Anderton claimed to hate going on the road and leaving her husband, Michael, her daughter, and her goldfish. “My family is the most important part of my life,” she said during an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show. “Aside from the booze. And I don’t trust Michael with the fish.”

From Cry Me a River:

The Lives of Pauline Anderton by Desmond Sullivan

1.

The record dropped onto the turntable, and within seconds, the noise of the traffic on West End Avenue and the sound of the piano student practicing in a neighboring apartment and the deep rumble of a jet making its final approach toward La Guardia were drowned out by Pauline Anderton’s big, grainy voice belting out the opening bars of “The Man I Love.”

Desmond Sullivan sat back in his chair, the unfinished manuscript of his biography of Pauline Anderton spread out on the desk before him. That’s singing, he thought. Not great singing—technically speaking, not even good singing—but sincere, unadulterated, and emotionally wrenching. There were no safety nets here, no studio filters or electronic tricks, just a beating heart, exposed nerves, and a tremendous amount of oxygen. “Some day he’ll come a LOOOOONG.” Every note Anderton sang went through your body, even when, clearly, it was the wrong note. Leave precision to brain surgeons and airplane mechanics; he’d take a singer willing to plow through a song with heartfelt inaccuracy any day.

He leaned his elbows on his desk, put his head in his hands, and stared out the bedroom window and across the air shaft. In less than a week he was headed to Boston for a four-month-long teaching job at Deerforth College. The offer had come through a mere three weeks ago, an indication that he wasn’t the school’s first choice and probably wasn’t their second or third choice either. Well, guess what? Teaching hadn’t been his first choice. He needed a salary and an airtight excuse for leaving New York for a little while, and Deerforth College was providing him with both. If the offer, with its aura of last-minute desperation, had been an insult, he’d thrown it right back in their faces by accepting it. With a little money and a little time away from Russell, he could finally fit all the pieces of this new book together and send it off to his publisher.

The song was approaching the bridge, the weakest part of Anderton’s rocky performance. The pretentious way she pronounced Tuesday (“Ta-Youse-Day”) always made Desmond cringe. One of Anderton’s managers had tried to refine her diction by sending her to elocution lessons, and the result was this occasional lapse in honesty, especially when she’d been drinking before a show or a recording session.