Who I Am: A Memoir (36 page)

I had found a boat in Mallorca, an old 65-foot Scottish-built Herd Mackenzie called
Ferrara
, capable of travelling several thousand miles. Our first adventure was in the Greek islands. We flew to Athens to meet the boat, then travelled east to visit two or three islands before the weather got very windy and we became storm-bound in Nisos Syros. Minta demonstrated her skill as a linguist by chatting to the local tobacconist in basic Greek, which she had picked up in a few hours. I felt I was embarking on a new life, in which my pleasures would be – if not strictly conventional – at least not artificially induced.

A few days before my 38th birthday in May 1983 I went to see Roger at his lovely Tudor house in Sussex. Driving there, I thought back to 1962 when I had walked with my guitar case to Roger’s doorstep; I remembered his girlfriend staggering towards me, and his nonchalance at her ultimatum.
Sod her. Come in.
I thought of how badly I had wanted
in
back then, and how much I wanted
out
now. This time I confirmed what Roger already guessed: I wouldn’t go on tour with The Who any more.

Back in 1962 I had expected Roger to break down in tears that he had been deprived of that angry teenage blonde goddess. But he didn’t then, and he didn’t now. I said I would consider working on special projects with him – charity shows, musicals, anything but rock tours. He seemed receptive.

Can you play ‘Man of Mystery’ by The Shadows? OK, see you at Harry’s.

It seemed to have ended as quickly as it had begun. I expect the same thought occurred to Roger. In my notebook, I wrote:

‘I proceed to freedom.’

22

STILL LOONY

I met Robert McCrum, Faber’s managing editor, and we spoke about a press conference to announce my role as editor in charge of a list focusing on ‘popular arts’. I liked Robert from our first meeting. He was tall, sharply intelligent, savvy and funny, but capable of real authority, imposing his will when necessary. His father had been the headmaster at Eton, but there was nothing about Robert that conveyed snobbery or superiority. His own writing was serious and dark, but to work with him was inspirational.

After the Faber press conference journalists got out their knives, and the
Sunday Times
was particularly nasty. But I knew I had been given one of the best jobs in London publishing (even though I was only being paid £7,000 a year and a percentage of any bestsellers), and I wasn’t going to squander the opportunity.

Much was said about my turning up for work in a limo wearing a suit, but that was how I had been living and dressing for several years. Offstage, even in my worst years, I had taken more care of the way I looked than I ever did on stage. I shared an office with Craig Raine, the poetry editor, who dressed like a scruffy art teacher and swore like a shipbuilder. Frank Pike looked after the plays, and one of my first commissions, with Frank’s approval, was to bring Steven Berkoff to Faber as a playwright. His 1986 play
Sink the Belgrano!
would be called ‘a diatribe in Punk-Shakesperian voice’.

Faber’s chairman, Matthew Evans, enjoyed my notoriety most. ‘Pete Townshend,’ he would announce with a certain ceremony when I walked into his office, as though introducing me to a new stage. Of course, that was exactly what he was doing. We got on very well, and became great friends.

My PA, Judi Waring, had retired, so I advertised for a new assistant. Out of a large number of applicants requiring someone ‘who could juggle chainsaws’ I chose Nicola Joss, who had sent a photo of herself juggling chainsaws. It seemed like a statement about the nature of illusion, the dream within the dream, the joke within the joke.

Nicola had worked for my friend Charles Levison, Chairman at WEA, and brought with her a whole new system of working. Suddenly my life was run with a level of efficiency I had never thought possible. Sadly, her first job was to fly with me to LA to tell Mo Ostin I wanted out of The Who deal, because I needed a witness to record all our meetings. This news was received courteously by Mo, but followed soon by a telex from David Berman, Senior Vice President, demanding repayment of advances paid thus far – multiple millions of dollars. If my colleagues in the band didn’t agree with my decision, I would pay back their shares as well.

Meanwhile I had started producing an album for my brother Simon. Intended to be a side project, this would become central until September. I loved working on it, and felt we had a chance of a hit with the title track, ‘Sweet Sound’.

Karen and I were, to all intents and purposes, living together again as husband and wife, though in my heart my ability to maintain any kind of matrimonial commitment at this stage was fragile and uncertain. In June 1983 we went together to see Bowie perform at Wembley Pool. During the intermission I had an intuition that if I looked very carefully around the vast hall I would see Louise. I spotted a woman sitting with a child, right opposite us on the other side of the hall. There could be no mistaking the movements of her head, the clothes she had chosen: it was her. I excused myself and went over to Louise to say hello.

‘I thought you might be here,’ she said. ‘I’m with my friend and his daughter.’

The next day I could think about nothing but Louise. I could barely function, and found it hard to breathe. Karen was looking more serene and attractive than ever, but my brain was still wired to the moon. Louise didn’t miss me.

My therapy continued twice weekly. Each session concluded with the same quip to my driver, Paul, waiting outside to whisk me back to Twickenham. ‘Still loony,’ I would say, gathering the seatbelt and settling down for the journey home through many of my childhood haunts.

I was troubled a little by anxiety attacks. Apart from therapy I had no other support. I thought Alcoholics Anonymous, for a celebrity, would be a bit of a misnomer – how would I remain anonymous?

When Minta and I had lunch with my parents Dad looked depressed and tetchy, which was unusual for him. He was usually so cheerful. He had recently closed his little junk shop, and I thought that might be a mistake.

I noted in my diary around this time that
Karen is getting scarily beautiful. Her face and body are coming alive – she is a greater presence now.
When I had been philandering, mainly with women younger than Karen, I had begun to think of her as too old to captivate me again. But it wasn’t she who had grown old, it was me.

The other three members of The Who had buried whatever resentments or problems they might have had with me, or with each other – indeed with anyone at all – and were now looking to find some way to carry on with the band, to continue, in my mind, on some kind of nostalgic sideshow. At a meeting at Bill Curbishley’s offices on 15 June, with all the band members, I stood by my decision to leave. Bill seemed to be the only one who could see I wasn’t going to change my mind. At the very end of the meeting Bill’s wife Jackie turned to me.

‘Perhaps you are finished,’ she said, not unkindly.

She had worked hard, and would continue doing so for some time, to try to support my work as a solo artist. This meeting was the last The Who would have for a very long time.

Nicola’s secretary Joanne took over the business of opening fan mail and setting it out for me to read. Often I found the letters either unthinking or overly analytical. A few were so unkind they could be tossed aside, but some letters demanded replies, and I was often defensive or brittle, which would elicit further attacks. I wanted my fans to understand why I’d left The Who.

One fan wrote, ‘This is bullshit. You know your hair is gone? Well so has your integrity.’ The writer and I had exchanged a few letters, and I thought I’d handled her pretty well. But I found it hard to accept that many fans would prefer me to stick to the rock ’n’ roll code, throwing myself back on the fire again and again until I was eventually consumed like Keith, rather than putting on the brakes and saving my life. But I came to understand that to many fans, although they felt they knew me well, I wasn’t quite real.

When Nicola and Joanne arranged a database, sorting the letters by name and address, it became clear that the same few hundred people were responsible for the whole pile. If men sent photos they tended to be family-oriented, fathers and sons, or groups of men at rock shows or baseball games. Women’s photos were almost always solo, intended to trigger a connection.

My post-Who life was continuing to move into new and exciting areas. In January 1984, through the philanthropist David Astor, I met Donald Woods, who had written a book about Steve Biko, one of the founders of the ANC in South Africa. Woods was indirectly fundraising to release Nelson Mandela from prison, and I told him I would do what I could to help. Astor and I continued to build the funding of Chiswick Family Rescue, the refuge for battered wives that Karen believed in and supported. Astor was a true philanthropist, and never afraid to be radical. We became great friends, and occasionally worked together on street projects like Brent Black Music (a music studio cooperative) and Ken McDonald’s
Fred
magazine (a pocket illustrated poetry book).

At Faber & Faber, Robert McCrum decided my free time might be better spent working on a book of short stories. I agreed that I would be taken more seriously as an editor if I could establish that I had at least paid my writerly dues. He also suggested I sort through the Faber archives looking for books to bring back in print, and read from the ‘slush pile’ of unsolicited manuscripts. From the mountain of submissions waiting to be read I took home three every couple of days, so I was reading six books a week on average, and writing six rejection letters. I loved reading these manuscripts, but whether I liked them or not they would never be published by Faber. Very little was published that hadn’t been commissioned by the editorial team.

I reissued John O’Hara’s first novel,
Appointment in Samarra
. McCrum then introduced me to the artist Brion Gysin, who had suggested to William Burroughs that he try ‘cut-ups’. We worked together for several months, always on the phone between London and Paris, where he lived. His writing was impossible to edit, but he was charming and we finally published his book as it stood.

Frank Pike passed me various novels of Jean Genet to try to revive. They were extremely controversial, all recently republished by Grove Press in the States. Genet was still alive (he died in 1986), and my job was to try to meet him in Paris and see what he wanted to do with his backlist. I never managed to track him down, but did arrange for his entire list of plays, essays and novels to be republished.

Once installed at Faber, I contacted Brian Eno about publishing his famously fastidious creative notebooks. I let Eric Burdon live in the cottage at Cleeve to write his autobiography
I Used to Be an Animal – But I’m All Right Now.
I wasn’t at all sure he was really all right – me either – but we both worked hard on the book.

I began moulding myself into the editorial team at Faber. P.D. James, William Golding, Ted Hughes, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Valerie Eliot and many other Faber authors treated me with suspicion but conditional respect, willing to give me a chance. It was exhilarating. I went to Queen Square twice a week, and on most other days held related meetings at Oceanic where I had based my new offices.

I met T.S. Eliot’s widow Valerie at Faber. She took me very seriously and made it plain that the vagaries of rock ’n’ roll would pale against those of the wild men of the early Faber days. Ezra Pound had been Eliot’s editor, after all. I didn’t doubt there had been more fireworks in Eliot’s life than sitting on the seafront in Margate where I myself had walked endlessly with my crazy grandmother.

Valerie Eliot was earning money for Faber through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Cats
. In March she and Matthew asked me to accompany her to the opening night of Andrew’s new piece,
Starlight Express
. She told Matthew Evans she was nervous about going, but felt she really should. Like me I think she felt a duty through her role at Faber.

I was appalled by the show. Neither of us quite knew how to take it.
Cats
had been a triumph, I thought, a masterful balance between family entertainment and literary brilliance. In
Starlight
the music and lyrics seemed deliberately corny. At the party afterwards I told a few people what I thought, not realising that one of them, Richard Stilgoe, had written most of the lyrics. He was so shocked that I knew immediately what a
faux pas
I had committed.

Every opening is just that, a beginning, often awkward; revisions could change a show completely in subsequent weeks. Years later I saw the same show in revised form in Las Vegas and found it enchanting. I had forgotten I was an entertainer, forgotten what entertainment was for.

Some of the most successful books I commissioned for Faber were rooted in my contacts from Eel Pie Books and the music business. Charles Shaar Murray was working on
Crosstown Traffic
, about Jimi Hendrix; Brian Eno brought in the artist Russell Mills for
More Dark than Shark
; Matthew Evans, after a brainstorm with me, suggested Jon Savage for a book about The Kinks. By June my own book of short stories,
Horse’s Neck
, was ready for delivery. McCrum had worked through the manuscript, reducing nearly 300 pages by over half.

‘Pete,’ he began cautiously. ‘You realise that readers are going to think all these stories are about you?’

‘They might, I suppose. And some of the settings are drawn from my world. I’ve only had one life, after all. But what I’ve written is fiction.’

‘I think it would help readers greatly if they were relieved of the burden of trying to second-guess whether the leading character in each story is really you disguised – or someone else, close to you.’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘Make every story about yourself, and if they have a central character, call him Pete. If any of the stories don’t have a central character, make them first-person.’

I took Robert’s advice, although the final story closes with a dream sequence in which a rider mounts a horse from behind. I wondered about the implications of putting it into the first person. Later, when the book was released to reviewers, critic Bryan Appleyard stopped me outside the lift at Faber.

‘You do know,’ he announced, ‘that readers are going to think you actually had anal sex with a horse.’

Working at Faber I felt right at the heart of London life. I was grateful to be alive, remembering how close I had come to dying from a careless overdose. My efforts to raise sympathy and understanding for the plight of addicts, and hope for rehabilitation within the National Health Service, brought me in July 1984 to a meeting at the Commons with the Secretary of State for Social Services, Norman Fowler. He agreed to put the junior health minister, John Patten, in touch with Meg Patterson. I believed I was being taken seriously by politicians partly because I had taken a serious role in the Establishment at last through my work at Faber.

My life was also enriched by time spent getting to know some of the more pre-eminent authors on Faber’s list. On holiday in our new house in Cornwall, Matthew Evans and his wife Lizzie came to stay, and we met William and Anne Golding at their house in Truro. Bill, as his friends called him, was a fiery, hearty man, generous-spirited and adored by his family. He’d published his classic
Lord of the Flies
around the time that my dad’s first record went on sale. I was surprised at how well Bill played the piano. He had taught music, as well as classical languages. We got on very well, and one day I took him sailing in my little Falmouth Bass boat; he hadn’t been on the water for many years after an almost fatal capsize with his family on his small sailing yacht, but he was obviously a natural seaman.