The Tragic, Real-Life Story Of Debbie Harry

The following article includes mentions of addiction, sexual assault, and domestic violence.

When the group Blondie burst out into the music scene with their mega-hit "Heart of Glass," the band's name became synonymous with its lead singer, Debbie Harry. With her bleached blond hair and brash style, Harry became the ultimate "it" girl. She combined a lot of glam with a little grunge for an edgy look and sound that wasn't easily classified. She exuded a certain street-smart vibe, but underneath that cool, blonde exterior were tragic details about Debbie Harry that started at birth and shaped both her life and career. 

Born Angela Tremble in Miami Florida, Harry got off to a shaky start in the world. For starters, her conception was the result of an extramarital affair and she was put up for adoption. At just 3 months old, Tremble was adopted by the Harrys, a conservative New Jersey couple who owned a local gift shop, and renamed her Deborah Ann. For the self-described "wild child,"  it was a pretty typical suburban upbringing, but being adopted created some lasting issues. "As an adopted child, my deep-rooted fear has always been abandonment," she told The Daily Mail. "It's always been scary for me to see people leave." In her autobiography "Face It," the singer elaborated, "I guess somewhere in my subconscious, a scene was playing on a loop of a parent leaving me somewhere and never coming back" (via The Guardian). Although she often toyed with the idea of finding her birth parents, it wasn't until she was an adult that Harry hired a private detective to track down her mother who, coincidentally, was a concert pianist. However, her mother was not interested in a relationship, so Harry let it go. 

Growing up in suburban New Jersey in what she described as a "straight-laced" household was a struggle for Debbie Harry, who said she never felt like she fit in. Harry told The Daily Mail that she was a "tomboy" but also "oversensitive," and she explained that she never saw herself as attractive, even though she was voted "Best Looking" by her peers at Hawthorne High School. "I didn't look like any other kids I grew up with and I felt very uncomfortable about my face," she said. "I hated looking in mirrors. I never saw myself the way others saw me." Her looks aside, Harry said she also felt like she didn't fit in with the traditional ideals of her adoptive parents. The artist explained that her parents' idea of a perfect life for their daughter would have included marriage and children. "They did not want me to venture forth – they wanted me to stay right there," she told Vice, adding that they wanted her to lead a "normal" life. 

However, "normal" was not a part of Harry's vocabulary. Ever since she was a child, Harry knew she wanted something more. "My biggest dream as a kid was to carve out a niche for myself in some interesting, creative way," she said to The Daily Mail. New York City was right across the bridge, and the aspiring singer wanted to experience all that the city had to offer. "I wanted to get out in the world," she told The Times. "Maybe if I'd have been madly in love I would have settled down, but it wasn't like that for me. I had ambition." 

Before she was the platinum punk powerhouse with the voice that led her band Blondie to fame, Debbie Harry was just a girl from Hawthorne, New Jersey who came to the Big Apple with big dreams. Like many people who go to New York City in the hopes of breaking into show business, Harry had to work an assortment of jobs to make ends meet. She tried her hand at modeling but soon found out that there was more to the job than just posing for photos. "I found myself constantly having to go to bed with photographers, even though I was repulsed by most of them," she revealed in Photoplay (via The Jersey Sound). "It was like, if you wanted to get free portfolio work done and make sure that you got copies of the pictures they took, you would eventually wind up on their couch. That was par for the course for me." 

Her sultry, sexy good looks eventually landed Harry a stint as a Playboy Bunny at the Playboy Club in Great Gorge, Vernon Township,  something she referred to as a "flash job." Thankfully, she didn't have to follow any of the weird rules women living at the Playboy Mansion had to follow, but it still wasn't easy. "Flash jobs are jobs that have a glamorous front, but they're really hard work," she explained in the interview. Even with some notoriety under her garter belt, Harry, who started singing in a church choir as a child, knew that music was her calling. "Music has always been my driving ambition," she said, and she was determined to pursue it one way or another. 

Not having much luck in New York, Debbie Harry returned to her roots in New Jersey, but things back home weren't much better for the blonde bombshell. With her striking looks, Harry had no shortage of lovers — or stalkers. Upon her return to her hometown, she found herself in an intense and dysfunctional relationship with a man whose jealous nature caused him to break into her apartment and hold a gun to her head while he threatened sexual assault. "That was crazy, wasn't it," she said while recounting the experience to The Guardian. His relentless pursuit of the singer led her to move  back to New York. It also led to one of Blondie's most famous songs, "One Way or Another." "I was actually stalked by a nut job, so it came out of a not-so-friendly personal event," she told Entertainment Weekly. 

He may have been the only one who inspired a song, but Harry's ex wasn't her only stalker. "Oh, I've had several," she said in an interview with Vice. "I've had a couple of ex-boyfriends who didn't understand the 'ex,' and that was problematic." Harry also had one ardent fan who sent her so many letters that she had to involve a detective. "It turned out he was this tragic guy who had gone off his meds and nobody was paying any attention to him, so he wrote to me," she said. Many famous celebrities tend to have terrifying stalker stories, but not everyone can say they turned their experience into a Billboard Hot 100 hit.

It's no secret that Debbie Harry's life has been a wild ride, but one specific ride nearly cost the "Rapture" singer her life. According to Harry, she narrowly escaped death after taking a ride with notorious serial killer Ted Bundy in the wee hours of the morning. She recalled stumbling around the city in heels trying to get a cab to take her to a party, when a guy pulled up and offered her a lift. "This car kept circling around and some guy was offering me a ride," she told The Daily Mail. "I kept refusing, but finally I took the ride because I couldn't get a cab."

Once inside the car, Harry noticed that there were no locks or window cranks and she began to panic. "The inside of the car was completely stripped and the hair on the back of my neck just stood up," she said. Noticing a small crack in one window, Harry managed to stick her arm out, open her door from the outside, and leap from the vehicle. "He tried to stop me by stepping on the gas and spinning the car but it sort of helped me fling myself out. I fell out and nearly got run over by a cab," she shared. It wasn't until she saw Bundy later on the news that Harry realized just how close she had come to disaster. 

Debbie Harry may have escaped Ted Bundy's attack, but when a robber broke into the apartment she shared with bandmate and then-boyfriend Chris Stein, Harry wasn't as lucky. The incident occurred when a man followed Harry and Stein home after a show, brandished a knife, and demanded to be let into their home. According to the singer, once inside, both she and Stein were tied up while the robber ransacked their apartment for drugs and expensive items he could presumably sell. After collecting all the material possessions he wanted, the intruder demanded one more thing. "He piled up the guitars and Chris' camera, untied my hands and told me to take off my pants," Harry wrote in her book "Face It" (via Stylist). "I can't say that I felt a lot of fear. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape."

Her reaction to something so violent may seem strange, but Harry claimed the instance was more abusive mentally than physically. Neither she nor Stein reported it to the authorities, and she never sought counseling support to help her process the situation. Her matter-of-fact response to being sexually assaulted left some readers in shock and seemed indicative of a bigger issue. When a reporter from The Guardian suggested that playing it down was the singer's way of protecting herself, Harry smiled and agreed, saying, "Yeah. Absolutely." 

With a hot lead singer and catchy tunes, it's hard to imagine that Blondie wasn't an overnight success. However, the truth is that Debbie Harry and the band struggled for nearly four years before hitting it big. Harry had tried folk singing and was in a glam rock band called The Stilettos when she met Chris Stein, the guitarist who would become a lover, bandmate, and life-long friend. In synch creatively and romantically, Stein and Harry created Blondie with a unique sound that earned them fans but no big recording deals. "Blondie was always at the bottom of the A-List," Stein told The Independent. "Everybody liked us, but nobody thought we would be successful."

The band was eventually signed to Chrysalis records and began making some noise overseas, but they didn't crack America until the release of "Parallel Lines," an album that the label initially rejected but that produced timeless hit after timeless hit, including "Hanging On The Telephone" and the iconic "Heart of Glass." While the meaning behind songs like "Heart of Glass" isn't necessarily artistic genius, Blondie was suddenly the name on everyone's lips, eventually selling 40 million records with hits like "Rapture," the first single with a rap element to hit No.1 both in the U.S. and U.K. With that level of fame came all the perils and pitfalls of celebrity life, including drugs, jealousy, and tension between band members that would eventually cause their collapse. 

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll tend to go hand in hand in hand. Take a look at rock star Steven Tyler's journey with addiction, for instance. The same was true for Debbie Harry of Blondie who, along with her boyfriend and bandmate Chris Stein, admittedly used heroin for many years. Harry had dabbled in the drug with a former boyfriend, but with Stein it evolved into a full-fledged habit. As the success and subsequent pressure associated with Blondie grew, so did the couple's drug use. "I was absolutely a drug addict for a couple of years," she told Daily Mail. "Everything fell apart and I fell apart along with it.'

Although some have attributed heroin use to the demise of both the band and her romantic relationship with Stein, Harry revealed that she used the drug to help her deal with the feelings of depression, and she maintained that she never used while working. She also claimed that, for her, the decision to stop using the highly addictive drug was more a matter of convenience over any sort of health consciousness. "Drugs are a funny thing," Harry told The Standard. "The thing that drove me away from taking them was having to acquire them and what a drag that was. It was kind of a full-time occupation and a waste of time. It became unpleasant. Luckily for me, I was able to handle the withdrawal." Stein, however, was not as easily able to quit and continued using for many years after the couple broke up.

If you are a huge recording artist with millions of record sales worldwide, you should be set for life, right? Wrong. As Debbie Harry found out, even the most financially successful artists can go belly-up. In the case of Blondie, it was revealed that the band's accountants did not pay taxes for two years, which resulted in a huge bill from the Internal Revenue Service. Harry and her boyfriend Chris Stein lost their New York townhouse, along with some of their personal belongings when the government came calling. Neither their relationship, nor the band, survived the fallout. "In Blondie, we were very bad at the business side and we lost a lot of money because of that," the pop star told The Daily Mail. "It was a hard lesson to learn."

Harry, who once joked that she'd have made more money as a hooker, said that hers is not a unique story and that musicians are easy targets for those who want to take advantage of their resources. "We weren't the first band to be ripped off and we won't be the last," she said to The Daily Mail. "Musicians make easy pickings because no one wants to know the financials or the numbers, they just want to go out there and perform," she added. "But it's pretty heartbreaking when you have worked seven years flat, taken no holidays, sold millions of albums and you are left with nothing."

At a time in Debbie Harry's life when her financial world was falling apart, insult was added to injury when her longtime love, Chris Stein became gravely ill with a mysterious ailment. He was eventually diagnosed with pemphigus vulgaris, a rare and potentially life-threatening autoimmune disease. Harry spent the next several years taking care of Stein, even sneaking him heroin into the hospital. She recounted the experience in her book "Face It" where she wrote, "I think that doctors and nurses knew that he was high all the time but cast a blind eye because it kept him relatively pain-free and mentally less tortured" (via The Guardian). 

Taking care of Stein became a full-time job for Harry, who was trying to launch a solo career, along with trying her hand at acting. With so much on her plate, however, she made some bad career moves. "My biggest regret of all is turning down the role of the blonde robot Pris in Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner,'" she told The Daily Mail, referring to the part that Daryl Hannah landed in the 1982 film, which has one of the most confusing movie endings of all time. "My record company didn't want me to take time out to do a movie. I shouldn't have listened to them."

Actor, model, Playboy Bunny, and singer are just a few of the titles that Debbie Harry has held throughout her life. But the one that eluded her was the title of "mom." Despite her parents' wishes, Harry never married nor had children, a decision she once claimed to be okay with. "I salute anyone who raises a family, but it doesn't bother me for some reason," she told The Times when asked if she regretted not having her own offspring. "I guess there's some missing element in my chromosomes."

Harry gets her "kid fix" from being the godmother to Chris Stein's two daughters, but in later years, she may have changed her tune about wanting her own. "I sort of thought: 'Gee, maybe it wouldn't have been so bad to have kids.' But I don't know if I could have done it while I was working so much," she admitted to The Guardian. "My natural inclination is to really throw myself into things. It wouldn't be like I could hand over the baby. I would really want to be involved." And although she never married, she does date, though she shared that these days the pickings are slim. "There are less men around for people my age, though," she told The Standard. "They're all married with children."

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, may be the victim of sexual assault, or is dealing with domestic abuse, contact the relevant resources below:

• Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
• Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
• Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233. You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.