I sat naked on a chair, as David Hockney, his eyes huge through pop specs, coolly appraised my loins. I felt shy and under-equipped. The artist sketched quickly. Conversation was minimal. Hockney had come to the basement at the behest of the Friends of Oz, our new PR lobby group. Dozens of artists had donated works to the Oz defence fund. The pièces de résistance were Hockney’s drawings of the editors nude, for which each of us agreed to pose. The originals would be auctioned, along with numbered lithographs, combined into a triptych. ‘What a fuss over Rupert Bear,’ Hockney said. ‘Do you think the Prime Minister’s behind it?’ I shrugged. It was all over in minutes. In the sketch, I looked a little sulky, almost epicene, and the sole prop, appropriately, was a blank TV.
Jim was drawn in half-profile, revealingly clad in a short T-shirt. Unlike me, he professed to be perfectly happy with the way his genitals were depicted.
Felix stole the sitting. Seated on a chair, with jaunty kerchief, legs splayed, cock dangling, he looked like a pirate poised for an orgy. I jokingly asked how he had buttered up Hockney, and forever afterwards he remarked to interviewers, ‘Oh, my goodness, it caused terrible dissension . . . Richard was furious.’
Our lawyers advised us to stay well clear of the Friends of Oz fund-raising hoopla. Sue Miles – wife of Barry Miles – and Stan Demidjuk, the hard-driving Aussie I had first met at the Isle of Wight, now a White Panther, put out a continuous flow of leaflets and posters, ran a film festival at the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road (‘Cannes Cums to the Ghetto’), and produced a range of chic, provocative T-shirts emblazoned with cult icons, including Inspector Fred Luff. A slick ‘press kit’ featured shots of the three editors as St Trinian’s girls in gym slips, pin-striped City gents in bowlers, and London bobbies.
They had a major fund-raising success with the Oz Police Ball, held at the former Middle Earth – I had been too Inked out to attend but 1,500 supporters had boogied till dawn and screwed on water beds. The Pink Fairies and a foiled police raid had been part of the fun – but the Friends of Oz masterstroke was to involve John Lennon.
Oh God Save Oz one and all, wrote John and Yoko, Oh God Save Oz in the street, Oh God save Oz climb the wall/Oh God Save Oz from defeat . . .
The pair offered to produce the single (Yoko’s ‘Do The Oz’ was the B side) in their home-studio at Ascot, and invited anyone from the magazine with a voice or musical flair to join the one-shot session group, The Elastic Oz Band. This ruled me out, being tone deaf, but there was a stampede of volunteers who claimed to be musically gifted. It was a celebrity daze at Ascot, with Ringo Starr playing drums, Phil Spector producing and everyone singing along with John and Yoko.
Let us fight for people’s rights
Let us fight for freedom
Let us fight for Mickey Mouse
Let us fight for freakdom . . .
Moving in the other direction from John and Yoko, or so it seemed, was Mick Jagger. In a ceremony in St Tropez, fully conforming to the strictures of Roman Catholicism, he married Bianca de Macias. For her wedding march, Bianca chose a medley of themes from Love Story. Mick boned up on Catholic dogma. On this day in May, at the same time as the Washington uprising, the French resort flowed with champagne and the bloodied noses of gatecrashers, while the Street Fighting Man found Satisfaction with a seventy-five-foot yacht, a fleet of Rolls-Royces, several kilos of caviar, an Yves St Laurent trousseau and all the frills of La Dolce Capitalism, including a public squabble with the bride over the division of worldly goods.
‘After trying out the drug and permissive scene,’ noted the BBC’s Jimmy Savile, a guest, ‘there’s a lot to be said for the nice normal life after all.’ The marriage was seen as the day the Stones Stopped Rolling. In a belligerent story for Ink, I dismissed it as ‘the end of any further pretence of Mick Jagger as a figurehead of radical lifestyle’. This attempt at Murdochian tabloid sensationalism, my very own LEPER RAPES VIRGIN, was perhaps unconsciously designed to revive the flagging fortunes of Ink. The piece was widely syndicated, and Martin Sharp dropped me a note in acknowledgement: ‘Sorry you missed an invite to the wedding.’
An explanation emerged for the behaviour of ‘Mad Mitch’ as our departed News Editor came to be known, when he resurfaced as a member of a left splinter group, the Socialist Labour League, presided over by an off-the-rails demagogue, who for years had been trying to launch a paper of his own. Piqued at Ink’s quick capitalisation, he had sent Alex on a mission of sabotage. Ed Victor recalls a meeting much later, when Mitchell was ‘in his cups’. He claimed to have fifth-columned Ink on behalf of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. But as Ed points out, it was a time when ‘conspiring was the mode, and everyone played at revolution’.
On Friday 11 June, less than a fortnight before the trial was due to start, Tom Williams informed our solicitor, David Offenbach, that he was unable to take the case. His explanation was vague – ‘a drug matter in Middlesex’. At our last meeting, Williams had warned that the authorities were determined to send us to jail ‘come what may’.
When David Offenbach rushed to the Oz office with the tidings, Felix raged, ‘Let’s do a Michael X and fuck off to the Caribbean’. He paced the floor, glaring at Offenbach. He stubbed out his filter tip, lit another one. ‘Or San Francisco. We can restart Oz, become underground heroes and make a fortune.’
‘In all the experience of our firm,’ David said, ‘such a thing has never happened before.’
What could we do?
‘I’ll be lodging a complaint with the Bar Council.’ David threw off the Bermuda jacket and loosened his regimental tie. His chief concern was a replacement.
‘Surely it’s grounds for an adjournment?’ I asked.
‘Not necessarily. To a judge, it’s just a matter of going shopping. Any QC can do the job.’
But we didn’t want ‘any QC’ – we wanted the best silk available.
‘Let’s just piss off,’ repeated Felix.
‘Sure – and get hunted down by the FBI.’
Jim leant silently against the wall, arms folded, mulling over the implications of Williams’s wimp-out.
‘Don’t let them make us crims,’ I argued. ‘Unless you want to live the rest of your life in Algiers?’
‘I’d settle for Tangier,’ said Jim, ever the romantic.
Andrew Fisher wandered across from Ink. ‘In the event of you three going to jail, now is the time to plan ahead.’ He asked what we wanted to do about Oz – cease it or lease it. ‘With all the publicity you could get a good price, a nest egg when you come out.’
‘I’m not going to jail,’ Felix shouted. ‘I’m going to fucking Rio with Biggs.’
‘Oh come on,’ Jim said. ‘Even in the unlikely event we’re convicted, they’re not going to send us to jail. Respectable old hippies like us?’
‘Boys, boys,’ said Offenbach. ‘Can we return to our legal strategy?’
An Ink staffer summoned Andrew back – another production crisis – and he scurried across the road, his shoulders hunched.
As possible QCs, the same two names kept cropping up – Basil Wigoder and John Mortimer, both of whom I’d briefly met. Wigoder had acted for Rudi Dutschke in his appeal against expulsion by the Home Office. John Mortimer was a charming literateur, a champion of free speech. In the early months after my arrival in London, during the swirl of parties given by my sister’s publishing friends, John Mortimer had mingled at the buffet with Louise. As he chatted about the bizarre sexual proclivities of Melbourne, it took a while for Louise to realise that his subject matter was a Victorian Prime Minister, not the capital of Victoria.
At the same party, John had met my sister Jill. Later, she was woken at home with a phone call. ‘Hello, lovey,’ purred the famous silk. ‘As I’m in the area – I thought I might drop by and pop into bed?’ In her Nivea night mask, my sister declined. ‘I quite understand, my dear,’ he said, his conspiratorial tone implying she must already be rolling about in the hay with someone else. ‘Perhaps another tim
e?’
Impeccable as were his credentials to defend Oz – John was currently appearing on behalf of The Little Red Schoolbook – he seemed almost too obvious. David Offenbach said he would check Mortimer’s availability, but in the meantime the brief for Felix and Jim would be sent to Basil Wigoder. And we would seek an adjournment.
On Wednesday morning, 16 June, I sat on a bench in the Old Bailey with Felix and Jim. The judge, a remote figure up there on his throne, was dealing with schedules and technicalities. The Oz case was listed ‘for mention’. A barrister had been briefed to seek an adjournment on the grounds that our QC had done a bunk. As soon as our case was called, the judge threw a fit, ordering the police to ‘take those men into custody’. We were dragged from our bench and shoved in the dock. ‘I see they’re carrying bags,’ the judge barked. ‘Search them for bombs.’ A joke, surely, but no one was laughing.
Our Junior Counsel, Jo Walker-Smith, started to explain the situation. The judge shook his head. The trial would begin as planned, on 22 June. It was our first encounter with Judge Argyle.
That night I walked around to Phillimore Gardens to dine with the Wintour family. Charles Wintour was the editor of the Evening Standard. We had become acquainted through his daughter, Anna, who was shy and beautiful, intrigued by the Underground press. The reason for my invitation to dinner was not entirely social. An expected guest was the Times columnist, Bernard Levin, a friend of the family. Anna had stage-managed my invitation so I could ask him to testify in defence of Oz.
Rounding up witnesses was still proving tricky. Others who had turned us down were Jill Tweedie and Alan Brien, the lefty journos; Stephen Spender, the poet; A.J. Ayer, the philosopher; and Alex Comfort, the free-wheeling author of The Joy of Sex. I wanted to hook Bernard Levin and turn the tide. He need not maintain that Oz was a work of merit, merely that it did not corrupt public morals.
At my first knock, Anna opened the door. Her bright eyes shone from what was to become her trademark Louise Brooks bob. ‘For God’s sake, don’t mention anything about Bernard Levin,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘He’s pulled out.’
‘A subsequent engagement?’
‘He loathes Oz.’ She led me upstairs, where her parents greeted me with warmth. Another guest was Maureen Cleave, the journalist credited with encapsulating Beatlemania, who had just flown back from Peru. Anna’s sister was a fervent Marxist, and the chatter focused on the legacy of colonialism in Latin America. The only reference to the trial was a joke I cracked about the opening-day procession – organised by the Friends of Oz – which was to be led by an elephant.
At midnight, back in Princedale Road, Ed Victor fulminated at the failure of Ink to materialise into a worthy counterpart of the Village Voice. ‘It’s so far away from what we wanted it to be,’ he said, as I scanned the proofs. ‘It has no core, no centre, no concept of itself . . .’
‘You’re right, Ed, you’re right.’ I was exhausted. Andrew Fisher, who was trying to close off the What’s On pages, looked shell-shocked.
‘I can’t go out in public,’ Ed continued. ‘I’ve lost the respect of all my friends . . .’
Not to mention their money, I was thinking.
‘We always said Ink wouldn’t be another Underground paper, but an alternative one. Goddamnit! Alternative to what?’ We should be doing what Fleet Street did for arts and politics, only better. A top team of writers gnawing at specific subjects. ‘Do you see what I mean? We’re an alternative paper, dig? Readers should be able to find a fuck of a lot of things going on behind what they think is going on . . .’
‘Sure, sure. Go for it, Ed.’
I dragged myself across the road to Oz. Ink might be blotting its copybook, but at the mother ship they were cruising. Pig Oz had come and gone, the Bumper Trial issue was going to press.
Its theme was Children’s Rights: on the cover a ribald procession to the Old Bailey, including a judge naked under his robes. On a flower-bedecked float surrounded by dancing hippies, grannies, kids and pigs, a mammoth cock was being hauled along towards an equally mammoth vagina, in a fertility rite inspired by customs in rural Japan. Inside were two juxtaposed quotes: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ – Voltaire. ‘Unless, of course, you’re eighteen or under’ – Director of Public Prosecutions.
A major story in this issue had caused personal heartache. Izak Haber, a friend and associate of Abbie Hoffman, now riding high in the States with Steal This Book, came steaming to my door with a bulky manuscript. He claimed it contained the true story of his partnership with Hoffman. ‘I was ripped off,’ said Izak. ‘Abbie stole my life for that book.’
At twenty, Izak was already known as the World’s Greatest Expert on ‘Free Living’. Abbie had fallen in love with all his scams and when Izak suggested a book, Abbie had said let’s do it. Izak and his girlfriend, Lynn Borman, had spent eight months researching and writing. Then came the ‘betrayal’. Izak was dumped from the project and denied co-authorship.
‘It’s not pleasant to be publishing an attack on Abbie Hoffman,’ I wrote in the Oz intro, ‘as he has been a good friend to this magazine. However, the iconoclasm of the Underground press should not be confined to establishment heroes.’ We called it ‘How Abbie Hoffman Stole Steal This Book’.
I had no sooner got out of bed the next morning when a courier arrived with an envelope from the Evening Standard. Charles Wintour urged me on no account to go to the Old Bailey on the back of an elephant.
At the meeting in the chambers of Basil Wigoder, the three of us stressed, of course, that we didn’t wish to confine our case to strict legalities – we wanted to raise issues of social justice, censorship and children’s rights. The values espoused in Oz and the alternative society were something to celebrate, not to hide. Wigoder and I had met at a party given by one of his clients, Jonathan Aitken, to celebrate an acquittal from a brush with the Official Secrets Act. Reassured by Wigoder’s support, we shook hands and took our leave.
Within minutes of my return to Palace Gardens Terrace, David Offenbach was on the phone.
‘Wigoder’s done a Williams.’
‘What?’
‘He’s sent the brief back – but I have a plan.’ According to Offenbach, the three of us had stressed our defiance of authority ‘rather heavily’ and he felt that it would be desirable to offer an undertaking to Wigoder to behave ourselves in court. ‘He’s afraid you want to turn the court into a circus.’
‘Tell him we won’t storm the Old Bailey on elephants.’ Our main aim was to win the case – by whatever means necessary.
‘As a matter of fact, Richard, I already took the liberty of putting that to Counsel.’
The cunning bugger. ‘And?’
‘He agreed, I’m happy to say – not without pressure.’
Geoff Robertson came by and the phone rang again.
‘Wigoder’s just rung me back,’ said Offenbach, ‘and – shit – I can’t believe it.’ The QC had been gurgling, like he was drowning in the bath. ‘He now flatly refuses to take the case.’
‘Fuck him. Let’s tell the press.’
‘Tell who you like. It’s outrageous. Right now, my dad’s dictating a letter to the Lord Chancellor.’ His father, Harry, was the senior partner. ‘This time we’re sure to get an adjournment.’
We agreed to meet in the morning at the Old Bailey.
Geoffrey insisted that I call John Mortimer at home.
‘It’s your last chance.’
Mortimer was gracious, and suggested we meet for lunch.
In the morning, Felix, Jim and I slow-marched off to face the judge. Again it was Argyle. Jo Walker-Smith embarked on the application, but the judge cut in: ‘I will not be trying this matter, so I make the following observation. There is evidence before me that this case is not being taken with due seriousness. Adjournment refused!’ Felix swore under his hand. His briefcase bulged with travel brochures. Our Counsel was on his feet: ‘Your Honour, the
term “evidence” implies testimony tendered in open court before all parties. Perhaps you could share this evidence with the defence?’ Judge Argyle was taken aback for a moment, but shook his head and called the next case.
With the date unchanged, Sue Miles went to Bow Street Police Station to make formal notification of the Grand Obscenity Parade. When Sue told the duty officer that she was from Friends of Oz, he replied, ‘They don’t have any friends around here.’ Permit for an elephant was denied.
Our friend Clive Goodwin was planning to seek permission of the judge to tape-record the entire proceedings, with the view to making a movie. To this end, he asked the Clerk of the Old Bailey how he could arrange a special pass. ‘We’re not issuing passes for this trial. It’s a minor matter.’
At Jonah’s restaurant I introduced Geoff Robertson to John Mortimer. This was the eleventh hour and I was nervous, but long before I had finished outlining the ins and outs of the case, even before Mortimer had finished his entrée of salami and sugar melon, the QC put down his fork, quaffed his wine and said, ‘Goodie, goodie – when do we start?’
‘Tuesday.’
I was thrilled and surprised. None of the issues which had so bothered Williams and Wigoder – the tenor of our defence, my plan to defend myself, the antics of our supporters – worried John Mortimer in the least. After inviting us to confer with him on Sunday night, at his home in Little Venice, John sauntered back to court for the concluding stages of his current case, The Little Red Schoolbook. Geoffrey and I raised our glasses and drank his health.
17
PRICE of ADMISSION –
YOUR MIND
‘It’s monstrous,’ Felix said. ‘I feel like hurling a fuck’n’ bomb . . .’ His beard was odourless, razor-trimmed, his thick locks were blow-dried and he wore a white suit.
Geoff Robertson put a finger to his lips: ‘Shush!’ A pair of police with tea-trays passed our café table. In a few minutes, we were due to cross the road to the Central Criminal Court. Louise and Marsha were with us, ultra outfitted for opening day.
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