Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  Mid-afternoon, and Ray’s friend Keith offers us the use of his house so we can talk quietly, away from the noisy pub. Things are turning quite chaotic. The man who was eloquent and funny on the train is getting drunker and more hostile.

  “Have you read up about false memory syndrome?” I ask at one point.

  “Go on. Go on. Go on,” Ray snaps. “What’s your degree in? Psychiatry? Are you a proper psychiatrist?”

  And then, a few moments later, “Are you coming to me with clean hands, Jon? Have you ever been sued?”

  I shake my head.

  “You bloody white clean Daz clean brilliant white man,” Ray says. “I’m human. I’m a human being.” Then he gives me a look as if to say, “Are you human? Coming here asking me all these questions?”

  I’m finding his position really annoying. I admire Ray enormously, but don’t see why I shouldn’t ask questions about what he did, or why being sued makes you more heroically human than not being sued. “I know some people’s brains can be odd when it comes to memory,” I say, “but surely you’d know for certain if you’d killed someone?”

  “It was sixteen years ago,” he says. “You were where? Jewish Lads’ Brigade?”

  “Yes, but if I’d killed someone in the Jewish Lads’ Brigade, I’d remember,” I say.

  There’s a silence. “You do seem to have a self-destructive streak,” I say.

  “Absolute bollocks!” Ray yells. “Absolute bollocks, that is. Do I fuck. You look at me with those London eyes. I know who you are. I know where you’re coming from.” And then, a few moments later, “You’re not a pretty man. You’re ugly.”

  There’s a short silence. Everyone looks at one another, a bit stunned.

  “Well, you certainly know how to ensure a good write-up,” I say.

  “One day, you’ll have what I have,” Ray says.

  “A criminal record?” pipes up his boyfriend, Mark, from across the room.

  “Oh, fuck off,” Ray says to everyone.

  Later, a friend of Ray’s—the photographer Mary Stamm-Clarke—tells me that the heavy drinking, the nastiness, is new. It’s all emerged since the conviction, she says. “It never crossed his mind that the mercy-killing story might backfire. I think he thought everyone would love him for it.” She says the stress has taken a terrible toll, even if he doesn’t know it. He looks very different from how he did six months ago: older, frailer.

  As I wait for my taxi to arrive, I feel quite remorseful. Ray spent a lifetime beautifully documenting life’s ordinariness, but then a generation of documentary makers like me came along for whom ordinariness wasn’t enough. We wanted to document life’s extremes, and so his gentleness became passé and he unraveled into chaos. And now I’ve come along to document it.

  “I’ve got to go and see the probation office on Monday,” Ray says as my taxi pulls up. “They’re going to ask me about my dependency on alcohol. Am I a fantasist? They’re going to ask me all these terrible . . .” He falls silent.

  “Maybe you can see me as a dress rehearsal for that?” I say.

  “I can do. Yeah,” says Ray.

  And I realize that, beneath the hostility, the unpleasantness, what he really is is embarrassed.

  I’m Loving Aliens Instead

  On December 18, 2006, Robbie Williams played the last of fifty-nine stadium shows in a row, announced he was going to spend Christmas at his home in Los Angeles, and then basically disappeared. He was hardly seen at all in 2007. He briefly checked into rehab. He spent quite a bit of time hiking and playing soccer (he owns a soccer field on Mulholland Drive). Then he stopped doing that too. According to reports, he seemed to have retreated inside his house, the curtains closed. His record company announced he had no plans to release an album in 2008.

  Today he unexpectedly calls me to ask if I want to go with him to the desert in Nevada to meet UFO abductees.

  “I’ve been spending so much time at home on the Internet on sites like AboveTopSecret.com,” he says. “I want to do something. I want to go out there and meet these people. I want to be a part of this. I want to do something other than sit in my bed and watch the news. And it starts with the UFO conference.”

  I log on to the conference website. It’s taking place at the quite down-at-heel-looking Aquarius Casino Resort. The conference slogan is “Educating the World One Person at a Time,” which makes it sound as if there won’t be many people attending. The speakers will include Ann Andrews, from Lincolnshire, who claims her son, Jason, has had “disturbing experiences at the hands of many different alien species,” and a surgeon, Dr. Roger Leir, who claims he has extracted from patients fifteen metallic implants that are not of earthly metal.

  “I wonder if he’ll bring the implants along,” I say.

  “So you can see with your own eyes whether they’re earthly or not?” Robbie asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “According to Jon,” Robbie says. “I don’t want to hear any debunking because I want to believe.”

  I fly to Los Angeles. When Robbie comes to his door, I hardly recognize him. He’s put on a lot of weight and has grown a very bushy beard. I stare at it. “OK,” he says. “I’m piecing it together now. I’ve grown a beard and I’m going to Nevada to speak to people about UFOs. I think I should shave so I don’t look so mad.”

  We go to his TV room. It’s bright outside but the curtains are closed. His girlfriend, the actor Ayda Field, is in there, watching a UFO DVD. We all watch it. This isn’t all he does nowadays—he has been writing songs and playing golf too—but the paranormal has become a very big part of his life since he disappeared from public view.

  Robbie first contacted me in 2005. He telephoned me out of the blue from a hotel in Blackpool where he was filming the video for his song “Advertising Space.” He said he liked a book I had written and was thinking of spending a night in a haunted house.

  “Do you know any?” he asked.

  I spent a week sending e-mails: “Dear Lady , I’ve read that, if the portrait in your drawing room is moved, a ghost is apparently disturbed and manifests itself. Recently I have been contacted by the pop star Robbie Williams who would like to spend a night in a haunted house and so I wonder whether he and I can pay a private visit.”

  I expected not to hear back from anybody, but, in fact, once I invoked Robbie’s name, owners of country piles started flinging their ghosts at me as if they were their debutante daughters.

  “One of the guest bedrooms is definitely haunted by a young woman called Abigail who was starved to death by a monk in 1732,” e-mailed one baroness. “Robbie is more than welcome to spend the night.”

  I was surprised to find how widespread the belief in ghosts was among the aristocracy. One hundred percent of the people I contacted responded instantly to say their houses were definitely haunted and Robbie was more than welcome to spend the night. Then Robbie e-mailed to say he didn’t really have time to spend the night in a haunted house after all.

  “I’ve put a week into this,” I crossly thought. “Now I see why Robbie Williams gets on so well with ghosts. They both only manifest themselves when it suits them.”

  But we kept in touch. For a while we planned to go on a cruise together—hosted by the psychic Sylvia Browne—through the Mediterranean. But he pulled out due to concerns that if the ship happened to be filled with Robbie Williams fans, there’d be nowhere for him to flee to. He also considered going to Peru to take ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic so powerful—a shaman told me when I inquired on Robbie’s behalf—it awakens our dormant plant DNA. But that trip was canceled when it dawned on him that ayahuasca is a terrible idea if one is in a fragile mental state. He’d speak wistfully about some future day when he’d have less work on and could investigate the paranormal for real. And now that day has come.

  • • •

  LAUGHLIN, NEVADA, looks from the sky like a tiny Las Vegas, a cluster of crumbling themed casinos poking strangely out of an expanse of desert. We are traveling here
in a private plane that Robbie has rented for the day. He’s brought along Ayda and a friend, Brandon. The flight attendant was there to meet us on the airstrip.

  “Welcome to your plane,” she said to us. “I just want to tell you that Snoop Dogg uses this plane a lot. What I’m saying is,” she added in a lower voice, “you can do anything.”

  We all looked at each other. We’re middle-aged now. None of us could really imagine what “anything” might mean anymore.

  “Are we allowed to stand up as the plane lands?” asked Brandon.

  • • •

  WE LAND. A car is waiting on the tarmac to take us to the nearby Aquarius Casino Resort. We take the escalator to the second floor, walk past the stalls selling DVDs with titles like Secret Space: What Is NASA Hiding? and into the cavernous conference room where British speaker Ann Andrews has just begun her audiovisual presentation to an audience of five hundred.

  I have to say, after all the anticipation, she seems a bit boring to me. She’s recounting various tales of alien visitations in quite a dull voice. I half switch off and glance over at Robbie. He is engrossed. He is leaning forward, taking in every word. I decide to pay more attention so I can try to understand why.

  Ann Andrews’s life was quite ordinary, she says, until 1984, the year her son, Jason, was born. She flashes onto the screen a snapshot of a sweet little boy sitting in a field in Lincolnshire with a horse in the background.

  “That’s Jason,” she says.

  One day, when Jason was a toddler, Ann says she noticed he had a terrified look on his face. She asked what was wrong. He replied that aliens had appeared the night before at the foot of his bed and taken him to their spaceship, where they conducted tests on him. He said it was happening every night. As the weeks and months passed, Jason’s story apparently never changed. When nobody was looking, aliens would come, float him up to a spaceship, and teach him the mysteries of the universe. They would teach him that he was placed on earth to become an Indigo child—a psychic sage.

  “We took him to a psychiatrist,” Ann says. “We cried so much. We had him tested. But the tests all came back negative.”

  And then one day, when Jason was twelve, Ann says she made a very big decision. She decided to believe her son. Every word. She has subsequently written a series of books about Jason, including one called Jason, My Indigo Child: Raising a Multidimensional Star Child in a Changing World.

  I lean over to Robbie.

  “She believes Jason!” I whisper. “She believes it all!”

  “What’s the other side of that, though?” Robbie whispers back. “It’s either believe everything the boy is saying or remain steadfast to earthly beliefs and have a black sheep in the family. ‘Oh, it’s him again.’ For her own sanity she has had to believe him.” He pauses. “But for me, right now,” he says, “everything she’s saying is true.”

  Ann’s audiovisual address ends with her projecting onto the screen behind her a series of extremely blurry photographs. From time to time, she says, Jason is summoned to the spaceship again. When this happens, Ann tries to photograph the UFOs. But she has only a disposable camera, and so the pictures always come out fuzzy and inconclusive.

  It’s time for the Q & A. Robbie’s friend Brandon stands up and walks to the front. Brandon is a record producer and cowrote some of the songs on Robbie’s last album, Rudebox.

  “I just wanted to ask: Why don’t you buy a better camera?” he says. A slight gasp reverberates around the hall. People don’t usually ask cynical questions at UFO conferences.

  “I’m absolutely useless at anything technological,” Ann replies.

  “Have you ever had any psychiatric evaluation or presented yourself for that?” Brandon asks. Robbie flinches.

  “No, I haven’t,” Ann says. “I’d like to think I’m all there, but if I’m not, there are quite a few of us that have these experiences, so maybe we’re all crazy!” She laughs, awkwardly.

  “Thank you very much,” Brandon says.

  Robbie goes outside for a cigarette. I tell Brandon I’m surprised Robbie brought him along after what he’d said about not wanting to hear any debunking.

  “There’s two sides to Rob in that respect, though, aren’t there?” Brandon says. “There’s the side that wants to go along with it, but there’s also a very sarcastic, skeptical side.” He pauses. “Which I’d like to think is the real side.”

  Robbie comes back.

  “My toes curled up the moment you walked toward the stage,” he tells Brandon. “But I think questioning somebody’s sanity when this is happening to them is perfectly acceptable. I question my own.”

  We’re standing near the table where Ann is signing copies of her various books about Jason.

  “She reminds me of my mother,” Robbie says, glancing at her. “Mum was a tarot card reader. She’d have people round and read their palms. She’d talk about spirits and ghosts. On the shelf of books just outside her room, there’d be the books about the world’s mysteries, elves, demons, witchcraft. I was so scared. I’d never talk to her about it. Instead, I just lived in fear of all of this stuff. Maybe that’s why I want to investigate UFOs and ghosts and everything. So I can work out why I get scared at night.” He pauses. “I’ll go and say hello to her.”

  He approaches the table. “Hi, darling,” he says, “I’m Rob. Can I buy a book from you? Will you sign it for me? How is Jason these days? Is he happy? Has he got many friends?”

  “No,” Ann says, “Jason doesn’t have many friends at all. In fact, it’s been awful, really. He’s socially shunned.”

  “When did this social shunning begin?” Robbie asks. “What age?”

  “I suppose it was when my first book about him came out,” Ann replies, “when he was fourteen.”

  “Jason, My Indigo Child?” I ask.

  “He lost all his friends at school,” Ann continues. “Nobody wanted to know him. And, of course, word got around the small village where we live. It got very nasty.”

  “I can completely relate to that,” Robbie says. “What is it he encounters from people?”

  “In England, in particular, people are really spiteful,” Ann says. “They ridicule him. They call out things from across the road like ‘Oi! Mental boy!’”

  Robbie puts his hand on Ann’s hand.

  “Even if this was all made up—which I don’t believe, by the way—even if it was,” Robbie says, “compassion should be shown anyway. Well, thank you.”

  Robbie pays for the book and goes to leave.

  “You know,” says Ann, “you look very much like Robbie Williams.”

  “I am Robbie Williams,” he says.

  “Can I just say I’m a big fan of yours?” she says.

  “Oh, bless you. Thanks, darling,” he says. “And please send Jason my best. Maybe we can have a chat one day. In fact”—Robbie writes out his e-mail address for Ann—“tell him to drop me a line if he wants. It must have been a terrible time for you, and an awful time for him. It’s just so sad to hear it happens. It’s happened to me.”

  “Really?” Ann says.

  “I think joining Take That was like leaving on a spaceship,” Robbie says, “and coming back and all your friends going, ‘He’s weird now.’”

  • • •

  WE QUEUE FOR the lunch buffet at the restaurant.

  “I’m glad I had a chance to sit down with her and talk to her, so I could see her eyes and read her,” Robbie says. “She’s a really beautiful woman.”

  “So you identified with Jason,” I say.

  “That’s not what I want to talk about,” Robbie says. “Because it’s long-winded, and whinging, and nobody wants to hear whinging. But if I was doing your job, I’d be asking that, because I’m asking the same question of myself—about why that nearly moved me to tears.”

  Everyone starts asking for his autograph, including one elderly American who says, “I don’t know who you are but my daughter works for MTV and so she might.” Word has obviousl
y got around the conference that, in the absence of any aliens, the most interesting thing to have come down from the sky today is Robbie Williams. One conference organizer asks him if he’ll consider being their official spokesperson.

  “We need someone like you to spread the word and get the young people in,” he says. Robbie seems quite attracted by the offer.

  “This is possibly the most important thing ever to happen to the planet,” he says. “It just amazes me that people aren’t as interested as I am in this stuff.”

  There is so much commotion, we miss much of the next presentation and consequently never find out “what happened when four artists embarked in 1976 on what was expected to be a routine fishing trip.”

  This isn’t the first time that Robbie’s fame has hindered his forays into the paranormal world. A few years ago he invited the TV psychic Derek Acorah to his home for a psychic reading. A story subsequently appeared in the Sun under the headline, “I Helped Robbie Williams Talk to His Dead Gran.”

  Robbie invited me to his apartment in London. We chatted and he told me how much he loved the program [Living TV’s Most Haunted]. He said he had given Most Haunted DVDs to lots of friends, including Robert De Niro, Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal, and they were hooked. I was able to contact a couple of his loved ones, including his grandmother, whom he dearly loved. It was very emotional.

  “The twat used my dead nan to sell his DVD!” Robbie told me, quite furiously, at the time. “Plus, I’ve never met Robert De Niro, Danny DeVito, and Billy Crystal. I’ve never even met them!”