LITMIR.BIZ

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– not real life!’ Michael Kostiff was struck by Vivienne’s evident obsession with McLaren: ‘She hung on Malcolm’s every word. She was quite in awe of him, {his} command of English and his art school and situationist background.’ But they were not a loving couple, rather ‘hardbitten and definitely not sentimental’ towards one another. Tommy Roberts agreed: ‘They weren’t an overtly loving couple. It was just an interesting twosome. They were strong and ambitious and doing interesting things.’

      To McLaren’s mind, the presence of Ben and Joe was inconvenient, and they were dispatched to a series of liberal boarding schools. He justified his disregard for them by claiming that he was imbuing them with a spirit of independence. Vivienne, in his thrall, concurred – McLaren was always right. Since the couple could not afford their school fees, the boys would be passed from one school to another once the goodwill had run out: ‘They were always being picked up in the middle of the night and shown to another school because they {Vivienne and McLaren} hadn’t paid the fees,’ says John Rowley, a colleague and flatmate of Joseph’s in later life. By the end of the boys’ preparatory school education, the couple owed £7,000 in unpaid school fees.

      Not yet ten, the boys would have to take their washing to the launderette when they were home from school: ‘Vivienne gave me such a free life that I spent most time outside,’ says Joe loyally. ‘Once I was out very late doing one of my first business transactions, swapping my padlock for a watch. I started to walk home feeling very pleased with myself, when I spotted Mum’s Mini. She had been driving around the streets looking for me, obviously worried sick. She jumped out and gave me a real clout.’

      Ben was left in no doubt about McLaren’s hatred for him. ‘He had no time for children,’ he remembered, although he did occasionally take the boys on adventures: ‘Once we hitch-hiked to Romney Marshes and walked right across a military firing range. Then we hitch-hiked to Anglesey and slept in a barn, and there was this dead sheep with his two back legs chopped off, and Malcolm said there was a madman about and we had to barricade ourselves in.’

      Gradually, the boys became more insecure. Joseph was sent to board at Hawkhirst Court in Sussex for two and a half years: ‘They were so strict, they just had stupid rules and regulations,’ he remembers. ‘You had to open all your parcels in front of everyone; the only time you’d get a present was on your birthday. She sent me a Chinese writing set. I’ve still got it … I didn’t really like Malcolm, but I didn’t hate him,’ he continues. ‘Once he gave us about fifty comics and a great bag of sweets that kept us going for about five hours.’

      For a time Joe boarded at A.S. Neill’s radically liberal Summerhill in Suffolk, but even to McLaren’s mind ‘it was too wild and too free’. He was next sent to St Christopher’s. McLaren only realised how lonely Joe was when he came home from one of his schools. He would tease his son by pretending that he, Malcolm, was the King of Portugal (his great-grandparents had been Portuguese Jews), and that Joseph was therefore the heir to the throne. When a letter marked ‘Royal Mail’ came he’d say, ‘It must be for you, Joseph.’ But despite his entertaining games, the children knew that they were insignificant to McLaren, and that their mother remained under his influence.

      They loved their mother, and were fiercely proud of her unorthodoxy. Ben describes her around 1973 as wearing ‘really short skirts and having blonde spiky hair. I remember going round to see boarding schools and the other kids were looking up her skirt and I was embarrassed.’ If he thought comments by other pupils were disrespectful, he would hit them: ‘I love my mum and I loved her then. I used to fight people. They’d say, “Ooh, I like your mum.” ’

      While many of McLaren’s friends dismissed Vivienne as no more than his mealy-mouthed and doting girlfriend, those who took the trouble to talk to her soon realised that she was a powerful woman who harboured a keen ambition. Gene Krell, a Brooklyn-born stylist and retailer who had worked as a doorman at the Salvation nightclub in Manhattan, and who married the Warhol Factory singer Nico, came into the fashion world as joint owner of the New York and London glam rock boutiques Granny Takes a Trip. His ground-breaking style was a riposte to the seriousness of the Mod scene. By 1973 he was running the London shop (in 1996 he became fashion editor of Condé Nast’s Vogue Korea). Krell, and Granny Takes a Trip, were the epitome of what McLaren and Vivienne hated – dandy glam rock shopkeepers and their upper-class hippie clientele. But Krell’s transsexual dress, such as black hennaed hair fastened up with combs and white powder makeup, turned heads. He favoured gem-coloured velvet suits, footwear from Gohil, a bespoke cobbler in Camden Town who made patchwork suede Cuban-heeled boots for the ‘in-crowd’, and garish forties print shirts (made out of material from Pontins, a delightfully dated department store in Kensington). Alternatively, he would wear a multi-coloured kimono printed with overblown chrysanthemums, his three-inch nails adjusting his unruly squid-black tresses.

      Krell was intrigued by the angular creature dressed in a leather, chain-hung mini, with spiked hair, skull earrings and lips painted like a Mondrian grid in three blocks of colour, who occasionally helped at TFTLTYTD (the artist Duggie Fields was inspired by Vivienne’s strange make-up to paint an acrylic portrait featuring the tricoloured lips). To Vivienne, other designers and shops were not merely commercial competition, but rival gangs on which to declare war. Didn’t they understand that Billy Fury was more significant to the history of pop music than Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones? Krell would listen amazed as she berated Anthony Price for the glam rock frocks and sharp suits he sold at his King’s Road shop Plaza, scoffed at the glitter clothes sold at Alkasura nearby, and dismissed Krell’s merchandise, to his face, for its apolitical decadence. A playful quarrel would ensue, until Vivienne bluntly conceded to Krell, ‘Though I hate your look, I really like you.’ A lifelong friendship was founded on Krell’s admiration for her strength, anarchy and candour, and her love of his loyalty and New York street humour.

      Vivienne was clearly beginning to outgrow the shyness that had previously hindered her. ‘She was certainly not in Malcolm’s shadow,’ Krell remembers. ‘She looked so visually stunning, whereas he looked like a nerd – a boring rockabilly guy.’ Immersed as she now was in the fashion pack, Krell found Vivienne’s fiercely anti-fashion stance unique. Despite McLaren’s claims to be ‘the voice of disenchanted youth’, it was commerce and a love of being in fashion that drove him, whereas Vivienne actually believed the propaganda of their cause.

      Vivienne’s extreme dress and heartfelt haranguing of her customers were beginning to attract attention. On 7 December 1973 West One magazine selected her, together with Nell Campbell (nightclub hostess and star of The Rocky Horror Show), stylists Louise Doktor and Shelley Martin, and the green-haired Rae Spencer-Cullen (aka the dress designer ‘Miss Mouse’) as one of the ‘London Belles’ with the strongest style. John Bishop photographed her for the magazine dressed as a proto-punk in a zippered T-shirt, fishnets and spiked hair. Asked about her ambitions and views, she replied that she wanted to be like a gorilla, her favourite food was brown rice and vegetables, her favourite book was Summerhill by A.S. Neill and her favourite song was ‘There’s No One to Love Me Now’ by Shaweez. Vivienne’s first appearance in print fuelled her ambition. At a fifties revival concert given by the Shananas, when the band invited someone from the audience up on stage, Tommy Roberts remembers that Vivienne was up there in a flash, ‘no messing about, and I knew then she wanted fame. She knew what the game was. She’s clever. “She’ll get what she wants,” I thought.’

      The arrival of the New York Dolls in London in November 1973 galvanised McLaren once again, and he devotedly followed them from gig to gig. In January he accompanied them to Paris, where he introduced them to Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. The seeds of punk were apparent in their antics – the rock star cliché of smashing guitars, pouring vitriol on the audience and the press – and their accessories, such as the swastika. Enthralled by the rock world, McLaren nurtured his fantasy of becoming the next Larry Parnes, the Jewish impresario who had managed Billy Fury. To that end he befriended Gloria Jones, the common-law wife of T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, and the New Musical Express journalist Nick Kent, and started casting about for a band.

      By the spring of 1974, class-ridden, economically depressed and seemingly leaderless England was in crisis. Prime Minister Edward Heath called an election

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