RICHARD TREVASKIS MEETS MALCOLM MCLAREN

By John Stapleton

For me London of the 1980s was always bound up with a band of Australians I had known for years.

Richard Trevaskis, who had starred in a play I wrote back in the 1970s called The Police Commissioner’s Grandmother, was one of the leading lights.

The play had garnered good reviews and I experienced for the first and last time the pleasure of sitting in a theatre listening to an audience laugh at my sense of humour.

A subsequent play The Oblivion Seekers, a multi-layered science fiction epic big on collapsing reality systems, was never performed. It found its’ first and only outing at a playwright’s forum in Canberra and was hated by the judges; ending that particular avenue of creativity.

We were all a little in love with Richard. He kept insisting on going out with girls while kissing us affectionately each time we saw him.

London, although we hadn’t realized it at the time, turned out to be Richard’s high water mark.

He was the barman par excellent; looked smashing in black and white. Trevaskis had a knack of getting gigs in some of London’s trendiest nightclubs, including that massive cathedral of hedonism known as Heaven. Richard was always a loyal friend. He showed particular skill at spotting our little gang and swishing us drinks from behind the bar across the six deep queues of customers clamoring for his attention. All with the greatest of panache. There were always privileges to knowing him. Until there weren’t.

Richard died of a drug overdose, retreating from London to Sydney and finally to Adelaide, along the way helping to organize some of Sydney and Adelaide’s wildest mega-parties before becoming an incoherent shell in his mother’s giant house. It was the most pointless of deaths.

Even in his final days Richard would have been interested in the news that Malcolm McLaren was dead.

The mother of my children relayed the news in the muggy heat of a Phnom Penh backyard in 2010, but it immediately took me back some 30 years to that day when, as per arrangement, Richard and I went to

interview Malcolm McLaren, often enough described as a Svengali like figure.

Richard Trevaskis acted as the photographer. He hoped it would be the beginning of a great career.

We were the boys from Australia, bumfuck nowhere as far as most Londoners were concerned.

Having more or less invented punk rock and the Sex Pistols, Malcolm had recently discovered opera.

His record, which I later played till no one could bear to hear it anymore, combining rock with Madam Butterfly, was just about to come out.

Everything seemed to be soaring then; the music, our lives, our loves; the endless adventures of London nights.

I would come home to my partner of the time sooner or later; but nothing much stopped some of us going out all night most every night.

Who was to know that this would be our last hurrah?

That Richard’s dreams of being a photographer or even a film maker would never amount to a pile of dust.

That these days, this interview, wasn't a precursor to an ever more fabulous life and successful career, but that this was it. There would be no rehearsal. We were already on the stage.

Richard didn’t finish work until late; and often drank heavily through until dawn. For a long time he got away with it. Women adored him. Men swooned. The lethal speed he kept scoring up Chelsea Road kept us running at a million miles an hour. Late at night the holy rituals led us to states of euphoria no human should endure.

Richard was always up at three or four in the morning, perfectly happy see a visitor. That was the sort of friend I liked.

For years aeer he died I kept expecKng Richard to show up in the early hours of the morning with a bojle under his arm; a sunny smile plastered across his ever appealing face, giving me a big hug and talking about everything and everybody just for the fun of it.

When, a few years later the whole of Sydney turned clean and sober overnight as self-help programs and personal recovery became the trendiest thing on God’s planet, I took Richard to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the hope he might join the throng of the recovered.

Instead of spending his nights in that Elizabeth Bay apartment with the harbor lapping on the sandstone walls outside; working his way through bottle after bottle of vodka and wondering why nobody visited him much anymore.

Richard, a walking encyclopedia on cocktails and every form of fancy alcohol known to man, couldn't think of anything worse than a sober life.

So I took him to a meeting when the slide had already begun, when the good times were in the past and the mega-parties of the era, which took months of planning and were remembered and discussed for months afterwards, were just objects in the litter of the city’s social history.

When the crates of fine beer and the bottles of high class booze began to clutter Richard’s apartment in an embarrassing way and he became pathetically glad to see any of the old gang.

Some of Sydney’s meetings were just ridiculous, full of people who didn’t have a problem except that they could never fit in anywhere and lacked ambition, motivation or talent. Instead they made up stories of their own dereliction and despair as incest survivors, describing their own supposedly terrible rock bottoms by piecing together bits and pieces of other people’s narratives.

At least they now felt they belonged somewhere, with a crew as equally dysfunctional and unaccomplished as themselves.

It was a terrible meeting. Even I, filled at the time with the fervour of recovery and the substantiality of a mainstream job, had to admit that.

It was an inner-city meeting I thought Richard might relate to; but far from being inspirational it was just chaotic. An old junky, obviously stoned, droned on for 30, 40, 50 minutes, and nothing Richard heard gave even so much as a glimmer of alternate fate lines.

After the meeting Richard couldn't wait to get down to the nearby pub the Lord Roberts, just couldn't wait. As I watched, he drank furiously, anything to wipe that dreadful meeting out of his mind.

Richard drank that night and every other night; and was determined not to stop; and that dismal meeting, that one attempt at rehabilitation in the soggy streets of Darlinghurst, became just one little point on the highway to no return.

Grow old? Forget it.

Richard retreated to his old bedroom in his mother's giant house in North Adelaide 1400 kilometers away. For the last year of his life I heard stories; and wanted to go and visit. We occasionally spoke on the phone. And then Richard was dead at barely 30 and there wouldn't be any visit south anyway.

But way back then, in London, Richard had been an aspiring young photographer and the idea of photographing Malcolm McLaren had excited him greatly.

We had shown up at McLaren's offices in Soho and while I did the interview Richard fussed around with all his gear, trying to pretend this was just another routine assignment. In fact it was the first time he had ever photographed a celebrity.

McLaren was an interview I had already sold to a magazine called Stiletto back in Australia.

After keeping us waiting for almost an hour McLaren couldn't have been more charming. It was that rarest of interviews. While not normally a fan of the interview format, I typed up the transcript, changed the order of the first and last sentences and sent the piece off. It read perfectly.

During the interview Malcolm disappeared several times into his offices and then re-emerged sniffing slightly, even more articulate than he had been minutes before, expansive on the future of fashion, music, cultural. Perhaps the high quality of the cocaine available in London at the time had as much to do with the quality of the interview as the subject’s natural gifts.

Richard fussed as McLaren expanded on his many themes. I was glad to see his earnest face there because I hated doing these jobs on my own.

What was the point of meeting famous people if you couldn't share the experience with someone afterwards?

Richard took photograph after photograph. And in later years would talk about the day he met Malcolm McLaren. And now McLaren is dead and Richard is dead; and everyone in those little rooms and past adventures has passed away; that precocious smile and fine body nothing but a skeleton in a remote grave yard.

“Malcolm McLaren is dead,” the mother of my children said as we lounged by a Phnom Penh pool behind 20 foot walls; the chaos of potholes and beggars that characterized the nearby streets lost on her. “Can you believe that? I loved Buffalo Gals. I loved the Sex Pistols.”

I just nodded. With her, saying nothing, silence, was the safest place to be.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

SALMAN RUSHDIE

John Stapleton.

The interview with Salman Rushdie took place in the same room where he had written Midnight’s Children. Despite having won the Booker Prize, these were the days before Satanic Verses scandalized the Islamic world and a fatwah was issued against him – a time when Rushdie’s fame was more or less contained within literary circles.

Serious breaches were breaking through the fabric of things.

I was using my newfound status as a freelance journalist to pursue literary idols.

Any Australian literary or features editor would practically slather down the phone If I asked them if they would like an interview with Joseph Heller, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Anthony Burgess, Dirk Bogarde or Salman Rushdie. And London was the place to do it all, to meet the gods.

I had walked on Hampstead Heath with Al Alvarez, who I had gone out of my way to befriend after interviewing him. He was the author of one of the bibles of my youth, a meditation on suicide and Sylvia Plath called The Savage God.

The story about his then just published book on Las Vegas and the lure of gambling, The Biggest Game In Town, got a good run in The Australian Financial Review. And I was off and running, the world full of hope, opportunity, fond affections.

Of course parts of Hampstead Heath were notorious as a gay beat, with God knows how many hundreds of men lurking in its bushes and hideaways. These weren’t the parts of the Heath on which we walked.

Back in the 1970s in the crowd with which I used to run, Sylvia Plath was one of our demi-gods, the author of The Savage God a legend.

To us, Plath’s early death at the hands of an oven in W.B. Yeats former London apartment simply made her all-the-more appealing.

We could quote lines from Plath's Daddy by rote; and we weren't even at school:

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time--

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe…”

“You do not do, you do not do, black shoe...you bastard I'm through” was one of our favorite lines.

“Sylvia Platitude” was scrawled across the lounge room wall of John Bygate’s terrace in Sydney's inner-city suburb of Paddington, the man who I wrote a short story about, and co-won a competition back in 1972. The then princely sum of $75. The discovery that you could make money out of something I liked doing, writing, was a revelation.

The British treated Australians, colonials as we were, with something between amusement and contempt.

But with the boldness of youth, it was still relatively easy to inveigle my way into all sorts of situations.

Salman was a special case.

In those days, before time and age and numerous life pressures crowded out the days and I would, like so many working journalists, be forced to interview people without having read a word of their work, heard their music or seen their paintings, back before the Executive Summary was all one would have time to read of some major report or other, back then, I always read as many of their books as possible before interviewing an author.

I particularly loved Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, as had millions of other readers. I read it in Bombay, or Mumbai as it became known, where the book was set. I even visited some of the locations in the book, including the site of the Jaan temple, in that sprawling, jumbled area of Mumbai with its feel of fading wealth which he describes so beautifully.

Midnight’s Children resonated with the chaos and multiple story lines of India. The London house where Rushdie lived at the time was a large hushed home which even then would have cost a substantial amount of money. Rushdie came from a wealthy family. Struggling to survive was not part of his experience, but was certainly part of mine.

I was living in squats at the time, and the casualness of the money struck me. My own life had been riddled with bohemian friends, and I was impressed by the substantiality of this world of casual influence and success.

A maid had opened the door. It soon became apparent that all four floors of the house were occupied by the Rushdie family; an astonishing thing in the London I mostly knew. His wife appeared briefly before disappearing into the bowels of the house. I was taken up to Rushdie's study.

In those days, before my short hand and personal hieroglyphics became good enough to keep up with most conversations, I used a tape recorder, which I duly set up.

Rushdie told me about his first published book, a science fiction novel called Grimus. And then the author pointed out a framed black and white photograph of a house featured in Midnight’s Children, the rambling Indian house where he had grown up.

Outside, before I knocked on the door, I had been frantically reading the last pages of Shame, the book I was ostensibly interviewing him about, a sprawling, black work set in Pakistan. Few of the characters were admirable, the plot confusing and the politics dark. Rushdie seemed impressed that I had actually read it.

The interview went well. He spoke disarmingly of the fame that had been thrust upon him with the phenomenal success of Midnight’s Children. He showed me the desk where he had written it; and asked: “If you had written a book like that, just sitting here, not really talking to anybody, without any orthodox plot, with multiple voices inside it, the voices of India, could you have possible imagined it would be a success?”

“No,” I replied.

And, of course, nor could he.

Afterwards, Rushdie saw me graciously to the door.

I walked back down the road into my own contrasting life in that overwhelming city.

After that intimate hour with one of the world's greatest writers, I always followed Rushdie’s career with interest, the wall of secrecy and security that surrounded him after the death threats stemming from Satanic Verses, the changed wives, his progress into the literary stratosphere.

The public relations person from Jonathan Cape said Rushdie had rang after our encounter and told her it was the best interview he had ever done. I couldn’t have been more chuffed.

The Final Days of Alastair Nicholson: Chief Justice Family Court of Australia, 2013. Pages 1-10.

The Final Days of Alastair Nicholson: Chief Justice Family Court of Australia. 2013. Pages 11-20.

DIRK BOGARDE

DIRK BOGARDE

JOHN STAPLETON

EXTRACT HUNTING THE FAMOUS

George Orwell finished writing 1984 in 1948, perhaps partly with the notion that the title depicted a date so far in the future the book would never age.

Within a few decades there would be countries where more than half of the population had been born since 1984.

The year did seem pivotal however, even if only because one of the 20th century’s most famous books had the same title.

The partner and I were settling into one of our cosier periods of domestic bliss. With Margaret Thatcher in full flight, in our political naivety it really did seem that the world was becoming increasingly Orwellian.

Martin had a trust fund.

I did not.

And the trust fund was kept under very tight wraps.

We were much the same age, in our mid-twenties – well he was 18 months younger.

And the younger was not about to keep the older in the style to which he was occasionally accustomed.

“Tighter than a fish’s asshole,” was one of the ways Martin was commonly described.

Everyone knew he had money.

Getting him to pay for a round of drinks was like climbing Mt Everest; well probably harder. Mt Everest just took perseverance. Getting Martin to pay for a round of drinks required a miracle.

It was old money.

Not flashy.

Not about to be spent.

Certainly not on a miscreant such as myself.

Instead, and not for the first time, I had to get inventive on that tricky little question of money.

The newspapers and magazines I was writing for back in Australia could take anything up to 10 weeks to pay; and then they didn’t pay well.

So as a result my hunting of the famous stepped into overdrive.

Once they hit the stratosphere of multi-million dollar sales, world-wide fame and flanks of public relations experts most living legends became unavailable to all except the most prestigious newspapers and magazines.

Except when they were flogging product.

And they all come to London to do just that.

While they might be impossible to meet under normal circumstances, particularly for an Australian from the other side of the known universe, they were all available when they had something to sell.

London had long been one of the world’s great cultural and artistic centres; but many of the city’s multiple joys were open exclusively to the rich.

And the people I was hunting were all rich.

In contrast I was the young man from the colonies staring from the outside in.

The interviews took me to legendary hotels like Claridge’s and The Savoy.

“You come sit next to me!” Dirk Bogarde declared, patting the elegant couch on which he was sitting in the luxuriant public areas downstairs at Claridge’s.

Bogarde was promoting his series of memoirs which included loving detail of his home in France.

It was his birthday and he was clearly in a jolly mood.

I had been slotted in with two other English journalisms, both at least by the look of them broken down hacks who couldn’t have much cared who they were interviewing.

Bogarde was known for his personal charm. While ignoring the English hacks he cosied up to me immediately and embarked on a lengthy reminisce about Australia and an uncle or someone who lived there; the light, the landscape, what a perfect place it was to paint.

For a while we got so familiar I thought I was going to be invited to the private party being held upstairs after the interviews in honor of his birthday.

I could have been the birthday present from down under.

But it never happened.

It’s always hard to pick up someone in the glare of publicity.

After the interview was over Bogarde swept up the stairwell under the gaze of just about everybody; and disappeared into a bubbling crowd.

While I headed out into crowded streets, a crowded life, a city full of opportunity. Everything about London that time around was different.

Journalism and writing was central to our state of grace; lives full of adventure and romance. I had just finished a novel set in Sydney about a younger man and his relationship with a high-profile sugar daddy. Dirk Bogarde would have been perfect for the role of the older man, and for a time, at that time of life, with horizons infinite, everything seemed possible. Even Dirk Bogarde in a movie based on a novel written by an aspiring journalist from Australia, a dream repeated so often it almost became real within itself.

The Final Days of Alastair Nicholson,: Chief Justice Family Court of Australia, 2013. Pages 21-30.