Frank Zappa’s daughter tells Hadley Freeman some home truths about her life as the child of a rock star.
Moon Unit Zappa was an anxious, pliant, hypervigilant child, the kind who would look for the fire exits when she walked in a room, because she had long ago learnt that the adults around her couldn’t keep her safe. After all, a parent who names their daughter “Moon Unit” is not one who prioritises giving the child any kind of normality or even anonymity. Yet she idolised her father, the legendary — and notorious — musician Frank Zappa, so when he took her and her younger brother Dweezil on a trip to New York when they were in their very early teens, she excitedly thought, “I want to savour every moment.” But that night in New York, Moon was woken in her hotel room by thumping and noises on the other side of the wall: her father was having sex with someone who was definitely not her mother. She cried into her pillow, realising she wasn’t her father’s priority on this trip, or ever.
“It felt like we were a social experiment that my parents were exploring,” she says. “I was being exposed to so much more than I was ready for.” When Moon was an adult she confronted her mother: why did her parents leave her naked as a small child with strange men and hand her over to babysitters who were so inexperienced she burnt her feet badly on a radiator? Her mother rolled her eyes and told her daughter off for being too uptight.
In the extremely large pantheon of celebrity children with eccentric names, the four Zappa offspring still put Brooklyn Beckham, Apple Martin and even Zowie Bowie in the shade: Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva. The names all have a very Zappa-esque rationale behind them. “Dweezil” was Frank’s nickname for his wife’s tiny toenails and, because his son had similar feet, that’s what he called him. Ahmet for Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records and possibly Gail’s former boyfriend. Diva because as a baby she had a loud cry. But first, there was Moon Unit. “If you knew my dad’s softer side, you’d know my middle name, ‘Unit’, was bestowed upon me because my arrival heralds our foray into becoming a family unit. I will automatically feel an unspoken, steadfast, ferocious loyalty to my family — the Unit part — and, like the actual moon, [I had] no light of my own, just an ancillary object in the infinite, reflecting the light of the sun, aka, the light of my heavenly father Frank,” Moon, 56, writes in her lyrical memoir, Earth to Moon. It describes in evocative detail what it’s like to grow up the child of a famous person — a nepo baby, as people say today — when your privilege is counterbalanced with having to share your parent with the rest of the world, and the creative drive that made your parent famous will always take precedence over you. She also writes about why she and her once very close siblings have spent the past near-decade locked in a vicious battle over inheritance. “It’s been an interesting time, rethinking what family means,” she says, with wry understatement.
By the time Frank Zappa died in 1993, aged 52, he had released 62 albums. In the 30 years since, there have been a further 66. Originally a classical composer, he remains one of America’s most astonishingly creative musicians, as happy to write for his rock band — the Mothers of Invention — as for classical orchestras; in 1983, the Barbican hosted Zappa and the London Symphony Orchestra for a concert so celebrated it was restaged in 2022. His name is still legendary, his face — all dark moustache and wild black hair — iconic. And yet few can name a single Zappa song. “I’m famous, but no one knows what I do,” he laughed in an interview captured in the 2016 documentary Eat That Question: Zappa in His Own Words.
That’s partly because his music — funny, angry, discordant and seductive —was indefinable. One of his most successful songs, Bobby Brown, tells the story of rapist who has sex with a feminist, realises he’s gay and then gets into S&M. What genre do you file that under?
Zappa himself defied any easy labelling. Born in Baltimore in 1940, as a teenager he loved R&B music as much as classical and he composed avant-garde orchestral music for his high school band. When he was 23, he appeared on the popular 1960s talk show The Steve Allen Show, playing a bicycle as a musical instrument. Soon after, he and his band found a following in Los Angeles’s underground music scene. He moved to LA’s Laurel Canyon in the 1960s, just up the road from Joni Mitchell and David Crosby, but he was not part of that sunshine-and-songwriters scene. “I’m not a hippy but I am a freak,” he said.
In 1969, Time magazine described him as “a force of cultural darkness, a Mephistophelian figure serving as a lone, brutal reminder of music’s potential for invoking chaos and destruction”. This makes him sound deranged and out of control when in fact he was brilliant and brusque. Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s last president, adored Zappa so much he appointed him as his government’s cultural adviser and ambassador. Zappa was also vehemently anti-drugs, to the point that he sacked band members when he caught them doing drugs on tour. He saw narcotics as antithetical to integrity, clarity of expression and talent, three qualities he prized above all. Instead, his preferred recreational activity was casual sex. “The closest I get to drugs is taking penicillin on tour because I got the clap,” he chuckled to an interviewer, also from Eat That Question. This was less amusing to his wife, Gail, who stayed with him his whole adult life, and their children.
Moon is talking to me from her home in Los Angeles, which she shares with her 19-year-old daughter, Mathilda. “I love old-fashioned names with lots of syllables,” Moon says (she is divorced from Mathilda’s father, Paul Doucette, the drummer and guitarist in the band Matchbox Twenty). Despite believing as a teenager that she was hideously ugly, Moon is very pretty, with a warm face and an easy laugh. She adored her father but her feelings about him are, she says, “complicated”.
“I kind of bristle when I hear [my father described as] ‘genius’,” she says. “It’s so easy to make your kid feel safe, to give comfort, to be interested in what they are interested in. So how on earth did a genius miss it?”
What does she want readers to take away from the book?
“I want them to ask if being a genius is worth the collateral damage. Because I know my answer.”
Frank and Gail Zappa met in 1966 when he was 25 and had released his first album, Freak Out!, and she was a 21-year-old secretary at the LA music venue Whisky a Go Go. “They both had an aversion to religion, the status quo and being mislabelled as hippies. They both had a love of sex, civics and cigarettes,” Moon writes. They also both had peripatetic childhoods — Gail was third-generation German-American with a father in the Navy, while Frank came from an Italian-American family who instilled in him a love of music and his father worked in defence. They were also both raised Catholic, but they rejected that and identified instead as “pagan absurdists”. Gail in particular was interested in the wackier side of life: witches, UFOs, conspiracy theories.
From the outside, Frank and Gail looked unusually stable given his celebrity: they stayed married until his death and their four kids lived with them in California. Everyone from John Lennon to David Bowie wanted to meet Zappa but, unlike a lot of nepo babies, Moon did not grow up surrounded by celebrities because her father prioritised talent over fame. And, of course, there were no drugs in the house. But the family was not wealthy — whatever money Zappa made went back into his music — and their home was dirty and often full of strangers.
Young women were regular visitors. Once, Frank moved out of the bedroom he shared with Gail and into another room in the house with another woman. Gail would scream at her husband, put hexes on his lovers, get depressed and neglect to take the children to school. Moon describes her parents’ marriage as “f*** and fight and stay together or not f*** and fight and stay together”. When she was 12, Frank woke her up in the night: “Gail is on a rampage. I need you to hide the gun,” he told her.
Frank prided himself on not kowtowing to social norms. “There are no such things as dirty words. It’s a fantasy manufactured by religious fanatics and government agencies to keep people stupid,” he said in an interview from Eat That Question. This sounds good in theory, but less so in practice when he would discuss his preferences in breast size in front of his young daughter: “No one wants to ride an ironing board,” he would say, but also: “More than a mouthful is a waste.” During one of the many, many fights Moon overheard between her parents about her father’s chronic infidelity, her father retorted, “It’s just f***ing.”
Did her father’s sexual disinhibition affect Moon’s own sexuality?
“Are you kidding? Of course! I was the kid looking for turtleneck bathing suits because I felt so exposed. The messaging was so bad. I grew up thinking it’s terrible to be a girl.”
Between tours, Frank spent almost all of his time in his studio and Gail would send meals down to him. For such a counter-cultural figure he ran a laughably patriarchal home, in which he offered little affection to his family and saved all his energy for his work. “When I was a kid I would compare him to Jesus and Spock, because he belonged to another world and was logical to the point of being icy,” Moon says. “He was the funniest person and he could be wonderful. But it doesn’t feel good when your favourite person isn’t choosing you.”
When she was 13, Moon thought she had come up with a solution when she asked her father if she could make music with him. He agreed, and asked her to do her funny imitations of the Valley girls in her school that made him laugh. He put music to it, released the song — Valley Girl — and it became his only Top 40 single in North America. Moon — shy and riddled with acne — was wheeled out by her parents on a national publicity tour. At first this was exciting but, she writes, both her parents seemed infuriated with her and the song’s success. Her father, she thinks, was frustrated that he was “43 years of age with 35 albums to his name and here, with me, having his first mega hit. And worse, with a light-hearted ditty that in no way reflected the full depth and breadth of his work”. Even Andy Warhol noted Frank’s defensiveness. He wrote in his diaries that he complimented Frank on Moon’s talents. “Listen, I created her. I invented her. She’s nothing. It’s all me,” Frank allegedly replied. “If it were my daughter I would be saying, ‘Gee, she’s so smart,’ " Warhol wrote. “But he’s taking all the credit.”
As for Gail, Moon thinks she was jealous. Suddenly there was yet another woman in her husband’s life and, worse, it was their daughter. The pair had always had a fraught relationship and it rapidly deteriorated. The book’s title, Earth to Moon, is what Gail used to shout, exasperated by her daughter’s complaints about their home life and desires to continue her education (Moon left after high school, as per her family’s wishes). “When your mother is your first bully, it’s hard to know where you go from there,” Moon says.
She drifted in her twenties. Like a lot of nepo kids, she was torn between wanting to be independent of her parents and believing they were the only thing she had to offer. She was thrilled when an art gallery offered to include her work in an exhibition but, just as the guests were about to arrive, the gallery owner whispered to her, “Thanks to your name, people will get to see the genius of the other artist’s work.”
“I had no idea that I was just a foot in the door for someone else,” she says. “That just reinforced the idea that I already had, which was I didn’t have any value.” She looked for guidance — from therapists, acting coaches and then a guru. “I never use the word cult [in the book], but it’s definitely implied.”
Moon found the cult in her twenties, and it took her to a Hindu ashram in Vermont where she chanted, meditated and listened to confusing spiritual guidance. Moon fell for it instantly. “I was already conditioned to put my needs aside and prioritise someone else in a position of power,” she says. She spent a lot of time there, escaping her confusing parents and the even more confusing real world. Then when she was 22, and her father was 48, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
This shouldn’t have been a death sentence, but Frank initially refused radiation because he worried it would affect his ability to have erections. Moon saw this as proof that he prioritised sex over staying alive for his family. In any case, he couldn’t afford it. “You cost us $200,000 to raise, so we need to sell your house to pay for your father’s cancer treatments because he has no health insurance,” Gail told Moon. So Moon sold her home and moved back in with her parents. Frank died in December 1993, surrounded by his children and his wife, and yet millions of dollars in debt. The 2020 documentary Zappa presents him as a creative genius who was humiliated by a music industry led by market forces, reduced to spending his own money — and money he didn’t have — to stage his elaborate rock and orchestral concerts.
“Things like that make me think, OK, he was a genius, if you say so. If ‘genius’ means a person being hyper-focused on what matters to them. But what gets left behind?” she says.
For all of Frank’s clear faults as a parent, it’s Gail who, Moon says, is “the villain” of the book. “I always knew there was an expiration date on her cruelty, plus I had empathy for her during her marriage. So I held a lot of conflicting feelings about her.” These feelings exploded in 2015, when Gail died from lung cancer at the age of 70, after Moon had nursed her for a year. Like her husband, Gail died in debt — partly due to her financial mismanagement as his music manager — and the only thing to leave the children was control over Frank’s music. It was assumed they would each receive 25 per cent when she died. But at the reading of her will they learnt that she left Moon and Dweezil only 20 per cent each, while Ahmet and Diva got 30 per cent, meaning the younger two were in charge and the older ones would need permission from the trust before making money from their father’s music. To Moon, this felt like her mother’s final act of cruelty.
For Dweezil it felt like the end of his career. For years he had been performing his father’s music under the name Zappa Plays Zappa. Now he risked a US$150,000 ($250,000) fine if he played a song without permission. “I am not standing in the way of Dweezil playing the music,” Ahmet said in 2016. “He would just have to be in accordance with the family trust.” Instead, Dweezil renamed his tour 50 Years of Frank: Dweezil Zappa Plays Whatever the F@%k He Wants — the Cease and Desist Tour.
In 2019, an agreement of sorts was reached, in which Dweezil agreed to stop complaining about his younger siblings and his mother in the media. Moon refused to sign it, meaning she remains a beneficiary of the trust, but not a trustee. Like her father, she prioritised freedom of expression over money — and over her family’s desires.
Is she still estranged from her siblings?
“Since I wrote the book, there have been inroads to connection. You know, these are people I have a shared history with, and no one makes me laugh harder.” But she has not shown them the book yet.
It would be easy to write Frank and Gail off as bad, selfish parents: they neglected their children in life and then pitted them against each other in death. But, as always with Zappa, things aren’t that simple. None of the children ever suffered from addiction issues, making them rare among LA celebrity progeny. “Drugs were seen as an obstacle to clarity of vision. None of us was going to cloud that,” Moon says. They are all stable and productive: Moon is focused on writing; Dweezil is still a musician; Ahmet is a businessman; and Diva is an artist. As nepo babies go, they are success stories.
Moon is grateful to her parents for the unique way they raised her, but sad that they made — and left — such a mess. They tried to do something different, she says, “but they didn’t think about the impact of their choices on us.” Or, as she writes at the end of her book, in a passage addressed to Frank and Gail, “As a duo, you created the map and destroyed the key.”
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London