by Jon Ronson
I watched this black magic. ‘Is this bad?’ I asked from the corner.
The producer gave me a patient look. ‘Think of it this way,’ he explained. ‘One interviewee suffers, but millions are entertained.’
I grinned nervously. He was right. This was OK. She was a Tory councillor. We were in the tradition of the great caricaturists like Hogarth. And history proved us to be pioneers. During the 1990s the approach we adopted with the town councillor became fashionable. Journalists in magazines and newspapers and on radio and TV would take the furthest reaches of their interviewees’ personalities – the hysteria, the pomposity, the passive-aggression, the delusions of grandeur – and stitch them together, deleting the ordinariness. We were defining people by their flaws. I did it to Tory grandees, white supremacists, anti-Semites, Islamic militants, and then conspiracy theorists, psychics and, eventually, hippies. We didn’t think hard about what we were doing. We did it because people liked it. The more we did it the more successful we were. But if we had thought hard we might have realized that we were contributing to what was becoming a conservative, conformist age. ‘If you behave like that’, our stories said, ‘people will laugh at you. They aren’t normal. We’re normal! This is the average!’ We were defining the boundaries of normality by staring at the people outside of it.
One night in the midst of this I stood wearing a tuxedo outside Grosvenor House, a five-star hotel on Park Lane, Central London. Downstairs in the banqueting hall I had just not won a radio award so I’d gone out for air and spotted another non-winner – the radio presenter Adam Buxton. He was leaning against some railings. I stood next to him for a while. We watched the limousines speed down Park Lane, the winners spilling out of the hotel in their tuxedos.
‘You know why we always lose?’ Adam suddenly said to me.
I shook my head.
‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘You and me? We’re marginal.’
I looked at him.
‘The things we like,’ Adam continued, ‘they’re marginal.’
‘You’re right!’ I said, my eyes widening. ‘We are marginal!’ I felt a great weight lifting. I’d spent years frantically reaching for the mainstream – but I didn’t have to. It was fine. I was marginal. I could still tell those stories but they could do something else – they could de-humiliate, dignify.
And not long after that I was in the park with my little boy when my telephone rang and it was Frank Sidebottom.
‘How are you?’ I said.
‘Oh I’m very well actually, Mr Ronson,’ Frank said.
‘Frank,’ I said. ‘Will you put Chris on?’
There was a silence.
‘Hello, Jon,’ said Chris, in a normal voice.
Chris filled me in on the past ten years. Mike was living it up somewhere in Thailand. Chris, now divorced from Paula, was an animator on the children’s claymation series Pingu, about the adventures of a penguin living at the South Pole. He loved the work but missed Frank and wanted to bring him back from retirement. I held my breath. I knew from watching The Blues Brothers what was about to happen. He’d say he was putting the old band back together. I’d say, ‘Of course I’ll play!’ But he never did ask. Instead he said he was wondering if I’d write something about my time in the band to help him with the comeback. Maybe for the Guardian? He’d just had some new portraits done by the photographer Shirlaine Forrest. He emailed them to me. I opened the attachment. Time hadn’t ravaged Frank. He looked exactly the same.
Frank Sidebottom.
The telephone call happened to coincide with an abnormally opulent moment in my life. George Clooney was turning my book The Men Who Stare At Goats into a film. All this was happening thousands of miles away in Puerto Rico. On the day filming started I sat in my room in North London and looked at online paparazzi pictures of George Clooney sunbathing at the Puerto Rico hotel and playing basketball with the crew. I ought to have been delighted but a deep gloom descended instead. ‘They must be having unimaginable fun,’ I thought. ‘And here I am in this tiny room.’
I telephoned the film’s screenwriter, Peter Straughan. ‘I’m feeling very out of sorts – almost depressed – and I think the only way to get better is to visit the set,’ I said. We flew to Puerto Rico.
We arrived late at night at the hotel. The air was hot and wet and we found one of the producers sitting alone by the swimming pool. He said to me, ‘The most exciting day of your life is your first day on a Hollywood film set. The most boring day of your life is your second.’
And so it transpired. My psychological itch was scratched within minutes of arriving on set the next morning. It was in a disused chemical factory near a rainforest an hour out of town. It had only recently become disused and there were still signs above sinks that read Emergency Eye Wash. It was exciting to be in such a place. George Clooney introduced himself to me, was very nice, talked about Darfur. Then word got around that the author was on set and crew members – costume designers and art-department people – clustered around to meet me. But within a few hours the people who had earlier glanced excitedly at me were now looking surprised that the author was still on set for some reason. It turned out that they weren’t having unimaginable fun. They were working very long hours in a disused chemical factory. They were exhausted. It was good to discover that my life wasn’t necessarily that much worse than George Clooney’s life. That evening I suggested to Peter that maybe we should spend the next day sitting at the hotel pool instead. Which was where we began talking about Frank. Could the story I’d written for the Guardian be adapted into a film?
A few weeks later Frank was playing at a pub near my flat – the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town, North London. I found Chris in a dressing room at the back, Frank’s head in a bin-bag at his feet.
‘How did you lose so much weight?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking pleased.
‘Are you exercising?’ I said.
Chris shook his head and shrugged. It was a mystery.
‘Well, whatever you’re doing,’ I said, ‘you look great.’
Later, we walked across Kentish Town Road so Chris could buy some cigarettes – a cheap and obscure brand I’d never heard of. He’d already given us his approval on the film and I told him the latest news. Film Four wanted to fund its development. They had a director in mind too – Lenny Abrahamson. I’d loved his film Adam & Paul, a melancholic slapstick comedy about two Laurel and Hardy-ish junkies wandering around Dublin for a day.
I remembered something Stanley Kubrick’s old business-affairs manager Rick Senat had told me about the film business. I’d met him when I was making a documentary about Kubrick. ‘What you need to know,’ he’d said. There was a flicker of rage in his eyes. ‘Films. They never get made.’ I know screenwriters in their forties and fifties who have spent their lives never getting a film made. Los Angeles is full of those people – spectral figures in cafes in West Hollywood, killing the mornings by hiking on Runyon Canyon, long, empty months peppered with meetings with producers who tell you you’re the greatest screenwriter of your generation. And then: nothing. The actor Stephen Mangan has said of Hollywood, ‘They kill you with encouragement.’
Even so, I had a feeling that this film might get made. What major star wouldn’t want to play a man in a big fake head? Plus my story in the Guardian had a coming-of-age quality to it, like Stand By Me but with a man with a big fake head.
But – and Chris and I shuffled awkwardly around the question – what would the film actually be about? Specifically, Chris wondered, would Chris be in it? Chris had said from the beginning that we could do what we wanted with the story. But this part seemed to worry him. However the film might depict Chris, any reality would surely damage Frank.
I had similar concerns. Chris always portrayed himself as untroubled. Whilst a total dearth of anxiety was a fantastically enviable character trait in real life, how could we write a film about a man who just didn’t care when everything went wrong and
in fact found disaster funny? There has to be something for someone to lose in a film, doesn’t there? And if Chris was secretly more obsessive about Frank than he let on, how would he feel if the film reflected that? When I considered these complications – the potential for hurt feelings, the possibility that we’d have to carefully manipulate certain facts whilst maintaining the illusion of truth – it suddenly seemed too stressful an endeavour to embark upon.
But there was a solution. It was something Peter had said back in Puerto Rico. And now I said it to Chris. What if we fictionalized the whole thing? We could forget the facts of the story but keep the themes. It could be about the world of marginal music – a celebration of people who were just too odd to make it in the mainstream, even if they had wanted to. It could be a fable instead of a biopic.
Anyway: who would want to write a music biopic? There’s always the moment that laboriously shoehorns into the plot whatever thing the person is noted for. Like in The Karen Carpenter Story when Karen reads about herself for the first time in Billboard. She’s delighted – ‘Close To You’ has just entered the top ten – but as she scans the article her face drops. She reads aloud: ‘ “His chubby sister”?’ Then there’s Summer Dreams: The Story of the Beach Boys, when Dennis Wilson is introduced to Charles Manson at a party: ‘I hear you picked up one of my girls hitchhiking in Malibu yesterday,’ Manson says. And then, about five seconds later, ‘I predict a race war’s coming that will be the end of the world as we know it.’
Chris said he liked the idea of us fictionalizing the story and Peter I began writing the screenplay, with Lenny joining us after a couple of years. I’d write for a month, send it to Peter, he’d write for a month, send it back to me, we’d send it to Lenny, and around again. It was the opposite of journalism. In journalism you write what’s unfolding in front of you. Journalism is a game with rules. In journalism what’s acceptable is what happened, and what’s not acceptable is what didn’t happen. But with fiction comes a daunting infinity. I remember staring blankly at Peter the first time he patiently said to me, ‘It doesn’t matter that it didn’t happen. We make it up.’
Fiction seemed all about harnessing infinity. In fiction when you walk into a restaurant and you sit down there’s nobody there and the restaurant doesn’t exist. The restaurant is a horrific never-ending nothingness. So you make scattershot decisions about what the restaurant might look like, and who you might be sitting with. You ask of your barely invented person: ‘Would they do this or this if, say, that happened to them?’ And one day you realize your decisions are no longer haphazard, but informed by things you’ve already written. And that’s when fiction and journalism meet. You have a mass of material and you start to whittle it down, like a sculptor chipping away at a slab. You make choices about what to lose – morally, and also because you want to write a page-turner. And at the end, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, you have a story.
But with screenwriting there’s a further leap of the imagination. It’s of no consequence whether your film reads well. The most beautifully written dialogue might be clunky and implausible when performed by actors. In fact the more beautifully written it is, the more implausible it’s likely to sound. Plus we cinema audiences are unforgiving. If we realize a scene has told us nothing we didn’t learn from a previous scene, we are outraged. We feel bored and trapped. ‘Films eat up ideas,’ Peter once told me. You can have the greatest idea of your life. You put it into your screenplay. It lasts half a page: maybe thirty seconds of screen time.
Our Frank was no longer Frank Sidebottom, so who was he? Although he was, and is, an entirely fictional character, it was fun to journey down a rabbit hole of research into the worlds of other great musicians who’d ended up on the margins, each for very different reasons. Some were natural eccentrics, others prone to anxiety or mania, others still victims of peculiar external circumstances. They were people like the Austin, Texas singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston. The early demos he recorded on a pump organ in his brother’s garage – ‘Hi, How Are You’ and ‘Yip/Jump Music’ – were masterpieces. This was the summer of 1983. He was so enthusiastic and tireless that when someone wanted to hear his music he’d sometimes – instead of just copying the demo – run home to re-record every song from scratch on a new cassette.
But his enthusiasm got more frenzied and his songs and career turned into a battle between his talent and his manic depression. When he sang, ‘I had lost my mind / You see I had this tiny crack in my head that slowly split open / And my brains oozed out / Lying in the sidewalk / And I didn’t even know it,’ he meant it. A film about him, Jeff Feuerzeig’s The Devil and Daniel Johnston, is the best documentary about mental illness I have ever seen. It captures how he grew increasingly delusional during the late 1980s, repeating phrases such as ‘Kick Satan out’ over and over, talking too fast, like he was a passenger in his own thought process.
An uneasy relationship formed between him and his audiences. The crowd would look at each other for clues to how they should respond, what they should think, whether they should like him or not. The moment in the documentary that stayed with me most powerfully was an interview with Daniel’s friend Louis Black, the editor of the alternative magazine the Austin Chronicle. He once found Daniel standing knee-deep in a river on the University of Austin campus, preaching loudly into the night about Satan.
‘We spend our lives with the notion of the crazy artist,’ Louis Black said, ‘Van Gogh cutting off his ear, and we really loved the crazy people because they were our people. They didn’t have any commercial sense. And yet here was a real sick person. And we were, “What are we going to do?” So we did the most pedestrian thing possible. We committed him. I’ve always had contempt for those people who didn’t understand genius. And here I am, saying, “Please put him in this hospital.” Because we didn’t know what to do.’
The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a tribute not only to Johnston and his music, but to his friends and especially his parents, Mabel and Bill, who have spent a lifetime doing their best in the midst of unbearable stress.
Then there was Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart, who ruled over his band with a tyrannical fury. For his album Trout Mask Replica he rented a house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, and forced his musicians to eat only a cup of soya beans a day. For eight months they weren’t allowed to leave the house at all, except for once a week when one of them was permitted to briefly go and get groceries. He would psychologically break his drummer and bass player down by yelling repeatedly in their faces, ‘You hate your mother!’ for thirty-hour stretches.
Peter, Lenny and I rented a disused railway station for a while just outside the Alton Towers theme park, near Stoke, so we could write. It was there Peter told me a haunting story about a band called The Shaggs. It was a story he only half-remembered from something he’d read years before, but it was so strange I felt compelled to fly to The Shaggs’ home town, Fremont, New Hampshire, to try and meet them.
***
Nowadays Dot Wiggin is a cleaner in her local church. You wouldn’t know from meeting her or her sister Betty that they once recorded about the strangest record ever made.
Betty Wiggin, Jon Ronson, Dot Wiggin.
Fremont looked as gentle and as unassuming as they did. The main display in the Historical Museum commemorated how Fremont was the first place in the world where a B52 bomber had crashed but nobody was killed. ‘B52 bombers had crashed elsewhere,’ Matthew Thomas, the town historian, told me when I’d visited the museum the night before, ‘but people had died. In Fremont, nobody died. That’s what made Fremont pretty unique with that episode.’
I took a walk with Dot and Betty to their house. Or the place where it used to be before the new owners burnt it to the ground so they could build a new house further up the land. The grass had never grown back so you could still see the outline – the ghost of a house. It was there they told me their story.
When Dot and Betty were children there was no music in their live
s. No music and no friends outside the family. Their father Austin wouldn’t allow it. ‘We couldn’t go to dances or anything,’ Dot told me. ‘We just stayed home. He didn’t want us to have a social life. He was afraid we’d get too involved on the outside.’
‘Which we would have,’ Betty said.
Given his devout bearing, the announcement he made over dinner one night sometime during the mid-1960s came very much out of the blue. He told his daughters that he’d just returned from his mother’s house where she’d read his palm and divined from it that the sisters were going to be in one of the most successful girl groups in America. He was therefore taking them out of school so they could practise. Relentlessly. From morning until night. Until they were ready.
‘We practised during the day when he worked,’ Dot told me, ‘and then when he came home from work we practised. We practised until he liked it. If he didn’t like it we practised over and over. Usually on Saturdays too.’
‘Did he ever ask you if you wanted to do it?’ I asked.
‘No!’ Dot and Betty laughed.
‘Did you sometimes think your father was nuts?’ I asked.
There was a short silence. ‘Yeah, that would fit it,’ Betty said.
‘Obsessive,’ said Dot. ‘Very obsessive with the music.’ And with exercises too: ‘Jumping-jacks,’ said Dot. ‘Push-ups. We had to stay in shape in case we ever got to be on The Ed Sullivan Show.’
