by Rupert Smith
Nick and Pinky, Pinky and Nick, their names chased each other round my head like rats in a trap. Together, they thought, they could break me. But inside myself I knew I was stronger, that I would fight and win. They had accused me, they who were two of the dirtiest, most disreputable creatures to crawl through the slime of the West End. How dared they ?
Then it clicked. I had a plan. It meant dirtying my hands, fighting my enemies with the same weapons that they were using against me, but it would be effective. Not for nothing had I listened to the gossip of the hairdresser’s salon, the green room, the theatre bar. I had ammunition and now was the time to use it.
I composed a letter to Pinky, which Julian delivered to the offices of the Evening News where, I calculated, its message would seem particularly clear.
‘Dear Pinky Stevens,’ it began, ‘I was so interested to read your article about me in yesterday’s News.’ It continued:
You have put me in a fascinating position: I have absolutely nothing left to lose. You, it strikes me, have a good deal. You have called me a murderer, a prostitute and worse. But you are not the only one with tales to tell. I will expect to see a full, unreserved apology in tomorrow’s edition, otherwise I will be sending details of the following to your notoriously uptight editor.
I. Your live-in relationship with Stuart. (I will also be pleased to send details of this to the headmaster of the school where Stuart teaches.)
2. Your holiday in Tangiers and your greedy consumption of hashish and young boys.
3. Precise details of Nick Nicholls’s business practices, a list of his regular clients and information on the contents of his photographic library to which I now believe you to be a subscriber.
With very best wishes, Marc Lejeune
The following article duly appeared on the front page of the next day’s News, under the headline MARC LEJEUNE: APOLOGY
In a recent article, we suggested that Marc Lejeune was somehow implicated in the death of his former teacher and flatmate Bernard Phillips. We were mistaken in doing so, and are pleased to confirm that Scotland Yard is ‘completely satisfied’ that the case is now closed. We also accept that Mr Lejeune was not in any way directly involved in the death this week of Janice Jones, and we regret any implication in our report which may have suggested this. We apologize for any distress we may have caused to Mr Lejeune or his family.
That was all: no retraction of the other foul insinuations, but a clear indication that Pinky’s report was nothing but lies. It would have to do: for now. But I vowed that Pinky and Nick would mess with me again at their peril. Finally I had discovered the one thing that they and their type feared more than anything else: exposure. I made sure that my parents had seen neither the original article nor the retraction.
The summer of ’68 ! It was every bit as exciting as it’s cracked up to be. I won’t add another account to the vast literature that exists about this special time, I’ll only say that everything you’ve ever read about it is true, and that I was at the centre of it all. By July, I had become a fully fledged hippy: my hair was long, my clothes were colourful, I even sported a beard for a while. I could go anywhere I chose and was seldom recognized. I was just a small speck in a warm, loving sea of humanity That’s how it seemed that summer – that summer that we thought would never end, that summer of long nights, of parties that lasted for days, of lovers that came and went, the faces I remember like snapshots, slightly faded now. The unforgettable atmosphere of the house where it all happened: the smell of food, the drugs, the cats, the great unwashed crowd that passed through that door, sometimes for a sweet, brief night, sometimes to stay for weeks at a time. Nutter, dear kind Julian, loving Anna – and of course Howard and Barbara, whom I could never warm to – were my constant companions. Together we laughed and loved and played like children in the garden.
But it wasn’t all play Slowly, painstakingly, the show that would relaunch my career was taking shape. Sometimes, during those long rehearsals in the Outer Space, I despaired; we were no nearer a script, a plot, or any sort of show at all. But then something wonderful happened. After weeks of aimless doodling, something began to coalesce: a series of unrelated scenes, a few fragmentary lines, a handful of diverse props – a toy gun, a whip, a set of handcuffs . . . We came back ceaselessly to these same few elements, and Moska began to embellish them with more ideas, some of them insane, all of them outrageous. By now we’d done so many trust exercises that I had blind faith in Moska’s judgement.
And then, God knows how, we suddenly had a show. Also, as Moska announced casually one day, we had a venue: the tiny Travesty Theatre Club on Endell Street, subversively positioned right in the middle of the West End. We would open at the end of September – a crucial date which, as historians will recall, marked the end of the Lord Chamberlain’s powers of censorship over the British stage.
For many years, I’d been at the forefront of the movement to abolish this ridiculous, outmoded legislation. All of my performances, from the very first time I stepped on stage as Cleopatra, had walked a legal and artistic tightrope; in my more recent work, I’d adopted subtler tactics, observing the conventional forms of thriller and farce but always stretching the content to the very limits. Sometimes I’d gone too far, hence the hostility of certain elements of the press, who saw me as a danger to their hidebound, conventional theatre. But it was thanks to the tireless efforts of me and a few others like me that, finally, censorship was lifted in 1968.
We would be the first to take advantage of the new freedom, opening our show at 6 p.m. on the day that the new act was passed, beating the rest of the West End by a few crucial hours. (There was another reason for the early curtain: the show was over four hours long.)
The first night of Meat – that was the title that Moska had finally settled on – will stay in my memory forever. I’ve been asked about it a million times by students, keen to know the minutest details of a turning point in cultural history. Did I realize, they ask, what I was doing? I have to be truthful: no, I wasn’t aware of its full significance, of the magnitude that it was to attain in later years. But yes, I certainly sensed something special in the air. There was a buzz in the West End; journalists were sniffing around on every street, limousines cruised up Shaftesbury Avenue, the evening papers sold out as fast as they hit the street. We weren’t the only opening in town that night: there was an American musical coming into the Shaftesbury Theatre that was also testing the new freedoms, amidst much hype. (This proved to be the vastly overrated Hair, a disappointing show that featured a brief flash of nudity at the end of the first act but was basically a conventional musical with a few trendy drugs references thrown in to grab publicity.)
Meat was a different kettle of fish. Our show was radical, not just in its content but also in its conception and form. Moska described it as a theatrical critique of imperialism, both sexual and political, and of theatre itself. The plot (such as it was – this was not conventional, bourgeois, ‘linear’ theatre) revolved around themes of the body: the body as sex object, the body as possession, the body as spectacle. ‘The central image’, he had said during one intense rehearsal, ‘is the flesh. The firm young flesh that we desire. The flesh that bleeds and dies and rots, the flesh that is eaten and sustains life. The flesh as commodity’ Hence Meat – flesh as commodity We picked up a lot of unexpected publicity in vegetarian publications, who threatened to picket us until Moska explained that Meat was a radical critique of a carnivorous society as well.
There were queues around the block by five o‘clock. I was used to full houses, but for Moska and the rest of the company this was an unimaginable thrill. Word had spread that Meat was the hottest ticket in town, and Moska had given interviews to the radical press promising shock after shock. He had also made great play of my presence in the cast, how he was ‘using an icon of the commercial culture as the focal point’ of the new show. The popular press had been quick to pick up on the fact that Marc Lejeune was appearing in a ‘sex and
drugs shocker’.
The audience were ushered into the tiny auditorium. I recognized a scattering of my faithful older fans who attended my every London show, some of them chums of Nick’s who had seen my very first performance at the club and had remained loyal ever since. How out of place they looked, those smart old gentlemen in their blazers and club ties, among the great hairy mass that comprised the rest of the audience! I noticed that they had commandeered the seats with the best view.
The house lights went down, and for a few seconds the room was in complete darkness, save for a few tiny red points of light where various members of the audience were smoking. Then, thundering from the huge speakers placed all around the room (one of Julian’s friends was a DJ), came ‘Mony Mony’ by Tommy James and the Shondells, a big hit that summer. As the beat pounded relentlessly in the tiny auditorium, the stage lights were brought up very, very slowly. Moska’s corps de ballet, naked and covered from head to foot in stage blood, crept on to the stage. The lights brightened a tiny bit more, and the audience could just make out the dark, glistening forms of the dancers’ bodies writhing in time to the music. More light, and now they were clearly visible, stamping and jumping across the stage. Every breath in the audience was held. This, they knew, was a revolution.
The record died away, but the dancers kept up the same rhythm, standing in a line across the stage, stamping their feet just inches from the front row Every breast, every scrotum, wobbled visibly in time to the beat. When Moska made his entrance wearing a white lab coat and pince-nez, there was a ripple of applause from the cognoscenti, which he acknowledged with a fluid hand gesture. Climbing on to a rostrum, he stuck his hand deep inside his coat (as the sound system struck up a deafening rendition of the death aria from Madam Butterfly) and produced a huge bullwhip which he brandished above his head then brought down with a crash on to the floor, mercilessly flogging the dancers who cowered and ran around the stage. After a few moments of this they fell panting at the foot of the rostrum, writhed around a bit, smeared more blood over each other then came to rest in a formation that explicitly represented a woman’s pudendum.
During the foregoing, I had crept invisibly from behind the curtains into a hollow space inside the rostrum. Now, as the aria reached its crescendo and Moska belaboured the huge human vagina with his whip, I crawled under the mass of dancers and emerged – was ‘born’ – through a central aperture of writhing, wriggling arms. There was sudden silence, and I lay, quivering in a foetal position and slightly streaked with blood, at the audience’s mercy. You could have heard a pin drop.
The dancers disappeared, and Moska once again cracked his whip. Now it was the turn of Nutter, Julian and Anna, who came tripping on to the stage dressed in nurses’ uniforms: Anna and Julian as women, Nutter in white Y-fronts, stripped to the waist, with a stethoscope round his neck and a paper nurse’s cap perched absurdly on his head. Between them they produced huge rolls of gauze in which they wrapped me, running round and round my body (while Moska blew a whistle) until I was completely swathed like the Mummy There was then a completely gratuitous scene in which Anna and Julian ‘simulated’ sex with Nutter (although how much of Anna’s performance was simulation is a matter of debate, at least from where I was watching).
I won’t go into detail about the rest of the show: more scholarly minds than mine have recorded that historic evening. Suffice to say that I was on stage for the ensuing four hours, during which time I was regularly stripped, whipped, dressed in a variety of costumes (nun, city gent, Vietnamese peasant) and engaged in sexual acts with every member of the cast. In one memorable scene, I was the front end of a pantomime cow while Nutter was the back; we were violently attacked by the rest of the cast who ‘slaughtered’ us with chainsaws then pulled out yards and yards of innards (old sheets soaked in fake blood) from our ‘stomach’. (This scene had been inserted at the last minute by Moska as a gesture to the vegetarian faction, who whooped and cheered hysterically during this scene of bizarre cruelty to an animal.)
The evening’s entertainment ended with my naked body handcuffed to a huge wheel upon which the symbol for nuclear power had been painted. The rest of the cast then took potshots at me with handfuls of wallpaper paste into which Moska had stirred several ounces of glitter. The resultant mess looked as if someone had had a huge and very glamorous orgasm all over me. Finally, Moska appeared in a Maoist uniform, brandishing the Chinese flag in one hand and a huge sacrificial knife in the other. He held a pose for a few, heart-stopping moments, then brought the knife down across my throat. Pints of fake blood (the biggest single expense on the Meat budget) pumped out and the show was over.
The audience was shell-shocked. Even when the lights came up and I stepped down to take my bow, they couldn’t applaud for over a minute. It’s the greatest tribute an audience can pay to an actor – the homage of stunned silence. Finally, they erupted. They screamed, they clapped, they stamped their feet. Fights broke out. Things were thrown – flowers, loose change, beer glasses, lighted cigarettes. I saw one of my oldest fans (a sweet old gentleman, actually) stagger out of the auditorium white-faced, clutching his chest. We took a final bow and beat it to the dressing room. It was 10.15. I peered out of the window to watch the crowds filtering politely out of the Shaftesbury Theatre, where Hair’s first night had just reached its disappointing conclusion. Where was the excitement, the revolution, there ? My audience was still hysterical in the theatre; finally Moska had to risk life and limb to calm them. At last, they were pacified and left to perpetrate God knows what acts of insanity in the London night.
It took me an hour to clean myself up after the show. In fact, for the duration of the run I had peculiar red stains from the fake blood inside my ears, and was forever discovering grains of glitter in the most embarrassing places. Finally, I was ready – to celebrate! I knew, and Moska knew, that together we had made history. But this was no time for analysis. This was time for a party!
Julian, that social butterfly, had arranged the first night celebrations at a club on D’Arblay Street that would entertain us ‘all night, and all tomorrow if necessary’. We were mad Maenads, high on our own powers of creation/destruction. We danced, we drank, we took drugs – nothing could quench the spirit that Moska had unleashed. And I danced longer, laughed harder, than anyone else there. What was it that Moska had unleashed in me – an angel ? Or a demon ?
And I made love that night – wild, carefree love. There was a woman at the club whom I had never seen before, a tall statuesque beauty with flaming red hair (she reminded me of Rita Hayworth in Gilda) ; Nutter couldn’t keep his eyes off her. But she was interested in only one person on the dance floor – me. I was delighted; I’d been having a little trouble with Nutter during rehearsals for Meat, listening to his endless complaints that Moska was a ‘pervert’ and that he hated the sexual acts that he was forced to perform. He particularly hated the sex act with Julian, and objected to a scene in which he and I had to kiss while the rest of the cast strafed us with machine-gun fire. ‘I’m not gay, Marc, I can’t handle it,’ he told me over and over again, as if I was somehow responsible for the strange company he chose to keep. His relationship with Anna had suffered too; the pressure to ‘perform’ on stage had rendered him incapable of making love to her in private. And now he was hoping to ‘prove’ himself as a man at a party that was being held to celebrate my success.
‘She’s gorgeous, man,’ burbled Nutter in my ear as ‘Rita’ sashayed across the floor towards us. ‘I’m gonna make it with her. God, yeah, I’ve got to, I’ve got to . . .’ He was a randy little schoolboy again, with an itch to be scratched. But I knew ‘Rita’ had eyes only for me. As she approached us, she peeled off one long, black satin glove. Nutter was practically doubled up with lust, and made to grab her. She deftly flicked him aside, wrapped the glove around my neck and drew me into a close, sensuous tango. Nutter was furious, and stormed out of the club. I didn’t care; for the moment, only two people existed – me and the woman i
n my arms. There was something about her that turned me on. It wasn’t just the glamour of the evening, the drink and drugs that I’d taken. It wasn’t just her physical beauty, or the way she touched me as we danced, although those were both powerful aphrodisiacs. There was something special about this lady, something that the other girls just didn’t have.
We were magical together on the dance floor. Every eye was rivetted upon us as we glided together, lost in each other’s embrace, oblivious to the envious stares from around the club. We danced for – what? Minutes? Hours? I’ll never know. And then, without a word, we left the club together. A short taxi ride (we could hardly keep our hands off each other), a smart apartment in Chelsea, a night that I will never forget. Had I finally found the woman of my dreams ?
You could have cut the air with a knife when I reported at the theatre the next afternoon. Nutter was sullen, threatening to jump ship (he ruined the show that night with an aggressive, erratic performance). Anna was pasty-faced and tired – hungover? Or had she and Nutter had a row? Even Julian was subdued, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. Thankfully, I was professional enough to rise above backstage bitchiness, and pulled the show together. It was a stunning success. But we’d lost something, the sense of camaraderie built up so carefully over months of rehearsal. Why ? What had happened ? I felt that the rest of the company was keeping something from me.
I found out the following day, and, once again, I had to turn to the newspapers to read the ‘truth’ about myself. It was Julian who sheepishly brought the Evening News to me; I knew as soon as I saw the familiar masthead that there was a shock in store. I expected it. I almost welcomed it. If you keep receiving blow after blow on the same bruise, it hurts a little less each time, although it never heals. And the pain becomes a part of your life.
