With a memoir, Deborah Santana emerges from Carlos' shadow

People might like to have Deborah Santana's problems. She's gorgeous, she's rich and she's married to Carlos Santana.

So he was gone a lot on tour, and sometimes yielded to a bold female stare. So sometimes a door to a party, all that music and conversation and cameras snapping, was absentmindedly closed in her face after her husband walked through.

"When I was out in public with Carlos, people were never interested, so I didn't bother saying anything. I didn't want people to talk over me or push me away to try to get to him. I developed this stoic personality in public with him. He's the star, I'm the closed smiling face."

Today that face is open and glowing. Deborah and her husband sit on stools in a San Francisco recording studio to talk about making the audio version of her memoir "Space Between the Stars," due out in March from Random House.

This is her day. Carlos, in black from his knit cap down, is here only as backup, to do the interview with her and add some songs to the audio book. They've driven in from Marin County, where the couple has lived since 1972. The 12-member Santana organization (not including the eight in the band) has its headquarters near the family's house in San Rafael.

Seven years ago, Deborah took a writing class with Melba Beals at Book Passage in Corte Madera. For the first time in a long time, she found something that came before Carlos and their kids (Angelica, 14, Stella, 19, and Salvador, 21).

Although she signed up "really just to continue using my mind," it was an autobiography class, so she started writing down her story. She was then a minor character even in her own life story. "I was pretty closed when I started," she says. "I'd come from class crying because I thought that I bared my soul, and Melba said, 'So what did you feel?' I had this porcelain surface. When I started writing, I cracked myself open." As Deborah talks about the writing, her shoulders go back and she blinks slowly, as if remembering a longtime love.

Years of workshops, editors and endless drafts followed, but she wrote the book. She put her writing schedule on the family calendar: "Dominican library 2-5 p.m." and taught herself to ask Carlos to find someone else to go over his schedule or proof the newsletter for the fan club.

In the book, we learn that Deborah King grew up in San Francisco on Majestic Avenue and went to local schools. Her father was the blues musician Saunders King. Deborah went to the Marin Civic Center in 1972 to hear Tower of Power and saw Carlos in a white suit waiting to go onstage. He was already famous, after electrifying the muddy crowd at Woodstock, doing "The Ed Sullivan Show" and Altamont in 1969.

The nicest musician

Wary after an unpleasant time with previous boyfriend Sly Stone in Los Angeles, Deborah was reluctant to take up with another famous musician, even after she was told that Santana was the nicest man in the business.

Carlos remembers being smitten. He says in his soft voice, "It was like that movie, 'West Side Story,' where Maria and Tony are in the gym and everything disappears." He unconsciously fingers his wedding ring when he talks about Deborah.

He pursued her, and they discovered they shared a spiritual questing. Eight months after they met they got married, when he was 25, and she was 22.

"I really kind of jumped into his ocean," Deborah remembers. She became involved in every aspect of his business, handling his schedule, going with him on tour.

The kids came along, and "he was sleeping with people on the road. That's not my standard of life. I didn't live that way. Carlos' partner was music. My partner was the family. A lot of people would have said, 'Screw this guy.' "

But she says he would make an effort to change his evil ways, and they would go on. "He would shift. He would want to grow, and he would make some effort in his life. And then I would fall in love with him again. I feel as if I've been married a few different times to the same person."

When the book was done, Deborah knew Carlos' name would open doors for her, but she was determined to use that advantage as little as possible. "Someone came to Carlos right after 'Supernatural' and offered him a million dollars to do his memoir. Someone told him, 'His wife is writing a memoir.' But I didn't go through them." Instead she took it to a booksellers' convention -- where someone asked her who wrote her book for her -- and shopped it to publishers, working on it as she went. When 17 publishers said, "We're over the guru thing," she slashed 200 pages about the couple's nine- year involvement with guru Sri Chinmoy.

Now it's done. She gave it to Carlos to read. "He sat down in our living room every night and then he just would sit there on the couch and read the book and look up at me with these wistful eyes."

This time it was Deborah who had changed.

This is the age of the memoir, when ordinary people, even those with famous spouses, have permission to write down what has happened to them. It is a singular act, to write a book that says: This is what happened to me, and this is what it meant.

A lasting marriage

Carlos proved again that he could make the kind of adjustments that make a marriage -- even one in the music business -- last for 32 years.

"We can discuss everything. I can tell him about writers, and it sticks. He had to ask me questions -- how is my writing going? Before we always talked about his life and the children. Now I see him wanting to be in my world."

She's still gorgeous, still rich, still married to Carlos Santana. And now she is something more. She's Deborah Santana. She says simply, "I wrote myself into existence."