Alexander McQueen

by Andrew Wilson

  After leaving school, Ronald worked at the British Road Service depot in Aldgate where he was in charge of looking after two horses, Bill and Daisy. It was his job to prepare them ready for work – ‘horses were still being used after the war as a form of transport, for coal delivery and by milkmen,’ wrote Joyce.43 The creatures grew so accustomed to hearing Ronald walk into the yard each morning that they would both neigh at the sound of his approaching footsteps. When Ronald was twenty, his sister, Jean, introduced him to her friend, Joyce Barbara Deane, the woman he would marry. ‘I cannot put into words the love your father and I had for each other,’ Joyce wrote to her children just before she died. ‘He worshipped the ground I walked on.’44

  Later in life, Joyce said she had traced her own family, the Deane line, back to the Normans, but when she told Lee this he replied, ‘I feel more Scottish than Norman.’45 On the scroll Joyce made about her side of the family, she documented the origins of the Deane name – ‘a Saxon word meaning “a clearing in a wood or valley where swine feed”’. As these clearings became inhabited by people they in turn would call themselves ‘of the Deane’.46

  On the same scroll, fashioned on graph paper, Joyce painted in watercolour a number of heraldic shields relating to the family: a white cross on a red background belonging to Drue Deane, a knight of Edward I; five black stars arranged in an upturned V shape on a bright green background, signifying Sir Henry de Den, Lord of Dean, who died in 1292 in Gloucester; and a black lion, the animal’s paw raised in the air in a gesture of defiance, the escutcheon of Sir John de Dene who died in the first part of the fourteenth century. The mystique surrounding these long-dead historical figures was a very long way from the reality of life at Biggerstaff Road. For Joyce and Lee the past was a way of escaping the poverty of everyday life.

  Joyce’s father George Stanley worked as a grocer’s warehouseman, while her mother Jane Olivia Chatland grew up in a desperately poor family. Jane’s father, John Archibald Chatland, could not work because he only had one leg. From a young girl Jane suffered from malnutrition and had to be admitted to Bethnal Green Infirmary at the age of one, and by the ‘age of five or six [she] was sent to a home in Kent by nuns because she was so thin and undernourished’, recalled Joyce. Later, Joyce remembered her mother telling her that she often went to school without shoes. ‘Her father was a bully and made their lives miserable,’ wrote Joyce of her mother.47 Jane met her husband George at the age of thirteen and the couple married in August 1933, at Christ Church, Hackney. Six months later, on 15 February 1934, their eldest child Joyce Barbara was born.

  Joyce attended Teesdale Street School in Bethnal Green and at the age of five was evacuated to King’s Lynn, Norfolk, where she lived with six different families, an experience she must have found deeply disturbing. During this time she also suffered a broken nose after being knocked down by a delivery bike. At the end of the war in 1945 Joyce returned to London to live with her parents at their new flat at 148 Skidmore Street, Stepney, first attending a school run by nuns off Cambridge Heath Road and then going to Hally Street School, Stepney. While still at school she worked at Woolworth’s and then after leaving Hally Street she took a job in a solicitor’s office in Moorgate. In her spare time she liked going to the cinema and enjoyed a night out at the Poplar Civic with her friend Jean McQueen. One contemporary observer noted that the Civic was a ‘big dance-hall and, though expensive, had a really good band, with girls from all over the East End, not the usual bunch one saw every night.’48

  One day in 1953 Jean introduced Joyce to her brother Ron, then a lorry driver. The attraction was instant and on 10 October 1953 the pair married at the Roman Catholic Church of the Guardian Angels on Mile End Road. A photograph taken at their wedding shows a handsome young couple about to cut the cake. He is wearing a dark suit, white shirt and tie, and she a simple, tailored white dress with an elaborate lace veil. On the table by their side is a spray of carnations and a lucky horseshoe.

  Their first child, Janet Barbara, was born on 9 May 1954, followed by Anthony Ronald in 1955, Michael Robert in 1960, Tracy Jane in 1962, Jacqueline Mary in 1963 and then in 1969, after a gap of six years, Lee Alexander. He grew up to be known in the household as ‘blue eyes’ – not only because of the colour of his eyes, but also a reference to the fact that he was the baby of the family and as such occupied a special place within the home.

  At the age of five Lee enrolled at Carpenter’s Road Junior School, a newly built single-storey structure a couple of minutes’ walk from the family home. Peter Bowes was a pupil at the same school – indeed the two boys would remain close friends throughout junior and secondary school – and remembers his friend with fondness. ‘Even then he liked to draw, he would rather draw than read or write,’ he said. ‘He was in the football team in the juniors and although he joined in with everyone, there was always something about him, even at a very young age, that made him different to all of us. I wouldn’t say it was to do with sexuality, it’s just that he was different. He was very artistic, a bit flamboyant, a bit of a showman, and yet at the same time he could be quite shy, which is an interesting contrast. He wasn’t feminine or sissy-like. He was actually someone who could look after himself.’49

  Later in life, Lee would talk about how he realized that he was gay – or ‘queer’ as the other boys called him – when he was still a young child. He told the journalist Lynn Barber that he was six years old when he first realized that he was gay. On a family holiday to Pontin’s he won a ‘Prince of Pontin’s’ competition, ‘but I wanted the boy who come second to win because I fancied him!’ he said.50 He claimed to have been at ease with his sexuality from an early age – ‘I was sure of myself and my sexuality and I’ve got nothing to hide,’ he said. ‘I went straight from my mother’s womb onto the gay parade.’51 In interviews he would often call himself the ‘pink sheep of the family’, but this was, as McQueen’s former boyfriend Andrew Groves said, merely a pat quote to stop further discussion of the subject. The truth was much more complex, and disturbing.

  When he was nine or ten something happened to Lee which was to have a profound effect on his later life: he started to be sexually abused by his brother-in-law, Terence Anthony Hulyer, a violent man who Janet married in 1975. Janet knew nothing about the abuse until about four years before Lee died, when he confided in her. The horrific news came as such a shock to her that Janet did not know what to say. She simply asked him whether he held it against her and he replied no, he did not. But she still felt overwhelmed by guilt and shame and despair. Why had she not been able to protect her little brother? she asked herself. After that brief conversation Lee never mentioned the abuse to Janet again and she didn’t want to ask any more questions because she felt so sickened by what her first husband had done.52

  Over the years Lee talked, sometimes obliquely, about the sexual abuse to a number of close friends and boyfriends, but he rarely went into detail about what it consisted of or for how long he had been forced to endure it. ‘Lee told me he had been sexually abused and that it massively affected him,’ recalls Rebecca Barton, who was a close friend of Lee’s when he was at St Martins.53 ‘Once when we were at my flat in Green Lanes he broke down and said he had been abused,’ said Andrew Groves. He believes that the sexual abuse contributed to McQueen’s unsettling ‘sense that someone was going to screw him over’ and an inability to trust those close to him.54 Once, when Lee was feeling particularly overwhelmed by a sense of darkness he had ‘a real heart to heart’ with his boyfriend Richard Brett ‘about why he went to the dark place’ and he told him too about the sexual abuse, but again kept the exact details to himself. ‘But I got the impression that some nasty stuff had happened to him when he was a boy,’ said Richard.55 Lee also confided in Isabella Blow and her husband, Detmar. ‘He was hurt and angry and said that it had robbed him of his innocence,’ said Detmar. ‘I thought it brought a darkness into his soul.’56

  Lee’s friend BillyBoy*, who he met in 1989, believes th
at the sexual abuse shaped McQueen for the rest of his life. ‘I got the impression that he endured it for a very long time,’ he said. ‘He was not well adjusted, he was angry, and he never had a relationship that lasted any length of time. Some of the men he had were like rough trade. I didn’t trust them; they were like thieves. I didn’t want them near me because they were on the make. One of his ex-boyfriends was an ex-prostitute. But he was attracted to that. He was masochistic and insecure and unhappy and had very low self-esteem, which is strange because he had a great talent and people told him that all the time. Anna Wintour and people would tell him endlessly how much they admired his work, but it was so sad because it didn’t compensate for his insecurity.’57

  Janet knew Terence Hulyer was a violent man before she married him, but she was only twenty-one and desperate to leave home. For years she suffered at his hands – once he beat her up because she took it upon herself to order a cup of tea and didn’t let him speak to the waitress in the café. ‘I did lose two babies as a result of violence,’ said Janet, who went on to have two sons, Gary and Paul, with him.58 Yet although Janet knew her husband had a bad temper, she never suspected he could be capable of hurting a young boy, let alone her brother. Lee not only had to endure sexual abuse at Hulyer’s hands but he also had to watch as his elder sister got beaten senseless. ‘I was this young boy and I saw this man with his hands round my sister’s neck,’ he told the journalist Susannah Frankel in 1999. ‘I was just standing there with her two children beside me.’59

  In his imagination, Lee began to fuse his experiences with Janet’s. Both of them had suffered abuse at the hands of the same man and he felt the need to purge the stew of feelings – anger, revenge, despair, corruption, guilt and fragmentation – that he felt growing inside him. He saw his sister as the archetypal woman, vulnerable but strong, a survivor, and she became the blueprint for everything he did later. This was the woman he wanted to protect and empower through his clothes; the patina of armour that he created for her would shield her from danger. ‘I’ve seen a woman get nearly beaten to death by her husband,’ he said later. ‘I know what misogyny is! I hate this thing about fragility and making women feel naïve . . . I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.’60

  The bruised, battered and bloodied models that he sent down the catwalk wearing the most graceful and bewitching creations carried traces of both his sister and himself. Through the medium of his work he aligned himself with his sister and with each new collection he revisited and replayed the abuse that both of them had suffered. He managed to take something ugly and, through the transformative power of his imagination, recast it as a thing of beauty. ‘I gave adults a lot of time in my life when I was young and some of them hurt me,’ he once said. ‘And that way I learnt even more. Let’s say I turned the negative into a positive.’61 The result was intoxicating, a mutant hybrid, the product of a strange metamorphosis.

  In the autumn of 1980, Lee moved from Carpenter’s Road to Rokeby School, a boys’ comprehensive situated off Stratford High Street. On that first day, Lee, dressed in his uniform of black trousers, black blazer and a white shirt, made his way down Biggerstaff Road to his friend Jason Meakin’s house on Carpenter’s Road. Then the two boys called for fellow pupils Peter Bowes and Russell Atkins and they all walked the ten minutes to school. They laughed and joked, but the bravado only covered up their anxieties at entering a large, single-sex school that had a tough reputation. Once inside the building the new boys were told to make their way to the main hall and there they were lined up in alphabetical order, ‘and read the riot act’.62 The boys were streamed according to their perceived ability using a system based around the initials of the school’s name, ‘ROKEBY’: the most academic were placed in ‘R’, the top set, then ‘O’ and down to ‘Y’. In the first year, Lee was assigned ‘E’; by his second year he had dropped down to ‘B’.

  From the outset, school never interested McQueen and at the end of that first term the head of year wrote in his report, ‘I feel quite confident that if Lee is prepared to try to come to terms with Rokeby, he will discover that not only will he feel happier but his work will improve too. However, without this effort he is going to become increasingly unhappy.’63 His punctuality was regarded as ‘poor’ – he missed a total of six half-days during that first term – and he was thought to be too much of a chatterbox and a distraction to the other pupils. His form teacher believed that the boy was finding it ‘difficult to cope in a large comprehensive school’.64 In English he scored 58 per cent, with a C for effort; in his geography exam 38 per cent, together with a comment from the teacher urging him to settle down and ‘begin to act like a comprehensive pupil instead of fooling about all the time’; and in maths only 23 per cent, together with an observation that his ‘class behaviour interferes with his work’. On 15 December 1980, McQueen’s father Ronald, after reading the report, wrote back to Lee’s form teacher, ‘Lee has always been too interested in everybody else instead of getting on with his own work. I have told him about this and hope he will listen. Also he is sent to school at 8:30 every morning but tells me he waits for his friend. I am very annoyed over this. Apart from this I know he likes school and will settle down as he matures.’65

  His next surviving report, which Lee brought home to his parents in March 1982, did show some signs of improvement. In maths he scored 49 per cent, with a B for effort; his English teacher gave him an exam result of 54 per cent, and a B+ for effort; in history he came eighth in the class, with 63 per cent and an A for effort. However, some teachers noted some problems with his behaviour during class. The French teacher said that Lee needed ‘constant goading to get his attention down to his work. He too often daydreams and enjoys chatting’; the RE tutor wrote that he was ‘very erratic in his work. He concentrates well at times and does very little work sometimes’; and the head of the lower school summarized the report as a ‘mixed bag – he has the ability but seems to choose when to apply it’.66

  There was one subject, however, which captured his imagination from the beginning: art. In his first-year exam he scored 73 per cent, with a B for effort and a comment from the teacher, ‘Lee has done some good work in art this term,’ while fifteen months later his teacher gave him an A- for art. ‘Excellent,’ he wrote. ‘Lee has artistic ability and always works hard.’67 Lee started to read books about fashion from the age of twelve. ‘I followed designers’ careers,’ he said later. ‘I knew Giorgio Armani was a window-dresser, Ungaro was a tailor . . . I always knew I would be something in fashion. I didn’t know how big, but I always knew I’d be something.’68

  His friends noticed Lee’s passion for drawing. ‘He just seemed to be sketching, drawing all the time,’ said Jason Meakin. ‘I never thought he would be famous, but I always remember him drawing dresses.’69 Peter Bowes recalls that in school Lee would always carry a little book around with him. Instead of listening to the teacher or doing the work assigned in a particular class Lee would bring out his sketchbook and a clutch of pencils and draw. ‘It was full of nutters,’ McQueen said later about Rokeby. ‘I didn’t learn a thing. I just drew clothes in class.’70 One day Lee showed Peter some of his sketches, drawings of the female form. ‘He was drawing clothes, people, figures, he knew how the female form worked, but it was nothing rude,’ he said. ‘He lived in the art department and his work was always superb.’71

  After a morning of lessons, Lee and his friends would go to the nearby pie and mash shop, where a meal of a broken pie and potatoes would cost ten pence; the rest of the boys’ diet consisted of ‘bread and jam and chocolate and chips’.72

  Outside school, Lee loved watching the birds that would circle around the tops of the tower blocks and he joined the Young Ornithologists Society. ‘It’s almost like Kes, isn’t it?’ he said.73 Later, he told a journalist that he envied birds because they were free. Free from what? ‘The abuse . . . mental, physical,’ he said, refusing to elaborate.74 He also liked playing with the family’s pet dog
– a black chow, officially named Black Magic of Chang Li, rechristened Shane and described by Joyce as ‘gentle as a lamb’.75 When Shane died, aged around fifteen in 1983, Lee was heartbroken but soon learnt to love its replacement, Ben, a red chow with a blue tongue. According to Peter Bowes, Lee helped to buy the dog with money that he had saved from his after-school job collecting glasses at Reflections, a pub situated near the school gates. One day Lee and his school friend Russell Atkins came out of Rokeby and as they were walking past Reflections they were asked by a barman whether they would like to earn a little extra money bottling up. The boys accepted immediately as the hours – the occasional lunch-time and Saturday and Sunday mornings – and pay (around £30 a week) suited them perfectly. They were also impressed by the flash interior – all the walls were covered with giant mirrors, hence the name – and glitzy bar. ‘I wouldn’t say there were villains in there, but it was quite a hard pub,’ said Russell. After a few months, the manager, Kenny, asked the new boys whether they would like to work nights, collecting glasses; Russell turned down the offer, but Lee accepted. ‘There were fights in there, but then there were fights everywhere,’ said Russell. The two boys worked there until they were sixteen when Reflections closed down. ‘We went there one day to get paid to find the police there,’ said Russell. ‘Something had happened, I’m not sure what, but they told us we couldn’t go in.’76