And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (45 page)

“The Teddys. They don't like us.”

“Who are the Teddys?”

“Assholes who hate punks. They attacked us on the street. They gave me two black eyes, too. Sid got knifed. But we're okay. And I'll be ready for 'em next time. Sid bought me a truncheon.”

Two weeks later she phoned to say she and Sid had moved to a different hotel. When I asked why, she replied that the manager of the hotel had asked them to leave.

“Sid got mad,” she explained, “and dangled me out the window. I was screaming at him to let me back in and I guess it pissed off the other people in the hotel.”

“Are you okay?” I asked. What else could I say?

“Oh, yeah. It was nothing. He was just upset.”

I did not yet know Sid or understand Nancy's relationship with him. But this incident clearly indicated to me that it had an ugly, violent streak. It made me wonder if perhaps Sid was the actual source of the beating Nancy had blamed on the Teddy boys. I didn't ask her. I couldn't. I didn't want to know. Besides, she kept assuring me his name and on-stage manner were an act, that he was in reality a “sweet lad.” Indeed, the few times I'd spoken to him on the phone he'd seemed pleasant.

They got in another reportedly violent quarrel in a different London hotel room at the end of November. Again, Nancy's screams brought the manager. This time the British press was also alerted. The papers reported that the manager went up to Nancy and Sid's room to find a bloodstained bed, a near-naked Sid bleeding from cuts on his arms, and broken glass all over the carpet. There was a bottle of pills on the nightstand. A police inquiry was launched.

Nancy had a different version.

“It was nothing,” she told me over the phone. “The manager didn't like us and he wanted us out is all. The pills were a prescription.”

“Do you need a lawyer?”

“There's nothing to worry about, Mom,” she insisted. “Forget about it. Malcolm's lawyer will take care of everything.”

“Are you sure you're okay, Nancy?”

“Of course. It was
nothing
. Sid was just upset. Something to do with the group.”

However, because of this second run-in with a hotel manager, Nancy and Sid decided to find a place of their own. She told me a few days later that they'd rented a small carriage house in the Maida Vale section of London.

“It's our own little house,” she gushed, “with our own little furniture. We bought a sofa. You'll love it. It's great. You'll
have
to come and stay.”

It was domestic bliss, punk style.

There was a second consequence to this hotel incident. A British reporter phoned us for some background information on Nancy. We gave it to him. We never heard from him again or saw the article. It was our first contact with the press, our first inkling that Nancy was becoming a celebrity in her own right. Why, we couldn't imagine. The hotel room story was not picked up by the American press. The Sex Pistols were still not very big here, nor was punk.

The group was bigger than ever in England. A second album,
Never Mind the Bollocks
, was recorded on the Virgin Records label. A film project,
Who Killed Bambi
, was in the works with financing from Twentieth Century-Fox. Responding to the incredible popularity of the Sex Pistols in England, America's Warner Records finally got in on the act that winter. They invested in a U.S. release of
Never Mind the Bollocks
to be tied in to a winter Sex Pistols concert tour of the United States. McLaren had arrived in the big money.

Nancy phoned to tell me the news about the U.S. tour. She was very excited about being able to come back and see us. She was anxious for us to meet her Sid.

Our feelings were mixed. Yes, we wanted to see our daughter. But she was very far away from us now. We had a life of our own, a life that no longer had a real connection to her. Frank and I had a social life now. We had people over to the house for dinner, something we'd never felt comfortable doing before. We had spent some money on the house, installing wallpaper and a sliding door from the kitchen to the patio. I had a new job and enjoyed it. David was now in his junior year at prep school and doing well and Suzy had found a job cooking in a health food restaurant, which she enjoyed, and was hard at work on her painting. Meanwhile, the four of us were planning a winter vacation to Saint Thomas.

All of a sudden I had visions of Nancy dragging us to a Sex Pistols concert. I had visions of her inviting the band and its entire following to our house, and of not being able to get rid of them.

As it happened, it was a false alarm. Malcolm McLaren refused to allow Nancy to come with the group on the U.S. tour. Apparently he did not like her. He found her disruptive and a challenge to his authority over Sid. Reportedly, he blamed her for introducing Sid to hard drugs.

“Sid wants me to come,” she told me over the phone, “but they won't let me. They said nobody else is bringing women so he can't.”

“Maybe it wouldn't be fun anyway,” I said. “After all, he'll be working.”

“Yeah, but it means I'll be alone on my birthday. All the fuck alone.”

“I'm sorry, sweetheart.”

I
was
sorry she couldn't come. And relieved at the same time. As it happened, she was not alone for her birthday. The much ballyhooed U.S. tour of the Sex Pistols was an unqualified disaster. It was aborted midway through, and Johnny Rotten left the group.

The tour got off to a roaring start. The band members got surly and walked out on an interview on the
Today
show. Then they headed for a concert swing through the Deep South, where it was believed they would get the maximum mileage out of their shock value and hopefully arouse the kind of rage they were able to with England's punk teens. At first they did. In Atlanta the audience threw plastic cups and popcorn at them. In Dallas, Johnny Rotten called the audience “redneck cowboy faggots” and Sid had his lip bloodied.

In Memphis the house was packed and rowdy. But within thirty minutes the audience was streaming out. Why? Because people had come to see the much publicized freak show, and, apparently, a lot of it was hype—always had been. There was no on-stage vomiting, for example. The Sex Pistols were simply not as outrageous as the reputation that preceded them. Additionally, they were terrible: Johnny Rotten could not sing; Sid Vicious did not know how to play the instrument he was holding on stage.

Without a punk following, without any musical talent, the Sex Pistols were not a success in America. Far from it. They were a joke. A bad joke. By the time they got to Los Angeles, the tour was off and the band shattered by business and personal squabbling.

Still, they drew headlines. When they got to New York, Sid had
to be carried from the plane unconscious. Reportedly, he had overdosed on drugs and alcohol.

He was back in London in plenty of time for Nancy's twentieth birthday. And for his and Nancy's arraignment on drug charges stemming from the hotel room incident at the end of November. As far as I've been able to learn, the charges against them were dismissed. As they left the courtroom the British photographers snapped a picture of Nancy and Sid. She was, according to one account, “wearing stiletto-heel boots, a mop of wild, white hair, and a defiant pout.”

We had always called it That Look.

Coming as it did on the heels of the Sex Pistols' much-heralded failed tour, the arraignment photo made the U.S. papers. Some featured it on the front page. Here was a nice, fresh angle—Sid apparently had a violent, drug-related romance going with an American girl. The Philadelphia papers jumped on it with particular zeal. Hometown girl makes bad.

Nancy was now a celebrity. Our life would never be the same.

The reporters started calling. Eight or ten of them called the day after the photo appeared, from Philadelphia, from New York, from California. All of them wanted to know about us, about Nancy's history, about her drug background. I said I didn't care to comment. As far as I was concerned, our lives were none of their business.

This was my first brush with the American press, and I was appalled. Several reporters were abusive and nasty to me, suggested they would simply go ahead and print what they knew to be hearsay and fabrication if I didn't cooperate with them. I repeated that I did not care to comment. I had the right not to.

“Why should anyone be interested in Nancy anyway?” Frank muttered at dinner that night. “It's nonsense. She's no celebrity.”

The next day my statement that I did not care to comment came out in more than one paper as: “When informed of her daughter's arrest in London on drug charges, Mrs. Spungen replied, ‘I don't care.' ” Several of our neighbors had also been contacted and quoted. They told me that they, too, had been misquoted.

I can't generalize about the practices of the American press, but in our case many reporters were unethical. Before my involvement with them, I'd always believed reporters were there to report the news. Now I realize that they are also given the license to manufacture it.

The press made Nancy into a celebrity. No fascination in her existed until the reporters stepped in, created an aura about her and Sid, and then milked it for all it was worth to sell papers. The press portrayed Sid and Nancy as Romeo and Juliet in black leather, roaring into hell. Sid was seen as a pop star associated with manufactured violence who was living it out for real. Nancy was seen as a coarse tramp who took whatever Sid dished out and gave it right back to him. Together they were portrayed as the living embodiment of the punk movement.

In reality there was no sensational story there. All that was there was illusion, a somewhat sick illusion but mostly just very sad. In reality there was a bright, mentally disturbed twenty-year-old girl whose misguided ambition it was to be associated with a famous rock musician. She had realized her ambition, she thought. Only her rock musician wasn't
really
a rock musician. He, like Nancy, believed he was. But he wasn't. In reality he was a talentless twenty-one-year-old kid off the streets whose pop celebrity had been achieved by means of hype and fakery. Sid was
not
a musician. He was simply a celebrity, a nonphenomenon—someone who had spat and snarled at an audience and become famous as a result.

In reality each was living out a dream via the press. Each was living up to a press-created image. I couldn't understand why anyone cared to read about them. The Sid and Nancy story was not one I myself would have read in the newspapers. But others, apparently, did.

The most painful story came out in the Philadelphia
Inquirer
a few days later. The newspaper had followed up the arraignment photo and story by assigning a reporter, Julia Cass, to probe into Nancy's past. She succeeded in opening up our private odyssey with Nancy to the public—by going around us. She spoke to Nancy's friend Karen, to Mr. Sylvester at Darlington. She retraced Nancy's route to Avon, then to Colorado and back again.

And she spoke to Nancy in London. She asked Nancy if she was a groupie.

“I am not or never have been a groupie,” Nancy replied in the article. “If a groupie came up to Sid, he'd kick her in the face.”

She asked Nancy about her domestic life.

“I sleep all day and go out to the shops, you know, for bread and milk. I don't cook. This place isn't a pigsty or anything, but I'm not into cleaning.”

She asked Nancy about her future plans, now that the band had broken up.

“I never think about the future,” Nancy replied.

Nancy then asked the reporter to send me a copy of the article when it came out. She wanted me to see how well she was doing.

We were extremely hurt and angry over this article. It is one thing to give up your privacy. It is another to have it taken from you. We felt victimized, like our family's dirty laundry had been snatched and hung in public. Moreover, we couldn't understand why anyone would want to read about us. But read they did.

At the office the following day I could tell that everyone had seen the article. They didn't say so, but I could tell. They looked embarrassed. They should have been. It was none of their damned business.

We began to get obscene phone calls as a result of the article. David, who was home sick with the flu, took one from a man who said, “Tell your parents it's all their fault. They should have taken the Pill.” Other callers simply cursed at him and hung up.

We also got obscene mail. One was simply a copy of the Julia Cass story with various words circled and obscenities written next to them. We called the police.

This public response baffled and upset us even more. Sixteen-year-old David took it upon himself a few days after the publication of the article to phone Julia Cass at the newspaper. He told her that she had hurt our family, that we'd been receiving obscene calls and letters, and that it wasn't justified based on the relative unimportance of the story. We were glad that David called. We appreciated it. We also thought it was a mature thing for him to do. He had something he'd wanted to get off his chest and he had. Julia Cass vigorously defended the story to him, though she later admitted to me that his call had affected her profoundly. By then we had become good friends. Still are. I can now ask her why anyone cared about Sid and Nancy, since I still cannot fathom it. And she, a veteran journalist, can simply reply, “They were the ultimate tabloid news story—amusing, amazing, freaky.”

David spoke to Nancy a few days later. She called to find out if the story had come out. David told her it had, and that we'd been suffering as a result. She apologized, then asked him for a copy of the article for her portfolio. Then she said Sid had something important to say, and put him on. What Sid had to tell David was that while he'd been touring America with the Sex Pistols, he'd had sex with a transvestite. All of the gory details followed.