by Morrissey
It is difficult to find legal professionals who will now represent me against Joyce, because to fight Joyce is to fight the judgment, and it feels like no lawyer or solicitor is allowed to question the word of a judge.
I ask one lawyer, ‘Why not? Why can’t the actions of Weeks be scrutinized?’
She replies, ‘Because he might lose his position.’
At my appeal against the Weeks decision, Lord Justice Thorpe had said:
There is one submission advanced on behalf of the appellant (Morrissey) that attracts a response of a family lawyer.
Although not highlighted in the skeleton argument Mr Rosen (Morrissey’s barrister) did in his oral submissions eloquently expressed his client’s sense of injustice at what he in effect labelled a gratuitous and unwarranted character assassination of his client by the trial judge (John Weeks). Since this was a straightforward money dispute between two former partners the complaint, if substantiated, would deserve strong support and due remedy in an appellate court ... A distinction is to be drawn between an assessment of credibility, an assessment of demeanor and an assessment of personality. In my opinion the judge in the passages under review was stating his assessment of Mr Morrissey’s credibility ... I am quite clear that the judge was expressing no more than an impression of the value of Mr Morrissey’s oral evidence ... The circumstances in which a judge is entitled to make a personality assessment in civil litigation must, in my opinion, be much more limited.
Peter Gibson, LJ, then spoke:
No dishonesty was imputed to Mr Morrissey by Mr Nigel Davis QC for Mr Joyce, nor do I read the judge’s comments amounting to a finding of dishonesty.
However, John Weeks described me as ‘devious’, which, in any language, is understood as meaning ‘dishonest’. What makes this attack harder to understand is that Weeks concluded the case based on the 1890 Partnership Act, yet he also went on to foul the air with personality assessments, the latter seemingly unnecessary once the 1890 Act had been presented as the final word. Rounding off the case with personality assessments would only be necessary if those very assessments were the reasons why the case must conclude as it had, but why is there a need for personality assessments if the wording of the 1890 Partnership Act supposedly said all that need be said?
Although the comments of the appeal judges in their own shy way cleared my character of dishonesty, this aspect of the events went unreported in the newspapers. Each man kills the thing he loves, and Joyce had murdered the Smiths.
In 1999, a case similar to the Smiths’ circus reaches the High Court, but is swiftly booted out by the judge who examines the relationships within Spandau Ballet. Justice Park concludes: ‘It is unconscionable for the [ex-members] to lay claim to large sums of money that they knew the group founder [Gary Kemp] had regarded as his own.’ The rationale and intelligence of Mr Justice Park further highlighted the wayward will of Weeks, and, at the same time, Michael Stipe is interviewed in Q Magazine where he describes John Weeks as ‘a fuckhead’.
Years later, when fattened and bored and watching the clock, Joyce manages to get two letters to me, one of which begins ‘I know you must hate me’ (which reads as ‘you have every reason to hate me’), and he continues with a plea for renewed friendship, whilst making public declarations in favor of a Smiths re-formation. Johnny, too, tells me that he is ready for a re-formation. But neither were ready for a re-formation during the trial or in the immediate years that followed, when neither felt any obligation to prevent the Smiths’ ruin; when Joyce denies 10 per cent whilst accepting 10 per cent, when sad-eyed weakness is utilized as an instrument of power, when Joyce finally makes himself count only via disagreements, when Nigel Davis suggested that I had considered Rourke and Joyce to be as replaceable as parts of a lawnmower (a quote which the national press then gleefully attribute to me). Joyce, Rourke and possibly Marr were too simple to realize that the repercussions from these High Court days would be felt for the rest of their lives, and with Morrissey dishonored in a million ways – his ruin made certain from the start. In 1996 and 1997, Joyce and Marr set their own terms, allowing court events to justify their lives more than The Queen is Dead ever could. Self-confirmation was found only in the wobbly words of Weeks, the life of Joyce justified by hateful ingratitude to those who were his companions in pleasure and success. He spoke as if accompanied on harp, exclusively absorbed in self-pity, present in court because he had nothing else to do.
Yes, time can heal. But it can also disfigure. And surviving the Smiths is not something that should be attempted twice. If the Smiths split was designed to kill me off, then it failed. If the Smiths court case was a second attempt to kill me off, it too must fail. There is another world, there is a better world; well, there must be, and even if the passing of time might mellow you into forgiveness, it doesn’t mean that you ever again want to be friends.
Sickened, I left England. The good life is out there somewhere. I found increasing strength as I purchased 1498 North Sweetzer Avenue in the West Hollywood zone of Los Angeles – the city of promises. Mercury Records had sacked its president and had also fired all of the artists that he had signed – one of which was I. I had no idea then that seven years would pass without a new label. But I have a real home with hardwood floors, and I am momentarily free from the petty wars of England. Palm trees range around each window of 1498, a house steeped in Hollywood history since 1931. I wake surrounded by weightlessness and a long-forgotten feeling of relaxation. I am alone, of course, but that is quite usual. My neighbor is the very famous Johnny Depp, who looks away should I ever appear. When my seven-year tenure at Sweetzer ends, Johnny Depp will buy the house for use as a guest annex.
In the third week of paradise found, my new car is stolen in the dead of night from my garage. Although both the car and the garage are fully alarmed, the sophisticates of robbery take moonlight possession with masterful silence. The insurance company is annoyed with me, but they pay in full as the car is found burned out on Figueroa. I buy a new car that is then dented by heavy kicks as it sits outside the house. Yippee. I am being watched, and every single day brings the oddest dilemma. The daily tedium of keeping house and garden acceptable becomes an enjoyment, and the pain of life slows down. Each evening raccoons cautiously totter down the hill at the back of the house and perch themselves on the water-fountain, where they lean in and wash their hands with human motion. If they spy me lurking by a window they will stand erect on their hind legs and stretch to their tallest position, as if to show me what a fearsome brute I might be dealing with. Grey squirrels begin their usual getting-to-know-you courtship, and it doesn’t take very long for their tap-tap-tap on several windows to rush me into serving up today’s menu.
However, the running feet bounding across the roof throughout the night I am certain belong to something other than squirrels. Since this house is built on sand, I am then told of desert rats that leap from tree to tree like monkeys, and my neighbors assure me that keeping the rats at bay is a non-stop occupation – a detail oddly left out of the realtor’s brochure.
The weather is a continuously inspired moment, making everyone stretch, whereas the blackboard sky of London makes everyone shrivel and walk with a hump. In England, days bleed into each other without distinction, yet in Los Angeles every single day seems like what it is – a new day. My disciplined life is greatly aided by my close neighbor Charles Moniz, who is on 24-hour call to solve a floodtide of incomprehensible household problems. Uncomplaining, Charles will arrive with drill or ladder day or night with a duty of friendship that is first and last. Charles sells vintage autographs and stocks of famous Hollywood costumes in a shop called Baby Jane on Santa Monica Boulevard. His house on De Longpre was once owned by Charlie Chaplin but now shelters Charles and his two dogs, who are introduced to me as Jane and Blanche. Jigsaw, jigsaw, jigsaw. In the 1962 film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? the sister known as Blanche is confined to a wheelchair, and, abstract
ly, Charles’ dog named Blanche has lost the use of her back legs and drags them behind her as she moves – as if mimicking the screen character of Charles’ most fondled film. Charles is a good friend, and we take several car journeys across the Mexican border.
England calls with an offer of a role on EastEnders, as the son (so far unmentioned) of the character Dot Cotton. I would arrive unexpectedly in Albert Square and cause births, deaths and factory fires every time I opened my mouth – numb to shame throughout. Funnier still, an offer slides in for a role in Emmerdale, and the most fascinating aspect of both offers is that somebody somewhere had thought it a good idea.
Since I dare not be myself, I would surely be even worse as an actor.
In July 1998 the Guardian ran a double-page damning assessment of my ‘decline’, and in the center of both pages their sole photograph is of singer Edwyn Collins, whom, such is the accuracy and expertise of the Guardian, they evidently assume is me. Uncut magazine also run an extensive nine-page account of my ‘decline’, while a Mojo headline asks: what went wrong? and the lid is slammed shut on my casket. The frenzy of attacks in the press becomes a fascinating study, with not a single line of defense to attribute balance. It is done. A plot is marked out and the hearse is hired.
The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.
A. E. Housman
Suddenly my life jumps, and the past is not me. The prevalent complaint of boredom subsides as whatever is sought is found. My forties flip and flash with Tina Dehghani, who becomes a lifetime constant. Iranian by birth, Tina’s family were forced to Los Angeles when she was two years old, and had lived in Woodland Hills ever since. Her father had been a key figure in the overthrown Iranian government, and if a move to the US had not been made the family would all have been executed. Tina is a host of brown-eyed good intentions and patience and endurance, and it is only in the ninth year of knowing her that she lets slip her first and last complaint. Although tough and unperturbed, Tina’s nature is to place others first and herself last at all times, and her spirit is never infected by gossip or betrayal. We take our place together almost without noticing, and all is said with such small gestures. We are a steely duo at our favorite restaurants and watering holes, and time never drags. The life I had always led is not the same as the life I now lead, and with Tina, all sorts of strangeness become less so. I have still, to this very day, never known her to be late, or to refuse, or to decline, or to grumble, or to umm or err. Tina is my first experience of uncluttered commitment, attached – quite inexplicably – to a woman of great independence and logic. Having been raised on scraps, this is daunting for me.
Tina’s parents had married and then divorced, then re-married and then divorced, and then married for the third time and divorced for the third time. Sweetzer is giving me a matter-of-fact life, so softened that Tina and I discuss the unthinkable act of producing a mewling miniature monster. Had I ever previously known such a thought? Lounging with incomprehensible joy in my own bed I am now a symbol of rest instead of panic, as the swooning view of West Hollywood rooftops from my bedroom window ushers the sun in every morning without fail. The questioning and the discontent are left to brood elsewhere – with someone else. My mind is open and happy, inscrutably grown-up and running my own life. I wonder if I could ever take it as it is and just enjoy it? Well, no. I awake at 7:00 AM on September 11th 2001, aware that the downstairs answer-machine seems to be clogging itself with bleeps and blips and dying voices. Someone, I assume, is dead. I bolt down the stairs and my mother’s voice is the latest booming message: ‘Turn on your television – your country is being bombed!’
My country? With a feeling of utter impotence I spend the entire day watching the television news reports of the Twin Towers horror, wondering whether any meaning could be left in the world. As the second plane glides into the tower I suddenly have no words to voice the hurt inside me. I do not know why what is happening is taking place, and my mind slows down, lagging behind the TV reports. The heavy-heartedness I feel for the people strapped into their seats – whose deaths I have just witnessed – joins that final roll of Concorde as the most appalling sight imaginable. This poor and pathetic human race. Human? Well, no, not even human. The scene is untranslatable.
Los Angeles becomes a ghost town for a full two weeks, as a deathly silence keeps everyone in their homes, so stunned and sickened are they, and nervous of further blasts. Everyone is frightened to breathe. The feeble newshounds quite naturally alert everyone to an anticipated immediate attack on Los Angeles, and urge investments in food stocks and rubber clothing lest giant ants mutate from small pods secretly buried in Bel Air gardens. Instantly, anyone with a Middle Eastern face is certain to eat you whole, and all of America overthinks itself into a stupor. Exactly how authorities are so certain of a second wave of attacks is peculiar since they claimed no knowledge of the first wave of attacks. How can they know now, if they didn’t know then?
As life begins to formulate some fashion of normality, the events of 9/11 are nonetheless used forevermore as a reason for policing authorities to treat the public abysmally, and nowhere is this more apparent than the gratuitous rudeness of airport and airline staff. From this moment onwards I shall never again use a domestic American airline.
The horror also, of course, gives President George W. Bush something to do, and with no understanding of why people of foreign lands might dislike American policies, Bush does the manly thing by ordering more death and destruction, with American error being forever unthinkable. Claiming that his war is ‘against terror’, he can only fight such terror by exerting more terror, and, in doing so, Bush himself becomes the world’s most famous active terrorist, as he bizarrely bombs the innocent people of Iraq out of existence in the name of freedom and democracy. We are asked to accept that the bombs being dropped on the harmless people of Baghdad – so grinningly approved by the British Prime Minister – are not, in themselves terrorizing, as babies burn and America’s problems are solved, rah, rah, rah.
The contracts to rebuild Baghdad are distributed amongst the fatted friends of George W. Bush – back yonder in the land of the free. This joint action to desecrate Iraq undertaken by both Bush and Tony Blair suddenly turned all of us into terrorist suspects – making air-travel security checks a migraine of harrowing proportions, while the resulting bombings in London that claimed more innocent lives were the answer to the ever-grinning Tony Blair’s meddling in Iraq, thus rendering him guilty of war crimes that his honorable judicial friends would make sure would never land him in the cooler.
If not for Tony Blair’s self-interests, the people who were blown to pieces on London’s transport system that July morning would more than likely still be amongst the living. Although Bush and Blair collectively made the world a more dangerous place, neither of them, then or now, lead unprotected lives and neither is susceptible to the dangers that they have carelessly created for ordinary British and American citizens. In dippy downtown Beverly Hills – where trout-pout women push their be-ribboned poodles along in garnet-studded baby-carriages – graffiti appears yards from the sacred church of Needless Markup, as the empowered scrawl of BUSHIT remains for months and months for three-laned traffic to nod to. On such streets of famous gaga dizziness, it is remarkable that the fuddled fuzz had allowed such glaring graffiti to remain for so long. At a Beverly Hills theater I catch the latest show by comedian Joan Rivers, who comments on the US bombing of Baghdad, ‘But ... come on,’ she says, ‘who cares about a city that doesn’t have Gucci?’
I gulp as the audience roars.
I drive to Northridge to see a show by the incredible Al Martino. Time has not taken its toll, and his voice shat
ters glass and topples pillars. I sneak side-stage after the show and ask him to sign one of his CDs for me, and he does so, but as he bangs his signature onto the disc his eyes are fixed on a young female standing a few yards away. I thank him, and he offers me no eye contact or warmth, and he turns away saying nothing.
Channel 4 television burst into my life at Sweetzer, wanting to make a 90-minute film for television. Contractually, they give me total control to say and do whatever I wish, explaining: ‘It’s time the tale were told – your way, and nobody else’s.’ It all seems too good to be true. And indeed it is. Once they have their footage securely under wraps, they are gone, gone, gone – to edit, chop, revise and delete in such a manner as to now give a ‘balanced’ view of Morrissey, bringing in anonymous sources who impart unflattering views. Yet again I am thrust into a legal battle to have the film removed of its blood-stained bitchery. Battered and bruised, I succeed, and the film emerges as an extremely modest success. Could life ever be sane again?