Peggy Caserta Dies: Janis Joplin’s Lover Whose Groundbreaking 1973 Tell-All Memoir Presented Rock Icon Through Queer Gaze Was 84

As the first chronicle of Joplin’s bisexuality, Going Down With Janis added a new texture to the singer’s brash public persona at a time when such topics were rarely discussed in the mainstream culture. While Caserta’s claims were initially met with skepticism even among Joplin’s friends, Caserta’s queering of the singer has long since become an integral and important part of the Joplin legacy.

Indeed, even by 1979, a character clearly based (without authorization) on Caserta was featured in the film The Rose, with a scene all but lifted from Going Down With Janis. The Rose was a fictionalized version of Joplin’s life, with a Janis-like rock star portrayed by Bette Midler.

In the years since The Rose, Caserta and her story have been featured in numerous Joplin documentaries and biographies. After 12 years caring for her ailing mother in Louisiana, she recently returned to California and was offering guidance on the Peter Newman-produced Joplin biopic in development.

The acknowledgment of her place in Joplin’s life was hard-won, with some fans and friends initially choosing to dismiss Caserta’s claims, and many others taking a hostile attitude toward the woman they believed was an enabler, at best, of Joplin’s deadly drug habit, a charge Caserta credibly dismantled in her 2018 memoir.

Born Peggy Louise Caserta on September 12, 1940, in the bayou country outside New Orleans, young Peggy would spend much of her childhood moving with her parents from Louisiana to Mississippi, Alabama to Georgia and even to Joplin’s home state of Texas. Going to grade school in The Lone Star State gave Caserta her first brush with future fame: She made friends with a shy young boy she simply called Lee, leaving off the Harvey that preceded Oswald.

But it was in the mid-1960s that Caserta would meet the stars of a blossoming cultural era and make her own place in it. The youth culture scene that was just beginning to take shape in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood mesmerized Caserta, who had just spent an unhappy period in New York City working as a flight attendant. In San Francisco, Caserta cast off the trappings of middle-class aspirations, opening one of the nation’s first hippie boutiques. Already living openly as a lesbian when that was a rarity even within the ostensibly liberal, though thoroughly heteronormative hippie culture, Caserta boldly called her new Haight-Ashbury shop Mnasidika after a character in the iconic Sappho-inspired poetry collection The Songs of Bilitis.

Soon, Caserta was something of an unofficial clothier to the freaks and runaways and incipient rock stars who had begun to populate the area. She dressed the penniless Grateful Dead for photo shoots, she sold blue jeans with legs she’d widened into what would soon be known as bell-bottoms, and when her small store couldn’t keep the pants – altered by Caserta’s crafty mother back in Louisiana – in stock she arranged with the San Francisco-based Levi-Strauss to custom-make orders for her shop. In recent years archivists at Levi-Strauss would acknowledge the contributions made by Caserta and Mnasidika to the pants that would remain a staple of youth well into the 21st Century.

It was 1966 when Caserta first noticed a new neighbor who would soon bedazzle the young shop owner – and the world.

“I found myself on Haight Street,” Caserta would write in I Ran Into Some Trouble. “The Grateful Dead lived at 710, I lived at 635, and Janis lived at 634. I had opened my window and she was opening hers at the same time. She happened to notice me, hung her head out the window and said, ‘Hiya honey!’ with her southern inflection. I said, ‘Hiya!’ back. Seeing and hearing Janis sing later that night, with Big Brother and the Holding Company, was powerful and mind altering. It shattered all conception of what was possible to convey within the realm of music and vocalization. Electrical, elemental, primal and progressive, Janis’ sound screamed from the depths of the raw earth and kaleidoscoped in from the far reaches of the cosmos.”

Caserta had found a kindred spirit, and the two soon met again, this time at Mnasidika. Janis, not yet the star she’d become in a matter of months, was broke. “Do ya think I could put fifty cents down on these jeans?,” she asked Caserta, mistaking the store owner for a shop girl. “I’ll keep bringing you fifty cents and maybe even a dollar sometimes until they’re paid off if you’ll hold them for me?”

Caserta’s book chronicles the rest:

“Yes, you can…” I said, and her face brightened. “But how ‘bout you just take ‘em?”

“What? No, I can’t do that,” she said as confusion and elation took turns in her eyes.

“Sure you can, go ahead, you can take ‘em.”

“Won’t you get in trouble?”

“Nah, don’t worry. It’s OK, really.”

A fast friendship had begun, one that would include voracious sexual appetites and an equally enthusiastic devotion to heroin. They enjoyed an easy and no-boundaries camaraderie that often cushioned Joplin from the stresses and demands of sudden, worldwide fame.

Despite their closeness, neither, in those long-ago days, ever described the other as lover or girlfriend, and indeed, according to Caserta, Joplin never verbally identified as lesbian, although Caserta certainly was not Joplin’s first female lover. Well into her old age, Caserta would have difficulty labeling what, exactly, she shared with Joplin, perhaps stuck in an era when labels for same-sex love were often elusive.

“I never saw Janis as a gay girl,” she said in a 2018 interview with this reporter for New York Magazine’s Vulture. “She was straight. She was wild. I’m gay, and lived a gay lifestyle even then. I was obvious. I had a girlfriend, Kim, there on the scene all the time, but Janis was never going to do anything that her parents didn’t approve of, other than sing.”

Pressed to characterize their relationship nearly 50 years after Joplin’s death, Caserta said, “I really don’t know how to answer this. I can honestly say that to this day, nobody has ever been as happy to see me as she was. How can you not love somebody that clearly digs you that much? People say, Come on, Peggy, admit it, she was in love with you. Well, I can’t. We never said I love you, ever. We adored each other, we had mutual respect, she respected me as a businesswoman way more than I think I deserved. And she loved that we were both Southern girls.”

At one point in the interview, Caserta put it another way: “I never even said that we were lovers, in the lesbian sense. I never believed that, nor did I really want that. I adored her. I loved her. But to be her lover was to resign yourself to being invisible, and as hard as it may be for people to understand now, I thought I was as groovy as her.”

However unconventional, erratic or ill-defined, the Joplin-Caserta relationship lasted four years, much longer than any of Joplin’s relationships with men despite whatever impressions she left with her “I Need A Man To Love” blues mama image. It was Caserta who was there with Joplin at Woodstock in 1969, a high point in the singer’s career, and it was Caserta who was there in the final days, if not the final night.

As has become a key part in the Joplin story, Caserta and Joplin’s final boyfriend, a man of short acquaintance and unclear intentions named Seth Morgan, were supposed to fly or drive down separately from San Francisco to join Joplin in Los Angeles where she was recording what would be her final studio album, the masterpiece Pearl (Caserta maintained that Janis’ Pearl nickname came during an afternoon the two spent at the Upper East Side ice cream shop Serendipity 3, a favorite source of sweets for two heroin addicts; during one visit there, they shared a copy of the New York Times, noting an ad for office equipment that featured two secretaries, one named Pearl and the other Ruby. Joplin and Caserta would use Pearl and Ruby as pet names thereafter).

But back to that final night. Either through miscommunication or druggy inertia, neither Caserta nor Morgan showed for what was to be a get-to-know-each-other three-way sexual encounter with Joplin on the night of October 3, 1970, at the Los Angeles Hollywood Landmark Hotel near the Sunset Sound recording studio. After a night in the studio working onPearl, Joplin returned to her room at the hotel, where, alone in the wee hours of October 4, 1970, she shot the final heroin dose of her short life, dying at 27 wedged between a nightstand and a wall.

The missed rendezvous would haunt Caserta for the rest of her days. Asked in 2018 if she had any regrets, she answered, “Of course I do. I wish that Seth had been there that last night. Or that I had been there. Or that we both had been there. I wish [Joplin’s heroin dealer] hadn’t entered the lobby…So regrets, yes, of course, the regrets we all have — that we lost her. Some people say, ‘Oh, we lost her so young.’ Well, for me, I regret that we lost her at all. I figured we’d be friends forever. I regret that I wasn’t there that night when she tripped and fell. I could have picked her up.”

The guilt over that missed hook-up, and over the admission made in Going Down With Janis – a book that paid her $2,000, money that went directly into her arm – that Peggy had played at least some role in reintroducing Janis to heroin after the singer spent a brief period clean while recording Pearl, took a tremendous toll on Caserta’s life.

In 2018 she said, “I was hiding for those first 25 years. Later, social media brought it all back to life. The phone would ring and I’d hear my elderly mom say, ‘Oh, that’s my daughter, just a minute. Peggy?’ And I’d think, ‘Oh my God.’ One woman told Mom that Janis wants to talk to me, that she came to her in her dreams. I got on the phone and said, ‘Now you listen to me. Don’t call my mother anymore. And if Janis wanted to talk to me, she would come to me in a dream, not you.”

Caserta also addressed the legacy of her first book in her second, I Ran Into Some Trouble, written with her friend Maggie Falcon and published by Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing in Oregon.

“For years, many people held me responsible for Janis’s death,” Caserta wrote. “Despite the fact that it was Janis who introduced me to heroin and not the other way around. But the deeper problem was with a peculiar blindness among the hippies. They were a very heterosexual movement. It was unusual to be the only known lesbian in the entire mix of people. Some in Janis’s entourage did not like me for that, did not like me for my friendship with her, and they did everything they could to get her away from me. It took me years to get over their blame, but I know that I was never the catalyst for her death. No one, and I mean, no one, could persuade Janis to do or not do anything she chose.”

Also in the second book, Caserta recalled the writing of the first, about how she answered a ghostwriter’s questions into a tape recorder between visits to a restroom for booster shots of heroin.

“About a year later, a badly written memoir with my name on it, full of errors and exploitative of Janis appeared in bookstores,” she wrote. “The ‘collaborator’ who had pumped me for dozens of hours of interviews, filled in what he didn’t know, and the editors bypassed showing me the final text. Or, at least that is how I remember it. Perhaps I had signed away that right in my drugged haze.”

“Nevertheless, that book, that lurid and graphic sexual content and the drug scenes depicted, hurt everyone, including my poor parents, so badly. I cannot blame anyone for me being strung out on heroin. My instincts were dulled at best. I naively believed all would be well, as I had been assured. I received my first copy of the book while in Mazatlan. I remember looking out at the ocean and reading the first paragraph. Instantly I got a sinking feeling in my stomach and my hands started shaking. I thought, “Oh my God, they didn’t.” I couldn’t read anymore. I just fell apart. What could I do about it. It was already in print. I only remember going off the rails.”

Many decades would pass before Caserta would leave heroin and, to a lesser extent, regrets behind. She found some peace after leaving California to return to the New Orleans area in 2005 to care for her elderly mother, who by then was showing early signs of dementia.

But even then, life would have more hurdles for Peggy Caserta. Shortly after arriving in Louisiana, Caserta found herself ordering her confused mother and two dogs into a bathtub, placing a mattress over them and sitting on the bedding to protect them from the oncoming Hurricane Katrina. “Opening the front door,” she later wrote, “the landscape that had been so familiar was replaced by mayhem.”

Still, she had saved her mother, their dogs and herself from disaster. Peggy Caserta would serve as her mother’s caregiver for the next 12 years, by her account happy years that she nonetheless relayed with the same sense of candor that marked all her writing. She ended I Ran Into Some Trouble with this memory of her mother:

Her little face searches mine. “Oh…” Then she asks, “What’s your name.”
“Peggy”
“No, your last name.”
“Caserta.”
“That’s the same name as my daughter.”
“I am your daughter.”
“Then why don’t you call me Mother?”
“I do. I call you Mother all the time.”
“So that means you’re my daughter.” She seems satisfied by this.
Then she asks, “Well, where’s Peggy?”

Caserta was preceded in death by her parents, Sam and Novelle. She leaves no survivors.