Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon

by Tony Fletcher

  There were just two other witnesses for one of the entertainment world’s most popular characters. Annette Walter-Lax spoke in a near-whisper as she told the court of Keith’s last hours: Keith had been sober at the party, had come home early from the movie, had a light supper, watched Dr Phibes, gone to bed and taken some pills, woken at 7.30, got up and then had her get up and make breakfast, presumably taken more pills (“I did not actually see him take any tablets,” she told the court) and never woken again. She had discovered his body shortly after getting up at 3.40pm.

  In regards to his taking too many pills, which she said he often shoved down his throat without liquid to help them, she observed that, “He had a great resistance sometimes because of his hyper-energy. Sometimes when he found it difficult to sleep he would take one or two more and then he would sleep. He would take more than the prescribed dose but he would not take more than he knew was safe.” The last part of that statement (italics added) is evidently untrue of a man she had seen overdose on various pills and substances several times. Her subsequent observations on his character were similarly contradictory: “He was very energetic, very sunny. He could also be very calm and relaxed.” All of which was true. But the subsequent assertion that “He did not suffer from depression” was not. Though most of the world might have believed her from what they saw of Keith in public, Annette had seen him forlorn and abject often enough to know that he had tremendous problems in that regard.

  Dr Geoffrey Dymond also painted a picture of a contented man unlikely to make a fatal mistake. He said Keith’s general health had been excellent and he was usually very cheerful, that occasionally he was very tense, but not depressed. He did, however, observe that Keith had such great difficulty in sleeping that he had occasionally been called out in the early hours of the morning to administer injections. This highly unusual practice – which by his reported use of the plural suggests it happened more than once, though Annette does not remember him being called to Curzon Place beyond the first occasion – was not followed up on. But by its very nature, it raises eyebrows. People of excellent general health who are not depressed do not normally call on doctors to sedate them.

  Adding to the confusion, Dymond confirmed that he had prescribed Heminevrin after Keith had been admitted to hospital for exhaustion and a couple of fits, the presumed result of alcohol withdrawal – which certainly indicates that he knew something, if not necessarily a lot, about Keith’s past. “I think he was taking four or five tablets every night instead of two and I warned him of drug dependency and asked him to cut it down,” he said in court. One is tempted to observe that any confirmed alcoholic in the process of withdrawal is already an expert on – and a victim of – ‘drug dependency’; it was surprising that the doctor did not recognise the temptation for an addict to replace one such dependency with another.

  Upon hearing the evidence, Dr Gavin Thurston concluded that Keith died from a drug overdose, and in a repeat of Pete Meaden’s inquest, noted that without any evidence to suggest suicide, he was compelled to record an open verdict. Keith’s death certificate, issued the following day, described the cause of death as follows: ‘Chlormethiazole (Heminevrin) overdose self-administered but no evidence of intention. Open verdict.’

  As if exacting revenge on Keith for successfully lying about his age all this time, the year of his birth was mistakenly recorded as being 1945 on that death certificate. All of a sudden, newspapers that had been quoting him as 31 when he died were now stating that he was 33. Even in death, he dodged the truth.

  Celebrity deaths attract conspiracy theories like nothing else, and in Keith’s case some of them emanate from surprisingly close to home. Almost no one that I spoke to from within the Who organisation while researching this book ever mentioned the overdose. They all understand that Keith choked to death instead. Pete Townshend and John Entwistle have even gone on record about this.

  Their logic is quite straightforward and highly plausible, when viewed as follows … Keith took way too many Heminevrin after having had a steak breakfast, his third meal in less than 12 hours. The sedatives immediately knocked him out. The food was not properly digested. In his sleep Keith, no stranger to throwing back up his pills or his food or his drink, tried to vomit up large, undigested portions of steak; he was in such a stupor from the number of sedatives he had swallowed that his system could not follow through with his stomach’s rejection of the undigested food.

  But the fact that no such evidence was revealed in the post-mortem nor the supposition even discussed in Coroner’s Court suggests that the theory was concocted down the line, perhaps by osmosis. (After all, Mama Cass has been similarly described both as suffering a heart attack and choking on a bacon sandwich. That she died in the same flat as Keith could well have had a ripple effect on Moon’s own perceived demise.) Rock stars have many medical privileges, as Keith had long been aware, but falsifying post-mortems is not usually among them.105

  Besides, Annette, who never heard the choking rumours, had performed mouth-to-mouth on Keith after finding his dead body, and says that, “I think I would have seen or felt or heard something if that [choking to death] was the case … I got some air to him, because I heard some gurgle deep down there. So I think his throat was clear.”

  The choking death is not the only rumour flitting around the Who camp. Certain insiders maintain that Keith had a famous visitor back at Curzon Place that night, after he got home from the movie. That famous person is also now dead, which of course means they can’t verify or deny. And Annette is absolutely adamant that no such visit took place. There would have been nothing untoward about a late-night visit, of course, unless said famous person brought drink or drugs with them that sent Keith over the edge. The rumour may have been born out of the fact that someone brought cocaine to Keith earlier that day. Though he did apparently consume some, it was not (significant) enough to be included in the post-mortem.

  While allowing that anything is possible, it is perhaps worth repeating at this point one more rumour about Keith’s death: the persistent one that had him actually dying at Paul McCartney’s house and his body secretly transported back to Curzon Place. To which one can only respond in ludicrous kind with the reminder that ‘Paul is Dead.’

  Putting aside hearsay, supposition and innuendo, the fact appears to be this: Keith Moon, a man who had spent his life tempting fate in various ways that included shovelling large quantities of hard drink and dangerous drugs down his throat and forever surviving, died of an overdose of the very prescription pill with which he was trying to wean himself off alcohol.

  This cruel irony is one I clung to over the years since 1978, all the way through my research into his life, viewing it as a bizarre sleight of fate’s hand, the gods stealing Keith away in the most absurd and contradictory method possible. Only now, as I find myself sadly immersed in his death, do I realise there was no irony involved. The fact that, as Annette puts it, Heminevrin was meant to be a ‘good’ drug, matters only to the extent that, as Pete later said, Keith might have thought, “If one of these is good for me, eight will be better.” (Thirty-two, actually.) Though Keith appeared to understand the dangers of his alcohol and cocaine addictions, he had long thought that anything he got from a doctor must be inherently positive106 – even though all prescription pills come with warnings and seemingly innocuous over-the-counter drugs can kill if taken in sufficient quantities. His over-enthusiasm or self-perceived high tolerance was, we must accept, always likely to claim him regardless of a drug’s intended purpose or effect.

  Similarly, though it is appealing to state, as it has been almost religiously, that after a lifetime of alcohol abuse, Keith died ‘sober’, at the very moment he was ‘successfully’ kicking the booze, it is not true. He had been drinking the night of his death, and that it was by his standards an insubstantial quantity does not make any difference allowing that Heminevrin was not to be mixed with any alcohol whatsoever. Considering how wildly fluctuating Keith’s dri
nking had been throughout the period that he was on the drug, it’s a wonder that he had not killed himself earlier. One can only presume that when he was drunk enough, he didn’t need to take Heminevrin to get to sleep – and that when he was with it enough to swallow the capsules at bedtime, he was not drunk. The plain fact is that if Keith had been winning his battle against chronic alcoholism, he would not have needed the pills, nor would he have been drinking alcohol. He may have been sober at the instant of his death, but he was not sober at the time of it.

  The one remaining mystery is why Keith poured so many Heminevrin down his throat that night. Given that he took them as an alcohol substitute, he may have swallowed several before going out so as not to be tempted by the free booze (which might explain what some saw as slurred speech, because two measures of alcohol wouldn’t have caused it); it’s highly plausible he then forgot upon waking in the early hours that he had taken a large handful before first going to sleep. Yet still neither explanation would excuse there being an incredible 32 tablets in his system: Keith must have had some understanding of how many he was taking each time and presumably (assuming, that is, he wanted to live) thought that, as always, his body could handle it. It couldn’t. Like Elvis’ before him, it had finally had enough of the abuse. For once it refused to fight back. Which means that, mistakenly or not, one way or another, he died of his own excesses and that, sadly, was that.

  But could Keith’s death have been avoided? And if it had been, that September 7, would it only have served to postpone the inevitable?

  At the core of the first question is Keith’s access to the drug that killed him. It is difficult to dispute that had he not had a bottle of 100 potentially lethal Heminevrin capsules on hand, he would surely not have died that night.

  Annette remains eternally bitter, and understandably so. “When they’re given to you by the doctor, you don’t think they’re going to kill you.” Bill Curbishley also insists that, “Keith was told there were no side effects and so was I.”

  Dr Dymond, asked whether it was unusual to give Heminevrin to a patient to administer to themselves, insists that, “No, it was given in those days. It still is to some extent. But now it’s becoming more and more hospital treatment only.” When asked if that was because, as a drug becomes better known, so do its dangers, he agrees. Dymond stresses that his relationship with Moon was short-lived, “probably only a couple of weeks, actually, maybe a month or something”. One can only conclude that a doctor more familiar with Keith’s history might have held back on the prescription of a drug so strong.

  But he didn’t. What then? Dougal Butler, familiar with Keith’s tendency to overdose, says that, “I wouldn’t have had those pills in the flat. I would maybe have let him have one or two, and I would have consulted Annette about them and said, ‘If he needs them, they are in the top of the kitchen cabinet,’ and the rest of them I would have kept on me.” It is easy to reply that hindsight is 20/20 vision. But it is fact that while Dougal was on watch, Keith did not die.

  Annette, who was closest to Keith, was in a difficult position; for all her assertion that she would have thrown away the drug had she known of its dangers, she was the submissive partner in the relationship and had not been able to prevent previous overdoses in Dougal’s absence. (Though she did subsequently save him on at least a couple of those occasions.) And Richard Dorse did not make a point of restricting or hiding Keith’s drugs the way that Dougal was known to do.

  Annette stands by what she believes to be Dorse’s genuine concern for Keith: “I think he was a good man.”

  Bill Curbishley believes otherwise. “I’ve thought a lot about it since. I guess no one would have stopped Moon dying, the way he died, and no one could cater for it, so I certainly can’t blame anyone for it, but I tend to feel that it wouldn’t have happened if Dougal had been here. All I’m saying is I don’t think he had Moon’s welfare at heart the same way Dougal did. Dougal loved Moon. With Dorse it was just a job.”

  The two big men clearly did not get along well. “Before the end, just before Keith died,” says Curbishley, “something happened, and I was in Mortons restaurant, and Dorse came in and said something to someone a bit smart, and I had just about fucking had it with Dorse, so I defended this person and told Dorse to fuck off… Basically I always knew that Dorse was a coward. In the end we were going to have a fight, so I said, ‘Come on then, let’s go outside.’ He was OK in the bar in front of a lot of people, and then we went outside and he shit himself. It told me a lot about him.”

  But if Curbishley had problems with Dorse, he chose not to sack him, which was certainly within his powers. In his defence, he points out that “I used to be in the office from 10am-8pm every day, spinning between phone calls and various meetings. You can’t watch a person all the time. That’s why they have assistants and minders. You go out and do the deals and make the money for them, and then you have to have an accountant look after the money for them. And sadly enough, most of the time you’re not dealing with adult people.”

  All of which is true enough. The Who organisation, Pete Townshend in particular, performed its fair share of interventions on behalf of Keith’s health. Then again, it just as often threw its arms up in despair. There was so much else going on and they each now had their own families to deal with so it was not possible to watch their kid brother around the clock. I don’t buy Dave Marsh’s belief, as intimated in Before I Get Old, that the Who let Keith continue on his merry way because the British see addiction as being in one’s nature, rather than treating it as a psychological problem the way Americans do. (It’s worth noting that Keith’s most damaging period was not in Britain but in California.) It must be obvious to anyone who has read this far that the Who organisation cared deeply for Keith and frequently tried to help him. Still, given that Keith’s problems were so well-known and such a concern within their camp, it is somewhat baffling that they did not place people of their own choice and knowledge in the critical roles of bodyguard and doctor to look after him and report directly back to them during this period of his difficult rehabilitation in the UK and constant battles with his addictions.

  Given that the pills were not kept away from him, the only way Keith might have lived through his overdose was if Annette was in bed with him that morning, where she might possibly have felt some sudden motion that would have indicated a problem and been able to get him to hospital the way she had in the past. (Then again, there might have been no motion at all.) Keith’s rudeness in demanding she make the steak did not, she says, provoke her to sleep on the sofa; rather, it was his snoring. This presumably means Keith was not angry enough either at having attended the party against his will, or at any perceived snub by Annette, to be provoked into deliberately overdosing in a familiar cry for attention as he had done so many times, expecting to have his stomach pumped once more and love for him proclaimed, not aware that he was for once doing the job properly. Without being able to ask him, that supposition can never, however, be fully discounted.

  For Annette, Keith’s life stopped in mid-sentence. The thoughts he had been sharing the previous few days with her, foreseeing a normal life together, the encouraging bout of sobriety, the wonderful behaviour that final night, raise more questions for her than answers. “He just died too soon for me to say what he had planned,” she says. Of his battles with the booze towards the end, “he tried harder. He didn’t succeed at all times, but he tried harder. He did. I think had he survived that fatal night, he could probably still be here.”

  That remains the biggest hypothesis of all. Had he beaten the odds yet again on September 7, 1978, is it not likely his old man’s body would have given up the next time he tempted fate a little too closely? And, all insistence that Keith was turning the corner aside, was it not likely that he would tempt fate again?

  A few days after Keith’s death, John Entwistle seemed to acknowledge as much. “I think someone looked down and said, ‘Okay, that’s your ninth life.’”


  Pete Townshend made much the same point in his official statement. “Keith has always appeared so close to blowing himself up in the past that we’ve become used to living with the feeling. But this time, Keith hasn’t survived, he hasn’t come round, he hasn’t thrown himself off the balcony and landed in one piece.”

  Both Townshend and Entwistle’s words captured the dichotomy of their friend’s death, the sense of shock that hit so many people when they heard the news – that although it had always seemed inevitable, it was nonetheless unimaginable.

  “It was a huge great incredible surprise,” says Chris Stamp. “Because Keith was so fucking magnificent, so alive as a person. If you give a couple of words to Keith Moon, it was ‘alive’ and ‘heart’. Then he was dead. Also, his resilience and his strength. He had this strength, this reserve, he would always come back.”

  “I was shocked even though I knew he was in trouble,” says Bill Curbishley. “I didn’t think someone in his early thirties was going to die on us.”

  I could repeat such comments almost ad infinitum. I heard them from far and wide while talking to people about Keith. The most succinct example, perhaps, is that from Alice Cooper, who knew Keith for the last ten years of his life. “I wasn’t surprised when Jim Morrison died. I wasn’t surprised when Janis Joplin died. I was surprised when Keith Moon died. Because he had no death wish. He was having too much fun living.”