Singer Janis Joplin's friend and former lover, Peggy Caserta, passed away on Thursday, November 21. She was 84. Per Deadline, she died of "natural causes at her cabin," located on the Tillamook River on the Oregon Coast.
Caserta is perhaps most known for the 1973 tell-all book, Going Down With Janis, which outlined her relationship with the rock & roll singer. Per the book, she and Joplin would get intimate with each other, abuse substances together, and more. However, she later rubbished the book as nothing but ghostwritten fiction. She told Rolling Stone in 2018:
"I didn’t write that smut about Janis. I would never talk like that about our close association. But I lost control because I was strung out and making awful decisions.”
Who was Peggy Caserta? The discoverer of bell-bottom jeans dies at 84
Peggy Caserta was born on September 12, 1940, just outside New Orleans. She grew up shifting between Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Georgia. However, she spent grade school at The Lone Star State, where she eventually went on to befriend the notorious Harvey Lee Oswald.
In her nascent career, Peggy Caserta held a stint as a flight attendant for Delta Airlines in NYC. Unhappy, she soon opened up her boutique in San Fransisco in 1965. For her to be living an open life as a lesbian was a rarity in and of itself back then, so for her to name her Haight-Ashbury shop Mnasidika was unheard of at the time. Mnasidika is a character in the poetry collection The Songs of Bilitis, which touches on Sapphic elements.
Soon, Peggy Caserta became everyone's go-to in San Fransisco. One day, Peggy noticed a girl wearing a unique pair of custom Levi’s®. The girl, Judy, had added a paisley triangle to her boyfriend's jeans by splitting the side seam. Impressed, she struck up a deal with Levi Strauss to custom-make orders just for her. The pants went on to become a massive hit, and in 2019, the company issued a press release acknowledging Caserta's work:
"Peggy and the employee started with 30 dozen jeans. When the Levi’s® pants sold like hot cakes, Peggy returned to the factory with a check in hand to pay off the advance. The partners then doubled the run and increased the flare, repeating the production again and widening the flare even more. In the end, Peggy worked out an exclusive, six-month deal through 1968 to sell the popular Levi’s® bell bottom jeans only at Mnasidika."
Then, it was in 1966 that she met her future lover. She penned about it in her 2018 memoir I Ran Into Some Trouble:
"I found myself on Haight Street. 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.”
The same book also made headlines the year it came out for refuting the claims that Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose in Los Angeles in 1970. In the book, Peggy Caserta claimed that Janis tripped over something, fell and broke her nose, causing her to bleed. She then choked on her blood. She told Rolling Stone:
"I saw her foot sticking out at the end of the bed. She was lying with cigarettes in one hand and change in the other. For years it bothered me. How could she have overdosed and then walked out to the lobby and walked back. … I let it go for years, but I always thought, ‘Something is wrong here.’”
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The book Going Down With Janis drew ire from the public on one hand for having outed Janice, but on the other, it was lauded for its queer representation at a time when such a thing was unheard of.
Per Deadline, Peggy Caserta's friend and publisher at Wyatt-MacKenzie, Nancy Cleary, confirmed her demise. Wyatt-MacKenzie is the same house that published I Ran Into Some Trouble.
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