Autobiography (29 page)

Warner UK had bought the Smiths catalogue from Johnny and I in 1992. Rough Trade had heaved and collapsed under a sea of bankruptcy and courtroom humiliations, but would later resurface with a slight alteration to their trading name. Rough Trade of old had wheezed its last, and their Smiths-days staff were packed off to the slaughterhouse.

‘I suppose you’re enormous in Cleveland?’
asks David Bowie.

‘No,’
I reply, utterly baffled.

‘Oh.’
He slumps.

Because Johnny and I were not in communication with each other, it was deemed wise (by my lawyer, who also represented Warner!
Oh, the maze, the maze
...
the quagmired maze
) that I accept an offer of £734,000 to let the Smiths catalogue go. So I did, and I assumed that Johnny received the same amount, to naturally be whittled down by those ever-helpful wire-pullers who logroll such negotiations. Warner immediately reissued the Smiths’ entire album catalogue with considerable success as seven Smiths albums lodged in the top 75 for a few weeks, the stars of which were
Singles
, reaching number 5, and yet another compilation, called
Best
, which reached number 1. Although I had no personal involvement in the reissue project, I found myself heavily criticized in the press for the quality of the Warner artwork. When asked to do a voice-over for a television commercial to promote
Singles
, populist John Peel refused due to what he termed
‘the Morrissey racism question’
. Himself a sermonizing pillar of wisdom, Peel quite interestingly wasted no time on moral prevarication when the Queen called him to Buckingham Palace for the bureaucratic
OBE
badge. Oh, at last he is fully plumbed with the stamp of approval from those who count.

For the sleeve of
Singles
Warner had used a bleakly soothing shot of Diana Dors that I had housed at Rough Trade many years ago in readiness for the next block of Smiths dynamite. It should be noted that at this stage neither Andy nor Mike were involved in the Smiths catalogue sale, and they had no involvement with Warner as catalogue buyers, since neither Andy nor Mike had a contractual position with Rough Trade or Sire Records.

Back in New York, David Bowie asks me,
‘Do you, er, still have the same band?’

‘Yes,’
I say, and he looks downwards.

The word is well established that the Morrissey band is not as good as the Smiths, or even up to much in their own right. It is an accusation that I must live with for the rest of my life, irrespective of how often the line-up changes. It is true that Spencer’s drumming was initially not earth-shattering, but he became greatly impressive, and his gypsy profile earned him a few screams. Insanely, he elected to abandon the drums precisely at the moment when he had polished and refined his craft. His temperament forever remained a puzzle, and in San Francisco he unwisely elected to throw a microphone stand off the stage. It bounced off the head of a security guard who was then rushed to hospital as his head gushed blood. This act by Spencer immediately placed my neck on the guillotine, since the security guard obviously had grounds to sue – that is, to sue me, but not Spencer. Quite incredibly, the guard asked only for an apology from Spencer, and equally amazingly he managed to get one. But by this time Avalon venue security have blacklisted Morrissey shows as being too violent, and they would keep me blacklisted until 2005.

Shamefully my interest in video as promotional tool had never exactly been pentathlon in endurance. The twitching brain could never connect, and the feet felt glued at the call of ‘action’. The ideas for almost everything from
Girlfriend in a coma
onwards rolled off Tim Broad’s pen. I stood and watched like a prized lemon. Mildly wicked storyboards drowned in their own sources, and I found myself plonked in there somewhere, matter-of-factly. It was Tim’s idea to travel to Fairmount, Indiana, for the
Suedehead
video, even though the song itself assumed an Openshaw expression of life-as-a-waste-of-time. The surviving members of James Dean’s family were happy to allow us to use the Winslow farmhouse where Dean grew up, and where many now-famous photographs caught Dean half-boyhood, half-Hollywood. Summers in baggy western jeanwear, confidently fooling around, barnyards and animals, before literary pretensions kicked in and lost the bespectacled boy to fame’s barbarity.

We arrived at Fairmount after passing through Marion, where Dean was born. There is nothing to see, and there is nothing to say about what is not seen. You can only wonder how those who live in the sheltered white wooden houses pass their time, never changing, always the same, off-center if not immersed in family and reproduction and just getting through. All aspects of the outside world must be deemed negative in order to justify your reason for not joining it.

February of 1988 was blanketed by snow and sealed in by frost. The camera crew had glassy strips of ice in their facial hair. It would be impossible to stand on Main Street for more than three minutes; the bones rattle, the face sags, the cold is unmerciful. Layers of restorative thermal underwear and a pair of boots that would otherwise be beneath my dignity just barely save my life. To these locals, I must seem like a bit of nonsense from Montague Square. A diner on Main Street remains where the young Jim slipped away his days, and he is remembered politely by the owners as I plough into French fries with white bread, for there is nothing else on the menu that I can eat. The Citizens State Bank remains, as does an intoxicating record store of spellbinding LPs and 45s, preciously presented, yet too voluminous to flick through, and the mind races at the wonderland of stacked shelves. As irritating as ever, I request:
‘Do you have anything by the New York Dolls?’
and I am met with what seems like an hour of silence. James Dean’s old high school stands abandoned. Four of us break the ever-choking laws of the land as we approach the school just before nightfall.

Tim Broad pulls at heavy boards that block the windows and we soon find a way in. An abandoned school is an eerie place – a worn-out husk of sadness that throws the mind in several directions. Walk through the cold corridors and all sorts of things test the memory. I stand on the school stage where James Dean attempted his first recitals, my mental vision revolving, banging as it goes. I sit in the old classrooms where desks and chairs remain since the 1940s prime of Fairmount High. I fold two chairs away with their Fairmount School badges still attached, and I will later ship them back to England. This can hardly be considered theft since nobody wants this junk anyway, and the poet within sighs at the likelihood that Dean himself once occupied these chairs with a wide sprawl of the legs – the stuck pupil awaiting the final bell so that he might be free to become eternal. I am standing in the school shower room where toilet cubicles are without doors – surely an army notion? But
...
for children?
No privacy to sit and lighten life’s load? I wondered if the girls’ section also had toilet cubicles without doors, for part-strangers to walk by and peer in? Probably not.
The boys’ open cubicles face a frontline of shower heads, and it must have been here on noisy afternoons as the hardy annuals stripped off that Dean met his undiscovered nature. No hiding place for the hefty lads of the mid-west.

The Winslow farmhouse is unchanged since the 1950s, and I recall a thousand photographs as I look around the kitchen where Dean and cousin Markie allowed the camera to click. Of those now ancient photographs I had been caught by how casual Dean and Markie had always been – no primly proper smiling into the lens, or embarrassed expressions, as were my own memories of childhood photographs. Whereas we stood to attention and gave the world a smiling face, both Dean and Markie allowed the camera to observe them whilst offering it no thought. The record retained is alarmingly convincing – as if Dean already had no doubts about his inner bearing. I sit in the old barnyard where Dean once sat reading his beloved
The Little P
rince
, and then the adult Markie takes me aside to show me something that few have ever seen. At the rear of the barn there is a large slab of cement covered by oilcloth. Whooshing back the cover, Markie reveals the handwriting of the juvenile James – signature and hand-patterns pressed into soft cement one exuberant 1940s summer, making his mark for such as I to trace decades later. I shake like a ship in a storm. It is a fact that even warming moments overwhelm me with despair, and this is why I am I.

I am filmed sitting by Dean’s grave, but the ground is a block of ice. Tim provides a square platform to spare me the icy discomfort, since every set-up seems to take hours. The platform is hopefully to be hidden by a flowing overcoat, but alas, the edge of the block is visible on the final film.

I am approached by an elderly farmhand who speaks in a whisper. He has James Dean’s signature from 1949, and he is prepared to sell it to me for $3,000. I ask to see it, and out comes a school yearbook with the Dean signature written mid-page in pencil. The man runs off when Markie appears, waving something at me.

‘Did you write this?’
he asks me sternly.

He is holding what unfortunately became of an essay written by me in the late 1970s entitled
James Dead is Not Dean
yet irritatingly printed by a Manchester workshop as
James
Dean is Not Dead.
A dreadful heap of 70s juvenilia, the essay brought me 40 useful pounds when nothing else could, and I had no idea that it would turn into a bookish presentation that would haunt me till death’s sigh. My head shamefully tilts, and Markie storms off, and minutes later we are off the premises. Thankfully, we had all of the filming that we needed, but there were no friendly mid-western waves as we chugged away from the farm.

It was also Tim’s idea to contact the embalmed comic actor Charles Hawtrey to hopefully take part in the video for
Everyday is like Sunday
.
Now in elderly exile in Kent, Hawtrey had always been media-shy and reportedly high acid. Rumors of vodka-soaked loneliness and intolerable eccentricity signaled the end for a British comedy actor whose aura of greatness always lit up his secondary roles. Even without dialogue he could steal any scene. I am given Hawtrey’s telephone number and I dial nervously, linking myself to the lost world of the British comedy film. A cadaverous component lifts the receiver with a hushed
‘Hulloh?’
and here is the voice of Charles Hawtrey – ripped from the palms of the dying, never to know how great he was. Our conversation inches along as I explain myself very badly, and I hear Hawtrey wheezing weariness. He is merely considering the point at which to drop the receiver, and sure enough, down it goes as I stutter mid-splutter. He has, I suppose, earned the right to be cantankerously rude. I shrug weakly, but I don’t blame Charles Hawtrey for finding me dull, since I, too, find me dull. Later in that year of 1988, Hawtrey dies, outstripped by horror multiplied as surgeons advise him to have both legs amputated or to face certain death. But Hawtrey is drenched in death anyway, and so the little man urges death to put its dukes up. The mule-cart media make a feast of his distorted life – a notable failure, a lonely death for a man whose last wish was that no stone or plaque be in evidence to mark his resting place – if, indeed, rest is to be found in death.

‘You are obsessed with dead people,’
my father tells me,
‘you ought to get interested in the living.’
He is right of course. Yet off I go to Charles Hawtrey’s house on Middle Street in Deal, which is now listed for sale, and a macabre wind sucks me in to inspect. As a lumbering nonentity, I enter Hawtrey’s pasty smuggler’s cottage on a depressing narrow street – the type of street that would remain shadowed and cold even during a heatwave. I inspect the solemn 1930s kitchen, and the rough coconut matting by the grim plastic bath.
There is heavy rope in place of a banister rail alongside the stairs, up which Hawtrey surely inched himself night after night having thrashed the Gordon’s. The main bedroom carpet is a patchwork of noxious stains, and a small corner sink is clogged with pubic hair. In the cellar, three ugly settees are positioned to face each other in an occultish triangle as a central red light bulb hangs down between. A mock-Moroccan bar tilts in the corner of the cellar, as if this had been Hawtrey’s afterhours den – a playground for those lucky nights when he could manage to persuade a sailor back for a nightcap, and, God willing, the sailor would be prepared to stand upright and then look away and bless Hawtrey with a momentary flash of human kindness.
I leave the house feeling dreadful, but it really is my own fault.

I am amazed when Tim’s video for
Interesting d
rug
(number 9, 1989) is shown on
Top of the Pops
, with its inclusion of a skinned baby seal; surely a first for
Top of the Pops
, who then cut to smiling DJ Peter Powell, and the Middle Ages are back with us once more. Tim had unraveled the cine-beast of the
Ouija board
video in Oxfordshire woodland, where Dadaism was stretched too far. In the muddle of Kathy Burke as idiomatic clippie, there is Joan Sims as mediocre medium, plus tragic singer led through woodlands by pantomime children. The movable stage is Joan Sims, now of old-school comedy, who could tell an entire joke without saying a word. Joan is yet another of the Carry On regulars who has lived forever unattached, whose face is known to millions, but whose comedic talents are not thought to be of great value. She lives alone in Kensington Square at the back of Barkers department store on Kensington High Street. The day before the shoot, Tim climbs the stairs to Joan’s intimate flat only to find the front door open and Joan sitting by the fire in tears. Around the walls are lines of framed photographs charting a lifetime of backstage moments, beaming smiles with people met that one time only, yet testament to a successful career now sealed up. On this day, Joan explains that her tears are for Hattie Jacques – another Carry On matron – and there is a curse on behalf of all the theater individuals who save their best moments for their time on a stage, and not for their private selves, for there are no private selves.
‘Do you know Nicholas Parsons?’
asks Joan, possibly tipsy. ‘
He is a c**t,’
she says, and that’s that.