Who I Am: A Memoir (44 page)

Elton John and his partner David Furnish were on board, and when I walked over to the replacement aircraft with them Elton told me that a rabbi had created a panic by trying to get into the cockpit. He was holding a small casket which, he said, ‘absolutely must get to New York, otherwise the consequences could be apocalyptic’.

‘More important than me leaving dirty underwear in the basket back home then,’ I quipped. That, absurdly, had been my main concern as I faced what seemed to be almost certain death. I wanted to commiserate with Elton about a hysterical woman who’d started screaming.

‘That was me, darling,’ he confessed.

The
Psychoderelict
meeting went well. We discussed the need for a new script, and possible directors. As I sketched out the piece to Kevin McCollom, he immediately saw problems. If the story was treated lightly, allowing the music to create all the shades and nuances, those who couldn’t access the kind of music I wrote would find the story too inconsequential. If the dystopian messages carried in the heart of the piece were pushed forward it could come over as pretentious. Somehow we’d have to strike a balance.

Meanwhile
Tommy
was closing in London. It had run for a few weeks under a year, plagued by indifferent audiences and by the IRA choosing the first day of previews to blow up the lobby of the nearby Cambridge Theatre. Attendance fell all over the West End, which was disappointing because, as with the American tour (which did much better business), the reviews were all very good, and very well deserved. As the producer, André Ptaszynski, said in his regretful announcement, the cast deserved better audiences.

I flew to Miami to spend a few days with Lisa to achieve closure, a desire stemming from her psychoanalysis. We were determined to remain friends. We had such a good time that I decided to adopt the concept I facetiously called ‘postponement of closure’, and invited her to join me in Germany and Austria when The Who performed
Quadrophenia
there in May. She accepted, and I looked forward to her company, unsure whether I wanted closure or reopening.

I flew to Courchevel to watch Joseph take his first skiing lesson. I actually chartered a plane from London to Chambéry and a helicopter from there to get in and out. It cost a fortune, and I wondered how I would maintain this high lifestyle. I had been approached to do a solo tour in the UK for a fee between £1,500 and £2,000 a night, but I was concerned it wouldn’t pay nightly hotel bills for myself and my crew, let alone any charter flights to maintain my Tuesday and Thursday schedule with Joseph.

The European tour of
Quadrophenia
was fast approaching. There was a rehearsal at Billy Nicholls’s new home in Twickenham to start blocking new guitar arrangements and divisions. Billy mentioned that Rachel Fuller, the girl from Nomis, had worked with him on a couple of his solo tracks. My intuition was telling me to be very careful. I saw Rachel as another Theresa Russell, who could rock my world – for better or for worse.

Rachel is a bomb
, I wrote in my diary.
Dangerous
.

The tour started with two shows in Scandinavia, then moved to Germany. I had some fiscal sense at last, and told Karen there was no way I could do the tour and continue to see Joseph in the normal way. I reduced the number of charters I’d considered, and took mostly scheduled flights.

In April 1997 Lisa sent me the kindest letter. She seemed to remember only the good times between us, and I had been longing to see her since leaving her behind in Miami. She was going through some difficult childhood issues; almost everyone I knew seemed to have at least one dark tale to tell. Her closure-advising shrink was suddenly facing divorce from her own wayward husband. I repeated my invitation for Lisa to join me in Vienna for a few days. It was a long haul for her, but I was glad she came. Her shrink had told her that two ex-lovers couldn’t sleep in the same room and not have sex. Sadly, we managed to prove her wrong.

The day before my 52nd birthday we played our last show on the
Quadrophenia
European leg at Wembley Arena. At the after-show party a tall, voluptuous girl approached me apologetically.

‘Do you remember me? I’m Laura. I just wanted you to know I didn’t steal your money, but I know who did.’ It was the girl from Phoenix whom I suspected of having stolen my $50,000 out of my tote bag all those years ago. She explained that one of her brother’s friends (who has now passed away) had spotted the cash and taken it; their mother had found out about it and panicked. Laura still had the poem I wrote for her. The poem was entitled ‘The Tall Richard’ (Cockney rhyming slang: Richard the Third – bird).

Suddenly, standing beside her, was the girl from Nomis. It was Rachel and they were friends! What an extraordinary coincidence. Rachel took me aside to tell me something important, then just placed her two palms on my chest and told me to be true to my art. She looked very beautiful that evening, but I had already promised a neighbour a lift home. I scanned the room to see if I could make another arrangement with my neighbour, and when I turned back Rachel was gone. I made a few calls to try to track her down, and thought about inviting her to join me on the forthcoming Who tour. I forgot all about the $50,000.

Then the US tour of
Quadrophenia
began, from 17 July to 17 August. I managed to persuade Rachel to come to New York to spend time with me, and when it emerged that Laura knew Wiggy I invited her as well, with Wiggy to be their minder.

My one-to-one counsellor suggested that I was insane in this venture. It was certainly not the best idea I’d ever had. Ensconced in the Royalton lobby, Laura was convinced I was still interested in her, and had I been less exhausted by my romantic absurdities of the past few years she would have been a worthy cause. She was quite spectacularly sexy, with a Jerry-Hall-like Southern belle elegance. I also remembered our time in Phoenix with real pleasure.

By contrast Rachel was, I had decided, troublesome; she was demanding and egotistic. Both she and Laura had met Ahmet Ertegun through Laura’s music-business boyfriend, and I had a sense that I had probably been displaced in the matter of Rachel by the great philandering record man. She told me she knew him, and he had entertained her at Tramp’s one night in the recent past. He wanted to sleep with her, but she turned him down.

After this I decided to sell
Nuovo Pensiero
and use the proceeds to buy a modest house near Karen in Cornwall. I found a converted barn in Mawnan Smith over the Helford river that was secluded, but a short dinghy ride would connect me to Joseph. On 6 September 1997 I noted a landmark event in my diary: Joseph slept in my new home at The Wick for the first time! I was delighted, and the swimming pool was great for him and his friends after school. I was grateful to Karen for making this happen.

That same month I had a few meetings with Rachel. I wanted to work with her as an orchestrator.

Or that was what I told myself.

On 1 December I took Rachel on a proper date, dinner at Riva, a restaurant near my home in Barnes. There were some music-business friends at a nearby table, some of them family friends. Rachel looked very lovely, and something felt different between us. She seemed suddenly grown up. There were fewer jokes, less teasing, less showing off. That night we made love for the first time.

I felt like Dustin Hoffman at the end of
The Graduate
, having stolen the girl he wanted from the altar, and driving away with her on a bus, both of them knowing they could never go back, but not sure whether going forward would work out.

I was swept away by Rachel, but it felt different to me than such moments in the past. There had been that instant attraction I had felt with other women, and perhaps if I had worked hard on any of those love affairs – or even my marriage – I could have made a go of it. But Rachel was especially talented, and this allowed me to hope she would understand my creative need for time and space of my own.

She was also young, and I felt I needed that. I still tended to have grand mood-swings and manic bursts of energy, to leave people around me in my wake sometimes, and to be impatient if they didn’t keep up. Rachel would keep up, I was certain of that. I could only wonder whether I could keep up with her. So, after one amazing night of talking and making love, every aspect of Rachel’s character that had troubled me seemed to become an asset. I felt at last that I’d found someone who could cope with me as I was.

Having girlfriends in America was all very well: they could never upset Karen, and that was important. But I loved some of the psychic risk Rachel posed – she still seemed wild and independent in some ways – and I realised that for once in my life my drive to be with this woman was not so much about wanting sex as her company, humour and energy. I would try to start a serious relationship with her; at least we were both musicians, and if it worked, great. If it didn’t, I would live the rest of my life an abstinent bachelor.

In the spring of 1998 Ethan Silverman, who directed
Bill Graham Presents
, sent me a film he had submitted to Sundance called
The Waiting Children
. In the documentary an American couple travel to Russia to adopt a child; there are harrowing scenes of awful conditions in some of the orphanages they visit, and we follow the sad waif of a boy that the couple brings home. It was very moving and I thought of Oleg, the Russian boy I’d met in the street in Teddington. I’d tried the phone number he’d given me without success, but this time someone replied.

‘You are the person who left messages last year? There’s no one called Oleg here, never has been.’

I still wanted to follow the impulse to donate money to one of these orphanages. I’d never been to Russia, and it wouldn’t hurt if my first visit was to do a special show for an institution looking after abandoned kids. Or I could just write a cheque.

I opened up my Toshiba laptop, went into my browser, selected a search engine and typed a few simple words:

russian orphanages boys donations

Search-engine results soon filled the page. I clicked on the first, and within a few minutes (in those days images loaded very slowly indeed) my screen was covered in images of young boys being sexually abused.

I was stunned. Like most men I had used the primitive internet of the time to look at pornography – it was the novelty of the period – but I had never seen anything like this.

I began to sweat and feel anxious. Images flooded before my eyes, but in these scenes I was the principal figure, a young boy, lying face down on a bed. My anxiety was quickly replaced by rage.

28

LETTER TO MY EIGHT-YEAR-OLD SELF

By the spring of 1998 I had stayed away from alcohol for four years. Although still receiving mail and dealing with Faber business, I hadn’t attended many editorial meetings since the Broadway production of
Tommy
. My involvement gradually receded. In 1995 Robert McCrum had suffered a massive stroke and left Faber the following year to join the
Observer
, and these two events somehow marked the beginning of the end of my Faber career. I had loved being involved in Faber editorially, but it was time to move on.

The knots in my life were untangling. Joseph was at school with new friends and seemed happy. Emma had made a record (
Winterland
), Minta had worked on a really great movie (as production assistant on
The English Patient
). The Des McAnuff incarnation of
Tommy
was almost over.
Iron Giant
was in Warner’s hands. The concert touring version of
Quadrophenia
had been laid to rest for a while. I had a new home in Richmond, and a practical retreat in Cornwall.

I had reached a degree of closure with Lisa and some other girlfriends, and was excited about Rachel. I looked forward to indulging myself a little, both creatively and in my charity work. Tom Critchley started work for me as creative facilitator (a term I invented) and took over
Lifehouse
. Spike had started compiling a third
Scoop
collection, a two-year project, and I planned to prepare some new pieces especially for the collection.

Who offers were still coming in, but tended to be one-offs. I planned to do a couple of charity events, returning to Chicago for Maryville Academy, this time with Eddie Vedder. Believe it or not, I felt a little calmer and quieter, and I was looking forward to the year ahead. I was still having bad days, often when I lost track of Rachel, heard she was out with friends or found she wasn’t answering her phone.

One night in March 1998 Rachel brought a friend and her children to my house for safety after some trouble with her friend’s ex-husband. They brought a lot of wine, and Rachel got very drunk. I had never seen her drunk, and she frightened me, creating such a scene that I put a stop to the relationship. Finding Rachel and making such a deep commitment to her, then realising I’d picked a girl who could get so crazy, shook me to the core.

I consoled myself by wiring up the keyboard studio in my house, the therapy I enjoyed most.

Linda McCartney lost her battle against cancer and Paul asked me to give a eulogy at the memorial service. A little later Karen rang to say that her father Ted was going fast. He died on my birthday. Another death that stung was Ted Hughes. Carol, his widow, was distraught on the phone and there was nothing I could say to console her.

With proverbial fingers crossed I had started seeing Rachel again, as she was orchestrating ‘Tragedy’ for
Lifehouse
. I arranged for her to get a flat in a building in Kew Road, wanting at least for her to be near me. I took her to New York where I bought her a new VW Beetle and prepared to see her whenever I wanted, but she turned out to be very hard to pin down.

After a month or two of paranoia on my part I discovered she had been secretly drinking all the time we’d been seeing each other, sometimes heavily, and that explained her absences. It was another last straw, and I wrote to her to end our relationship. She called shortly after to say she had decided to get some professional help, and agreed that we needed to take a break.

During the month in which Rachel was away I wrestled with feelings of disconnection, loss and loneliness. My Uncle Jack had fallen down the stairs in his house, and after he came out of hospital he came to live with me briefly and I looked after him. Perhaps Uncle Jack’s presence stirred up feelings in me about the past and my family. Or maybe I had projected too much hope onto the idea of Rachel being the one and my desolation was due to my belief that our relationship wasn’t going to work out.

I was still raging to anyone who would listen about my exposure to the child-porn images I had seen. Nick Goderson contacted me to say that Matt Kent, a Who biographer and computer geek, wanted to help me run my personal website. That, I decided, was where I would break the true story about what was happening on the internet. I envisaged running the first internet theatre. The plan was to get the website going in the summer. In the end it didn’t happen until much later.

Matt was creating two websites for which he would serve as webmaster. One was www.eelpie.com, dedicated to a mail-order and downloading service. The other website was www.petetownshend.com, dedicated to what nowadays we would call a blog. The bigger idea – for a kind of web-based music-theatre venue – would have to wait for faster broadband speeds and larger server spaces.

I had funded Gustav Metzger’s first major UK show at MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art, in Oxford), and one of Rachel’s best friends Melissa More curated the opening night for us. I remember driving to Oxford, determined I was going to do something soon about the sudden whirlwind of news about child pornography on the internet. I remember feeling that being on my own, spending time with Gustav again, who was so saintly in a sense, set up a determination in me to do something profoundly impetuous and brave.

Uncle Jack died shortly after, which was incredibly sad. I was extremely fond of him. He left his money to Mum, who spent most of it building a large swimming pool for her little villa in Menorca.

I had found Julia Cameron’s book
The Artist’s Way
so useful in kickstarting my creativity that I bought twenty copies and gave them away. I started doing the ‘Morning Pages’ in
The Artist’s Way
, which recommended writing three pages every day to clear out the mind to give creative ideas some space. Another exercise the author recommended was called ‘An Artist’s Date’, which involved setting part of a day aside for whatever one’s ‘inner artist’ fancied doing. Whenever I closed my eyes and asked what I fancied doing, I got the same answer.

‘I wanna go outside and sit on the pavement,’ the voice of a six-year-old boy said, ‘with my dog.’ I didn’t have a dog, but I did go and sit on the pavement, which was great fun. I’m still not quite sure why.

Julia Cameron also suggested writing letters to oneself, and during this period I wrote one to Pete Townshend, aged eight. It proved to be a crucial act of affirmation that eventually helped to heal the pain and hurt I had been harbouring all my life: it started me on the path of becoming more at peace with myself over the next decade, and of forgiving myself for whatever it was that still intermittently caused me anxiety, guilt and shame.

Yet it was also to trigger a series of events that in the short term and in the next few years were to rebound on me in a completely unpredictable way.

It was sobering to be shunted from the humiliations of my early childhood to the financial difficulties of my old friend John Entwistle. The news came in the form of a letter from Bill Curbishley on 26 May asking if I would agree to do a tour to help.

His situation is pretty dire. The bank have been bouncing cheques on him, he’s already topped up his mortgage to the absolute maximum and his credit cards have been blocked. He lives by selling his guitars, but he can only leak those onto the market to maintain price/supply/demand. Not good. For you and I it’s a case of ‘but for the graces of God …’ In the end I came round to the feeling that if it was me in this situation I’d pray I had the friends to help me. […]

If there was ever a case of ‘all amends in one basket’ this is it! It would mean going away, it would mean doing what you don’t want to do, and it would have to be promoted. No doubt, any shows would kick-start the BBC
Lifehouse
album but the angle would have to be a Who farewell/Millennium/celebration/survival theme and fuck the critics! This is honestly the last thing I expected or wanted to be doing. I had my year sort of planned out and I’m still struggling a bit on the health front, but I’ll go with your decisions whatever it is.

In June I wrote to Bill agreeing to do a tour to help. He was right; I wasn’t keen. I was enjoying the prospect of pursuing my
Artist’s Way
vision over the next eighteen months. A visit from Roger helped me decide. I couldn’t let John go down. I set down all kinds of conditions and side issues, but these were flimsy, really; I was just trying to make myself feel better.

Back in February 1995 Des McAnuff had called me after a meeting with Warner Brothers’ heads; he’d also met the executives in charge of animation. They liked our ideas for
Iron Giant
and wanted the rights in advance of starting their own creative process; they were envisaging a $50 million budget.

I had flown to Los Angeles to go with Des to meet Brad Bird whom Warners had suggested direct
Iron Giant
. Brad was keen but he hated musicals, and hated what Disney was doing with Elton on
The Lion King
. I recommended Michael Kamen to do the conventional orchestral score, for which the budget set aside was far too small. Michael did it as a favour for me, using talented junior associates to do the work quickly and efficiently. I had worn myself out with
Iron Man
. I still had my Young Vic version, and I thought one day I might revisit it and pull it into better shape.

I went to LA in July 1999 to see the finished
Iron Giant
. It was beautifully animated with hand-coloured frames – one of the last animation films to be made that way. The film came too late for Ted Hughes himself, but his daughter, to whom the original book was dedicated along with her brother, loved it.

The
Lifehouse
play was recorded at BBC Maida Vale in a studio dedicated to the task, with a proper kitchen to rattle around in, car doors, creaking chairs to sit in and light switches to manipulate. Jeff Young, who wrote the play, later married the director’s assistant.

Rachel and I went to my house in Cornwall to watch the solar eclipse on 11 August. The sky was so cloudy we saw nothing. She was always uneasy in Cornwall. She saw it as Karen’s territory and hurried home the next day. She called me, distraught: her mother had died suddenly from a deep-vein thrombosis on a plane back from Bali. It was a terrible shock.

I saw some progress on my new websites in the autumn of 1999, which was exciting, but I felt the designs were lacklustre. This was my first indication of how sensitive Matt Kent could be. I saw him as webmaster, but he was (and still is) a very creative man, and he saw much of what he was doing for me as creative in its own right, not just a facilitation of my needs.

In November The Who played their first show at the Chicago House of Blues for Maryville Academy. During the rehearsals Roger began talking about global conspiracies – one of his favourite themes – and my lack of engagement in what he was saying annoyed him. Upset, he started to walk out of the theatre, but I managed to stop him. The next day I wrote to him.

Dear Rog,

I have been thinking about our communication blip yesterday at rehearsal. I know your response was emotional, and after you became upset I’m so glad you stayed around long enough for me to get to you to talk. I care about you very much and I hate to feel that as adults we can so easily fall into old behaviour like that. But we do love each other today, and I think that means we will be able to stand some ups and downs, at least I hope it will. […]

Don’t be too emotional about what may or may not happen with The Who. As you said yesterday, what we have today is more than we thought possible. What makes me proud is that whether or not we make another great record, whether or not we knock them dead in some new way, we are loving friends today. That is our example as men to those who trusted us with their dreams. We’ve come through. I’m proud of both of us.

The tiny House of Blues venue was not a good place for the new Who band. The main problem was that on such a small stage the drums were too close. It was deafening. Ears ringing, I spoke to Eddie Vedder afterwards.

‘I can’t do this any more,’ I said. ‘I’m blowing my brains out.’

‘Well, then, stop, Pete,’ he said simply. ‘You’ve done enough.’

Reviews of my performances referred more to the way I conducted myself on stage than the way I played. My solo shows had encouraged me to talk to the audience, which didn’t always go down well in the context of The Who. Roger, especially, had always looked uneasy when I took over the front of the stage and started to rant, but some of our exchanges were great; he was becoming very quick-witted in his on-stage repartee, and often made me laugh.

‘I’m just trying to keep the bastards in check,’ I told him when he frowned at me for telling the House of Blues audience to shut up. He came back at me in a split second.

‘They’ve kept you in cheques for long enough.’

On 5 December 1999 the
Lifehouse
play was aired in the UK on BBC Radio 3. David Lister, the
Independent
newspaper’s Arts Editor, gave the front page to the event. Not everyone was so encouraging. In the week leading up to it there was a lot of press about the break-up of my marriage, which seemed old news to me, but was surprisingly comprehensive. I was worried Karen would be upset by it, but she was fairly sanguine.

That week Rachel and I went with recently separated Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall to see Bowie perform; the tabloids printed a photo of Rachel and me together, the first published. Rachel was pleased to be described as ‘stunning’ in the
Sun
. I was less pleased, having been described by one critic as looking like a vicar, but I felt good about Rachel and my creative life. I still believed I had great work ahead of me.

The Who did a couple of shows at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. The tickets had sold out in under thirty minutes. I played well, and threw myself into the shows. The sound was very loud again on stage, but this time I was ready for it. Grander concert events had been touted, a new album was being considered, but for me two nights with our old Bush fans was the best way to bring in the new year and whatever would follow.