by Rupert Smith
When the longed-for deal arrived, the record entered the top 40 within a week. And once again, I had the same old problems: Top of the Pops wouldn’t book me, the radio wouldn’t play me. I was hardly surprised. After all, this was an underground record. Everything about it – the avant-garde production, the erotic content – was calculated to shock the old and delight the young. There was a time in my life when rejection by the BBC seemed like the end of the world. But now – their loss. What happened on TV and radio didn’t matter any more. The buzz was in the clubs. The record was an instant, best-selling club classic. (Collectors may wish to know that there are still a few hundred 12” copies in mint condition available for £3.50 including p&p from Ginger Vernon Enterprises, PO Box 4787, London NW3.)
History repeated itself. Just as the record had peaked in Britain, demand began across the Atlantic. The ultra-hip Pyramid Club on the Lower East Side booked me for a show. The money wasn’t great ($200) but the signs were promising: if ‘Bi Bi Baby’ was a hit in America I could play the New York clubs flat out for six months. I thought America had forgotten me – after all, I’d left Manhattan during a lean period in my career. But no! Even after all these years, they still loved me.
I couldn’t wait to get back to New York and see all my friends. But, much as I longed to pick up the threads of my American life, I was scared. So much had happened in the last few years! I wasn’t the same confused, vulnerable young man who’d loved and lived with John Kinnell. I’d been through therapy, I’d found an inner strength and peace. And what of John? I’d heard nothing from him for all these years. I’d seen him through the worst of his drug addiction; I had no guilt on that score, even though I’d left him in such a hurry. But where had life taken him? Had he rediscovered his passion for work, as I’d prayed night after night that he would? Or had he drifted down the path of least resistance, squandering his talents? Would he want to see me again? Would he even remember me?
I didn’t know where to find him. He’d left our old apartment, of that I was sure; all my letters had returned unopened. He wasn’t in the Manhattan phone book. But I knew, somehow, that fate would bring me and John Kinnell back together. I stepped off the plane at Newark full of misgivings.
But my first surprise was a nice one. I picked up a copy of Village Voice, hoping to acquaint myself with the downtown scene so many years after I’d left it. I flicked through the pages of gossip, news and reviews, checking that my forthcoming show at the Pyramid was properly advertised. There it was, a small display ad down at the bottom of the page.
RETURN OF A LEGEND! Kitsch pop and seventies porn star Marc Lejeune in his one and only New York show at the Pyramid Lounge, 18 April 12 midnight.
One and only New York show! Little did they know: the bookings were already rolling in. Then my eye alighted on a much larger advert at the top of the page.
DEATH IN LIFE AND LIFE IN DEATH. An exhibition of photographs by John Kinnell, Weiss Gallery. Private view 16 April.
My heart leapt. John – my John! – was working again, getting shown in a prestigious SoHo gallery, and the private view was today! I felt proud and humble; after such trials and hardships, two artists were finally getting their just rewards. I would surprise John by congratulating him in person!
The Weiss Gallery was a stark, glass-fronted building, air-conditioned and almost entirely white inside. The atmosphere as I arrived that evening was hushed, reverential – the tribute of an awe-struck public to the work of a great artist. A snooty receptionist asked to see my invitation, but I simply told her who I was and she motioned me in with a respectful apology. And now for my second shock: on each of the square, white walls of the gallery hung one enormous black and white print, maybe eight feet by ten, of a hideous, gaunt skeleton of a face. Different lighting and angles told the full story: the bald, moth-eaten scalp, the bright, sunken eyes, the lips pulled taut over teeth too big for the mouth. There had always been a morbid side to John’s work, but this, I felt, was too much. What had possessed him to photograph these . . . these terminal cases, famine victims, whatever they were? It was neither beautiful nor brave; it seemed to me only obscene.
And then the third shock. A familiar voice from behind me.
‘Marc. They told me you were here.’
I turned, and there was John. But not the John I had left behind all those years ago. His was the face on the wall. Death in life and life in death: it was my John.
My first impulse was to scream and run. I felt as if I was trapped in a horror movie, that my life was in danger. But then everything fell into place: John, the man I had loved and practically given my life for in the seventies, was dying. I swallowed hard, blinked and held out my hand. He shook it, weakly, and leaned forward as if to embrace me. I must have flinched.
‘It’s okay You don’t have to kiss me if you don’t want to. I’ll understand. Enjoy the show!’ He laughed, and tottered away. I couldn’t breathe. I fell out on to the street and into the subway, sweating and sick.
As soon as I was back at the hotel I phoned Ginger and told her to cancel the show at the Pyramid; I had to come back to London immediately, for reasons that I couldn’t explain over the phone. But for once, Ginger let me down. It was too late to cancel, she said, and any breach of contract would cost us dearly. But what was money compared with my peace of mind? I pleaded with Ginger, I’m not ashamed to say that I cried, but she was a rock. ‘You’ll do the show, Marc, and you’ll be fine. Don’t call me again, I’ll be away for the weekend. We can fix the flight for next Saturday if you want, but it comes out of your own account. Good luck.’ And with that, she rang off.
I got through the show – I don’t know how – and the kids loved me. And of course I gave a great performance; I’ve never given anything less. I bumped, I ground, I closed my eyes and rolled my head in ecstasy But with every beat, I saw John’s giant death mask on the gallery walls. Every young, attractive face that gazed up at me in adoration was transformed to a putrefying skeleton. Each moan of pleasure sounded to me like a death rattle.
For the rest of the week, I stayed in my hotel room arranging my early return to London. I was scared to step out on the street. How many more ghosts would I see, faces that I’d once known as beautiful young men? And, absurdly, I believed that death was waiting for me on the streets and in the clubs of Manhattan. I had escaped once, but it wouldn’t let me slip through its bony fingers again. I had to go home.
Back in London I threw myself into the night life, dancing my life away, anything to exhaust myself and escape from the nightmares that plagued me. I discovered a new side to the clubs that had once seemed so innocent and joyful. The drug-dealers had moved in, supplying the kids with ecstasy and amphetamines
– and I got a taste for them. On ecstasy, everything was fine: you could forget your troubles, you could love your fellow man without seeing him crumbling away into a shrivelled corpse in your hands. And the speed kept me awake and buzzing, going from pub to club to party, talking and walking sometimes for days on end without sleep – and without the terrible dreams that came with sleep. Sometimes I’d drink a bottle of wine and pass out for twenty-four hours, but then it was back to the clubs and the drugs, running, running from death.
But it was catching up with me. In a nightmarish repetition of history, Pinky was on my tracks again, hounding me through the papers just as he’d done twenty years ago. Every day he published a report ‘outing’ a show business colleague, dragging the most personal, intimate secrets into the public arena. ‘How can these rich, privileged hypocrites continue to deny the truth about their sexual preferences while thousands of their gay brothers are dying of Aids?’ asked one column, seeking to add a moral dimension to what was clearly a campaign of hatred and revenge. Marc Lejeune is sending dozens of young men to their graves,’ he claimed one day.
By refusing to speak out about his sexual preferences he is perpetuating an atmosphere of fear and ignorance which can only lead to the spread of HIV and Aids. It
is time he was stopped, and if he and his closeted co-conspirators don’t have the courage to speak out then others must do so for them.
And he didn’t stop there. In a full-page feature headed WAR CRIMINALS, SEXUAL TRAITORS Pinky named his top ten ‘closet killers in the Aids wars’ (I was in good company: it was a who’s who of top entertainers) and listed our various ‘crimes’. Mine included voting for Mrs Thatcher, failing to speak out against anti-lesbian and gay laws, doing a benefit for our troops in the Falklands and releasing a record that failed to promote bisexuality in the context of a safer sex relationship.
Marc Lejeune is personally responsible for the spread of Aids among young people in Britain. We invite him to make a personal statement of his own commitment to safer sex and fund-raising for HIV research.
God, I knew it was lies – how many years had I spent listening to Pinky’s insane lies? But this time, I couldn’t ignore it. The words seemed to pursue me as I ran from dancefloor to dancefloor: Marc Lejeune, a killer! A killer! And every time I saw John’s face, laughing as he turned away from me in the gallery, laughing because I’d shirked his kiss. I threw myself into an even more punishing round of clubs and drugs, finally, when all the clubs had closed, wandering Hampstead Heath where the party carried on all night. I couldn’t be alone: I had to have company to feel that I was still alive, still sane. I’d go anywhere with anybody, back to sordid flats in the worst parts of town – anything to avoid the terrors that overtook me when I was on my own. But there were the nights when I passed out drunk, waking in terror in a strange room or even, I’m ashamed to confess, in a doorway near Embankment station. And at last it caught up with me, the thing I dreaded most: I became ill. I collapsed one night with a fever, dragged myself out of the club and into a cab that took me to Ginger’s. She put me to bed and called a doctor who ordered two weeks total rest. I had a serious chest infection.
I’ve always, thank God, been a healthy person: like all actors, I know that my body is my livelihood. And for forty years, I’d looked after myself. But now a combination of bad diet, lack of sleep and too many late nights out on the damp Heath had conspired to give me a nasty respiratory problem. I lay there for days, unable to eat, seemingly not getting any better. I lost weight: without exercise, proper food or fresh air I was bound to. But gradually, with rest and care (provided selflessly by Ginger) I recovered. Now there was only one thing left to fear: myself.
I dreaded each lonely day in bed, when Anna had gone to work and Ginger’s visit was many hours away There was nothing – no drink, no drugs – to take away the pain that had brought me to the edge of madness. But finally, in those dark days of recovery, I faced up to my fear. Yes, John was dying, hundreds were dying, but I was alive. I was one of the lucky ones: I had survived. I realized what had terrified me, what had driven me through the hell of the night: guilt. I felt guilty for my good fortune. Fate had claimed others, perhaps as talented and beautiful, but had spared me. Why? Why leave me to grieve? Why not just take me! But no: mine was a different destiny. I had escaped from New York with my life: now, I realized, it was my duty to make the most of it.
There was another important factor that contributed greatly to my recovery. Pinky Stevens had continued his crusade against his many show-business enemies, pouring down fire and brimstone from his newspaper pulpit. And finally, his ‘outing’ campaign hit the big time: a major, well-established British star about whom there had always been rumours (strenuously denied) was finally caught in the act. Photographs, quotes, the lot. It was on the front of every paper for a week, Pinky was on television justifying himself with his mad, fundamentalist rants, the whole country was talking about him. He must have been so happy. But then the worm turned. The star in question (whom I won’t name – why rake over other people’s dirt ?) marshalled his resources, engaged the best lawyers in the city and mounted a counter-attack, suing Pinky and his paper for defamation. The papers went into overdrive, reporting every detail of the trial, and Pinky lost. He was personally liable for damages in excess of £1 million, and the paper had to pay punitive costs. Pinky lost his job (again) and disappeared from the public eye. Ginger’s spies kept us informed of his rapid downward spiral: he was arrested for a physical attack on a member of the clergy at a demonstration outside Westminster Abbey, was tried and found guilty not only of grievous bodily harm but also of contempt of court, and was finally sentenced to three years in prison. Serving his sentence was probably the happiest time of his life: at last, he would really have something to complain about. And that was the last I heard of Pinky Stevens.
I was so delighted that I ignored my doctor’s orders and went out for one grand celebration. Details of that night are sketchy in my mind: I started off at my favourite drinking club in Wardour Street, then went for dinner and on to a West End disco, where I took a couple of tabs of ecstasy. When the club closed, I took a cab to the Heath to walk myself sober. I was found unconscious the next morning by a jogger, with blood pouring from wounds in my wrists where I had cut them falling on some broken glass, and my foot firmly (and painfully) lodged down a rabbit hole into which I had tripped and stumbled, knocking myself out in the process. It was not, as was widely reported at the time, a suicide attempt.
I was taken to the Royal Free Hospital, where I lay unconscious for several days. The first thing I saw when I came round was a television camera sticking straight in my face.
The ward where I had landed up had just become the subject of a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary series for BBC television. For several days, I had ‘stared’ without even knowing it. Cameras had recorded my unconscious state, the nurses and consultants clustered around my bed, the other patients whispering excitedly about a celebrity on the ward. When I finally regained consciousness, there was great rejoicing, and there was Ginger by my bedside, urging me to sign a release form allowing the BBC to screen the footage of my admission and recovery. ‘It’s a guaranteed ratings-topper!’ she beamed as I weakly scrawled my name at the bottom of a form.
But before I could adjust to my new stardom, I had to scotch the ugly rumours that were spreading about me. My accident on Hampstead Heath – a simple matter of a sprained ankle and freak laceration of the wrists – was misinterpreted as a botched suicide. That was ridiculous enough, but nothing compared to my supposed motives. I was a has-been, some papers said, unable to cope with living in obscurity. I was a drug addict, reported another ‘news’ paper, making much of the fact that I’d been associated with acid house ‘raves’. All that was harmless enough, but there was one story that outraged and upset even me.
I had attempted to kill myself, the rumour went, because I was dying of Aids. They’d done their homework, I’ll give them that: they’d dug up my relationship with John Kinnell, they’d ‘linked’ me to various other Aids cases, famous and unknown (of course I’d already lost several friends to the disease). They even reported that I’d been laid up with a minor chest infection. The inference was clear: Lejeune must be dying.
Now, I knew that this was impossible: thanks to my Guardian Angel, I’d been completely celibate during the crucial years when I might have come into contact with the virus. But that wasn’t the point. How would the public react to the news that Marc Lejeune – the eternally young, fun-loving Marc LeJeune – was the victim of an incurable, wasting disease? Who would want to employ me then? No, I’d become at best a figure of pity, at worst a leper, shunned and feared by an ignorant society. People with Aids have my greatest respect and sympathy, but I couldn’t allow such a malicious falsehood to destroy my career. So I settled upon a plan.
In return for using my name to boost their ratings, the BBC would allow me to make a short, dignified statement quashing the rumours about my health, supported by the testimony of one of the hospital doctors.
With this understanding, I set about making the most of this marvellous opportunity. The cameras loved me; instead of hovering around the ward watching the various admissions and emergencies, they spent
more and more time by my bed recording my views on life, my hopes for the future, my salty anecdotes about a lifetime in showbusiness. When Intensive Care hit the airwaves a couple of weeks later, I was an instant smash. Viewers were shocked by my pitiful state on admission, distressed by the ugly rumours, moved and inspired by my courage as I fought my way to recovery. What had set out as ‘a fly-on-the-wall documentary with unprecedented access to one of London’s busiest hospitals’ became, in the words of one television critic, ‘a tea-time dose of homespun philosophy, gushing gossip and enough gore to keep the kids happy’. And yes, the gossip did come gushing forth – and the jokes, the stories, even a few tears as I remembered friends and family who had gone before. By the second week of transmission (it went out for twenty minutes five nights a week) my bed was surrounded by flowers and cards from well-wishers; by the fourth week there was such a frenzy of attention that we had to have a police guard on the hospital doors to keep the press and fans at bay My daily flower delivery ensured that every single bed in the hospital was brightly decked.
