LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

the next seven years. McLaren was one of a generation of British art school graduates who were to become prominent in the nation’s phenomenally successful pop music, pop art, advertising and media industries, which contributed significantly both to Britain’s gross national product and its cultural prestige.

      By 1965 Vivienne could no longer sustain her dull marriage. Despite Derek Westwood’s kindness, good looks and dancing skills, she was bored. She did not share his simple interests, and resented the fact that, as she saw it, she ‘was not learning from staying with him’. A tempting world had opened up to her through her brother Gordon and his friends, five or six years her junior, at Harrow Art School. Despite Derek’s pleas, she strained to escape the marriage. After several attempts to leave, she finally broke away in 1965, taking three-year-old Ben to live in her parents’ flat above the post office. The couple divorced the following year. (In later life, Vivienne conceded that Derek had been a good husband and a kind man – ‘too kind for me’.)

      Every day Vivienne would wheel Ben’s pushchair past Gordon’s Morris Cowley, parked outside the Swire flat, and peer through the steamed-up windows. There, hunched under an old coat, lay Malcolm McLaren, who had taken up Gordon’s offer to move from his previous abode – ‘under a tree in the Harrow-on-the-Hill cemetery’ – into the car. Dora Swire disapproved of this dosser, and refused to allow him into their home, but once she had taken her place behind the post office counter, McLaren would sneak upstairs to take a bath and cadge breakfast.

      Vivienne admired this camp dandy in his makeshift home, and he was amused by her fiery temperament and Sunday school ways. His earliest memory of her, as a shy Christian out of Picture Post dressed in home-knits and kilt, was a caricature that served his storytelling. She remembered being ‘a mess’ when she met him: ‘I was into the dolly bird look. Wispy hair and fur coats. I looked dreadful.’ McLaren loved to expose her provincialism: ‘London seemed to her a city of snobs … she found the people frightening, arrogant and unkind and she could not deal with it.’ Though this curious provincial and this posturing metropolitan seemed poles apart, McLaren’s rebelliousness was simply a more aggressive expression of Vivienne’s discontent. As well as their fertile imaginations, they shared an inclination to conjure up idyllic notions of youth and childhood; he because he had not enjoyed his, she because she had. They also shared a low boredom threshold, and an unwillingness to mention their fathers. But in other ways they were very different. While Vivienne had an earnestness that bordered on the humourless, McLaren treated life as a game, and adopted an irreverent and sarcastic pose.

      Like Vivienne’s Glossop schoolfriend Maureen Purcell, McLaren’s relatives were Jewish tailors. Just as Maureen had introduced her into new circles in Manchester and Leeds, so Vivienne believed that McLaren could provide access to a fascinating world: ‘I felt there were so many doors to open, and he had the key to all of them. Plus he had a political attitude and I needed to align myself.’ She sought out his company, impressed that ‘he was cultured. His family were Portuguese diamond merchants way back and had a whole cosmopolitan understanding.’ But McLaren was afraid of women: they were either unreliable, like his mother, or suffocatingly manipulative, like Grandmother Rose. He was unable to befriend them and, though his friends were lustily experimenting in that dawn of promiscuity, he remained a virgin.

      Dissatisfied with her uneducated state, Vivienne determined to improve herself in the company of McLaren and her brother’s student friends. But for a time she remained suspicious that artists were ‘anarchists, time-wasters or vagabonds’, and her nature prevented her from sharing wholeheartedly in their lack of interest in the practical side of life. Torn between the self-improvement promised by higher education and the necessity to find a job, she enrolled for a Diploma of Education course at St Gabriel’s Teacher Training College in Camberwell, South London, reasoning that she could always be an art teacher. ‘I thought, if I can’t find a way to make a living at painting’ – which, under the influence of her brother Gordon and his art-school friends she had come to believe to be the most desirable way of life – ‘at least I can be a teacher, and teach someone else to paint.’

      Gordon left Harrow to study at the London College of Film Technique. He rented a rundown house at 31 King’s Avenue, near Clapham North underground station in South London. Two fellow film students, John Broderick and Chuck Coryn, variously described by McLaren as ‘American draft dodgers’ or ‘Vietnam vets’, shared the house, and after a few months McLaren joined them.

      To McLaren’s horror, Vivienne and her son moved in shortly afterwards, compromising his ‘boys’ domain’. He also found Vivienne attractive, and ‘a sexual threat’. But the attraction was not mutual. Vivienne liked pretty boys, and McLaren’s rail-thin physique, pigeon-toed stance, unruly ginger hair and rage-red face, which he optimistically tried to disguise under talcum powder (hence his nickname ‘Talcy Malcy’), were not conventionally handsome. Looks aside, his pent-up anger would from time to time explode violently, and this disturbed her. But slowly, over the weeks, a combination of boredom, curiosity and sheer proximity to this compelling storyteller broke down her indifference to him. While the others attended film school, they passed the hours hunched over an inadequate bar-heater, sharing beans on toast and tea, or smoking Woodbines and downing whiskies late into the night.

      As McLaren lectured her on the political power of art and the appeal of cult fashions, Vivienne assembled the costume-jewellery crosses she had started to sell at the weekend in Portobello market to add to her modest student grant and social security benefit. The jewellery was to be their first joint venture. McLaren would watch his methodical companion set the stones in place – red, then orange, then purple, then red again – before intervening to rearrange the colours. ‘She started to be taken by me because of the way I put the beads together and made them less boring, and … I was intrigued by her … because she hung on my every word,’ he recalled, with characteristic egotism. Vivienne readily deferred to his suggestions, which she believed were ‘more like exercises, more balanced in the way modern art was, instead of what I was doing … all sort of bunged together. His were more artist {sic}, mine more crafts. I always thought his ideas were so much better than mine.’ During these weeks, their roles were established and set for the next decade: she as the student craftsman, he the opinionated art director.

      McLaren, who was obsessed with fashion and style, also art directed Vivienne’s appearance. She abandoned the ‘dolly bird’ look. ‘He took me by the hand and made me more stylish. I was twenty-five and got heavily into the school uniform look,’ which she bought in the children’s department of the Oxford Street department store John Lewis and wore with ankle-socks. This formative lesson in style, and its associations with carefree romance, were to emerge two decades later in Vivienne’s collections.

      Intimacies were exchanged. McLaren disclosed his hatred for his polygamous and absent parents, who had turned him into ‘an odd fish’, and his regular nightmares about his mother. ‘He had just left home very traumatically, a very Jewish home, and he felt he didn’t have any roots outside Jewish society.’ Vivienne says, romanticising his background somewhat. She in turn confided her relief that she had escaped her marriage to a ‘no-hoper’, in which she had been ‘saddled to the kitchen sink with a screaming brat round my ankles’.

      McLaren’s anger was channelled into subscribing to any movement that incited anarchy. According to his first art teacher at Harrow, Theodore Ramos, he was ‘playing with art’, but Vivienne was intrigued by McLaren’s anarchist conceits, which suggested an outlet for her righteous indignation about ‘this horrible world’. Nevertheless, she was not in love with this ranting revolutionary, though his manic displays of hysteria did arouse her sexual appetite. ‘He seemed quite spectacular at the time, really. He had a very, very pale face {thanks to the talcum powder} and he had very slight hair on his skin and very, very close-cropped hair. But I once remember I said something to him … and he suddenly exploded in front of me … His lips were very red in the context of his pale face and I remember his mouth – he’s got a well-formed, well-shaped mouth, quite pointed it is – well, it just opened up and I could see all the gums inside. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I respected this kind of intensity.’ No physical detail was missed by Vivienne, whose visual recall is exceptional.

      When Vivienne mentioned

Скачать книгу