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2 MEETING MALCOLM

1965–1971

‘I was a coin and he showed me the other side.’

Vivienne Westwood on Malcolm McLaren

Vivienne never fell under the spell of the sixties, whose politics, music and clothes were not to be a significant influence on her. But her life did change during that decade. She met Malcolm McLaren, who, in tune with the times, channelled her latent creativity into fashion, a medium in which the pair could showcase his political and artistic posturings and her campaigning zeal. Manipulated by him, Vivienne evolved from a cussing, church-going housewife into a subversive seamstress of agitprop clothing.

It was within her brother Gordon’s circle of friends that Vivienne met Malcolm Robert Andrew Edwards (né McLaren) in 1965 at the Railway Hotel, Harrow and Wealdstone, where Derek was now managing the club and she served as hatcheck girl in the evenings. McLaren was amused by her waspish asides to her husband. The dyspeptic child of a broken home, he liked to witness marital discord, and may have speculated that her aggression was for his benefit.

Malcolm Edwards (as he was known until 1971) was born on 22 January 1946 in the family home in Carysfort Road, Stoke Newington, a working-class district of North-East London. His parents were Emily (née Isaacs), the daughter of lower-middle-class Jewish diamond-cutters, and Peter McLaren, a working-class Scot who had served as a sapper with the Royal Engineers during the war and then became a motor-fitter. Emily considered that she had married beneath her. They had two sons, Stuart and, two and a half years later, Malcolm. When Malcolm was eighteen months old, Peter abandoned the family. He eventually married five times.

Emily then married Mike Edwards, a tailor (who, probably to disguise his origins, had changed his name from Levi), and decided to call herself Eve. Eve Edwards was a good-time girl and a flirt, boasting a sexual intimacy with the millionaire tycoon Sir Charles Clore. McLaren loathed his stepfather and felt betrayed by his mother, who was permanently absent, by day helping to run the small family clothing factory, Eve Edwards Ltd, and by night out with her lovers. Her sons were brought up by their grandmother, Rose Isaacs, who lived next door.

Rose Isaacs was born in 1887. Wanting to become an actress, she had taken elocution lessons which made her sound pretentious and affected. She was separated from her husband and, frustrated by her circumscribed life, lived out her fantasies through her grandson Malcolm, with whom she shared a bed until he was ten years old: ‘She created her own world and I lived in it and was protected by it,’ he remembered in 1996. ‘She allowed me to do anything; anything, in her eyes, that was not boring. Her motto was, if you were bad you were good, and if you were good you were boring.’

Favouring Malcolm at the expense of his brother Stuart, Rose established a pattern that he was to repeat as a father and stepfather. He was encouraged to defy authority, particularly that of his teachers – egged on by his grandmother, he lasted only one day at the William Patten School in Stoke Newington. After a short spell with a private tutor, he attended a fee-paying Jewish school called Avigdor in nearby Lordship Lane. His final schooling was provided by the Orange Hill Grammar School in Burnt Oak, where he passed an unremarkable three O-levels in 1961. Spoilt by Grandmother Rose and ignored by his parents, McLaren developed a jaundiced view of family life. He became a troublemaker, attracted to any philosophy that incited anarchy and excused belligerence.

Following in Stuart’s desert-booted footsteps, McLaren became a mod, a youth style which by 1958 had ousted the teddy boys’ insular little Englandism. The mods were dazzled by sharp Italian tailoring and American casuals, such as windcheaters, check or intasia knitted shirts, and short, close-fitting, single-breasted, small-lapelled jackets. Mod tailoring recalled the sexual tightness of Italian Renaissance court dress: the short jacket, codpiece and hose. The sixties version revealed every flex of muscle. The boxy, waistless ‘bum-freezer’ jacket with narrow, notched lapels fell from unpadded shoulders. It was single-breasted and three-button (only the centre one being fastened), and ventless, or virtually so. A series of flapless ‘ticket’ and secret pockets were inserted into its plain dark cloth. The jacket was worn with American import denim jeans or slacks that were tight against the thigh and narrowed to a sixteen-inch hem. Trousers hung on the hips rather than being suspended under the armpits with braces, and the zip relegated the buttoned fly to the fashion scrapheap. A white drip-dry or woollen shirt, desert boots and short socks and short, tidy hair completed the look. The effect was hard, clean and modern.

By the autumn of 1964 McLaren, a puny, aggressive flâneur, had run away from home and found work with a vintner in the West End of London. The previous year he had taken evening classes at St Martin’s College of Art, and in 1964 he entered Harrow Art School, where he befriended Vivienne’s brother Gordon. Thanks to a series of student grants, he remained in higher education (Reigate, Walthamstow, Chelsea, Chiswick, Croydon and Goldsmith’s) for the next seven years. McLaren was one of a generation of British art school graduates who were to become prominent in the nation’s phenomenally successful pop music, pop art, advertising and media industries, which contributed significantly both to Britain’s gross national product and its cultural prestige.

By 1965 Vivienne could no longer sustain her dull marriage. Despite Derek Westwood’s kindness, good looks and dancing skills, she was bored. She did not share his simple interests, and resented the fact that, as she saw it, she ‘was not learning from staying with him’. A tempting world had opened up to her through her brother Gordon and his friends, five or six years her junior, at Harrow Art School. Despite Derek’s pleas, she strained to escape the marriage. After several attempts to leave, she finally broke away in 1965, taking three-year-old Ben to live in her parents’ flat above the post office. The couple divorced the following year. (In later life, Vivienne conceded that Derek had been a good husband and a kind man – ‘too kind for me’.)

Every day Vivienne would wheel Ben’s pushchair past Gordon’s Morris Cowley, parked outside the Swire flat, and peer through the steamed-up windows. There, hunched under an old coat, lay Malcolm McLaren, who had taken up Gordon’s offer to move from his previous abode – ‘under a tree in the Harrow-on-the-Hill cemetery’ – into the car. Dora Swire disapproved of this dosser, and refused to allow him into their home, but once she had taken her place behind the post office counter, McLaren would sneak upstairs to take a bath and cadge breakfast.

Vivienne admired this camp dandy in his makeshift home, and he was amused by her fiery temperament and Sunday school ways. His earliest memory of her, as a shy Christian out of Picture Post dressed in home-knits and kilt, was a caricature that served his storytelling. She remembered being ‘a mess’ when she met him: ‘I was into the dolly bird look. Wispy hair and fur coats. I looked dreadful.’ McLaren loved to expose her provincialism: ‘London seemed to her a city of snobs … she found the people frightening, arrogant and unkind and she could not deal with it.’ Though this curious provincial and this posturing metropolitan seemed poles apart, McLaren’s rebelliousness was simply a more aggressive expression of Vivienne’s discontent. As well as their fertile imaginations, they shared an inclination to conjure up idyllic notions of youth and childhood; he because he had not enjoyed his, she because she had. They also shared a low boredom threshold, and an unwillingness to mention their fathers. But in other ways they were very different. While Vivienne had an earnestness that bordered on the humourless, McLaren treated life as a game, and adopted an irreverent and sarcastic pose.

Like Vivienne’s Glossop schoolfriend Maureen Purcell, McLaren’s relatives were Jewish tailors. Just as Maureen had introduced her into new circles in Manchester and Leeds, so Vivienne believed that McLaren could provide access to a fascinating world: ‘I felt there were so many doors to open, and he had the key to all of them. Plus he had a political attitude and I needed to align myself.’ She sought out his company, impressed that ‘he was cultured. His family were Portuguese diamond merchants way back and had a whole cosmopolitan understanding.’ But McLaren was afraid of women: they were either unreliable, like his mother, or suffocatingly manipulative, like Grandmother Rose. He was unable to befriend them and, though his friends were lustily experimenting in that dawn of promiscuity, he remained a virgin.

Dissatisfied with her uneducated state, Vivienne determined to improve herself in the company of McLaren and her brother’s student friends. But for a time she remained suspicious that artists were ‘anarchists, time-wasters or vagabonds’, and her nature prevented her from sharing wholeheartedly in their lack of interest in the practical side of life. Torn between the self-improvement promised by higher education and the necessity to find a job, she enrolled for a Diploma of Education course at St Gabriel’s Teacher Training College in Camberwell, South London, reasoning that she could always be an art teacher. ‘I thought, if I can’t find a way to make a living at painting’ – which, under the influence of her brother Gordon and his art-school friends she had come to believe to be the most desirable way of life – ‘at least I can be a teacher, and teach someone else to paint.’

Gordon left Harrow to study at the London College of Film Technique. He rented a rundown house at 31 King’s Avenue, near Clapham North underground station in South London. Two fellow film students, John Broderick and Chuck Coryn, variously described by McLaren as ‘American draft dodgers’ or ‘Vietnam vets’, shared the house, and after a few months McLaren joined them.

To McLaren’s horror, Vivienne and her son moved in shortly afterwards, compromising his ‘boys’ domain’. He also found Vivienne attractive, and ‘a sexual threat’. But the attraction was not mutual. Vivienne liked pretty boys, and McLaren’s rail-thin physique, pigeon-toed stance, unruly ginger hair and rage-red face, which he optimistically tried to disguise under talcum powder (hence his nickname ‘Talcy Malcy’), were not conventionally handsome. Looks aside, his pent-up anger would from time to time explode violently, and this disturbed her. But slowly, over the weeks, a combination of boredom, curiosity and sheer proximity to this compelling storyteller broke down her indifference to him. While the others attended film school, they passed the hours hunched over an inadequate bar-heater, sharing beans on toast and tea, or smoking Woodbines and downing whiskies late into the night.

As McLaren lectured her on the political power of art and the appeal of cult fashions, Vivienne assembled the costume-jewellery crosses she had started to sell at the weekend in Portobello market to add to her modest student grant and social security benefit. The jewellery was to be their first joint venture. McLaren would watch his methodical companion set the stones in place – red, then orange, then purple, then red again – before intervening to rearrange the colours. ‘She started to be taken by me because of the way I put the beads together and made them less boring, and … I was intrigued by her … because she hung on my every word,’ he recalled, with characteristic egotism. Vivienne readily deferred to his suggestions, which she believed were ‘more like exercises, more balanced in the way modern art was, instead of what I was doing … all sort of bunged together. His were more artist {sic}, mine more crafts. I always thought his ideas were so much better than mine.’ During these weeks, their roles were established and set for the next decade: she as the student craftsman, he the opinionated art director.

McLaren, who was obsessed with fashion and style, also art directed Vivienne’s appearance. She abandoned the ‘dolly bird’ look. ‘He took me by the hand and made me more stylish. I was twenty-five and got heavily into the school uniform look,’ which she bought in the children’s department of the Oxford Street department store John Lewis and wore with ankle-socks. This formative lesson in style, and its associations with carefree romance, were to emerge two decades later in Vivienne’s collections.

Intimacies were exchanged. McLaren disclosed his hatred for his polygamous and absent parents, who had turned him into ‘an odd fish’, and his regular nightmares about his mother. ‘He had just left home very traumatically, a very Jewish home, and he felt he didn’t have any roots outside Jewish society.’ Vivienne says, romanticising his background somewhat. She in turn confided her relief that she had escaped her marriage to a ‘no-hoper’, in which she had been ‘saddled to the kitchen sink with a screaming brat round my ankles’.

McLaren’s anger was channelled into subscribing to any movement that incited anarchy. According to his first art teacher at Harrow, Theodore Ramos, he was ‘playing with art’, but Vivienne was intrigued by McLaren’s anarchist conceits, which suggested an outlet for her righteous indignation about ‘this horrible world’. Nevertheless, she was not in love with this ranting revolutionary, though his manic displays of hysteria did arouse her sexual appetite. ‘He seemed quite spectacular at the time, really. He had a very, very pale face {thanks to the talcum powder} and he had very slight hair on his skin and very, very close-cropped hair. But I once remember I said something to him … and he suddenly exploded in front of me … His lips were very red in the context of his pale face and I remember his mouth – he’s got a well-formed, well-shaped mouth, quite pointed it is – well, it just opened up and I could see all the gums inside. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I respected this kind of intensity.’ No physical detail was missed by Vivienne, whose visual recall is exceptional.

When Vivienne mentioned her attraction for an Italian she had met in a Soho coffee bar and who had promised to take her to Italy, McLaren’s jealousy was excited. Posing as her disinterested friend, he warned her against this ‘Italian gigolo’. Couldn’t she see that his promises were just a ploy to get her into bed? Many years later he admitted that he ‘did fancy her’, and had ‘an ulterior motive’ for his self-serving advice.

Though McLaren felt secure in his mental domination of this awe-struck, to his mind sexually experienced older woman, he was uncomfortable when she provoked him by walking round the house naked. Unwilling to make a direct approach, he deployed an emotional cliché to seduce her – appealing to her motherly instincts. He slept on a mattress in the sitting room, and one morning he feigned a stomach ache, moaning and groaning until Vivienne surrendered her more comfortable divan and went to the chemist for medicine. On her return she nursed him until nightfall when, since he would not return to his own bed, she stripped and climbed in alongside him, unconvincingly claiming that she had no other recourse. Finally they consummated their two-year friendship, the twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher instructing the twenty-one-year-old virgin, who ‘refused to get out of bed for days’.

Habitually loath to acknowledge any emotional tie, McLaren jocularly dismissed the incident as the amusing sexual initiation of an innocent lad by a voracious nymphomaniac. Vivienne saw it differently: ‘He pursued me aggressively. It wore me out and finally I succumbed.’ Lust may have driven McLaren to lure her into bed, but her resistance was hardly staunch.

The loss of his virginity unsettled McLaren. He became possessive, insisting that Vivienne ditch her Italian friend. If a man came to tea or was seen in the street with her, he would ‘have a fit’. (He retains an extremely short and violent temper.) On one occasion, in despair, he shaved his head roughly, and theatrically emerged covered in blood. These masochistic poses appealed to Vivienne who, casting herself as the indispensable nurse to this lust-sick youth, reasoned that she could not leave him: ‘He thought I’d committed myself, but only because he’d been so confiding in me. He thought I’d just thrown him over and not realised the seriousness of the situation. He’d never had a girlfriend before me. And so I started to – I hesitate to use the right word – not fucking, and not making love, because I wasn’t in love with him – I guess you could say I started sleeping with him.’

Their sex life was irregular. Throughout their fifteen-year relationship, McLaren only sporadically indulged Vivienne’s appetites, partly in order to retain control over her. Though he became infamous for advocating sexual freedom and perversion, he was remarkably prudish about his own sex life. When pushed, the most he would say was, ‘I could never understand Vivienne’s attitude to sex,’ adding defensively, ‘As far as I know we had good sex and she was happy about that.’ Their working relationship dwarfed their sexual one.

Within weeks Vivienne discovered that she was pregnant. McLaren’s attitude to her changed immediately. He claimed to have been duped into thinking she was using contraception, and the prospect of imminent fatherhood distressed him. Since Vivienne was not in love with him, they discussed an abortion. In Britain in 1967, abortion was illegal. Most women who wished to terminate a pregnancy had to risk illness, even death, either from barbaric and dangerous do-it-yourself methods or at the hands of a backstreet abortionist, at considerable expense. An abortion was strongly recommended by the possessive Grandmother Rose, who disapproved of Vivienne, whom she dismissed both as a gentile and a scheming older woman from the wrong side of the tracks who was already burdened with another man’s child. She was determined to end the relationship.

Because Vivienne was close to her mother (‘perhaps everyone is except me, so maybe that’s normal,’ he conceded), McLaren tried to break communications between mother and daughter. Her parents were infuriated, regarding him as wilfully irresponsible. When he saw them approaching the house one day, he jumped out of the window to avoid a confrontation. His ‘benefactor’, as he referred to his grandmother, offered to pay for an abortion. ‘Vivienne was fairly for it,’ he says, but the deliberation continued for weeks, right up to the moment when, standing on the porch of a Harley Street doctor, Grandmother Rose’s cash in hand, Vivienne finally made up her mind and set off to Bond Street to buy a coat instead. McLaren felt trapped. He warned Vivienne that he would take no responsibility for the child, but by now she was too emotionally entangled to terminate her pregnancy.

In recalling his relationship with Vivienne now, McLaren describes an extraordinary parabola: from cold-hearted refusal that she ever meant anything to him, to the admission of deep fondness and even perhaps, in his own terms, love. What were his feelings for the woman who was carrying his child? ‘When she was pregnant I never saw her looking so beautiful … it was the time that I’d seen her look the most kind, the most open, the most centred and somehow as though she belonged … it was meant to be. I’ll never forget the vision of her being pregnant.’ This tenderly remembered vision of her is not typical of McLaren’s practised persona of cynical control.

Their child was two weeks overdue, and the stoic mother worked right up to the last moment, selling her jewellery and hoping that the baby would not arrive that day. Finally, she was summoned to the hospital in Streatham to be induced and, after an intense, short labour, her second son was born at teatime on 30 November 1967. She had been hoping for a daughter.

Grandmother Rose dissuaded McLaren from attending the delivery, and it was not until several days later that he went to the hospital to see his son. Having being quizzed about his absence by an officious nurse, he approached Vivienne’s bed. She recalls that his initial reaction was, ‘He’s not mine! He doesn’t even look like me.’ McLaren remembers, ‘I’ve never seen Vivienne look happier.’ Vivienne retains a poignant memory of her lover arriving in a snow-dusted Harris tweed greatcoat – bought on the way to the hospital at a second-hand shop on the Vauxhall Bridge Road – and often includes a description of it when sentimentally recounting her time in the maternity ward. The traditional Scottish cloth was to play an important role in her life nearly twenty years later.

The boy was christened Joseph Ferdinand Corré, the middle name after McLaren’s favourite Velázquez portrait, Archbishop Fernando de Valdés y Llanos in the National Gallery, and Corré being Grandmother Rose’s maiden name. While Vivienne called her son ‘Joe’, McLaren always referred to him as ‘Joseph’. In refusing to confer his own surname on his son he was distancing himself not only from paternity but also from his own parents, the former distance later underscored by Joseph being forbidden to call him ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’. The birth strained the relationship for McLaren, but it convinced Vivienne to commit herself to it.

In the autumn of 1967 McLaren had enrolled at Croydon College of Art and Design in South London to study painting, and he and Vivienne moved to a ground-floor flat in Aigburth Mansions, Hackford Road, near the Kennington Oval, which McLaren found from an advertisement in a sweet shop. The flat, in a terrace of three-storey pebble-dashed buildings, was in good condition by student standards, and the family was briefly happy there, entertaining Gordon and friends from Croydon on macrobiotic fare. Six weeks after the birth, Vivienne, needing money, reluctantly returned to work as a teacher, leaving Joseph in a crèche.

One of McLaren’s Croydon friends was Jamie Reid, the son of a radical Scottish family. Though his political commitment was temporarily debased by his association with McLaren’s disingenuous radicalism, Reid remained active, working after graduation for a community press in Croydon which served black, feminist, prisoner and trade unionist causes. At art school he stood alongside McLaren in the hope of changing the world; his companion was happy simply to play up and dress up.

In 1967, radical elements in the student communities across Europe were enthralled by a new publication, Guy Debord’s Societé de Spectacle. Debord was the chief theorist of the Situationist International, founded in Italy in 1957, which declared that artists should break down the barriers between life and art and, acting as provocateurs, create ridiculous situations in urban environments as a nihilist reaction to the status quo. Developing the Marxist critique that every aspect of capitalist life had been reduced to a commodity, the situationists fused it with the artistic agitation of dadaism, the absurdities of surrealism and the unrestrained hedonism of their times. The setting up of ridiculous spectacles was to be a modern expression of popular resistance.

Debord’s bestseller honed the arguments about the rampant commodification of cultural icons, and became the textbook behind les évenements de Mai the following year in Paris. From the Situationist International and Debord, McLaren absorbed the manner in which the media could be exploited through the production of manifestos, newspapers, collages and misinformation. Through a British offshoot of the movement, King Mob, he became acquainted with the writings of the Scottish Beat writer Alexander Trocchi and the American anarchist/feminist Valerie Solanas, author of ‘The SCUM {Society for Cutting up Men} Manifesto’, who gained notoriety by shooting Andy Warhol in 1968. Guided by situationism, McLaren perfected his skills as the great dissembler.

A friend from Harrow Art School, Fred Vermorel, who was living in Paris as a ‘hanger-on’ at the Sorbonne, corresponded with McLaren during the months preceding les évenements of May 1968. Like the 1965 race riots in the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts and the anti-Vietnam war rallies, these French student demonstrations were vividly communicated on television, uniting the younger generation across the world in its condemnation of what it saw as heavy-handed suppression by governments.