Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  Then, just as I think how self-assured she must be not to let their attacks eat her up, she says, “I’ve had a private investigator on Randi and Lancaster, and I have enough on them to hang ’em.” She reels off a few defamatory allegations, then adds, “But I’m not going to play that game. That’s vengeance, see? Who cares? Randi is an evil little man. When I told him he was going to have a heart attack, and then he did—ha!—he wouldn’t give me any kudos.”

  In the end it is a short interview, just half an hour. What was I thinking? That she would admit to being a fraud? I will give her this, though: I believe that she is genuinely passionate and knowledgeable about spiritual things. The only times during the interview when she becomes really animated are when she talks about Mother Goddess this and that. So I don’t believe that part is fake. But there is no doubt that she makes a fortune saying very serious, cruel, showstopping things to people in distress, especially, it seems, when she’s in a grumpy mood.

  “I don’t think people should go to a psychic to hear a fairy story,” she says. “It might be nice for a time, but what about the validity in the future?”

  “But when you’re dealing with missing kids and you’re wrong,” I say, “it’s very, very bad.”

  “Right.” She shrugs.

  “What do you say to people who say you’re a fraud?” I ask.

  “My years,” she replies. “My years of validation save me.” She pauses. “If after fifty-three years I was a fraud, don’t you think they would have found out?”

  DAY 5: DISEMBARKATION

  I jump ship in Athens, two days early. I miss Sylvia’s final lecture. The next day I receive an e-mail from Cassie, the German fan who went off her after she was rude in the shopping arcade. “Please call me!” she writes. “Sylvia talked so harsh about you! I wrote everything down she said!”

  I phone her.

  “You have no idea what that woman said about you yesterday!” Cassie says. “She got up onstage and said to the audience, ‘Are you guys enjoying the trip?’ And everyone yelled, ‘Yeah! Whooh!’ And then she said, ‘Because I heard that some of you aren’t enjoying the trip.’ And she launched into this huge attack on you! She said, ‘I had an interview with this pale little man and he said I was rude to some of you in the shopping arcade. You must have seen him around. He’s a creepy little worm. . . .’ She said you were a worm and a creep and a dark soul entity. She just went on and on about you. It lasted for about twenty minutes!”

  “How did the audience respond?” I ask.

  “People didn’t know where the hell this was coming from,” Cassie says. “A few of them said to me afterward, ‘I didn’t pay four thousand euros to listen to someone go on like that.’”

  All this proves one thing to me. Now I know for sure that Sylvia isn’t psychic, because I don’t have a dark soul at all. I have a very light soul.

  The Fall of a Pop Impresario

  September 10, 2001. The Old Bailey trial of the pop mogul and former pop star Jonathan King, in which he is accused of a series of child-sex offenses dating back to the sixties, seventies, and eighties, begins this morning. Back in July, Judge Paget decided, for the purposes of case management, to have three trials instead of one. So the jury will hear only the charges that relate to the years between 1982 and 1987. There are six within this time frame—one buggery, one attempted buggery, and four indecent assaults on boys aged fourteen and fifteen.

  I have been having an e-mail correspondence with Jonathan King for the past nine months, and last night he e-mailed me to say, “I think you know, young Ronson, that whichever way it goes for me you could have an award-winning story here, if you’re brave. You can change the face of Great Britain if you do it well. Good luck! JK.”

  I have just returned from New York, and in the canteen on the third floor of the Old Bailey—in the minutes before the trial is due to begin—Jonathan King comes over to make small talk about my trip.

  “Did you bring me any presents back?” he asks. “Any small boys? Just kidding! Don’t you think it is amazing that I have retained my sense of humor?”

  He smiles across the canteen at his arresting officers. They smile faintly back. Jonathan has always told me about his good relationship with the police, how kind they were to him during his arrest, and he looks a little crestfallen at their evident withdrawal of affection.

  “The police are far less friendly than they were,” he says. “Quite boot-faced, in fact. And there doesn’t even seem to be a senior officer around. I’m getting quite insulted that I’m so unimportant that only constables are allowed anywhere near the case.”

  He looks at me for a response. What should I say? Yes, his crimes are so significant and he is so famous that it would seem appropriate for a more senior officer to be in attendance? In the end, I just shrug.

  There are half a dozen journalists here today covering the case. In the lobby outside the court, Jonathan approaches some to shake their hands. “Who’s the gorgeous blonde with a TV cameraman?” he whispers to me. “Sorry if this ruins my image.”

  “I felt terrible about shaking his hand,” one reporter says a little later. “I felt disgusting. I was standing there thinking, ‘What’s he done with that hand?’ I should have refused to shake it.”

  “I just asked my solicitor if it’s unusual for the accused to make a point of shaking the hands of the press and the prosecution barrister,” Jonathan says as we walk into court. “He said it was absolutely unheard-of!” Jonathan laughs, and adds, “You know, I fully intend to change the legal system just like I changed the pop industry.”

  And at that, we take our seats. The jury is selected, and the trial begins.

  • • •

  ON NOVEMBER 24, 2000, Jonathan King was charged with three child-sex offenses dating back thirty-two years. In the light of the publicity surrounding his arrest, a dozen other boys (now men) came forward to tell police that King had abused them, too, during the seventies and eighties. Some said he picked them up at the Walton Hop, a disco in Walton-on-Thames run by his friend Deniz Corday. Others said he cruised them in his Rolls-Royce in London. He’d pull over and ask why they were out so late and did they know who he was. He was Jonathan King! Did they want a lift?

  He told the boys he was conducting market research into the tastes of young people. Did they like his music? His TV shows? Were they fans of Entertainment USA, his BBC2 series? He asked them to complete a questionnaire—written by him—to list their hobbies in order of preference. Cars? Music? Family and friends? Sex? “Oh, really?” Jonathan would say to them. “You’ve only put sex at number two?”

  And so they would get talking about sex. He sometimes took them to his Bayswater mews house, with its mirrored toilet and casually scattered photos of naked women on the coffee table. Sometimes he took them to car parks, or to the forests near the Walton Hop. He showed them photographs of naked Colombian air hostesses and Samantha Fox. He could, he said, arrange for them to have sex with the women in the photos.

  Sometimes, within the bundle of photographs of naked women he would hand the boys, there would be a picture of himself naked. “Oh!” he’d say, blushing a little. “Sorry. You weren’t supposed to see that one of me!” (When the police raided King’s house, they say they found ten overnight bags, each stuffed with his seduction kit—his questionnaires and photos of Sam Fox and photos of himself naked—all packed and ready for when the urge took him to get into his Rolls-Royce and start driving around.)

  He told the boys that it was fine if they wanted to masturbate. And then things would progress from there. Some of the boys reported that his whole body would start to shake as he sat next to them in the Rolls-Royce.

  And then he “went for it,” in the words of one victim. None of the boys say he forced himself onto them. They all say they just sat there, awed by his celebrity. The boys all say that Jonathan King has emotionally scarred them for life, although almost all of them returned, on many occasions, and became the victims of more
assaults.

  Later, Jonathan King will spend his last weekend of freedom—the weekend before the guilty verdicts—recording for me a video diary of his feelings about the charges. At one point, midway through this twenty-minute tape, he hollers into the camera about this perplexing aspect of the case. “They kept coming back to me again and again and again, although this vile behavior was supposed to be taking place!” He laughs as if he’s delivering a funny monologue on some TV entertainment show. “Why on earth would anybody do that? I’d be out of that house as fast as I possibly could! I’d make damned sure I was never alone with that person again. Mad!”

  When the police asked Jonathan why all these boys—who have never met or even spoken to each other—had almost identical stories to tell, he replied that he didn’t know. I am determined to ask at least one victim why he continually went back for more.

  The defense argues that the police actively encouraged claims of emotional scarring when they interviewed the victims, because, without it, what else was there? Just some sex, long ago. The danger, says the defense team, is that if Jonathan is found guilty, the judge will sentence him not only for the acts themselves but also for the quantity of emotional scarring the victims claim to have. And how can that be quantified, especially in this age of the self, when the whole world seems to be forever looking to their childhoods for clues as to why they turned out so badly?

  “Jonathan King,” says David Jeremy, the prosecution barrister, in his opening remarks to the jury, “was exploiting the young by his celebrity.”

  When I first heard about King’s arrest, I looked back at his press interviews for clues, and found a quote he gave Music Week magazine in 1997: “I am a 15-year-old trapped inside a 52-year-old body.”

  I talked to some of his friends from the pop industry, and one of them said, “Poor Jonathan. We were all doing that sort of thing back then.”

  I attended an early hearing at Staines magistrates’ court. Jonathan King arrived in a chauffeured car. The windows were blacked out. Two builders watched him from a distance. As he walked past them and into the court, one of them yelled, “Fucking nonce!”

  He kept walking. Inside, he noticed me on the press benches. We had appeared together on Talk Radio a few years ago and he recognized me. On his way out, he gave me a lavish bow, as if I had just witnessed a theatrical event, starring him. Outside, the builders were still there. They shouted, “Fucking nonce!” again.

  My e-mail correspondence with Jonathan began soon after this hearing. In one e-mail, he asked me if I would consider it fair if, say, Mick Jagger was arrested today for having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl in 1970. I agreed that it wouldn’t be. He told me that he was being charged with the same crime that destroyed Oscar Wilde—the buggering of teenage boys—and we perceive Wilde to have been unjustly treated by a puritanical society from long ago. I wonder if the reason why we look less kindly upon Jonathan King is because he sang “Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air),” while Oscar Wilde wrote De Profundis.

  In another e-mail, he wrote about Neil and Christine Hamilton, falsely accused of rape while being filmed by Louis Theroux, whom Jonathan sees as my great competitor in the humorous journalism market. He wrote, “Louis EVERYWHERE . . . but who on earth would want to cover the Hamiltons, famous for doing NOTHING. Still, I do hope The Real Jon Ronson will have the balls, courage and integrity to take up the crusade (whatever the outcome) that it is GROSSLY unfair for the accused person/people to be smeared all over the media. Over to you, Ronson (we don’t just want a Theroux treatment, do we?).”

  Later, in court, some of the victims say that Jonathan had a trick of making them feel special, as if they could do anything, as if they could make it big in show business, just so long as they stuck with him (and didn’t tell anyone what had happened). Has King got legitimate grievances against the legal system, or is he simply trying to seduce me in the same way he seduced the boys?

  His Jagger analogy was alluding to some covert homophobia at the heart of the case. But perhaps the real contrast lies somewhere else. Mick Jagger (or, indeed, Bill Wyman) wouldn’t have needed to pretend he was conducting market research into the tastes of young people. He wouldn’t have needed to have promised them sex with Colombian air hostesses. But Jonathan did not, intrinsically, have much pulling power, so he did need those extra little touches. Perhaps the real contrast, then, is one of aesthetics.

  The Walton Hop closed down in 1990. There were complaints of noise from the neighbors. But the Hop’s home, the Playhouse, still stands. Jimmy Pursey, the lead singer of Sham 69, was one of the Hop’s most regular teenage attendees. He went dancing there every Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday night throughout the seventies. One day, shortly before the trial began, Jimmy gave me a guided tour of the Playhouse.

  “It’s so hard to explain to people who see in black-and-white the color that existed in this club,” he said. “The Playhouse was a theater for fringe plays and amateur dramatics. But on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays it would become paradise.”

  Jimmy took me through the hall and toward the stage.

  “It was inspirational,” said Jimmy. “This wasn’t table tennis. This was dancing. This was testing out your own sexuality. Normal people would become very unnormal. It was ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome.’ It was everything.”

  He leaped up onto the stage and took me to the wings, stage right. We stood behind the curtains.

  “This is where the inner sanctum was,” said Jimmy. “From here, Deniz Corday would have the best view of the teenagers who were a little bit bolder, a little bit more interesting.”

  “Bolder and interesting in what way?” I asked.

  “People like me,” said Jimmy. “If Deniz liked you, you’d be invited backstage and get a little bit of whisky added to your Coca-Cola. Backstage, you see. And you’d go, ‘Oh, I’m in with the big crowd now.’ That’s all there was to it with Deniz.”

  “And Jonathan?” I asked.

  “He’d drive into the Hop car park, and come backstage from the side,” he said. “And we’d all be going, ‘God! There’s a Rolls-Royce outside with a TV aerial coming from it! Ooh, it’s got a TV in the back and it’s a white Rolls-Royce!’ Because you’d never know if it was the Beatles.”

  “But it wasn’t the Beatles,” I said.

  “No,” said Jimmy. “It was Jonathan King.” He laughed. “A very big difference there!”

  The Beatles lived on St. George’s Hill, in nearby Weybridge, and were often seen driving around Walton in their Rolls-Royces.

  • • •

  A DISPROPORTIONATE NUMBER of celebrities who are now convicted pedophiles hung around backstage at the Walton Hop during the seventies and eighties. There was Jonathan King’s friend Tam Paton, the manager of the Bay City Rollers, who was convicted of child-sex offenses in the early eighties. (It was Paton who first introduced Jonathan King to the Hop—they met when Jonathan was invited to produce the Rollers’ debut single, “Keep On Dancing.”)

  Chris Denning, the former Radio 1 DJ, was another Hop regular. He has a string of child-sex convictions, is currently in jail in Prague, and was friendly with King and Paton.

  For Jimmy Pursey, the trick was to pick up the girls who were drawn to the Hop to see the Bay City Rollers while avoiding the attentions of the impresarios who orchestrated the night.

  “It was fun with Deniz Corday,” said Jimmy. “Deniz would say, ‘Oh, Jimmy! Come here! I’d love to suck your fucking cock!’ Deniz was a silly, fluffy man. Then there was Tam Paton. I remember being back here having one of my whisky and Coca-Colas one night, and Tam turned to me and he said, ‘I like fucking lorry drivers.’ Chris Denning was more reckless. One time he placed his penis within the pages of a gay centerfold and showed it to my ex–bass player, who proceeded to kick the magazine, and Denning’s dick, and yell, ‘Come on, Jimmy, we’re fucking out of here!’ But Jonathan King was more like a Victorian doctor. It wasn’t an eerie vibe . . . but Jonathan had thi
s highbrow, Cambridge, sophisticated thing about him. The Jekyll and Hyde thing. There wasn’t much conversation with Jonathan. And with Jonathan, you’d always had these rumors. ‘Oh, he got so and so into the white Rolls-Royce.’ And they’d always be the David Cassidy look-alike competition winners. Very beautiful.”

  “Would he make a grand entrance?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” said Jimmy. “It was never, ‘Look at me!’ He never went out onto the dance floor at all. He was much happier hiding backstage up here, behind the curtains, in the inner sanctum.” Jimmy paused. “The same way he hid behind all those pseudonyms, see? He’s always hiding. I think that’s the whole thing of his life. He always says, ‘That was me behind Genesis! That was me behind 10cc! That was me behind all those pseudonyms.’ But what do you do then, Jonathan? Who are you then, Jonathan?”

  Jimmy was referring to the countless pseudonymous novelty hits Jonathan had in the late sixties and seventies—the Piglets’ “Johnny Reggae,” for instance, and Shag’s “Loop Di Love.” These came after his hugely successful 1965 debut, “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” which was recorded while he was still a student at Cambridge. (Before that, he was a pupil at Charterhouse.) It was a remarkable career path: a lovely, plaintive debut, followed by a string of silly, deliberately irritating hits.

  One of King’s friends later suggests to me that it was his look—the big nose, the glasses, the weird, lopsided grin—that determined this career path, as if he somehow came to realize that it was his aesthetic destiny. He’s sold forty million records. He’s had a hand in almost every musical movement since the mid-sixties—psychedelic, novelty bubblegum pop, alternative pop, Eurovision, the Bay City Rollers, 10cc, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Genesis, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, the Brit Awards, and so on.

  Within two years of leaving Cambridge, he was running Decca Records for Sir Edward Lewis, with his own West End offices and a Rolls-Royce parked outside.