Peggy Caserta, Who Wrote a Tell-All About Janis Joplin, Dies at 84

Her Haight-Ashbury clothing store was ground zero for the counterculture. But she was best known for a tawdry book — which she later disavowed — published after Ms. Joplin’s death.

Peggy Caserta, whose funky Haight-Ashbury clothing boutique was a magnet for young bohemians and musicians, and who exploited her relationship with Janis Joplin in a much-panned 1973 memoir that she later disavowed, died on Nov. 21 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 84.

Her partner and only immediate survivor, Jackie Mendelson, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.

The Louisiana-born Ms. Caserta was 23 and working at a Delta Air Lines office in San Francisco when she decided to open a clothing store for her cohort, the lesbians in her neighborhood. She found an empty storefront on Haight Street, near the corner of Ashbury, which she rented for $87.50 a month.

At first Ms. Caserta sold jeans, sweatshirts and double-breasted denim blazers that her mother made. Then she added Levi’s pants, which a friend turned into flares by inserting a triangle of denim into the side seams. When the friend couldn’t keep up with the orders, Ms. Caserta persuaded Levi Strauss & Company to make them.

She named the place Mnasidika (pronounced na-SID-ek-ah), after a character in a poem by Sappho. “It’s a Greek girls’ name,” Ms. Caserta told The San Francisco Examiner in 1965, for an article about the “new bohemians” colonizing the Haight-Ashbury district.

“We didn’t even know we were hippies,” Ms. Caserta told another reporter.

The store became a hangout for Ms. Caserta’s friends, a ragtag bunch of drug smugglers and musicians, including a then-penniless band called the Grateful Dead — “a scraggly group,” she called them — who posed for her store posters and lived around the corner. So did Ms. Caserta and her girlfriend, and Joe McDonald, of the band Country Joe and the Fish, and his girlfriend, a young singer from Texas named Janis Joplin.

Ms. Joplin came into the store one day and asked to buy a pair of jeans on layaway. The jeans sold for $4.95, and she had 50 cents to put down. Ms. Caserta gave them to her, at no charge, and the two became fast friends, occasional lovers and then dope-shooting comrades, even as their fortunes rose.

Mnasidika was enormously popular, a go-to clothier for Jimi Hendrix, Kris Kristofferson and Sly Stone, among others — and the local pot dealers. And Ms. Caserta, with her enticing Southern drawl, became a kind of hippie entrepreneur. She sold tickets for Bill Graham’s concerts at the Fillmore and LSD for Augustus Owsley Stanley, the Dead’s sound engineer, who found fame with his psychedelic product.

She was generous with her friends — she bought one girlfriend a motorcycle and a Porsche — and once put her house up as collateral for a bail bond to get a pot-smuggling pal out of jail. Later, she would help his colleagues break out of a Mexican prison.

Ms. Caserta continued to branch out, opening new stores and buying property, and she and Ms. Joplin were planning to start a production company, said Ms. Mendelson, who was on the scene at the time. They intended to call it Honeysuckle Productions, and they even had a logo and stationery.

Then everything went sideways.

On Oct. 2, 1970, Ms. Caserta and Ms. Joplin had each scored heroin and were staying together at the Hollywood Landmark Hotel. Ms. Joplin’s boyfriend at the time was on his way to see her, anticipating a threesome. Ms. Caserta, who declined to participate, left and checked into the Château Marmont.

Two days later, Ms. Joplin was dead at 27 from an apparent overdose. Ms. Caserta’s seemingly bottomless descent into addiction had only begun.

She was pilloried by friends, who blamed her for Ms. Joplin’s death, and pilloried again when her tell-all, “Going Down With Janis,” was published in 1973. Hers was one of a few Joplin books out that year, including the more conventional “Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin,” by Myra Friedman, the singer’s publicist.

Most reviewers dismissed Ms. Caserta’s book as “tedious trash,” in the words of one critic, and opportunistic pornography. Ms. Friedman, who decried the book as “loathsome and untrue,” was one of many in Ms. Joplin’s circle who claimed that the singer had recently been clean and blamed Ms. Caserta for her relapse.

The book’s “one revelation,” Midge Decter wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “although an unwitting one — and as if we didn’t know — is that sex and heroin do not mix.”

For her part, Ms. Caserta said that she never saw the book before it was published, and that it was the creation of a ghostwriter who had interviewed her at length and hyped up the drugs and the sex.

She acknowledged her own complicity, however, having sold her story to pay for her habit. In the end, she pocketed only about $2,000, which, as she wrote in a 2018 memoir, “I Ran Into Some Trouble,” “quickly and completely disappeared into my arm.”

For more than 30 years after Ms. Joplin’s death, Ms. Caserta remained an addict. And as her habit grew, her business collapsed.

She ran one prescription scam with a friend, buying and selling the opioid Dilaudid, and another with a Dr. Feelgood, who ended up in jail.

She spent months in a Mexican prison by choice, pretending to be the partner of a man incarcerated there. The prison was rather lax and allowed conjugal visitors to stay for weeks, which she did while helping her friends dig an escape tunnel. (She stayed longer than necessary to ensure their success because the drugs inside were, to her, so good.)

She also spent many months at a women’s prison in California — not by choice — and cycled in and out of rehab centers and jails for years before finally kicking her habit in 2004.

Peggy Louise Caserta was born on Sept. 12, 1940, in Covington, La., the only child of Sam and Novell (Kirkpatrick) Caserta. Her father was a postal worker.

Peggy was homecoming queen at Covington High School and an honor student at Perkinston Junior College (now Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College), from which she earned an associate degree.

Soon after, she went to work for Delta, hoping to be a flight attendant. But she was sidelined by airsickness and transferred to a desk job, first in New York City and then in San Francisco, where she was lucky — or prescient — enough to start a business at what would become ground zero for the counterculture.

“I Ran Into Some Trouble,” written with Maggie Falcon, was her effort at redemption after the fallout from “Going Down With Janis,” which many said exploited Ms. Joplin’s death — although in recent years it has been rehabilitated as a gay touchstone.

“I was hiding for those first 25 years,” Ms. Caserta told New York magazine when her 2018 book was published. “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.”

She continued: “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.’”