LITMIR.BIZ

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following year in Paris. From the Situationist International and Debord, McLaren absorbed the manner in which the media could be exploited through the production of manifestos, newspapers, collages and misinformation. Through a British offshoot of the movement, King Mob, he became acquainted with the writings of the Scottish Beat writer Alexander Trocchi and the American anarchist/feminist Valerie Solanas, author of ‘The SCUM {Society for Cutting up Men} Manifesto’, who gained notoriety by shooting Andy Warhol in 1968. Guided by situationism, McLaren perfected his skills as the great dissembler.

      A friend from Harrow Art School, Fred Vermorel, who was living in Paris as a ‘hanger-on’ at the Sorbonne, corresponded with McLaren during the months preceding les évenements of May 1968. Like the 1965 race riots in the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts and the anti-Vietnam war rallies, these French student demonstrations were vividly communicated on television, uniting the younger generation across the world in its condemnation of what it saw as heavy-handed suppression by governments.

      It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the student risings against de Gaulle’s conservative rule in France. Les évenements were the culmination of a protest march organised by the student Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ‘Danny the Red’, which began on 22 March at Nanterre, a university in the suburbs of Paris, and gathered support from students and workers alike until it culminated in fierce riots, centred on the Sorbonne, in the heart of the French capital. The protesters were brutally suppressed by the Compagnie Republicaine de Securité, the civil guard. Vermorel sent vivid reports of these events to McLaren and his fellow students who, wishing to claim solidarity, mimicked the French protests.

      On 5 June McLaren, Reid, and other art students, including Robin Scott, who was to move into the Hackford Road flat in 1969, barricaded themselves into the Croydon College of Art and Design. Obeying the situationist dictum ‘Demand the Impossible!’, they issued preposterous demands, such as being allowed to sculpt in pure gold. The outside world was informed of their grievances through a series of press releases, and on 12 June Scott’s views were published in The Times. It was more fun to revolt than to study, and hedonism, as much as idealism, underpinned many student cries for revolution. The fervour of the protest waned with the onset of the summer holidays.

      Participating in such pranks left McLaren little time for his family: ‘I was excited by this idea of taking culture to the streets and changing the whole way of life, using culture as a means of making trouble. These were not dead words, this was action!’ McLaren’s ‘actions’ now look like mere attention-seeking high-jinx. He joined twenty-four others in Selfridges toy department to give away toys. Their flysheet manifesto read: ‘Christmas: it was meant to be great but it’s horrible. Let’s smash the great deception. Light up Oxford Street, dance around the fire.’ On another occasion he pulled on black gloves to ‘steal steaks from the college canteen and cook them in the college kitchens late at night – no fingerprints! It was fun. It felt like the best years of your youth.’ Vivienne shunned these antics, focusing on the essentials of motherhood and earning a living.

      McLaren visited Paris in 1968, and retrospectively exaggerated his role in the ‘revolution’. Though he claimed to have marched with les enragés in May, he did not actually arrive until August. Accompanied by a friend from Croydon, he inspected the iconic debris of student protest with awe. Not a brick of the façade of L’École des Beaux Arts on the rue Bonaparte was visible under the wallpaper of posters and graffiti declaiming such situationist slogans as ‘It is forbidden to forbid’, ‘Under the pavements, the beach’, and ‘Imagination is seizing power’. Gallery owners were peeling these mementoes off the walls, aware that posterity would prize them (just as the avant-garde London art dealer Robert Fraser was to do a decade later, collecting punk posters and donating them on his death to the Victoria and Albert Museum). McLaren found refuge in the Left Bank cafés, imagining that the waiters ‘liked the anarchic idea and believed in it too’, especially as they did not present him with a bill. Unlike Vivienne, who was thrifty, he was mean.

      Attracted by notions of Algerian freedom fighters and Black Panther revolutionaries, the two students headed south, aiming for North Africa. But prosaic bureaucracy thwarted the budding rebel; McLaren had not been inoculated. He was forced to kill time on the south coast of France, waiting for his friend, who had travelled on to Libya, to return.

      It was not love but loneliness that prompted McLaren to miss Vivienne. He began to write to her, describing his life among matadors and gypsies, passing the time, he claimed, discussing communism with the local workers. It is unlikely that his pidgin French would have stretched to philosophical complexities, and after a few companionless days he summoned Vivienne. She borrowed her fare from her mother, left her sons in a crèche and headed south on her first trip abroad.

      Together they bought a small tent, pitched it on Le Trayas beach and camped there for a few weeks, subsidised by money sent by Dora to the local post office. Austerity-trained Vivienne made their modest funds last by collecting discarded fruit from underneath the market stalls and cooking cheap sardines in the sand. Alone together for the first time, the couple were happy and relaxed. Vivienne, undistracted by children, was riveted by McLaren’s accounts of his imaginary exploits on the barricades in Paris, and he was happy to have an audience. His eccentricities amused her: he would insist she take off all her clothes to keep warm, and would refuse to leave the tent to urinate, preferring to use a bottle he would make her take outside to empty. In years to come, she would nostalgically recount these perfect weeks of happiness. ‘When she falls, she really falls,’ says fashion journalist and former Vivienne employee Caroline Baker, who remains a friend and admirer of Vivienne. ‘She really loved him and she talked about {the holiday} so romantically. Every little thing about Malcolm impressed her.’ Even the fact that he only had to pee once a day. She said she was in awe of his strong bladder.

      August passed into September. One night, according to McLaren, the lovers under their canvas roof were woken by the thumping and crashing of pots and pans. A strong tide had swept their tent into the sea. They scrambled onto the beach, having lost everything: cooking utensils, clothes, passports and wallets. It was 3 a.m. Naked and shivering, they ran to the local village, where they persuaded the baker to let them crouch by the ovens to dry out.

      The idyllic holiday had ended. They hitched to Marseilles, where they sat on the church steps in the main square and discussed how to get back to England. There was no point in contacting Dora and asking her to send the bus fare, it would take too long. Perhaps they should surrender themselves to the British Consul, in the hope that the Foreign Office would fund their return. According to McLaren’s implausible account, while they were dithering in the afternoon sun a mini-van pulled up alongside the steps and McLaren’s friend, returning from Africa, rushed up to greet them. ‘Great! You got my postcard then?’ he began. Apparently the friend, assuming that McLaren would still be hanging round Aix-en-Provence, had sent him a postcard, care of the university, instructing him to meet up on the steps of the church in the main square of Marseilles on that very day, 7 September, at 3 p.m. The three piled into the van and set off back to England.

      Vivienne and McLaren came home to a shock. Joseph had slipped into what McLaren described as a ‘catatonic trance’. They took him to the park and tried to rouse him, cajoling him to react, but he just sat inertly staring into space. Finally Joseph responded to McLaren – ‘not to me, because I’d really let him down’ (by abandoning him), his guilt-ridden mother recalled. The following Monday she handed in her notice at the school, determined never to leave Joseph again. McLaren supported her decision.

      Gradually, penury and McLaren’s lack of commitment tore the family apart. When the lease expired in Kennington he escaped back to his grandmother, who had moved into a council flat above South Clapham tube station. Since she refused to shelter Vivienne and the boys, they went to live with her parents, who had now retired and moved from Harrow to a cottage just outside Banbury in Oxfordshire. A former employee remembers Vivienne telling her matter-of-factly that her father made her sleep in the garden shed.

      The relationship between Vivienne and McLaren was now, conveniently for him, in limbo, though Vivienne expected a reconciliation. McLaren kept in touch by taking the train to Oxfordshire approximately once a month to see Joseph (Ben does not feature in his recollections). He received

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