Iggy Pop (4 page)

For the future Iggy Pop, Rick Miller and George Livingston would become symbols of the casual cruelty of white, American, middle-class kids - despite the fact that, as far as most of his peers were concerned, Jim Osterberg was in fact the epitome of white, American, middle-class privilege. That impression was symbol ised by his friendship with Kenny Miller, son of Arjay Miller and godson of Robert McNamara. Even for the sophisticated, academic residents of Ann Arbor Hills, the Millers were classy people. And as it turned out, Jim Osterberg had the knack of making friends with classy folk.

There was always something going on at the Millers’ house on Devonshire, in the heart of Ann Arbor Hills. The dance lessons were what really impressed the neighbours: a private teacher tutored Kenny and his classmates in foxtrots and waltzes in a spacious studio at the back of the house - the kids dressed in formal attire for the lessons, right down to skirts and gloves for the girls. At Christmas, a professional choir entertained the guests; there were tasteful artworks on the walls, while the house itself - all clean red brick and redwood sidings, with balconies overlooking its wooded setting - was a case study in understated, contemporary style. The colour TV in the lounge was the first one most of the Millers’ guests had ever seen, but the Millers never seemed to brag. Chauffeurs would whisk the kids round to golf, football, or a coke and hotdog at the Howard Johnson Hotel on Washtenaw Avenue. On the way back from the hotel one time, one of Kenny’s friends spilt a milkshake in the back of the Lincoln. No one from the family batted an eyelid, but the next day the chauffeur arrived to pick up his charges in a brand new car.

While the Millers’ maid, Martha, was the one who spent most time with the kids, Kenny’s mom, Frances, was always interested in her son’s friends. Arjay, too, seemed approachable; remarkable behaviour in a man who shouldered the heavy burden of turning round a company that was in severe financial straits. Arjay was company comptroller over a period that saw infamous debacles, such as the launch of the ill-fated Edsel. Several senior Ford executives based in Ann Arbor succumbed to stress or alcoholism over that time, but Arjay calmly negotiated his way through the Ford jungle, succeeding to the company presidency after fellow whiz kid Robert McNamara was lured away by John Kennedy to become Secretary of Defence, and later overseeing the launch of Ford’s biggest money-spinner, the Mustang. In the course of his busy life, Miller got to know Jim Osterberg well enough that he remembers him to this day, although he politely declines to elaborate on the time Jim spent round at his house.

Within a short time of arriving at Tappan, Kenny Miller - an unassuming, friendly and rather gangly boy - had become firm friends with Jim Osterberg, to the extent, some say, of having a schoolboy crush. Early on in their friendship Kenny asked his mom Frances to invite Jim around to play; Frances got the name confused and asked Jim’s alphabetical neighbour, Denny Olmsted, around by mistake. As Olmsted remembers it, Kenny opened the door and said, ‘I don’t want to play with you, I want to play with Jim, I like Jim better!’ before bawling out his mom as the crestfallen Olmsted shuffled away.

Kenny Miller and Jim Osterberg were the nucleus of a small group of kids, including Livingston and John Mann, who spent long evenings playing golf at Pat’s Par Three. They exemplified Jim Osterberg’s ability to network with Ann Arbor ’s most influential people, as did his girlfriend in eighth grade, Sally Larcom; Sally’s father was the city administrator, her mother a professor at Eastern Michigan University. Both parents were charmed by Jim Osterberg: ‘He was definitely one of the good ones, that they liked me going out with.’

Although Jim was definitely not a stereotypical fratboy - he was too smart and too funny for that - he was clean-cut, with short hair, always dressed neatly in a polo shirt and slacks. His build was slim, wiry and muscular, which made up for the fact he was slightly smaller than average, and he was definitely an intellectual. He was also confident and opinionated, ready to engage adults in conversation, but always with a touch of humour. In the time they dated, Sally and Jim would mostly go golfing together; if there was anything about Jim that irritated Sally, it was probably the fact he was so opinionated - ‘Authoritative, almost.’ He was also noticeably obsessed by status, constantly ranking boys and girls in the class. Jim was cute, sexy even, with just a touch of angst that made him seem all the more attractive. The angst seemed to come from the fact that, despite being popular, he wasn’t quite as popular as the football players or prom queens in the class. But Sally saw no trace of an inferiority complex: ‘It was more a superiority complex; just one that didn’t sit with his life situation. I don’t mean that as a criticism, more that that’s what drove him.’ Cindy Payne, who went out with Jim a couple of years after Sally, retains almost identical memories of Jim’s charm, the ease with which he impressed her father - who was a doctor - the same angst that seemed to underlie his ambition, as well as Jim’s remarkable ‘con fidence. He was an amazing young person, a real go-getter.’

By the end of his first year at Tappan, Osterberg was well known, and his natural exuberance seemed to expand. Certainly, his classmates remember him as funny, analytical, always ready to challenge prevailing wisdoms. Several of the teachers were undoubtedly charmed; his impressive vocabulary and use of idiom endeared him to his English teacher, Mrs Powrie, and there were suspicions he was her teacher ’s pet. Several of his contemporaries recall him using phrases they’d never heard before - ‘men of the cloth’ or ‘hoi polloi’ - and today note the fact that he used them correctly, too. That ability to pluck words out of the air was memorable and helped him ultimately make the school debate team, the home of most of Ann Arbor’s brightest kids, although his talent for swimming and golf prevented him being regarded as a geek. Most tellingly of all, says John Mann, ‘His sarcasm was great. I just remember looking at him and having to think, what did he say? Then you realised he was being sarcastic. Most seventh and eighth graders weren’t ready - he was way over our heads at the time.’

For all Jim Osterberg’s presence and charm, the jibes of kids like George Livingston and Rick Miller did have an effect; while confident in his own abilities, Jim seemed excessively ashamed of his background. Most of his acquaintances were more struck by how often he mentioned the trailer park than by the living conditions themselves; there was another large trailer park on Packard Street with its share of middle-class residents, and James Osterberg Senior’s status as a high-school teacher was an extremely respectable one in a town that set such store by education.

Nonetheless, Jim Junior seemed sufficiently ashamed by his background to invent - as, perhaps, do many schoolkids - a more impressive one. Tappan pupil Don Collier remembers one occasion when Osterberg was talking about ‘his neighbourhood, the area of the very rich: Ann Arbor Hills’. Collier was impressed until the afternoon, a few years later, he offered to give Jim a lift home from high school. Only as Collier began to turn left into Ann Arbor Hills did Osterberg ask him to continue up to Carpenter Road and then to Coachville trailer park. Jim seemed matter of fact about the dramatic change in his living conditions. Perhaps he’d forgotten his impulsive fib about where he lived, three or four years before.

By 1961, when Jim reached ninth grade, most kids in his junior high school class would have considered the notion that Jim was regarded as an outsider or a dork as faintly ridiculous. Instead, he was widely regarded as an impressive figure who was undeniably part of the classy set. In a preppy environment, Jim was more preppy than most, always nicely turned out in loafers, slacks, button-down shirt and nice sweater. It was a look to which many at Tappan aspired, but Osterberg managed it to perfection, and he convinced many that he was the product of inherited poise and fine breeding. Rather than being mocked for his trailer park origins, in these years he was more likely to irritate his peers with his sheer slickness and confidence: ‘Jim Osterberg?’ says fellow pupil Dana Whipple. ‘He had the highest quality line in BS of anyone I ever knew. He learned early on that you only had to keep one step in front of the other idiots in order to impress them.’

Osterberg certainly looked around at his classmates and envied their middle-class charm, but it didn’t seem to occur to him that behind that façade they too had their own problems. For, as conversations with many of the kids who went through the school reveal, some of those confident exteriors had been erected to hide stories of shortages of cash, drinking problems and the anxious awareness that hard-won status could be easily lost.

The 14-year-old Jim Osterberg possessed, in fact, a sense of what would impress his colleagues that was almost supernatural. His abilities were demonstrated by his campaign to become class vice president in ninth grade. Jim’s political platform was brave, for in a staunchly Republican environment he chose to champion Jack Kennedy and support unionisation - whatever his hang-ups about his father, he shared his liberal political convictions. Denny Olmsted, who was also a popular figure in the class, decided to run for class president, but was struck by Osterberg’s political sophistication: ‘He would’ve run for president, but he was a realist. He told me no one would win against Bill Wood, a popular guy who was running for president, but that he could make vice president. And he was absolutely right.’

Olmsted, with Brad Jones running his campaign, put up a strong fight. But Osterberg knew exactly what would play with the Tappan audience: ‘I gave a speech,’ says Olmsted, ‘and there was this bit at the end where I walked away from the podium, and did this gesture with my eyebrows - it was something funny taken from a commercial. And it just infuriated Jim. He took me aside and said, “You had Bill beat, you had a better speech, a better presentation, then you did that stupid eyebrow thing and that’s gonna lose you the election!”’ Osterberg’s instincts were spot on; he waltzed into the vice president’s spot, a real feat considering his platform was based on restraining ‘evil big business’, while Olmsted lost to Wood. By now Jim had convinced many classmates that he was a potential future President of the United States.

It was around ninth grade that Jim’s interest in music surfaced. Like many of his contemporaries, he became obsessed with Sandy Nelson and the Ventures, and in 1962 he formed the Megaton Two, a musical duo in which he played drums alongside a friend from the choir, Jim McLaughlin. McLaughlin, a sweet, unassuming boy, was a pretty decent guitarist, and for a time would be Osterberg’s closest friend, replacing Kenny Miller, who left for a private school. As we shall see, in Osterberg’s private life music was starting to become a dominating passion, but at Tappan it seemed strictly a secondary interest. Today it is his talent for politics, rather than his musical ambitions, that his contemporaries remember - dozens of them still recall his support for John Kennedy, and his prediction that he would be in the White House before the age of forty-five (‘He would be a huge improvement on what we have today,’ laughs fellow pupil Dan Kett).

In 1962, during his final year at Tappan Junior High, Jim Osterberg was voted the boy ‘Most likely to succeed’ by his classmates. He signed dozens of his friends’ yearbooks, often with a joke, but the inscription on Ted Fosdick’s yearbook was serious. It was signed, ‘From the 43rd president of the United States: Jim Osterberg.’

By the time Jim and his classmates reached tenth grade and moved down the road to Ann Arbor High, he was a well-known character at the huge new school, which was situated in impressive grounds directly opposite Michigan Stadium. The baby boom meant Ann Arbor High (more recently renamed Ann Arbor Pioneer) was packed to overflowing, with over 800 pupils in junior year, but even in this huge crowd Jim was widely recognised. A select few knew by now that an interest in music accompanied his obsession with politics. Rock ’n’ roll would eventually become the new vehicle for Jim’s ambitions, but any pupils who bumped into him in the sleek, clean corridors of Ann Arbor High - another elegant,
moderne
building, so high-tech that it even boasted its own planetarium - would still have taken him for a pillar of the establishment. ‘Straight’, was how a younger Ann Arbor High pupil, Ron Asheton, described him.

In his junior year, Osterberg secured a coveted place as an entrant to the American Legion’s Boys’ State program. An intensive summer course based at Michigan State University in Lansing, it drew five or six pupils from each of Michigan’s most competitive high schools, all of them ‘selected for outstanding qualities of leadership, character, scholarship, loyalty and service to their schools and community’. Many of the schools had intensively trained their entrants for the event, which was modelled on the state’s political structure; each boy was assigned a dormitory, which took the role of a city, all of whose inhabitants would run for public office. Mike Wall was one of Jim’s companions from Ann Arbor High, and ran for lieutenant governor; Wall made it through two or three rounds while Jim’s campaign just kept on rolling. ‘He looked at this thing,’ says Wall, ‘and said to me, Hey, I’ve got this figured out. I’m gonna run for governor of the state of Michigan!’

Up against boys who’d arrived with a party organisation and carefully constructed manifestos, Osterberg vanquished his opponents with almost embarrassing ease. He boasted formidable skills as a public speaker, but his progress through the system called for much more complex talents: ‘He had to be cunning, and really sophisticated,’ says Wall. ‘In any political convention you’ve got different coalitions, guys who are gonna throw their votes behind you. He was very shrewd, very cunning, and had the skills to capitalise on the moment.’

It was at a Boys’ State conference in Little Rock just one year earlier, 1963, that a young boy from Arkansas named Bill Clinton had taken his first step to political fame, becoming the state’s delegate to the Boys’ Nation conference in Washington DC. Osterberg seemed to be destined for a similar distinction and made it through every round, finally winning his party nomination to compete for the top slot. Says Wall, ‘It was an incredible feat. He manoeuvred all the way through. He didn’t win governor in the end, that went to the other party, but it was an amazing achievement. But was that Jim? Hell, no. It was basically, Fuck you guys, I’m having fun. ’Cause I’m not a mainstreamer and you’re gonna vote for me anyway.’