“Too bad,” Frank said, “she couldn’t find somebody more outrageous.”
“It’s all an act,” Suzy said as Johnny stomped around on stage. “It’s fake. It’s show biz.”
Indeed it was an act. A Sex Pistols concert was a performance, and the band members performers. But they seemed to be caught up in this angry, hateful act just as much as the crowd was. There was something dangerous about all of the hostility being let loose in that concert hall, something that was almost out of control. It scared me.
Then the camera panned across the foot of the stage, at the punks who were crowding close to the Sex Pistols, clapping, cheering, yelling obscenities back at them. There, clapping her hands high over her head, was Nancy Spungen.
“That’s my sister!” cried Suzy.
At least it almost looked like her. If you could picture Nancy with a wild mane of hair bleached white, and giant smudges of black makeup around her eyes. And black leather clothes.
She was one of those freaks. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it was my baby, that I was the mother of that girl.
I wasn’t. That wasn’t my Nancy. My Nancy had slipped away. My Nancy was gone.
That face on the TV was a doomed face. The face of the terminally ill. Her days were numbered. Her wish was coming true. I knew it for sure as soon as I saw her that night.
She’d gotten too close to the flame.
My immediate response was to cross the bridge before I came to it. From that evening on I began to daydream about the details of Nancy’s death. I didn’t wish her dead. I just knew she soon would be. I was preparing myself. I knew that no matter what she had done, how much I had hated her and wanted to smack her sometimes, it would hurt. A lot.
She would be back from London. It would be a golden, sunny autumn day, her favorite day, her favorite kind of day. The New York Police Department would call me to say that Nancy had overdosed and was in critical condition. I would phone Frank, Suzy, and David with the news. The four of us would rush to the New York hospital. There, we would find her in her bed, conscious. She would say good-bye to each of us, then die peacefully in my arms.
Then it would be time to make arrangements. First I would have to have her body moved to Philadelphia. I would arrange that. I would call the funeral director and give him all of the instructions. Next I would phone my dear friends Janet and Susan, and my mother. Janet would go to our house immediately and be waiting there for us when we got back. So would my mother. Susan would be out. Or could be. I had to be prepared for that. I would leave a message with her son, that’s what I would do. I would ask him to tell Susan that “something’s happened” and to come over. When we got home, I would make arrangements for the visitors who would come by. I would order assorted deli platters from Murray’s Delicatessen. I would sit down with Frank so we could decide what should be said at the funeral. A rabbi. We’d have to talk to a rabbi.
My daydreaming occupied my mind whenever I was alone—driving to work, shopping for groceries, or trying to fall asleep at night. Sometimes I felt guilty about having these daydreams. I wondered if it was wrong. I didn’t know.
I was very, very strong in my daydreams. I acted in a calm, detached, businesslike manner. I just did what I had to do. I fantasized Nancy’s death so many times that when a business contact asked me at one point how many children I had, I automatically answered, “Two.” It just fell out of my mouth. It was as if she were already dead. I was ready for it, I thought. I was prepared, so prepared that when the inevitable happened, it wouldn’t hurt.
How foolish I was.
Nancy phoned toward the end of the summer. I told her we’d seen her on TV.
“Didn’t I look great, Mom? My hair?”
“It was exciting to see you,” I replied.
“Did you hear the band?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t they great?”
“Uh … to tell you the truth, it’s not really my kind of thing.”
“That’s cool. Aren’t you proud of me, Mom? I’ve made it. I’ve really made it!”
She genuinely believed she had achieved something. I understood her pride, but I didn’t share it. Having an affair with Sid Vicious was not my concept of doing something worthwhile with your life. But she was proud. Her rock fantasy was coming true.
She called the following week to tell me that she and Sid had gotten married.
Chapter 19
“Aren’t you happy for us?” she cried, excited.
Shocked was a better word.
“When?” I asked. “Where?”
“Now you can send us a gift,” she said.
“When were you married?” I repeated.
“We’d prefer money to things. Tell everyone in the family, okay? No gifts. Cash.”
The amount of emphasis she placed on money made me doubt her story.
“Nancy, can you prove you and Sid are married? I mean, if he’s such a big celebrity, how come it wasn’t publicized?”
“We didn’t want the press to know. It’d be bad for his image.”
“Can you prove you’re married?”
“Don’t you believe me?” she snapped angrily. “Don’t you believe your own daughter? I’m happy. You should be happy, too. Instead you’re calling me a bloody liar.”
“I’m not—”
“I’ll send you the bloody wedding pictures, okay? Now send us our wedding gift.”
She hung up.
I told Frank the news. We discussed it. We were confused. We didn’t know whether to believe her or not.
She called again two days later.
“Did you send the money, Mom?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong, don’t you believe me? You don’t think I’d lie about something like this, do you?”
“I don’t know, Nancy. You told me never, ever to trust a junkie when they ask for money.”
“But Mom, this is different. We’re married. Your Nancy is married.”
We sent her a hundred dollars. My mother sent her fifty.
We had been conned. The wedding pictures never came, and Nancy never referred to her “marriage” again. (After her death our lawyer was in London and checked the records. As far as he could determine, there had been no marriage.)
We were angry at ourselves for having been taken in. The incident also heightened our mixed feelings about Nancy. It was getting to be so hard to love her. It seemed sometimes like all we got in return for our love was untruth and crap. I’d never do something like that to her. How could she do it to me? And why?
But I kept remembering something my housekeeper had once told me: “Your child is your child, no matter what she does or is. She is still your child.” It was true. No matter what Nancy did, I still loved her.
Soon after this I had a nightmare. I was walking in a cemetery. Suddenly I came upon several men who were working on a new tombstone beside a freshly dug grave. They were chiseling a person’s name on the stone. A first name and middle name were already there: NANCY LAURA. SO was a date of birth: FEBRUARY 27, 1958. Nancy’s date of birth. One of the men put his chisel to the stone to begin the first letter of her last name.
“Stop!” I cried in my dream. “I don’t know what her last name is! I don’t know if it’s Spungen or Vicious! And Vicious isn’t his real name!”
I awoke from the nightmare in confusion. Frank was sleeping peacefully by my side.
I had not, I realized, looked at the date of death on the tombstone.
Nancy and Sid stayed with his mother for less than two months. She and Nancy apparently didn’t get along. So Nancy and Sid moved into a hotel. Nancy phoned me from her new place of residence. From her calls, I learned that she was becoming exposed to the violence that surrounded the Sex Pistols.
“I got beat up, Mom,” she moaned. “My nose is broke somethin’ ’orrible. It’s all over my face. It hurts.”
“Who did it?” I asked.
“The Teddys. They don’t
like us.”
“Who are the Teddys?”
“Assholes who hate punks. They attacked us on the street. They gave me two black eyes, too. Sid got knifed. But we’re okay. And I’ll be ready for ’em next time. Sid bought me a truncheon.”
Two weeks later she phoned to say she and Sid had moved to a different hotel. When I asked why, she replied that the manager of the hotel had asked them to leave.
“Sid got mad,” she explained, “and dangled me out the window. I was screaming at him to let me back in and I guess it pissed off the other people in the hotel.”
“Are you okay?” I asked. What else could I say?
“Oh, yeah. It was nothing. He was just upset.”
I did not yet know Sid or understand Nancy’s relationship with him. But this incident clearly indicated to me that it had an ugly, violent streak. It made me wonder if perhaps Sid was the actual source of the beating Nancy had blamed on the Teddy boys. I didn’t ask her. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to know. Besides, she kept assuring me his name and on-stage manner were an act, that he was in reality a “sweet lad.” Indeed, the few times I’d spoken to him on the phone he’d seemed pleasant.
They got in another reportedly violent quarrel in a different London hotel room at the end of November. Again, Nancy’s screams brought the manager. This time the British press was also alerted. The papers reported that the manager went up to Nancy and Sid’s room to find a bloodstained bed, a near-naked Sid bleeding from cuts on his arms, and broken glass all over the carpet. There was a bottle of pills on the nightstand. A police inquiry was launched.
Nancy had a different version.
“It was nothing,” she told me over the phone. “The manager didn’t like us and he wanted us out is all. The pills were a prescription.”
“Do you need a lawyer?”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Mom,” she insisted. “Forget about it. Malcolm’s lawyer will take care of everything.”
“Are you sure you’re okay, Nancy?”
“Of course. It was nothing. Sid was just upset. Something to do with the group.”
However, because of this second run-in with a hotel manager, Nancy and Sid decided to find a place of their own. She told me a few days later that they’d rented a small carriage house in the Maida Vale section of London.
“It’s our own little house,” she gushed, “with our own little furniture. We bought a sofa. You’ll love it. It’s great. You’ll have to come and stay.”
It was domestic bliss, punk style.
There was a second consequence to this hotel incident. A British reporter phoned us for some background information on Nancy. We gave it to him. We never heard from him again or saw the article. It was our first contact with the press, our first inkling that Nancy was becoming a celebrity in her own right. Why, we couldn’t imagine. The hotel room story was not picked up by the American press. The Sex Pistols were still not very big here, nor was punk.
The group was bigger than ever in England. A second album, Never Mind the Bollocks, was recorded on the Virgin Records label. A film project, Who Killed Bambi, was in the works with financing from Twentieth Century-Fox. Responding to the incredible popularity of the Sex Pistols in England, America’s Warner Records finally got in on the act that winter. They invested in a U.S. release of Never Mind the Bollocks to be tied in to a winter Sex Pistols concert tour of the United States. McLaren had arrived in the big money.
Nancy phoned to tell me the news about the U.S. tour. She was very excited about being able to come back and see us. She was anxious for us to meet her Sid.
Our feelings were mixed. Yes, we wanted to see our daughter. But she was very far away from us now. We had a life of our own, a life that no longer had a real connection to her. Frank and I had a social life now. We had people over to the house for dinner, something we’d never felt comfortable doing before. We had spent some money on the house, installing wallpaper and a sliding door from the kitchen to the patio. I had a new job and enjoyed it. David was now in his junior year at prep school and doing well and Suzy had found a job cooking in a health food restaurant, which she enjoyed, and was hard at work on her painting. Meanwhile, the four of us were planning a winter vacation to Saint Thomas.
All of a sudden I had visions of Nancy dragging us to a Sex Pistols concert. I had visions of her inviting the band and its entire following to our house, and of not being able to get rid of them.
As it happened, it was a false alarm. Malcolm McLaren refused to allow Nancy to come with the group on the U.S. tour. Apparently he did not like her. He found her disruptive and a challenge to his authority over Sid. Reportedly, he blamed her for introducing Sid to hard drugs.
“Sid wants me to come,” she told me over the phone, “but they won’t let me. They said nobody else is bringing women so he can’t.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be fun anyway,” I said. “After all, he’ll be working.”
“Yeah, but it means I’ll be alone on my birthday. All the fuck alone.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
I was sorry she couldn’t come. And relieved at the same time. As it happened, she was not alone for her birthday. The much ballyhooed U.S. tour of the Sex Pistols was an unqualified disaster. It was aborted midway through, and Johnny Rotten left the group.
The tour got off to a roaring start. The band members got surly and walked out on an interview on the Today show. Then they headed for a concert swing through the Deep South, where it was believed they would get the maximum mileage out of their shock value and hopefully arouse the kind of rage they were able to with England’s punk teens. At first they did. In Atlanta the audience threw plastic cups and popcorn at them. In Dallas, Johnny Rotten called the audience “redneck cowboy faggots” and Sid had his lip bloodied.
In Memphis the house was packed and rowdy. But within thirty minutes the audience was streaming out. Why? Because people had come to see the much publicized freak show, and, apparently, a lot of it was hype—always had been. There was no on-stage vomiting, for example. The Sex Pistols were simply not as outrageous as the reputation that preceded them. Additionally, they were terrible: Johnny Rotten could not sing; Sid Vicious did not know how to play the instrument he was holding on stage.
Without a punk following, without any musical talent, the Sex Pistols were not a success in America. Far from it. They were a joke. A bad joke. By the time they got to Los Angeles, the tour was off and the band shattered by business and personal squabbling.
Still, they drew headlines. When they got to New York, Sid had to be carried from the plane unconscious. Reportedly, he had overdosed on drugs and alcohol.
He was back in London in plenty of time for Nancy’s twentieth birthday. And for his and Nancy’s arraignment on drug charges stemming from the hotel room incident at the end of November. As far as I’ve been able to learn, the charges against them were dismissed. As they left the courtroom the British photographers snapped a picture of Nancy and Sid. She was, according to one account, “wearing stiletto-heel boots, a mop of wild, white hair, and a defiant pout.”
We had always called it That Look.
Coming as it did on the heels of the Sex Pistols’ much-heralded failed tour, the arraignment photo made the U.S. papers. Some featured it on the front page. Here was a nice, fresh angle—Sid apparently had a violent, drug-related romance going with an American girl. The Philadelphia papers jumped on it with particular zeal. Hometown girl makes bad.
Nancy was now a celebrity. Our life would never be the same.
The reporters started calling. Eight or ten of them called the day after the photo appeared, from Philadelphia, from New York, from California. All of them wanted to know about us, about Nancy’s history, about her drug background. I said I didn’t care to comment. As far as I was concerned, our lives were none of their business.
This was my first brush with the American press, and I was appalled. Several reporters were abusive and nasty to me, suggested they woul
d simply go ahead and print what they knew to be hearsay and fabrication if I didn’t cooperate with them. I repeated that I did not care to comment. I had the right not to.
“Why should anyone be interested in Nancy anyway?” Frank muttered at dinner that night. “It’s nonsense. She’s no celebrity.”
The next day my statement that I did not care to comment came out in more than one paper as: “When informed of her daughter’s arrest in London on drug charges, Mrs. Spungen replied, ‘I don’t care.’ ” Several of our neighbors had also been contacted and quoted. They told me that they, too, had been misquoted.
I can’t generalize about the practices of the American press, but in our case many reporters were unethical. Before my involvement with them, I’d always believed reporters were there to report the news. Now I realize that they are also given the license to manufacture it.
The press made Nancy into a celebrity. No fascination in her existed until the reporters stepped in, created an aura about her and Sid, and then milked it for all it was worth to sell papers. The press portrayed Sid and Nancy as Romeo and Juliet in black leather, roaring into hell. Sid was seen as a pop star associated with manufactured violence who was living it out for real. Nancy was seen as a coarse tramp who took whatever Sid dished out and gave it right back to him. Together they were portrayed as the living embodiment of the punk movement.
In reality there was no sensational story there. All that was there was illusion, a somewhat sick illusion but mostly just very sad. In reality there was a bright, mentally disturbed twenty-year-old girl whose misguided ambition it was to be associated with a famous rock musician. She had realized her ambition, she thought. Only her rock musician wasn’t really a rock musician. He, like Nancy, believed he was. But he wasn’t. In reality he was a talentless twenty-one-year-old kid off the streets whose pop celebrity had been achieved by means of hype and fakery. Sid was not a musician. He was simply a celebrity, a nonphenomenon—someone who had spat and snarled at an audience and become famous as a result.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 32
