Autobiography

by Morrissey

  Kirsty MacColl had entered my life in 1985. She had arrived at RAK Studios in north London to sing backing vocals on Bigmouth strikes again. She walked towards me carrying a bulging Londis bag.

  ‘Today’s laundry?’ are my first words to her.

  She laughs and opens the bag to reveal a cluster clutter of canned beer. ‘If I’m gonna sing with Morrissey I want us both to have a good time,’ she says, and chuckles that warm deep-in-the-chest giggle of hers. A friendship for life is born. There is no war between men and women as far as Kirsty is concerned – she who mused her youth in Acton pubs, almost unmanageable in her goodness, yet nobody’s pushover. Lower Addison Gardens in Kensington is currently her cave, from which the Rolling Stones smoke her out to sing on their new album, and from which Bono smokes her out to organize the track-listing of a U2 album. Cursed is how she signs all letters and postcards, but loved is how she is. Her father, Ewan MacColl, had, of course, written The first time ever I saw your face, and had also recorded the somewhat lesser-known Morrissey and the Russian sailor. When the Smiths record Lynn Ripley’s Golden lights Kirsty sings on that, also, and here and there come Ask, Interesting drug and I’d love to. ‘I’d never refuse you ANYTHING,’ she vows, and I chug along in the Saab to her new Ealing pile, where she has asked me to listen to her new song, which is called You know it’s you.

  With the soft suburban life around us, and with Kirsty hunched over a cognac, and me in endless fidget, the 1990s are being sewn up. You know it’s you is zealously magnificent, although Kirsty is neither artificial nor inflated enough to ever lower herself into the fat vat of stardom. In 2000, Kirsty telephones me in Los Angeles to ask about Mexico, because she knows that every drab Thursday I excitedly flit over the border. Kirsty wants to know if Cancun would be worth the trek, and I urge her to go. Before she rings off she reminds me about You know it’s you and how she’d love me to record it. Her voice trails away as Cancun calls, and it is there, a few weeks later, that she will be killed. On the first day of her holiday, Kirsty takes her two boys Louie and Jamie for a dash into the sea, when an out-of-control speedboat rages towards the boys. Kirsty throws her body into its path in order to shield her kids, and she is smashed to pieces as the boys look on. They had been splashing about in a spot that is forbidden to boats of any kind, yet all investigations into Kirsty’s death are blocked, and whisper upon whisper reveals that the boat had been operated by an indestructible Mexican businessman, and inherently decent bureaucracy strikes again. Watching and waiting for a development on the story, we all have no reason ever again to have faith, as the hands behind the wheel are suddenly said to have belonged to a meager milksop Mexican minion, and a pitifully small fine is imposed for the life of one of Britain’s greatest songwriters. Government officials in Britain fail Kirsty. Investigations into her death prove to be a long and thwarted battle for Kirsty’s mother, Jean, and life is a pigsty.

  Weeks after Kirsty’s death I receive a card which she must have posted to me the second she arrived in Mexico. It reads:

  You know it’s you.

  xxx Cursed xxx

  It is an unusually overcast Sweetzer afternoon as I plough logs onto the open fire and crack open a bottle of vodka, and cradle Kirsty’s card in my hands like a prayerbook, wondering if she would still be alive had I talked her out of traveling to Cancun. The vodka induces bewailing, and I cry myself blind for yet another lost friend.

  Los Angeles is essentially the ever-youthful Promised Land, and although I have been offered several recording contracts it becomes impossible to pin anyone down the day after the promise, as numbers on cards no longer exist, as people are eternally unavailable in the revolving world of Ago lunches. For the first time in my professional life I am certain I look slightly desperate. I am tapped several times by Merck Mercuriadis, who appears to run the entire Sanctuary label.

  Canadian, yet American, yet Greek, yet British, Merck makes genuinely impressive sidechatter and is as dedicated a watchdog of music as I have ever known. Now a responsible axis for a label in fast ascendancy, there are enough exciting signposts in Merck’s roll of ideas to soften my heart. One more strained meeting with a gaggle of snarling industry panthers here in the city of dreams and I would drop dead. However, I tell Merck how much I hate the label name because it brings to mind pasture and refuge and soup kitchens and hiding places.

  He says, ‘Well, don’t use it – rescue a credible imprint from the 70s and make it your own. We have Attack, Black Swan ... a host of unused labels from the late 60s ...’

  ‘You – have – ATTACK?!’

  ‘Yes.’

  My signature lands on a Sanctuary document within seconds.

  In 2001 my cousin Matthew, who lived in Stockton, California, had his life cut short at 29. As the eldest child of my mother’s sister Mary, the shock of his death concussed the entire family. I attend Matthew’s funeral with my aunts Rita and Dorothy. Twelve months later, Rita herself has died at 48, a sudden assault of cancer making war on her entire body. Beautiful and loving, Rita shrugs at her doom.

  ‘It’s the luck of the draw,’ she repeatedly says – as if it is she who is now protecting us with her calmness.

  We attend to her during her final weeks at her home in Sale, still she smiles – losing the hair she had attended to so proudly, each good day inevitably leading back to a bad day, her two teenage sons knowing yet too shaken to fully grasp. Rita had been there every day of my life, and I had felt certain she would be there for the remainder of it.

  Suddenly, her body is a hostile stranger, and all of us around her are talking gibberish, bumping into one another as we fuss – giving the attention that nobody wants – as Rita fades before our eyes, minute by minute, forty years ahead of schedule. You catch yourself lying, and you are choking on your own in-built censorship, and you are only able to watch as Rita becomes less and less present in the body that she had meticulously maintained all of her life. There are seconds of forgetfulness in her eyes, until a conversational pause forces her face back into the darkness of her pillow, unable to look at her sisters and her sons. Neither we, nor she, can do anything, and we all explode with rage. Days of Queen’s Square and Trafalgar Square and Milton Close and Roebuck Lane, and now Rita closes down on Winchester Drive, facing what is just meant to be, sitting in the garden with a blanket across her knee – always a vision of an awaiting final journey for souls to be traded. So much life in Rita, her daily visits to the gym, her cycling, her salads, her garden, and now all to be sucked away – and, for what? Even now, one is asked to be patient as the final days are addressed and Rita’s breathing becomes heavy. Why do we not all howl and rage? Rita wants to live, yet is longing for sleep, a solid fixity of positivity, ‘but these are not my legs,’ she says, looking down at the swollen limbs – and it is true, they aren’t, yet she is still the girl of Piccadilly, in a fixed image of vigorous fun, a listener of playful nature, the Supremes at full voltage, a room teeming with hair products. Now, I hold her hand, not wanting to let her go and she not wanting to go. Soon we are checking to see if she is still breathing, as the chest heaves in struggle, and Rita will wheeze out an apology as the physical limits are reached and the soul cries to be let go – not to be let go from life, but to be released from this state of departing, so grotesque in its sucking dry and wasting away. Rita’s smile had become lifeless, and we all begin to snap at one another as we stand around feeling useless yet wanting to stop time. There is too much brain involved, and as Rita’s will surrenders to erosion, we all feel a mixture of relief and repulsion. Death is one of many penalties of being human, but nothing will tidy up this situation for Rita, a finishing off that bleeds the body dry – as if anyone could possibly deserve such a slow execution.

  It is not as if the death of Christ would prevent our own deaths – we must also go the way of our own final muster, and always unresolved, always too soon. Suffer and accept, because here you are faced with
something far stronger than yourself, and even your intuition leads you nowhere. How many billions donated to cancer research? How many billions of animals tortured in the name of research – and, to what progress? And what if progress were ever truly made? How many giant industries would fall – fully dependent, as they are, on cancer victims? Has a cure been found but blocked? Now is the time to dig down for questions, impossible to accept that your powers are so limited, and impossible to accept that your own body can’t always behave and respond well. Life is a mesmerizing mess, but if you were a proper Christian you’d find a comforting answer for the finite and infinite, the temporal and spiritual, with no grasping insistence that tomorrow, after all, will not be just another day. Isn’t it all too burdensome, this life, with so much loss taking its root in the heart, as the body goes spinning on towards a dreadful cessation. As Rita dies, I am a clenched fist, and we are soon in the church, where our intensity must be contained because you must accept that for a while you are here, and then one day you are not, because it’s all part of living. Accept, accept, accept. Accept even the unacceptable. As the months pass, I drive along Washway Road near to the turn-off to Rita’s house, and I cannot believe that she is not there, rattling about the house, busy with the small things of life, lost in cleaning duties and shopping lists, up and down the stairs, organizing the week to come, brushing her hair and answering the telephone. How could that heart ever stop? Oh Rita, I shall catch up with you in the afterlife, and if there is not to be one, then neither of us shall be alert enough to be disappointed.

  Elaine Stritch cooks in the mid-day sun, long-necked and busy at her courtyard table at the Bel Air hotel. She eats chopped fruit from a large plastic Zip-lock bag. Stritch stretches back one hundred years, a true star of the American stage, and a hallowed prize on any of her rare television appearances. She is a cauldron of Lucille Ball, Tallulah Bankhead, Coral Browne, Estelle Getty and Beatrice Arthur – her creaky tough-nut croak of a voice is loud enough to fill the hotel foyer. She is a blasé broad of yesteryear – so funny that people hope that she will soon stop talking. She has the rare distinction of ducking commercial speculations unless they please her own infallible critical guide.

  ‘Y-y-y-yes?’ she looks up at me as I approach her table.

  ‘My name is Morrissey,’ I start off.

  ‘That’s a funny name sit down,’ she orders – minus any commas.

  Like the very best of them, the face of Elaine Stritch never twitches at her own lightning wit, and she remains stone-faced even whilst delivering the most rafter-quaking retort. All of her acting takes place around her mouth and eyes. The body doesn’t do much. We sit and talk for an hour, and I explain that I had seen her on stage in New York in a play called A Delicate Balance.

  ‘Oh, yeh,’ she says, midway between gruff and boredom (but probably very interested), and I remind her of her harrowingly funny contributions to BBC Radio’s Just a Minute with Kenneth Williams.

  ‘Oh yeh,’ she looks away,‘I remember him,’ she coughs, suddenly a commendable wreck.

  I can imagine Elaine in the heat of disagreements to be savage and pitiless – ‘calling ’em as she sees ’em’ – with useful enemies trampled to death. Elaine is here in Los Angeles to film an episode of the television comedy Third Rock from the Sun. ‘Come along and watch what time shall I pick you up and what’s your home address?’

  Elaine’s studio car pulls up at Sweetzer the following day and off we go to the television studio in Burbank. Elaine is given a mobile-home dressing room, but as I step in she tells me to step out. ‘No, you go and busy yourself leave me alone for awhile,’ and she grabs another Zip-lock bag of fruit and slams the door. I am not offended. I understand the tubercular theatrical typhus of one such as Elaine Stritch, who acts as if she had fought under the Sultan of Turkey (and probably had). The crushing replies to silly questions were all part of the ungovernable control, and the overreaching frenzy of rage is high altar in the depth and sweep of theater. It isn’t friendly, it is a substitute for intimacy, and even if it seems overdone you will still accept it as a passionate experience of truth. The art of the put-down is in no hands more capable than those of Elaine Stritch.

  ‘Did you ever know Richard Conte?’ I ask, like a bouncing cheerleader.

  ‘Oh, STOP it,’ she says, a square of watermelon jumping into her mouth, ‘how many thousands of years old do you think I am?’

  On set, Elaine introduces me to a host of people whom I do not know and who do not want to know me – because Elaine is in the room and her gift occupies space with volcanic power. A constant interrupter, Elaine wants it known that she has been there first – as she has, irrespective of where ‘it’ might be. The monumental face is a wretchedness that is great, and, because she has never learned how to be timid, she points the way for all assembled technicians and actors. She knows herself and she knows her worth, and we all spend our entire lives in search of such prizes.

  ‘Ah, the very best,’ says the star of Third Rock from the Sun, John Lithgow, as he extends his hand to mine but has already raced past before I have time to return a single word. A herd of bison encircles Elaine, and I back away as she is led to her mark on the set. The episode is called ‘My Mother, My Dick’, which I assume to be a pun on Nancy Friday’s famous My Mother, Myself book. I watch the live taping from a secret spot side-stage, where French Stewart, who seems to act with his eyes closed, paces the room whilst running his lines through his head. Elaine is enviably brilliant, and gets a huge roar from the audience each time she belts out a contemptuous snap of dialogue. She is a great success. I slip away without saying goodbye because I feel like excess baggage. A week later a handwritten letter arrives from Elaine, and I reply, but she then doesn’t.

  I am back in the same studio some weeks later to watch a taping of Friends, having been invited by Reprise Records. Friends has become the most popular TV show in the world, showing life as it is commonly lived in America’s carefully preserved unreality. The cast is friendly, and I am immediately taken aside by the scriptwriters and asked if I’d jump in on a newly jumbled plot-line where I appear with the character Phoebe in the Central Perk diner, where I am requested to sing ‘in a really depressing voice’. Within seconds of the proposal, I wind down the fire-escape like a serpent, and it’s goodbye to Hollywood yet again.

  Nancy Sinatra coils in a recliner at her Beverly Hills home.

  We have become good friends, and she is desperately generous and humble. She has recorded my song Let me kiss you, and it is to be released as a single, and I am dumb-struck with excitement at the fullness and strength of the final mix. There is a flickering sensuality to Nancy’s voice that is unique, and with the restorative power of Sanctuary behind the release, I sense a huge hit. On this day Nancy points to a large upstairs room that houses all of her father’s private belongings, and she tells me that she is struggling to store them properly due to lack of space, and she must therefore move on to an even larger house. I think Nancy is lonely, and a little lost, but given her biblical Beverly Hills upbringing she is uniquely sane and lacking in the fussy flash of the 90210 privilege. Unthinkably, Let me kiss you gains no airplay, and plonks onto the UK chart at 46. In the US the situation is even worse, and it is as if the recording didn’t exist. I am aghast. What does it take?

  Robbie Williams sticks two notes into my front door. His handwriting is so bad that I can only make out one central line that shouts ‘Let’s do something TOGETHER.’ And then another note shouts out ‘I LIKE YOU!’ He fragments further with scattered lyrics from You are the Quarry, adding, ‘If we sing together it would really confuse them.’

  I am then invited to sing with Robbie at the upcoming Brit Awards, of which Robbie has somehow collected eighteen (it need hardly be said that my own award cabinet remained polished and empty). I politely refuse the request, but the ever diplomatic British tabloids jump in with MORRISSEY SNUBS ROBBIE. It is inc
onceivable to the press that a refusal could submit good terms and accord instead of sizzling spite.

  Wherever I go I seem to see the Duchess of Nothing, Sarah Ferguson. A frantic gadfly at the Four Seasons in Chicago, there she is running a business breakfast, talking loudly with the intention of being overheard – hoping to make even more money out of a position freakishly acquired in the first place. A male member of the British ‘royal’ family wants to sleep with you and suddenly you are a Duchess, and because of this sexual fumbling the entire British population is assumed to be overtaken by a jittering interest in the nonentity now tinkeringly known as a Duchess. It’s all so easy! There she is again in the bar of the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge, looking around as if awaiting fireworks of recognition, and there she is again at the Dorchester. This time she stares me out. She is a little bundle of orange crawling out of a frothy dress, the drone of Sloane, blessed with two daughters of Queen Victoria pot-dog pudginess. A thousand embarrassing press exposés will not persuade her to back off, and although Diana Spencer, too, was stripped of her Potty Princess title, Sarah Ferguson remains lodged in the US talk show mind as a British ‘royal’ boil, or at least as someone who has had the honor of hearing the Queen belch after a rousing luncheon of peppered horse. Diet shows, Oprah, business ventures, commercial ventures, Sarah Ferguson chases the limelight until it will kill her – or you. It is the unfortunate drive of the overly untalented.

  The Tiffany Theater is a small cognac room on Sunset whose navel-high stage had historically drawn in Hollywood’s best late-night entertainers, from Phyllis Diller to Rusty Warren to Fabian to Rich Little to James Darren to Debbie Reynolds; sophisticated cocktail glamor for those too rich to go home. I am pulled in to see a show by Lypsinka, who is a living picture created by the man who hides within, John Epperson. This show is so fascinating that I return to see it eleven times, and each time I laugh louder. Although the entire show is lip-synch’d (naturally), there is never a single moment when it seems as if anyone other than Lypsinka is singing and talking with her own voice – which she isn’t, of course, since the soundtrack is a high-speed montage of female voices from American entertainment history; Oscar acceptance speeches, crude recordings, vintage commercials, sitcom snippets, familiar splats of show tunes, all of which cease to be the property of A Rage to Live or Valley of the Dolls and instead become copyright Epperson to the watcher’s eye.