by Wendy Leigh
From his father, David got his love of reading (even in his darkest drug days he traveled the world with trunks containing his vast library of books); he got his first taste of Hemingway from his father’s readers’ book club, which sent him a book a month, each of which David eagerly devoured. “My father opened up my world because he taught me the habit of reading. I got so much information, so many of the things I wanted to do came from books,” he recalled.
Another, less salutary habit that David picked up from his father was chain-smoking, and despite undergoing hypnosis and aversion therapy to break the habit, for a great part of his life, he was unable to quit. John’s favorite brand of cigarette was Player’s, which he chain-smoked, and David followed suit, making Player’s his own cigarette of choice. In later years, though, he switched to Marlboros, making sure that Coco always carried a secret stash in her handbag, just in case he ran out.
Another legacy from his father, according to David, was religious tolerance. “My father was one of the few fathers I knew who had a lot of understanding of other religions. He encouraged me to become interested in other religions,” he said. His tolerance was enhanced as well by the fact that his half brother, Terry, nine years his senior and his mother’s son by her former lover, Jack Isaac Rosenberg, was half Jewish.
An adventurous and liberated woman, Peggy was the daughter of Jimmy Burns, a professional soldier of Irish descent who fought with distinction during the First World War. However, when he returned home to England virtually penniless, he resorted to what he did best: playing the clarinet in the streets of Tunbridge Wells, as passersby threw coins into his hat in appreciation. Music was a Burns family passion and all six of Jimmy’s children—Peggy, the eldest; Nora; Vivienne; Una; the youngest girl, Pat; and their brother, Jimmy, all sang and played an instrument.
When David was a little boy, every Sunday during lunch, he and his parents would listen to the BBC Light Programme’s Family Favorites together. Peggy’s most beloved song was “O for the Wings of a Dove,” sung by soprano boy singer Ernest Lough, and she would sing along with him, transported.
“Her voice would soar in ambitious unison, effortlessly matching Ernest note for note as she delivered the gravy boat to the table,” said David, who went on to remember that his mother told him: “ ‘All our family could sing. We couldn’t do much else but we all loved music. It was thought I’d have a career in music at one time.’ ”
Apart from sharing her son’s musical talent, he and Peggy had something else strikingly in common: Throughout her life, Peggy composed poems—lush, introspective poems—which, even though she left school at fourteen, were quite literate. In addition to writing poetry, like John, she also read a great deal. Sometimes it seemed to visitors that she was so involved in whatever book she was reading that it was as if she were alone in the room and David wasn’t there at all. Terminally self-involved, Peggy didn’t bother herself with encouraging David’s burgeoning artistic talents. “A compliment from her was very hard to come by. I would get my paints out and all she would say was, ‘I hope you’re not going to make a mess,’ ” David remembered.
According to Ken Pitt, David confided that his mother never kissed him. “There was no sign of affection any time,” Dudley Chapman, one of David’s childhood friends, confirmed. “It was a very cold household. She’d feed him, clothe him, do all the mother’s things, but there was no cuddling.”
Peggy’s lack of warmth toward David would take its toll on his emotions for her. So that when he grew up and left home, he would virtually sever contact with her and his family. In 1992 David’s aunt Pat, Peggy’s youngest sister, tracked his unhappy relationship with his mother and recalled, “David started out as a fun-loving, beautiful little child. But he grew up in a cold atmosphere and by the time he was five he was extremely quiet and serious.
“I remember David coming home from school when he was fourteen upset by something which had happened that day. He ran upstairs and threw himself onto his bed sobbing his heart out. I asked Peggy if she was going to see what was wrong. She went up, but, being such an unemotional person, she was unable to give him a hug or a cuddle to make him feel better.
“David turned to her and said quietly, ‘You know, Mum, sometimes I think you hate me,’ ” his aunt Pat said.
Although Peggy did do the requisite amount of cooking and cleaning and washed David’s clothes into his teens, her deep-seated remoteness, her strangeness, her inability to relate closely to David are highly likely to have been a slight manifestation of the schizophrenia from which her sisters Una, Nora, and Vivienne also all suffered. For as much as David might try and joke about it, cracking of his family, “Most of them are nutty—just out of, or going into an institution,” the reality was dark and serious.
In September 1950, Una was sent to a mental hospital, Park Prewett, where she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. She was thereafter subjected to archaic treatments for the condition, and died in her thirties. Vivienne suffered from schizophrenia. Nora was also hospitalized, diagnosed with manic-depressive psychosis, and, most horrifying of all, underwent a lobotomy. Then there was Terry, David’s half brother, whom David idolized, but who would also be felled by the family curse of schizophrenia.
It was inevitable, then, that David would grow up haunted by the specter of mental illness and petrified of losing his wits. “He told me so, quite often and quite clearly,” his first wife, Angie, confided.
“He told me about the insanity that ran through his family and that it scared him,” model Winona Williams, who had a two-year relationship with him in the early seventies, said.
“There’s a lot of madness in my family,” David told biographer George Tremlett, who proceeded to suggest to him that he was merely talking about eccentricity. “No, madness—real fucking madness,” David shot back. “It worries me sometimes, because I don’t know whether it’s in my genes and if I’ll end up that way, too.”
David’s salvation would prove to be his love of reading, which led him to R. D. Laing’s seminal reappraisal of schizophrenia, The Divided Self, published when David was thirteen, and which became one of his all-time favorite books. In it, Laing wrote, “It is the thesis of this study that schizophrenia is a possible outcome of a more than usual difficulty in being a whole person with the other, and with not sharing the common-sense (i.e., the community sense) way of experiencing oneself in the world.” Or, put more simply, Laing also said, “Insanity—a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
Laing’s book, a sensation upon publication in Britain, was the first bulwark against David’s fear of inheriting his family’s insanity. The second was his ability to submerge his fear in his lyrics and thus disarm it.
But he was a winsome baby, with blue eyes, blond hair; his photogenic little face is wreathed in smiles, and the only intimation of the future captured in the earliest photographs of him when he was ten months old, is his charisma. In short, he is the epitome of a happy bouncing baby. But as always, with David, everything is not what it seems.
A quintessential moment in his childhood: “The very first memory I have is of being left in my pram in the hallway of 40 Stansfield Road, facing the stairs. It seemed to be a very, very long time and I was very scared of the stairs. They were dark and shadowy,” he recalled
TWO
STARBOY
When David was about three years old, his mother caught him putting on makeup for the first time. Not hers, but makeup belonging to the tenants in the apartment upstairs; lipstick, eyeliner, and face powder, which he daubed all over his little face.
“When I finally found him, he looked for all the world like a clown,” Peggy Jones remembered in 1986.
Shocked and amused, she rounded on David and told him in no uncertain terms that he shouldn’t use makeup. If that edict had been handed down to him by his father, whom he idolized, and whose calm temperament he appeared to have inherited, he might have accepted it. Instead, David said, somewhat r
eproachfully, “But you do, Mommy. . . .”
In the spirit of fairness, Peggy agreed, but then hammered home her point that makeup was definitely not for little boys. It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to analyze the ripple effect that Peggy’s ruling had on the three-year-old David when he grew up, feeling as ambivalent about her as he did. . . .
However, only a few years later, Peggy did back down and encourage David’s childish tendency toward theatricality, perhaps because she saw her own passion for singing reflected in him, and perhaps also because she intuited his nascent talent. After she sewed David a robe and headdress, and his father made him a crook for his role as a shepherd in the nativity play put on by Stockwell Infants School, which he first attended when he was almost five, Peggy observed how much he loved dressing up. “It was then that we realized that there was something in David,” she said.
That realization was compounded by David’s reactions when he listened to the radio, in particular to American entertainer Danny Kaye’s “Inchworm.”
“He would tell everyone to be quiet and listen, and then fling himself about to the music,” said Peggy, adding, “In those days we thought he might become a ballet dancer.”
However, David’s exhibitionist tendencies did not find favor with his aunt, Peggy’s sister Pat, who sniped, “He was a vain child, and he always tried to look different.” Clearly irritated by David’s childish vanity, Pat targeted his hair: “He always liked to comb it his way, forward, with a quiff by his ear. If you combed it, he always had to do it again himself. He looked at himself a lot in the mirror,” she said.
David may have looked in the mirror a good deal, but only child or not, he wasn’t in love with himself. Instead, his hero as a small boy was his half brother, Terry. Space in Stansfield Road was at a premium, and Terry and David shared the ground-floor bedroom. Consistently kind and loving to David, Terry compensated in part for Peggy’s coldness and inability to express her feelings.
Nonetheless, David’s pain at his mother’s failure to demonstrate maternal warmth toward him inevitably took its toll. “I was cut off from my feelings since I was maybe four years old,” he revealed.
Even then, as a very small child, David was already attracted to the limelight, and the limelight, in turn, appeared to be attracted to him. When David was five, his father had a brief stint working at Dr. Barnardo’s office in Harrogate, Yorkshire, and David and his mother stayed there with him. Taken to an agricultural show that the new Queen and Prince Philip were attending, David managed to elude the adults with him and end up right in front of the Queen, who looked down at him, and said, in the kindest tones possible, “Oh, hello, little boy,” when a local photographer immortalized the moment.
Consequently, David made his debut in the media by appearing on the front page of a Yorkshire newspaper, which (according to him) ran the picture of him and the Queen, looking down at the little boy, slightly bemused. Sadly, that picture has proved to be untraceable.
And back in London, when his father took him to see a Christmas pantomime at a local theater, little David slipped out of his seat in the stalls and ran backstage, where he positioned himself behind the curtain, drinking in all the activities, watching the stagehands and, most important of all, the audience—and then, of course, there was the applause. Mesmerized by his first live show, David was equally enthralled by television. In early-fifties Britain, owning a television, even a black-and-white one, was a luxury, but John Jones, with his important job at Dr. Barnardo’s, as well as his abiding interest in show business, didn’t balk at getting one for the family. Almost immediately, it became clear to anyone visiting that David had commandeered the television; the choice of program the family watched depended on him.
Until 1955, when ITV—the Independent Television channel (which, unlike the BBC, transmitted commercials) was launched—British television consisted of just one channel, the BBC, which broadcast only in black-and-white, starting in the afternoon. With only one channel available, there were also very few programs, particularly for children. David’s favorite show, The Flowerpot Men, a children’s program featuring the puppets Bill and Ben, the flowerpot men, and their sidekick, Little Weed, was to become the highlight of his day.
He also developed a fascination with the science-fiction series The Quatermass Experiment, followed by Quatermass II, but which his parents decreed was far too adult for him, and forbade him to watch. Undeterred, while his parents watched the program, the resourceful David hid behind the sofa and watched wordlessly, most likely secure in the knowledge that even if his parents did discover him there, he would suffer few consequences.
He was undoubtedly his father’s favorite, and poor Terry generally had to sit on the sidelines when John arrived home from work and recounted his day in detail to David, and just David. Even Peggy, as cold and remote as she was, nonetheless, favored David over Terry, as well.
When David was six, his parents sold 40 Stansfield Road, and after a year in Bickley, outside Bromley, in Kent (one of England’s “home counties,” with South London its northern border and the English Channel its southern one), moved to Clarence Road, Bromley. Finally, in 1955, David and his family moved to 4 Plaistow Grove, Sundridge Park, Bromley, a terraced house with four rooms, a kitchen, and an attic, where they would remain for fifteen years.
David’s bedroom overlooked the back of a pub, but even though the noise of carousers could be deafening, especially on a Saturday night, he could always lose himself in his dreams, and in reading. “I was a kid that loved being in my room reading books and entertaining ideas. I lived a lot in my imagination. It was a real effort to become a social animal,” he said.
When he was ten, he enrolled at Burnt Ash Primary School, in Bromley, joined the church choir, and was popular with classmates, who dubbed him a leader, not a follower, and he refused to take part in roughhousing with the other boys.
“I felt very protective toward him,” said his neighbor, Barrie Jackson, who lived across the street from him. “He was very small and when all the boys gathered together . . . telling rude jokes, David sat in the corner mostly, not at all impressed.”
Rude jokes might not have impressed him, but at the young age of ten, he was already aware of girls, and claims to have fallen head-over-heels in love with one of them. “She was the first girl in the class to get tits,” he said succinctly: Clearly, he always remembered her—and them. “I went out with her years later, when we were about eighteen—but I fucked it up. On our second date, she found out that I’d been with another girl. I could not keep it zipped,” he said.
Although David’s thoughts may have started to stray toward girls when he was very young, those thoughts and anything else in his life were dwarfed by his rising passion for rock music. David was eight years old when Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” hit the top of the charts and swept Britain with its revolutionary sound, aimed exclusively at teenagers. And young as he was, David was set on fire by “Rock Around the Clock.” As a result, he fixed his already considerable will on amassing a record collection. Fortunately for David, unlike most kids in Britain at that time, most of whom had to save up six shillings and eight pence in order to buy a 45 rpm of their chosen hit, he was in the privileged position of getting them for free, as his father, chief publicist at Dr. Barnardo’s Homes, routinely brought him the latest records that well-wishers had donated to the charity.
And when Little Richard (complete with gold lamé suit, glittering from top to toe with gold jewelry) broke into the hit parade with “Tutti Frutti,” David was in the seventh heaven when his father presented him with the disc. Little Richard became his idol, and David remained true to him and as an adult would always cite him as of one of his favorite artists.
Little Richard and the other American singers whose discs John Jones gave David also provided him with his first taste of America, that far-off wonderland that seemed a million miles away from Britain. “I had America mania when I was a kid,” David
recalled, adding, “but I loved all the things that America rejects; it was black music, it was the beatnik poets, it was all the stuff that I thought was the true rebellious subversive side. What makes America great is its pioneer, independent spirit.”
From the time when he received his first Little Richard disc from his father, America became his fantasy home, and from then on, at night he would often slide under the covers and listen to the American Forces Network radio station playing the top ten records and broadcasting plays based in Springtown, USA. “I would put myself into the play in my head and be living there, and drink sodas and drive a Cadillac and play sax in Little Richard’s band and all that,” he once said.
Little Richard didn’t just represent the advent of rock and roll in Britain, or personify America for David, but as Richard also played the sax, David, who never did anything by halves, resolved to follow in his footsteps and those of Terry, who had always been a huge jazz fan and favored iconic saxophonist John Coltrane.
Determined to learn to play the baritone sax, David was not a little disappointed when his father gave him a white acrylic Grafton alto—not baritone—sax. Still, undeterred, he picked up the local telephone directory, found a number, and called renowned baritone sax player Ronnie Ross, who had performed with Woody Herman and other jazz greats—and, better still, as far as David was concerned, lived just a few miles away from him in Orpington, Kent.
Following the Pied Piper of his sense of destiny, David wasn’t in the least bit shy in asking Ronnie to give him lessons. As he remembered: “I said, ‘Hi, my name is David Jones, and I’m twelve years old, and I want to play the saxophone. Can you give me lessons?’ ”
Ronnie was taken aback by the request—his first instinct was to refuse. But somehow or other, David convinced him to meet, and when they did, he won the sax player over. David’s Saturday morning lessons with Ronnie, which cost him the princely sum of £2 a lesson, lasted for three months, during which Ronnie was impressed by his pupil’s diligence, persistence, and talent. And David, returning the compliment, judged Ronnie to be cool, and always remembered him fondly.