Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (28 page)

“He didn’t have any reason to be worried,” Kim insists, “but that’s the way he was.” Coveted by a sizeable portion of the female teenybop population, promoted unreservedly by his management and record company as the (one) good-looking member of his band, a talented, passionate, witty, lovable, beautiful boy for whom the world was his oyster, still Keith Moon fixated himself with the idea that he was not worthy of a 16-year-old part-time model from Bournemouth who’d never had another serious boyfriend. To him, there was only one way to ensure he could hold on to Kim forever, this despite his recent entry into the world of pop stardom and all its temptations, and Kim’s only recent graduation to the age of consent, let alone of adulthood.

‘I spoke to my mum tonight and told her that I was going to get engaged to you in four-five months,’ he wrote at the beginning of this same letter. ‘She was worried that, as you were younger, you still just had a big crush on me instead of the real thing. I told her that I wouldn’t want to marry you if I thought that you would leave me. I hope for God’s sake I’m not wrong. To me you’re everything I’ll ever want so please don’t stop loving me.’

If anyone had cause to be ‘frightened’ about the intensity of Keith’s feelings, it was Kim, and with good reason. One Wednesday when Keith visited Bournemouth, which became more difficult as the Who found themselves playing live sometimes seven nights a week, Kim had a gig of her own. Indeed, her career as a 16-year-old beach town starlet was successful enough that she frequently found herself lending money to her pop star boyfriend for the train fare home. (He always seemed to be broke.) This particular day she had an assignment that reflected the interests of her area – a photo shoot for a yachting magazine. Nothing as glamorous as playing the drums on television, Kim’s job was simply to stand on a yacht in the arms of a male model, who was to glow radiantly at her affections.

–Not with my Kim you don’t! Keith stormed onto the photo set, all five-foot-eight of him lunging at the male model with the aggression he usually reserved for the drums, knocking the cameraman aside, grabbing the hapless model’s shirt with both hands and threatening him with serious bodily violence in no uncertain terms. Leave my Kim alone. No one touches her but me. Others on set were forced to intervene. It’s only a photo shoot, they tried to assure him, nobody’s suggesting anything more than that. But Keith simply could not see it that way. The shoot was ruined.

Kim was subsequently told by her agent never to let her boyfriend near a set again if she wanted to keep working. Keith went a step further: there was no way Kim was to keep working as a model if she was going to be with him. He didn’t want every grubby boy in the country – or grown-up sailor man on the south coast, which was about the extent of it – masturbating over her beautiful image. Never mind that his face could appear on every television show and every magazine that wanted it, that Kim had to share her boyfriend with a million other teenage girls. Keith wasn’t going to share
her
with anyone. She was his. For now and always. “That was our problem,” she says these many years later, uncomfortably reliving the memories. “I was his possession.”

If Keith’s jealousy and obsession seem to have exploded out of all due proportion more or less overnight, if they clash with Kim’s initial memories of a shy, quiet, pleasantly insecure young boy, reflect for a moment upon Keith’s world. Imagine yourself a teenage boy still burying your head in the make-believe of Superman and Spiderman at the same time as you are bedding the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. Imagine yourself with insecurities like any other teenager, the usual doubts about self-worth and personal prowess that always come to the fore when taken out of a familiar environment and placed in a series of unusual ones, and then imagine what those new environments are: television shows, press interviews, live concerts where 1,000 eyes are on you, teenage girls screaming at you, your picture in all the papers as the ‘cute’ one, hanging out at the ritziest, most happening clubs with the stars of the day, and you yourself one of them, a rapidly rising beacon of youth, a true face of the newly christened ‘swinging Sixties’ though you’re only 18 … Imagine what it is you do for a living – hitting the drums like a madman – and understand the impossibility of admitting to weakness or lack of confidence if you want that reputation to grow. If you don’t have time to stop and think (and who does when they’re 18 and the world is falling at their feet?], imagine how easy it is to forget where the world of fantasy ends and reality begins. Or where reality ends and fantasy begins. Does anyone expect you to stay normal in such circumstances? Is there any reason you shouldn’t let your Clark Kent turn into Superman when you see Lois Lane in danger?