just became habit. I would read anything that was around. I wasn’t picky. Thrillers, detective novels, sci-fi.
Around the time I moved in with Simone, I found a box of history biographies on the side of the road one day, up in Beachwood Canyon. I tore through those in no time.
Simone: I’ll tell you, she’s the entire reason I started wearing a sleeping mask. [Laughs] But then I kept doing it because I looked chic.
Daisy: I was living with Simone for two weeks before I went home to get more clothes.
My dad said, “Did you break the coffeemaker this morning?”
I said, “Dad, I don’t even live here.”
Simone: I told her the one condition of living with me was that she had to go to school.
Daisy: High school was not easy for me. I knew that to get an A, you had to do what you were told. But I also knew that a lot of what we were being told was bullshit. I remember one time I was assigned an essay on how Columbus discovered America and so I wrote a paper about how Columbus did not discover America. Because he didn’t. But then I got an F.
I said to my teacher, “But I’m right.”
And she said, “But you didn’t follow the assignment.”
Simone: She was so bright and her teachers didn’t seem to really recognize that.
Daisy: People always say I didn’t graduate high school but I did. When I walked across the stage to get my diploma, Simone was cheering for me. She was so proud of me. And I started to feel proud of myself, too. That night, I took the diploma out of its case and I folded it up and I used it, like a bookmark, in my copy of Valley of the Dolls.
Simone: When my first album flopped, my record label dropped me. My producer kicked us out of that place. I got a job waiting tables and moved in with my cousin in Leimert Park. Daisy had to move back in with her parents.
Daisy: I just packed up my stuff from Simone’s and drove it right back to my parents’ place. When I walked in the front door, my mom was on the phone, smoking a cigarette.
I said, “Hey, I’m back.”
She said, “We got a new couch,” and then just kept on talking on the phone.
Simone: Daisy got all of her beauty from her mother. Jeanne was gorgeous. I remember I met her a few times back then. Big eyes, very full lips. There was a sensuality to her. People used to always tell Daisy she looked just like her mother. They did look similar but I knew better than to tell Daisy that.
I think one time I said to Daisy, “Your mom is beautiful.”
Daisy said to me, “Yeah, beautiful and nothing else.”
Daisy: When we got kicked out of Simone’s house, that was the first time I realized that I couldn’t just float around living off other people. I think I was seventeen, maybe. And it was the first time I wondered if I had a purpose.
Simone: Sometimes, Daisy would be over at my place, taking a shower or doing the dishes. I’d hear her sing Janis Joplin or Johnny Cash. She loved singing “Mercedes Benz.” She sounded better than anybody else. Here I was trying to get another record deal—taking voice lessons all the time, really working at it—and Daisy, it was so easy for her. I wanted to hate her for it. But Daisy’s not very easy to hate.
Daisy: One of my favorite memories was … Simone and I were driving down La Cienega together, probably in my BMW I had back then. They’ve got that huge shopping center there now but back then it was still the Record Plant. I don’t know where we were headed, probably to Jan’s to get a sandwich. But we were listening to Tapestry. And “You’ve Got a Friend” came on. Simone and I were singing so loud, along with Carole King. But I was really listening to the lyrics, too. I was really feeling it. That song always made me thankful for her, for Simone.
There’s this peace that comes with knowing you have a person in the world who would do anything for you, that you would do anything for. She was the first time I ever had that. I got a little bit teary, in the car listening to that song. I turned to Simone and I opened my mouth to talk but she just nodded and said, “Me too.”
Simone: It was my mission to make Daisy do something with her voice. But Daisy wasn’t gonna do a single thing she didn’t want to do.
She’d really come into herself by then. When I met her, she was still a bit naïve but [laughs] let’s just say she’d gotten tougher.
Daisy: I was seeing a couple guys back then, including Wyatt Stone of the Breeze. And I didn’t feel the same way about him that he felt about me.
This one night we were smoking a joint up on the roof of this apartment over on Santa Monica and Wyatt said, “I love you so much and I don’t understand why you don’t love me.”
I said, “I love you as much as I’m willing to love anybody.” Which was true. I wasn’t really willing to be vulnerable with anybody at that point. I had felt too much vulnerability too young. I didn’t want to do it anymore.
So that night after Wyatt goes to bed, I can’t sleep. And I see this piece of paper with this song he’s writing and it’s clearly about me. It says something about a redhead and mentioned the hoop earrings that I was wearing all the time.