London Calling (58 page)

At the first Alternative Miss World (AMW) competition, held in Andrew Logan’s cramped studio in an old jigsaw puzzle factory
in Downham Road, Hackney, in March 1972, David Hockney and Robert Medley were the judges. The event forms one of the central
tableaux of Jack Hazan’s
A Bigger Splash
, the documentary film of David Hockney’s life at the time, and contains footage of the ceremony in which kisses are bestowed
upon the lucky winner. Here Andrew met his life-long partner Michael Davis. Derek and Patrik Steede bought couture dresses
at second-hand shops to wear; classic Balenciaga and Dior could still be found for five pounds. They first wore their drag
at a performance of Peter Maxwell Davies’s
Eight Songs for a Mad King
, where they disrupted the audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The composer was not overly pleased but said nothing as the
season had been launched with a reception at Jarman’s studio. Patrik won the Alternative Miss World by wearing the dresses
that the other contestants had cast off, a simple spur-of-the-moment expedient that, as Jarman said, ‘was much funnier than
anything anyone else had dreamt up for the occasion as he had not even entered officially’.
²⁴
But Derek’s ego was bruised and he determined that one day he would wear the crown.
²⁵

Before the move to Butler’s Wharf, on 13 October 1973 Andrew Logan held the second A M W competition at his studio. Karl Bowen
had borrowed a mink coat from Lindy Guinness for the occasion but the catwalk, made from orange boxes, was very narrow and
there was not really room for two people to pass, and he was brushed against by Miss Germain Depraved, a Left Bank artist
whose costume involved wet paint. Jarman tersely remarked: ‘This was a catastrophe for the mink.’
²⁶
The judges were David Hockney, Ossie Clarke and Zandra Rhodes. Eric Roberts as Miss Holland Park Walk won and was crowned
seated on the ‘Morning Glory Throne’ by Miss Yorkshire, Patrik Steede, the previous year’s winner, wearing a python. Logan
wore his now traditional half ’n’ half outfit, one side a male evening suit from a jumble sale, the other half of a glamorous
evening dress designed specially by Bill
Gibb. Logan had modelled the event not so much on the tacky Miss World competition, but on Cruft’s dog show, with prizes for
poise and personality, and an added category, ‘glamour’, because the outfits had to be glamorous, though it was later changed
and he adopted the three Miss World categories of ‘Daywear’ ‘Eveningwear’ and ‘Swimwear’. Nonetheless, the straight ‘Miss
World’ sued. Logan: ‘We were taken to court by the Morleys, who ran the ‘other’ Miss World, and were defended by a young barrister
called Tony Blair. The first judge was outraged by our infringement of the name, but eventually we won and the show went on.’
²⁷

It was not until the third Alternative Miss World, in March 1975, that the highly competitive Jarman finally won the event
as Miss Crêpe Suzette. His costumes included a Jeanne d’Arc suit of armour with a built-in sound system, and a silver diamanté
dress accessorized with snorkelling flippers and ‘a headdress made from a green rubber frog, with pearls and lashings of ruby
and diamanté drops’.
²⁸
He was desperate to win and he did. This year the female hostess side of Logan’s outfit was designed by Zandra Rhodes. This
was a boisterous Miss World held at Logan’s new studio in Butler’s Wharf: Miss Statue of Liberty almost burnt the building
down when she spilled burning oil from her flaming torch and Molly Parkin was thrown in Logan’s miniature swimming pool by
Miss Holland Park Walk after an unfortunately phrased remark complimenting her on doing so well considering she was not ‘of
our colour’. It was not ill-intentioned and Molly Parkin joined Divine and Andrew Logan as a co-host for the 1978 celebrations
(they were not held every year).

The 1978 AMW was held on 20 October in the blue circus tent on Clapham Common, where Andrew had staged his ‘Egypt Revisited’
– a spectacular show which had finished three days earlier. It was won by Miss Carriage, Miss Linda Carriage, Stevie Hughes,
who was crowned seated on a donkey. Unfortunately, shortly afterwards, in all the excitement she and the donkey tumbled off
the catwalk but neither was hurt. Little Nell sang and Jenny Runacre appeared as Miss Slightly Misanthropic. Some of the most
elaborate costumes were worn by the art dealer James Birch, who came as Miss Consumer Products: a cheeseburger made from two
tractor inner tubes and foam rubber. For his beachwear costume, he appeared as a tube of Ambre Solaire, which spurted suggestive
white gobs of liquid into the audience, and for evening wear he came as a box of After Eight Mints. He came fourth but many
feel he should have won.

Jarman had been considering the idea of a film based on the life of St Sebastian for some time, and his friend Patrik Steede
had even completed a screenplay for it. Then at a lunch party he met a wealthy young film student
called James Whaley who wanted to become a producer. An almost casual mention of the St Sebastian project resulted in Whaley
presenting Jarman with a synopsis of the proposed film and the suggestion that he should produce it. Though Jarman acknowledged
Steede’s early involvement, there was always a whiff of betrayal in his treatment of Steede.

There had not been a homoerotic film made in Britain, and certainly not one where the dialogue was in Latin with subtitles.
The Latin script was a clever solution to the problem of achieving some sort of historical verisimilitude given that the film
was made on a tiny amount of money. The Roman soldiers were also to be naked much of the time, obviating the need for expensive
costumes. Sebastian was a captain of the palace guard at the time of the Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians
and, because of his Christian sympathies, was condemned to be killed, but in at least one version of the story the soldiers
were so taken by his beauty that he was only shot in the arms and legs and, though left for dead, was rescued by the widow
of another Christian martyr. Jarman was quietly confident that
Sebastiane
would become a cult film with gay audiences and make its money back because ‘it was homoerotic in its very structure’. As
this was Jarman’s first film, he and Whaley decided that they needed some professionals on board and managed to hire Paul
Humfress, a BBC editor with years of experience.

In Rome they met the film designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, who generously suggested that they use a strip of coastal property
owned by his family at Cala Domestica in southern Sardinia, an idyllic setting on the west coast of the island with sandy
beaches, rock coves and a few ruined fishermen’s cottages. They were delighted to find that the nearest village was called
Buggerru. They stayed in a hotel in Iglesias and Luciana Martinez rose every morning at 5 a.m. to buy that day’s supplies
from the market. The crew was up by six and, after a long bumpy ride along the dirt track to the coast, they usually managed
to begin filming by about 10.30. With a short lunch break, they filmed until six and by the time they returned to their hotel
for dinner they were all exhausted. The film was made on £30,000, by raising money from friends; Whaley had such faith in
it that he borrowed money against his house. Though they paid the crew union rate, found money for the actors and even some
to sustain Jarman, such a small budget meant that they could not afford daily rushes, or to edit in colour, and it was only
when they reached Humfress’s editing suite that they could see what they had filmed. It was immediately obvious that there
was not enough footage for a feature so they added a party at Emperor Diocletian’s palace, the only way of
doing ‘ancient Rome cheaply’ as Jarman put it as he rounded up all his most decadent friends.

Andrew Logan offered his loft in Butler’s Wharf. Costumes were made. At the last minute, after the walls were hung with gold,
Andrew painted the floor to look like pink marble. Johnny Rozsa painted himself gold and entered carrying a lyre, and a half-naked
Lindsay Kemp arrived in whiteface with his dance troupe from
Flowers
carrying enormous phalluses, which, to Jarman’s delight, eventually squirted ‘a condensed milk orgasm’
²⁹
all over Kemp. Rain on the roof meant that little more than the party could be filmed, but Jarman now had enough and so for
the next eight months, beginning in September 1975, he and Humfress spent two or three days a week hunched over a Steenbeck
editing suite. Naturally they were unable to find a distributor, but David and Barbara Stone, owners of the Gate Cinema in
Notting Hill, visited the cutting rooms and liked what they saw, and the film opened at the Gate in late October. After sixteen
sell-out weeks, it transferred to Scene 2 in Leicester Square; Jarman was playing the West End. It also opened on the Screen
on the Green in Islington and in provincial art houses all over Britain. It was an underground success; the first gay film
to be exhibited in high street cinemas to show full-frontal nudity and a hard-on. Strangely the film bombed in America, where
it was expected to have a large cult following. The reason given was that they couldn’t understand the Latin, as if the language
mattered, but the Americans already had a thriving sex film industry, complete with on-screen sex, so Jarman’s film did seem
a little esoteric.

There’s nowhere else like London. Nothing at all, anywhere. Paris is much more beautiful to look at. The French have got taste.
If there’s a monument, it’s placed properly and really considered. London is really sprawling and if they’ve got a lovely
monument they put it around a corner where you can’t find it. It’s all higgledy-piggledy.

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD
¹

The seventies was an important decade for London street fashion and style: first came glam rock – David Bowie in a dress,
David Bowie without a dress – followed by punk. Punk varied from bondage trousers costing more than a week’s wage to personalized
jumble sale tat. By the end of the decade punk had developed into the New Romantics and the most extreme fashion statements
of the century. The first inkling came in 1972 when Bruce McLean started Nice Style, a pose group consisting of himself, Paul
Richards and Ron Carra. They described themselves as the World’s first pose band, having eliminated all other extraneous elements
of a rock band. To them, the key to style was the perfect pose. They perfected 999 styles, of which number 383 was ‘He Who
Laughs Last Makes the Best Sculpture’. After a year of preparation and preview performances they launched their career at
the Royal College of Art’s art gallery in 1973 with a lecture on ‘Contemporary Pose’. The lecture was delivered by a speaker
with a very pronounced stammer, while the group, dressed in a silver space suit inflated with a hair dryer, a double-breasted
overcoat (homage to their hero, Victor Mature) and other stylish garb, adopted the poses described. The poses were adopted
with the aid of ‘stance moulds’ which McLean had specially made from clothing with built-in poses or ‘physical modifiers’,
which also incorporated huge measuring instruments to demonstrate the exact angles for arms and legs and tilt of the head
required. In 1973,
Crease Crisis
was released, a filmed performance in honour of Victor Mature’s famous overcoat. That same year,
The Pose That Took Us to the Top, Deep Freeze
was performed in the banqueting suite of the Hanover Grand Hotel off Regent Street. Their researches into pose continued
through 1974 when they concentrated more on entrance and exit poses. Having exhausted their subject, and its humour, they
disbanded in 1975.

Club culture has always been of extreme importance to London’s creative scene: the fashion industry thrives on it, the music
industry cherry-picks it, and it has always provided shelter for the disenfranchised, be they blacks, gays, hippies, punks,
afternoon drinkers, midnight gamblers or cross-dressers. In the seventies there were hundreds of clubs, some having a greater
role in the culture than others, all of them sucking in talented young people from the far-flung suburbs. The Masquerade off
Earls Court Road is a good example. It began as a rival to the Sombrero and usually managed to stay open until 3 a.m.. There
was a glassed-in restaurant overlooking the dance floor and for a while it was the place to be seen and was very popular with
the music business crowd. It was mostly a gay scene and there were some outrageous costumes. Pamela Rooke, known to her friends
as Jordan, who became the manager of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s SEX clothes shop on the King’s Road, was a
regular on the dance floor. She told Jon Savage: ‘I went to the Masquerade… I liked good dance music… the only places you
could get that were those gay clubs.’
²
A particular favourite was ‘Masterpiece’ by the Temptations, a fourteen-minute track from their 1973 album of the same name.
There was a crossover between the glam rock scene centred around these gay clubs and the punk scene which developed in the
mid-seventies. Johnny Rotten, for instance, became a hero at El Sombrero when a disgruntled punter pulled a knife on the doorman
but was prevented from stabbing him by Johnny kicking him in the balls.

There was one key club that helped spawn the punk movement. Before the Roxy and the Vortex, there was Louise’s, a lesbian
club at 61 Poland Street, Soho. The red-painted door had a brass nameplate and a small spyhole where guests were scrutinized
before being admitted. Louise ran the door herself; a very chic, older French woman in a black dress and jewellery with grey
waved hair and heavy eyeliner who sometimes wore a grey fur coat to escape the cold wind whistling under the ill-fitting door.
Not everyone was allowed in. ‘Are you members?’ she would lisp, and if she liked the look of you, ‘Ah, you must become members.’
Admission was £3. Siouxsie Sioux was the first punk to go there; her sister was a go-go dancer and through her she knew a
lot of the gay clubs in London. You entered through a small foyer where Louise sat at her low desk protected by Michael, the
American doorman. The foyer led to the dimly lit bar traditionally decorated in red and black with long mirrors, a long black
leatherette banquette, black chairs, red carpet and small
drinks tables with red tablecloths. It was classic Soho, designed for posing and preening. The bartender’s name was Tony and
the head waiter was John. Berlin, one of the Bromley Contingent of punks, described how they called him ‘“Ballerina John”,
an Irish queen with really awful acne and long red hair that he kept flicking over one eye’. Britain’s peculiar licensing
laws at the time meant that food had to be served if alcohol was consumed, so the drinks came with days-old recycled spam
sandwiches served with shrivelled gherkins on disposable paper plates.