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Because there are lots of voices speaking in their heads, very often at the same time, and it can be very confusing. I have complete respect for the insanity of what it was like to be fifteen or sixteen or nineteen or twenty-five. I couldn’t have been more fucked up myself, going through all those years. I may not have been peeing on someone’s desk, but I was certainly driving myself or some other person crazy. I think it’s a miracle that certain people can survive the fame they get at an early age. I mean, Axl Rose—one minute he’s sleeping in doorways, a minute later he’s a multimillionaire and every girl wants to fuck him. That’s very hard to deal with. I think it’s a miracle that people survive becoming big stars. As we well know, many don’t.

Yet there’s a thrill to being a celebrity. I remember seeing a wonderfully striking Annie Leibovitz photo of you, lying in bed in the morning, on the phone—and you were completely at ease. It didn’t look like you had any clothes on. Do you normally sleep in the nude?

I do. The truth of the matter is I’ve known Annie for many years and I trust her completely. So I’ll do anything. I once posed in 1971 in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel naked with a leaf in front of my dick because she dared me to do it. Jackson Browne has it framed in his living room.

What I found intriguing about the photo of you in bed was that all the books on the shelf were biographies of people from dysfunctional families. ‘The Hustons,’ ‘The Binghams of Louisville.’ You came from a complicated family yourself. Your mother fled the pogroms in Russia and never saw her family again. And when you grew up in Brooklyn, she was the real breadwinner in the family.

She was an amazing woman, one of those kinds of classic people who survived incredibly difficult lives. My father didn’t have a job, so she took in sewing and ended up developing a business where she made corsets and brassieres for people in her apartment. Then she had a store and finally bought the building the store was in.

So your mother always worked?

I grew up in an odd family. When other kids came home at three p.m. for milk and cookies, my mother wasn’t there. When you’re a kid, you don’t quite understand. You kind of wonder—is there something wrong with you? I don’t know how to describe my mother except to say that I admired her, although there were times in my growing up that I wanted to kill her.

Why? Was she domineering? Overprotective?

When I was fifteen, she said: “Okay, that’s it. No more allowance. You want money, you go to work.” That’s the way it was in our family. My mother was going to teach us to take care of ourselves. I can remember my mother ironing my shirts, and she said to me: “Come on, I’ll teach you how to iron a shirt.” When it was finished, she said: “Okay, that’s it. I don’t have to iron any of your shirts anymore. Now that you know how to do it, you do it.” I wanted to kill her.

You’ve said your father fancied himself an intellectual. He spoke many languages, but he never really worked much.

He read a lot. He was scholarly. He traveled the world. In Yiddish there’s an expression: schvare arbiter. Hard worker. He wasn’t one of those. As a kid, it made me resentful.

Did you consider him a failure because he didn’t work?

Yes. I was angry with him for what I saw as his failure in life. But he died when I was seventeen. So I never really got to resolve my relationship with him. That’s always been a sad thing for me.

What made your mother a big influence on you?

No matter how badly I did in school, no matter how little faith I had in myself, my mother always said, “You have golden hands. Whatever you want to be, you’ll succeed at.” And I thought she was a nut, because I was a complete fuck-up and I didn’t think I could do anything. But my mother’s belief in me gave me a level of confidence that enabled me to succeed in life.

Michael Apted has made a series of documentaries that follow kids as they grow into adulthood, based on the maxim “Give me the child