London Calling (48 page)

In September 1969 the London Street Commune took over a 100-room mansion at 144 Piccadilly at Hyde Park Corner. The only entrance
was via a ladder to clear the top of the balustrade protecting the area, then over a well-made drawbridge to a window. Posted
next to the window was a tourist poster showing a drawing of a London policeman with the words, ‘are wonderful’
beneath it. The other ground floor windows were boarded up. (Later the 1791 building was demolished by property speculators
and replaced by the ugly Intercontinental Hotel.) The London Street Commune was the same group that had occupied the
International Times
, called in by two or three freelance writers who had hopes of taking over the paper rather than starting one of their own.
They accused
IT
of becoming bourgeois. As they hadn’t the slightest idea of how to bring out a newspaper they left after a few days but not
before the police had arrived, called to prevent them stealing the IBM compositing machine. The office manager, Sue Small,
hid the address files and subscription lists by sitting on them. The underground was plagued by these factional fights, the
counter-cultural equivalent of corporate raids, the worst being an attempted takeover of Release by a group affiliated to
Mick Farren’s White Panther Party who could not possibly have run it themselves. In fact, it was all good training for the
straight world but we didn’t know it at the time.

The most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have ever seen since I began reviewing

RICHARD SCHICKEL
,
Time
magazine

Indescribably sleazy, self-indulgent and meretricious.

JOHN SIMON
,
New York Times

Performance
by Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg has been called the best-ever British gangster movie, the best psychedelic movie and the best
‘Swinging London’ movie, and has become a cult classic, taught in university courses and with numerous books written about
it.
Performance
is the best portrait ever made of the late-sixties Chelsea scene. Marianne Faithfull: ‘
Performance
was truly our Picture of Dorian Gray. An allegory of libertine Chelsea life in the late sixties, with its baronial rock stars,
wayward jeunesse dorée, drugs, sex and decadence – it preserves a whole era under glass.’
¹
The filming of
Performance
was completed in December 1968 and truly captures a cast of characters in a moment in time: Mick Jagger, James Fox, John
Bindon, Keith Richards, Donald Cammell, Anita Pallenberg, Christopher Gibbs, Jack Nitzsche, David Litvinoff. As such, it is
worthy of detailed analysis.

Donald Cammell was a society portrait painter who had trained with Pietro Annigoni, and though he had written two previous
screenplays, he had never before directed a film. Recognizing his lack of experience he approached his friend Nic Roeg to
co-direct. Cammell:

We made an agreement that Nic shouldn’t talk to the actors if I wouldn’t talk to the camera crew. I spent a lot of my time
talking to the camera crew because I wanted to learn all about cinematography, all the things that Nic knew and I didn’t,
which was a hell of a lot at the time.

Donald persuaded his brother David, who made television commercials, to take a year off to associate-produce the film with
Sandy Lieberson. Warner Brothers put up £1.8 million, thinking they were getting a ‘Swinging London’
film. In fact they even tried to get Jagger on their payroll as a ‘youth advisor’ and enquired whether ‘any of the other boys’
would like to be in the film.

The publicity handout described the film as featuring the story of ‘a strange electronic poet, a latter-half-of-the-twentieth-century
writer who had retired from the pop scene and established himself in an opulent lifestyle accompanied by two young women.
His privacy is shattered by the unexpected arrival of a gangster, on the run from both the police and his underworld colleagues
for murder, who is seeking shelter.’ James Fox plays Chas Devlin, who is a henchman of a gangster called Harry Flowers, played
by Johnny Shannon. Chas sees himself as a ‘real man’, c.1968, with his neat suit, his immaculately tidy bachelor flat with
Playboy
neatly arranged on the coffee table, and a subservient girlfriend called Dana who works as a nightclub singer. He is a thug:
we see the violence in his private life through his self-absorbed sado-masochistic sex with Dana, and at work, menacing a
Soho porno film distributor and the owner of a mini-cab firm that his boss wants to take over.

Chas, along with two of Flowers’s other henchmen, Moody, played by John Bindon, and Rosebloom, played by Stanley Meadows,
is sent along to put the frighteners on someone who might involve their boss in a court case currently in progress. They intercept
the man, along with his barrister, outside a respectable gentlemen’s club in St James’s and reinforce their warning by ambushing
the barrister’s chauffeur, roughly shaving his head and pouring acid over the Rolls-Royce. All along, the scenes of mayhem
and violence used by Flowers to expand his business are contrasted by court scenes in which a hotly contested merger is described
by the barrister as not only legal but also essential for economic growth.

Flowers sends Rosebloom to smash up a betting shop that he wants to acquire, owned by one Joey Maddocks. However, the next
day it is Chas who collects Maddocks for a meeting with Flowers and so they think it was he who demolished the place the night
before. The most violent scene in the film follows. Maddocks and two of his henchmen attack Chas in his own flat. In the course
of the fight Chas manages to get free and shoots Maddocks dead. Chas flees, knowing that Flowers will have him killed for
involving him in a murder. In Paddington Station, Chas overhears a conversation about a room available in nearby Powis Square.
He goes to the address and the film makes an abrupt change of style. Up until this point there had been a straightforward
linear narrative but now we have jump cuts, montages of images, fast-forward and backwards shots, and random edits.

Chas is let into 81 Powis Square by Pherber, played by Anita Pallenberg.
The house is owned by Turner a reclusive, semi-retired rock star, played by Mick Jagger, who lives there in a ménage-à-trois
with Pherber and Lucy, played by Michèle Breton. Turner and Pherber don’t believe Chas’s implausible claim that he is a nightclub
juggler and initially Turner wants him out before realizing that Chas’s violent edge, his ‘demon’, might be just what he needs
to shock him out of the lethargy that has becalmed him and get him back to writing music. He and Chas find that gangsters
and rock stars have a lot in common. Chas knows that Flowers will track him down and plans to leave the country. He needs
photographs to get a false passport and asks Pherber and Turner to take them. They dose him with hallucinogenic drugs and
play identity games with him, dressing him first as an archetypal gangster, then in more feminine clothes. Pherber flirts
outrageously with him and at one point holds a mirror to Chas’s body so that her bare breast is reflected there to show how
he would look with breasts. The gangster’s macho façade begins to break down and they eventually get him to wear a wig and
make-up to explore another side of his sexuality.

Disoriented by the drugs and role-playing games, he goes off with Lucy and they have sex. Unlike the sadistic performance
we witnessed with his girlfriend, he shows tenderness and concern towards Lucy and the next day, in an uncharacteristic display
of kindness, goes to his room to get her some shampoo. Rosebloom and ‘some of the chaps’ are waiting for him, having tracked
him down from his attempt to get a false passport. Knowing they are going to kill him, he asks if he can pop upstairs for
a second. He goes to Turner’s room and says he has to go. Turner says he wants to come with him. ‘You don’t know where I’m
going,’ he tells him. ‘I do,’ Turner replies.

Chas draws his gun and shoots Turner in the head and, in a celebrated, much discussed sequence, the camera follows the path
of the bullet into Turner’s brain. Next we see Chas being led to Flowers’s Rolls-Royce parked outside, but as the car pulls
away, it is Turner’s face we see through the window. They have become one.

In the film Turner supposedly lived at 81 Powis Square, but the exterior shots were filmed at number 25. The house at 15 Lowndes
Square was chosen for the interior shots because David Cammell remembered it from losing rather a lot money there in a poker
game and it was proving hard to find a large house that had not been converted into flats. The house was owned by Lenny Plugge,
the 85-year-old father of the man who had organized the poker game, and was filled with what was euphemistically known as
‘the Plugge Collection’, which included pictures by Rembrandt, Rubens and Velasquez.
Plugge was very pleased to rent the house but insisted that his pictures be insured for £2 million.

Leonard Plugge had been a Conservative Member of Parliament and was the first person to broadcast commercial radio to Britain.
He started I B C, the International Broadcasting Corporation, in 1931 and transmitted his English language Radio Normandy
to Britain every evening. It is thought that he had 80 per cent of the radio listeners on Sundays when the BBC broadcast nothing
but religious programming. He explored every potential source of income, and in addition to paid advertising he was happy
to receive money in order to promote a record by putting it on his playlist. The term ‘plugging’ a record comes from Leonard
Plugge’s early exercise in payola. He went to the opera every night wearing an ermine coat and usually had a beautiful girl
on each arm even though he was constantly pursued by creditors. Plugge had two daughters, twins, one of whom, 27-year-old
Gale Benson, was later murdered by Michael de Freitas – Michael X – in the Caribbean.

The house was looked after by a caretaker who carried a Luger and was accompanied everywhere by a lice-ridden mongrel. One
of the first things to do was fumigate the caretaker’s room. The pictures were then wrapped in blankets and stored in the
caretaker’s flat.
²
One of the many complications during filming was a telephone call to Cammell from the police to say that the Plugge Collection
had disappeared. He first thought it was one of the gangsters having a joke, probably David Litvinoff, but it was true. Then
the crew remembered that the caretaker had recently bought himself a new car and no-one had seen him for a few days. He was
on the run for two weeks before being captured at Paddington Station. He had the nerve to ask Cammell to stand bail, which
he absolutely refused to do. The man had sold the paintings at auction, where they had realized a mere £3,800 as they were
all copies or fakes. The next problem came from a neighbour who brought an injunction against Plugge for lowering the tone
of the neighbourhood by bringing in a film company. In court it then turned out that Plugge had double-mortgaged the house
and had no right to rent to a film company. He had only eighteen months left on his lease and the Sun Life Insurance Company
were delighted to have an excuse to terminate it. Plugge agreed to give up the remainder of the lease and the film company
was allowed to continue its work.

Neither Nicolas Roeg nor Donald Cammell had directed a film before, Sandy Lieberson had never before produced a film, Jagger
had not acted in one, and neither had Michèle Breton, except for a television series in France
the previous year, and most of the gangsters were being played by real gangsters, just as the charlady’s little girl, Lorraine,
who runs errands, was really a little girl (Laraine) who ran errands for Cammell in Chelsea.

The sets were designed by Christopher Gibbs, assisted by Cammell’s girlfriend, the American model Deborah Dixon. Christopher
simply reproduced the style he had given Mick and Marianne for their Cheyne Walk house and Brian Jones for Courtfield Road:
the walls were dark red and partly hung with antique tapestries; there was an incredibly elaborate Moroccan bed – which Anita
later bought for her and Keith – next to which stood an antique wooden rocking horse, a mosaic table supporting a pair of
heavy gold candlesticks, a pink conch shell and a packet of Rizla cigarette rolling papers. The oriental carpets were scattered
with cushions. In the marble fireplace stood a pair of lion shaped firedogs.
³
The housekeeper in the film was named Mrs Gibbs, as an acknowledgement to Christopher.

Performance
has a multitude of influences, from Joseph Losey’s
The Servant
(1963), which had first made James Fox a star, to John Boorman’s
Point Blank
, which Cammell insisted the whole cast and crew went to see. He claimed film-maker Kenneth Anger as ‘
The
major influence at the time I made
Performance
’, much of which is ‘directly attributable to him’. The final edit was based to an extent on the random cutting in Antony
Balch and William Burroughs’s film
Cut Ups
; Cammell went to see Balch to ask how it was done. Although credited entirely to Cammell, the screenplay of
Performance
was written while they were sitting on the beach at Saint-Tropez by Cammell, Deborah Roberts and Anita Pallenberg. (At one
point a gust of wind blew the whole script into the sea and Anita had to iron each page to dry them out.) Collaboration was
a strong part of the sixties ethos and it was Cammell’s favoured method of working; it was a way of avoiding his self-destructive
tendency to sabotage whatever he was doing. Turner’s domestic arrangement in the film, living with two women, was taken directly
from Donald Cammell’s own situation.

Michèle Breton had been part of Donald’s ménage in Paris, where he, Michèle and Deborah Dixon lived together. Anita Pallenberg,
who played the other woman, had only a couple of years earlier had an affair with Donald and Deborah which, Cammell said,
was still ongoing when
Performance
was made. According to Marianne Faithfull: ‘That was Donald’s thing. Threesomes.’
⁴
Cammell described Michèle Breton as being a ‘great sexual catalyst in the film’. He said she was very beautiful, very intelligent
but with no education at all. He said she worked very well with James Fox. ‘She was about fourteen when Deborah and I met
her and then we took her back to
Paris and she was already destined for a bad end.’
⁵
At the time of filming she was seventeen, and Cammell had to lie about her age.