At Trinity and Oxford, Wilde embraced aestheticism, a fashionable reaction to strict Victorian morality that sought to promote beauty (often in the pursuit of decadence) in everything from furnishings to mannerisms. Making his entry in London society as the ultimate dandy, sporting colorful breeches and brocaded velvet suits completed by the personal touch of a green carnation in the buttonhole, Wilde quickly became such a stereotype of the aesthetic that he inspired not one but two characters in Gilbert and Sullivan’s parody of the movement, Patience; when that operetta became a hit in the United States, Wilde toured America lecturing on the subject. Though Wilde married, and sired two sons (for whom he wrote his fairy tales), he was never shy about his fondness for what a Trinity professor euphemistically described as “Greek love” (the aesthetics worshipped the ancient Greeks). Still, it was one thing to have crushes at college, conduct discreet affairs with other male literary types, or to engage in anonymous rough trade in the dark alleys of London and Paris, all of which was part of Wilde’s rich life story; it was another thing entirely to parade a (much younger) member of the aristocracy on his arm about town, as he did with Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queensbury, throughout the early 1890s—a time when the crime of homosexuality was subject to increased punishment under the moral Victorian establishment.
The affair caused Wilde’s downfall: when the pugilistic, confrontational marquess left a calling card at Wilde’s club accusing the writer of “posing as a sodomite,” Wilde sued for libel, against the warnings of his lawyers. In court, perhaps inevitably, he was brought down by the rapaciousness of his own wit like a character in one of his society plays; when asked, directly, whether he had kissed a certain one of Lord Douglas’s servants, he replied that he had not, because the boy “was unfortunately ugly.” Upon such a facetious quip did his world turn. The prosecution instantly dropped its case, and Wilde was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel in Knightsbridge that same day and charged with “gross indecency.” Both Wilde and Lord Douglas were ultimately found guilty and sentenced to two years hard labor. Wilde’s plays were immediately withdrawn from the stage, his books recalled, his epigrams silenced. With but one or two exceptions, his friends disowned him rather than risk their own ruination. Wilde died of meningitis in a fleapit Paris hotel at the age of forty-six. Though his literary output survived his personal downfall—The Importance of Being Earnest was still taught in British secondary schools during the 1970s—his life story remained disgraced (except in gay circles, where it was celebrated) through much of the twentieth century.3
“It’s a total disadvantage to care about Oscar Wilde, certainly when you come from a working-class background,” Morrissey later opined. But it didn’t stop him: Wilde became more than one of his obsessions but rather his first true hero, indeed something of a role model and an inspiration. Everywhere he turned in the story of Wilde’s life, there was something from which Steven Morrissey could learn and apply to his own artistic ambitions. From Wilde’s writing structure, for example, he acquired the power of simplicity: “He used the most basic language and said the most powerful things,” observed Morrissey, suggesting that his famous quotations surpassed even those of Shakespeare because Wilde’s were more easily understood. From Wilde’s demeanor, he learned the importance of the sartorial statement, best manifested in the Smiths via the gladioli in his back pocket. From his pen and conversation (Wilde was considered nothing less than “the greatest natural talker of modern times”) Morrissey learned and perfected the art of the precise epigram: the style of his wit and wisdom, delivered time and again through the Smiths’ career not only in his lyrics but in those devastatingly perceptive, frequently hilarious, and purposefully provocative interview quotations, was almost entirely based on that of Oscar Wilde.4 And from Wilde’s own maxim that “talent borrows, genius steals,” he would offer no apologies for heisting entire phrases from beloved plays, movies, and novels for his lyrics—though he appeared to know better all along than to claim Wilde’s actual words as his own.
But in one area, he crucially differed. From Wilde’s downfall, Morrissey learned that there are certain things society will countenance and certain things it will not, and to be on the safe side, he would endeavor, forever, to keep his own personal life entirely private. His fans would have to draw their own conclusions from the fact that so many of his childhood heroes—from Wilde to Dean, from Kenneth Williams to Charles Hawtrey—were homosexuals or bisexuals of variously, and arguably understandable, degrees of self-repression; Morrissey was not going to be any more forthcoming on the subject than that.
CHAPTER
FIVE
They were my only friends. I firmly believed that.
—Morrissey on the New York Dolls, Select, July 1991
Just before he saw T. Rex perform live in the summer of 1972, Steven Morrissey bought the single “Starman,” David Bowie’s first hit since his number-one “Space Oddity” back in 1969. Morrissey claimed he “hadn’t even seen a picture of” Bowie before then, though he was hardly alone in his conversion: “Starman” caused something of an epiphany with a significant segment of British youth after a performance on Top of the Pops that June, when Bowie, his hair dyed orange and wearing a lurid jumpsuit, cuddled up to guitarist Mick Ronson, equally resplendent in a gold lamé two-piece. As a middle-aged Morrissey would acknowledge, “There was no doubt that this was fantastically homosexual.”
The thirteen-year-old Morrissey of 1972 promptly went out and bought Bowie’s last three albums. His enthusiastic commitment made perfect sense, for Bowie was the closest that the British glam rock scene—indeed, that British pop culture throughout the 1960s and ’70s—came to an Oscar Wilde figure. Presenting his provocative output as his own inventions though much of it was borrowed from society’s fringes, confronting conventional mores with his increasingly (and unapologetically) flamboyant changes in image, proving almost impossibly prolific now that he had the public’s attention (he and Ronson, as producers and/or songwriters, revived the careers of both Britain’s Mott the Hoople and America’s Lou Reed in the space of a year), Bowie also turned musical society mildly on its head with his comment to Melody Maker, in January 1972, that “I’m gay, and always have been.” Homosexuality had only been legal for five years; it was a mark of how far Britain had come that Bowie, despite being married with a child, could make such a claim as a quest for publicity, whereas Oscar Wilde had been brought to ruin for a similar yet unintended statement of sexual orientation.
As for so many kids in Britain, Morrissey’s maturing musical tastes directly coincided with his immersion in the country’s thriving music press; he saw his name in print for the first time when he won a copy of Bowie’s latest LP, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, in a competition in the weekly paper Sounds. In particular, Morrissey learned from Bowie’s cult of personality and his powerful confidence in the face of potential adversity. “He would roll into Doncaster or Bradford in 1972, looking as he did, and if you had a problem with it, then it was your problem—not his—he was the one who was always laughing or smiling. He wasn’t persecuted by anything. It was the people who objected who were persecuted.”
Morrissey would often claim that his love of Bowie put him in the minority at school, but when the Ziggy Stardust tour came to Manchester in September 1972, Bowie was already popular enough to play two nights in the city. They took place at the Hardrock Concert Theatre, on Great Stone Road, which extended northward from the large roundabout (the “Quadrant”) close to Morrissey’s Kings Road home; through the early 1970s, the venue was a major Manchester performance venue, one of the few saving graces of growing up in Stretford. Morrissey was at the second of Bowie’s two Hardrock shows, and returned in November with Mike Foley to see Bowie’s early partners in glam, Roxy Music. After that show, the pair ventured into town hoping to meet the band, only to be attacked outside the Midland Hotel for their appearance, which presumably showed the influence of a glam infatuation.
Foley recalled that while he stood his ground against the “queer bashers, or whatever they were,” Morrissey relied on his athletic skills to sprint through the hotel doors to safety.
The pair had arrived early at the Hardrock that November night to see the opening band, the New York Dolls; though they had yet to release a record, Morrissey knew about them already from their constant write-ups courtesy of Melody Maker’s New York correspondent. What he did not know was that just a few days earlier, the group’s drummer had died from a totally preventable drugs-and-coffee accident at an exclusive house party in London. He only learned about the calamity when someone came onstage to announce that the New York Dolls would not be performing.
A full year would pass before Morrissey had the chance to see the (revamped) New York Dolls play live—and then only on television, when the quintet appeared on the BBC’s late-night program The Old Grey Whistle Test wearing, variously, frilly blouses, leather trousers, polka-dot shirts and gold bow ties, their curtains of long hair occasionally opening to reveal considerable layers of mascara and eyeliner. This presentation, along with the group’s musical manifestation of a primitive, dirty rock ’n’ roll, so inflamed the show’s host, “Whispering” Bob Harris, that he dismissed the band on air as “mock rock.”
Not Morrissey, though. For him, the appearance of the New York Dolls on The Old Grey Whistle Test served as his “private ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ in the sense that they were as important to me as Elvis Presley was important to the entire language of rock ’n’ roll.” He loved the way that they embraced the gang ideal integral to all great rock groups—but that they did so in a deliberately juvenile, almost amateur manner, perfect for a musically untutored fourteen-year-old. He loved too that they appeared to be blue-collar/working-class street toughs, and yet that they were delightfully decadent, parading through the mean streets of 1970s New York City like peacocks. And if it was true that they were all firmly hetero at heart, there was nonetheless an element of gay pride—or at least gay solidarity—about the New York Dolls. That the four-month summer 1972 residency that brought them their initial acclaim took place in a room named for Oscar Wilde, within a downtown Manhattan Arts Center, must have seemed beyond coincidence.
Steven Morrissey duly pledged himself to the New York Dolls with all the blind devotion of a teenager’s first romantic infatuation, going so far as to get permission from the group’s American office to establish a British fan club of sorts. The Dolls were to be almost as roundly ignored in the UK as in their homeland, and therefore his role, by his own account, “wasn’t very dramatic.” It consisted of little more than placing ads in the back of the music papers seeking other fans, and then endeavoring to keep them informed, hopefully cultivating a few pen-pal relationships in the process. His status as fan club president was perhaps more notable for the fact that he did not grow out of it, continuing to champion the group with unabashed devotion long after they broke up and well into his adulthood.
More so than any of his other many fanaticisms, this obsession with the New York Dolls seems confusing given the lack of reference points in the Smiths. The adult Morrissey never moved about onstage with the suave sexual confidence of Dolls singer David Johansen; he did not wear such colorful and effete costumes as anyone in the band; his lyrics did not venture into the Dolls’ world of hard drugs and open transgression—although two lines from “Lonely Planet Boy” were lifted for “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” (Equally, despite Johnny Marr having his own youthful fixation on Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders, little of that came across in either his playing or the Smiths’ arrangements.) What the Dolls represented, for Morrissey, at the point when glam rock was becoming a watered-down commodity for the pre-teens, and when the 1960s rock bands had distanced themselves from their original audience as a result of their increasingly artistic pretentions, was rock ’n’ roll as genuine rebellion, something that could still offend your parents (and Bob Harris). The fact that the Dolls released just two albums—the latter entitled, with inadvertent prescience, Too Much Too Soon—only added to Morrissey’s sense of private ownership and public injustice. For while his love of Bowie and Reed, of Roxy Music and Mott the Hoople, and also of the duo Sparks (his first published letter in a British music paper effusively cited 1974’s Kimono My House as “the album of the year”), rendered him part of a significant cult, his devotion to the New York Dolls, at school at least, safely inoculated him within a church of one disciple. Reveling in this newly acquired role as prophet without honor, he wore homemade Dolls T-shirts on the St. Mary’s playing fields, adorned his schoolbooks with the group’s photos, and somehow convinced a teacher to play one of their songs to the whole class. “Everyone got to say how they felt afterwards,” he recalled of the occasion. “And they didn’t feel too well, I’m afraid.”
Morrissey also bought into the hype surrounding the New York glam rocker Jobriath, whose 1974 debut album had one of the most lavish publicity campaigns of all time. The first truly gay rock musician to put his heart on the line as such (unlike Bowie, who was only teasing), Jobriath appeared for his coming-out concert on American television in a pink leotard, grossly overestimating the public’s willingness to support such overt sexual liberation. Musically, he was almost equally overdramatic, rooted in an impersonation of the “cosmic jive” that his obvious role model, David Bowie, had long left behind. When his album flopped on a titanic scale, a European tour was canceled; like the New York Dolls, Jobriath never played in Manchester. And like the New York Dolls, Morrissey’s failure to see the act live only served to increase his lifelong passion.
Emboldened by his love of obscure New York glam acts, and inspired by the brazen fashions of the era, Morrissey started dressing the part. When a large group of St. Mary’s pupils went to see Bowie at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in June 1973, he and Mike Foley cut and dyed their hair for the occasion, though the results were reputedly a disaster and Morrissey was sent home from school for his troubles. He also took to carrying a denim bag around with him—a relatively simple statement of individuality, but a brave one all the same, given his local environment. A neighbor, Ivor Perry, three years his junior, had a clear recollection of Morrissey “walking down the road, having tight pants, pointy shoes, a quiffy hairstyle, and a man bag, which was outrageous in … 1974–75.” But while Perry acknowledged that Morrissey “had a lot of courage to carry it off,” such individuality came at a cost. “My friends’ older brothers would mug him for his money. Nobody beat him up, they didn’t hate him. They’d even leave him his bus fare. They’d just make him pay a fee for walking up the road!”
Morrissey’s own recollections of attempts at social integration reflected that sense of persecution. He attended Old Trafford on his own once or twice, but after being robbed of his woolen souvenir hat (by a Manchester United fan, there being no honor among thieves), soon gave up. He went to the fair over at Stretford Raceway—drawn, admittedly, by the atmosphere of danger—but “somebody just came up to me and head-butted me.” He knew better than to ask why. “There never needed to be a reason.”
At school, he mostly managed to avoid such outright aggression (and though he claimed to have received the strap, it was not often), but his increasingly camp appearance only furthered the notion that he was, to use the word most frequently bandied about in retrospect, “effeminate.” Coarser words were likely used at the time, and there may have been outright insinuations about Morrissey’s sexuality—except that, not only was he not seen dating boys, but he was proven to be attractive to girls: the opposite sex recognized in Steven Morrissey a handsome, intelligent, and, above all, a sensitive teenager, with a good line in conversation and a refreshing absence of sexual intent. His friends Mike Foley and Mike Ellis were both baffled by (and jealous of) the ease with which Morrissey could secure female company, which peaked with the news that he was hosting a regular group of girls in his bedroom each Sunday evening—to listen to the Radio 1 chart countdown.
Indeed
, friends were always welcome to stop in at the Morrissey household—and regardless of the fact that Steven chose his company carefully, he had no small share of it. He attended the occasional school disco, camped out in the back garden with his neighbors, and even took vacations with other kids’ families, going to North Wales with schoolmate Jim Verrechia, who was sufficiently impressed by Morrissey’s musical knowledge as to try to teach him guitar. The effort proved no more successful than Morrissey’s other attempts to learn an instrument; despite being a walking encyclopedia on pop, it remained evident that he had almost no natural musical affinity.
School itself, meanwhile—or rather, the school itself—was going from bad to worse. Morrissey’s close friend Mike Foley was now moving in particularly troublesome circles, alongside Paul Whiting, Ian Campbell, and another lad who, said Whiting, had the rare ability to “shit at will”; he would defecate into a class desk, place a firework “banger” on top, light the touch paper, step back … and watch with delight as the explosion sent his feces around the classroom. This boy’s dubious talents were most infamously used when he defecated in a fire-bucket of sand that Foley then emptied into the school piano, the blockage only noticed during the following morning’s assembly, when efforts to play “Kumbaya” failed to elicit a recognizable sound but emitted a distinctive smell. According to the ringleaders, Morrissey was often on hand during such escapades, though never quite so close as to be accused of instigation.
The relentless beatings of the pupils evidently had no positive effect on their behavior. “Nobody showed us kids respect,” said Whiting; rather, the violence “taught you how to fight and who to fight. If you know you can’t beat ’em, go ’round the back and get ’em from behind.” The classrooms and playing fields of St. Mary’s increasingly became a battleground. There were incidents of pupils knocking out teachers, teachers flattening students, and kids arranging classroom distractions so they could rob unwitting teachers’ handbags, taking the money to the Stretford Shopping Precinct, though they’d be as likely to shoplift the latest fashions from the Pakistani stall owners as buy them. Rare attempts at field trips usually ended in disgrace, the St. Mary’s pupils thrown out of a magistrates’ court gallery for shouting their opinions on proceedings and awarded the rare distinction of having the police called on them when they visited an Army barracks, a search of the school bus revealing that they had attempted to steal grenades and bullets.
A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths Page 9