Platinum Blondie

The problem is that she wasn't expecting an interview; all she had been told was that she was to meet this writer — me. There is a short discussion of whose fault this mess is. Debbie hates me, she hates Chris, right now she hates the world. She's just feeling rotten. I try to cheer her up, congratulate her for "Heart of Glass" being Number One.

This makes her even glummer. "Yeah. It's Number Two. It was Number One for a week. Now it's Number Two." She looks like Mimi wasting away in La Boheme.

"We got bumped by Peaches and Herb," says Stein, "and it's not even the real Peaches."

Now the storm breaks. Debbie hollers at me. Everyone looks down at the floor. I'm afraid she's either going to cry or pull a derringer out of her raincoat and shoot me. This is a roomful of miserable people. It's like a wake for somebody no one liked.

The second time I see Debbie, a week later, the atmosphere is much more copacetic, but then it's hard to go downhill from a debacle. We are at Power Station Recording Studios, which is in the middle of being renovated, so there are boards and nails and hammers everyone. The room we are in seems to have no other raison d'etre than to intervene between the hallway and the bathroom (sign on the bathroom door: HIT RECORDS MADE WHILE U-WAIT).

Debbie refuses to be interviewed without Stein, 29, but he keeps wandering off to fiddle with dials. The couple never seem to be separated for very long. Even those in their inner circle say they don't really understand the relationship. One insider told me, "She can't do anything without him. It's kind of spooky." Debbie is curled up in a dusty alcove. The window is boarded up rather clumsily, so a single bar of sunlight streaks across her. I ask about her image as a fashion plate.

"I don't do the campy stuff anymore," she replies. "I've eliminated all that, the secondhand store look. I've outgrown it, you know? I can afford to buy clothes and to have them made, so now it's more what I would specifically choose to wear." Her voice is very soft. "What I do now is more of an image. It sticks in peoples minds." Which isn't to say that she doesn't look funky nowadays. Today she's wearing red tights, red high heels and a childish, embroidered smock that she is continually tugging on and smoothing out.

The daughter of a salesman in Manhattan's fashion district, Deborah Ann Harry was born in Miami and raised in New Jersey. She has one younger sister, Martha, and a cousin, Bill, now in college, who has lived with the family since his early teens. When Debbie left home and moved to Manhattan, her first apartment was on St. Marks Place in the East Village, down the street from poet W.H. Auden's residence. Her initial stab at a musical career, a brief and ill-starred effort, was with a Mamas-and-Papas-esque group called Wind in the Willows.

Next came a long stretch as a New York survivor. She kept her artistic credentials alive by hanging out on the periphery of the Warhol crowd, writing and painting while supporting herself with a succession of jobs — as a beautician, Playboy Bunny and barmaid at Max's Kansas City, the rock bistro where she would eventually be a headliner. There was a flirtation with heroin. Then she found her milieu with a campy glitter band called the Stilettoes. Chris Stein joined the band shortly after her first club gig with them.

The Stilettoes went down with everybody else in the Great Glitter Crash that began in the early Seventies. By then, Debbie and Chris were a team, romantically as well as musically, and together they founded Blondie.

Looking back on her career, does it fit together, or was it something more experimental, a case of trial and error? "A lot of people think that everything you do is, like, preconceived," she offers blandly. "Yeah, it's been good, because it's been very inspired — whatever happened was it. Our biggest consideration was just to survive, so, like . . . all art forms are frivolous. That's what 'stay hungry' is all about.

"Now we're sort of at an in-between stage, commercially and artistically. We're at a stage where we are what we are, and we've been clearly defined, and there is a market for us, right? So we're taking steps in our direction, you know. We're moving on, we're doing things, but we're doing things that people can identify. We're not taking a total turn from what we've been classified as. But, like, the next things that we do, we could very well do a total turnaround."