Angels Dance and Angels Die by Patricia Butler

Author:Patricia Butler [Butler, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-359-6
Publisher: Music Sales Corp.
Published: 2010-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

Pamela’s business card from Themis.

“I thought it was the most extravagant gift a man could give a woman,” says Bill Siddons, of his first visit to the store. “And Jim loved giving her the gift, he loved that Pamela was having so much fun with it.”

To others, though, the store seemed like nothing more than a plush money pit. “John and I went over there,” recalls Ray Manzarek, “and walked into the place while they were working on it and said ‘Holy shit! This has gotta cost a fortune!’ Soft young men with soft moist eyes wearing soft garments and flowing hair were stapling feathers to the wall. Jesus Christ! What is going on here?”

That’s what Mirandi Babitz wondered the day Pamela called to tell her old friend that she was opening a new boutique, a store that would be in direct competition with Mirandi’s own.

Mirandi and her boyfriend, Clem, who was British, had moved to England in 1967 and had been married there. Clem had previously done some leather work in Chicago, and Mirandi knew how to sew, so the couple began designing clothing together. It wasn’t long before some of the hippest shops on London’s Kings Road—Granny Takes a Trip, Hung On You—were selling Mirandi and Clem’s designs and taking special orders as well. “I started meeting groups like The Who and The Rolling Stones and all kinds of people because we made clothes for everybody in the rock world,” Mirandi recalls.” We were pretty good.”

The couple returned to the States in 1968 and opened a boutique on the Sunset Strip. “I didn’t see very much of Pamela until they started coming in and then I started making clothes for Jim,” says Babitz. Pamela showed an immediate interest in her friend’s shop and asked Mirandi about the details of opening and operating the boutique. “It wasn’t like everybody was opening a boutique,” says Babitz. “I mean there were like three in L.A. I had mine, and the next thing I know Pam calls me up and says kind of guiltily that she’s going to open this boutique and Jim’s giving her all this money and she’s going to design clothes.” That was, says Mirandi, “pretty much the end of my feeling comfortable with her.”

Part of Mirandi’s resentment of Pamela’s actions stemmed from the fact that, unlike Mirandi, Pamela didn’t have to scrimp and save to open her shop. “I was twenty-one,” Babitz says, “and I had done this whole thing entirely on a shoestring, scraping together the money.” But Pamela only had to ask, and whatever funds she needed were instantly at her disposal.

“Jim was always giving her stuff,” says Paul Ferrara. “Money, clothes, cars, dogs, anything she wanted. He was crazy about her, and so he pampered the hell out of her. She would want something, and he would just call Max and say ‘Give her whatever she wants, Max.’”

January Jensen recalls a typical incident that illustrates the point: “One night we were going to the airport. Jim had just bought Pamela a new Porsche, so she drove us.

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