Stardust Memories Page 5

  He’s a sportsman and an entertainer, a cult hero and a sex symbol. And paradoxically enough, at a moment when the image of the adolescent idol is one of acute anaemia, it is this tough little soccer player, who isn’t allowed by his club to make records or films, who is throbbing most northern hearts.

  ‘I seem to be getting a lot of mail from Communist countries these days,’ he says, ‘particularly Yugoslavia. People used to think that footballers were big blokes with short haircuts, but I’m just an ordinary young bloke who happens to play football.’

  Best joined Manchester United when he was fifteen after being spotted playing with a youth club in Belfast. (’I went to a grammar school for a few months but I didn’t like it there because they played rugby.’) They put him in digs with a widow and her family and got him a job as a tea-boy, and when he was seventeen he became a regular first team man.

  He is still in the same widow’s digs. ‘I’d like a flat but they won’t let me have one for the obvious reasons. I suppose they think I wouldn’t be able to look after myself, and anyway it wouldn’t do for me to come back screaming in the middle of the night and asking people back and all that. You need lots of sleep if you’re going to play football.

  ‘I’ve quietened down quite a lot myself though these days. Most of my friends are married or engaged and I’ve got a regular girl friend — a film script writer in London. Matt Busby still has to give me talkings to, but not too often, and I haven’t smashed my present car up yet.’

  Almost twenty-two, he is exceptionally young to be Footballer of the Year, an award which usually goes to players getting near to the end of their careers.

  He says: ‘Now I suppose there are a few people who think I’m one of the best players in the world, but I won’t be happy until everyone accepts me as one of the best players in the world.

  ‘You can’t make a footballer; it’s either born in you or it isn’t. I’ve been kicking a ball around for as long as I can remember. I’d like to stay in football for about another ten years — and then hope that I’ll have enough business interests going for me to be able to get right out.’

  So far his business interests are a half-share in two boutiques and a fish and chip shop which he bought for his mother and father in Belfast. He hopes to buy them a pub soon, and plans to open a restaurant in Manchester. ‘There’s no choice up here,’ says Best the gourmet.

  His appeal is very broad. There are the professional soccer spectators who admire his speed and balance, there are the girls for whom he is a symbol of sexuality (’You can see sex in anything depending upon the way your mind works, but I don’t suppose many girls get the chance to see a bloke running about with only a pair of shorts on very often’), and there are the young boys, whose pipe dream he fulfils.

  He looks very young — not unlike Terence Stamp — but he has a very heavy beard and shaves twice a day. His legs are short and for a footballer he’s not very big. He must be one of the best-looking footballers ever, makes an extra living as a male model, and I know of at least one film producer who wishes he would give up soccer.

  ‘I had a fan club until recently but the work became too much for the people who were running it. Now I’m looking for a private secretary to handle the mail but I’m frightened to advertise because of the response I’ll get.

  ‘It’s unbelievable — I could have been working from 9 to 5.30 in the shipyards like my father. It was he who first got me interested in soccer. He used to be an amateur player but lost interest when he got married.

  ‘I’m the eldest of six, and we didn’t have much money. But they know now that if they want anything they only have to ask.’

  POSTSCRIPT George Best is a tragedy of British football. Possibly the most gifted player since the war, his career was interrupted by an increasingly lurid number of tabloid headlines when he failed to turn up at Manchester United for training. The pressures on him led to alcoholism, and although he made some success of a career in America, controversy pursued him wherever he played. He has been married and is now separated, and despite his early successes in trading off his name, has had more than his share of money problems.

  October 1968

  Yoko Ono

  ‘the idea for our “Two Virgins” album came from John. I know some people may think “ah, that bottoms-girl Yoko has persuaded John into this” but that wasn’t how it was. I don’t think my bottoms film inspired him either. I know some may think that I have a bottoms fetish, but when we made that film I was so embarrassed that I was never in the same room as the filming. I’m very shy. I just set up the camera and allowed the technicians to do it and my friends went before the camera as though they were being X-rayed. John is very shy, too. I don’t think he’s seen the bottoms film. He heard one of the tapes of my voice pieces and said this should be an LP record, and that if it were made it should have a picture of me naked on the cover. I don’t know why he said that. I suppose he just thought it would be effective. He didn’t even know me that well at the time. Anyway he sent me a drawing of me naked, and I was terribly embarrassed. But when we decided to make a record we decided that we should both be naked on the cover. He took the photograph with an automatic camera. No — we wouldn’t have had anyone else there to photograph us. And it’s nice. The picture isn’t lewd or anything like that. Basically we’re very shy and square people. We’d be the first to be embarrassed if anyone was to invite us to a nude party.’

  Right now Yoko Ono is probably the most enigmatic lady in the world. She came to London in 1966, had a couple of avant garde exhibitions which met with generally favourable reviews, became a topic for national ribaldry when her film study of bottoms walking was shown in London, and then front page news when she struck up a friendship with John Lennon last spring.

  But, somewhere in between the escalating-sized headlines, Yoko Ono, the artist, has lost her real public identity. Her notoriety doesn’t prepare one for the smiling, charming, slightly nervous woman who for months has waited at the recording studios while Lennon worked on the Beatles’ new album.

  Of course we know she’s Japanese and very small, but it still comes as a surprise to notice the diminutive hands, with the nag-nailed fingers and that the eternal white tennis shoes she wears, tiny as they are, are actually about one and a half inches too long for her.

  She looks like Lennon, and is flattered when one tells her so, because she herself only noticed it the other day.

  ‘Both of us think that we met previously in other lives and were meant to meet again,’ she says, her accent a soft Eastern flattening of American.

  She’s thirty-four, twice married, and was brought up in Tokyo and America. Her family were rich (her father was a governor of a bank and she had an uncle who represented Japan at the United Nations) and her childhood was rigidly authoritarian and dedicated to education.

  Her mother was Buddhist and her father Christian and, in addition, her school lessons were with a governess who took her in Bible reading and Buddhist scripture, as well as caligraphy, music and Japanese culture. She has a younger brother and sister.

  ‘I was like a domesticated animal being fed on information’, she says. ‘I hated it. And particularly music. And before my music lessons I used to faint — literally. I suppose it was my way of escape.’

  On top of education came a strict moral code. God was always watching, and any misdemeanours or bad thoughts had to be confessed to her mother.

  ‘I never went so far as to read comics, but I remember when I was about eight sneaking into my father’s library and reading adult books like Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. Of course, there was nothing improper in them, but I had to confess, and that was a terrible ordeal.

  ‘When I was older and received letters my mother always read them before I did, and if one was from a man admirer she would blame it upon some loose thoughts I’d been having.’

  As a child she thinks she was probably considered precocious: she wrote a diary of poems at nine, and remembers w
ith some pride that her teacher sent a letter to her mother saying that some day she would make a name for herself as a painter or a poet.

  In her teens she tried to rebel by running away from home, but never got further than her granny’s home: ‘I always seemed to be very weak. Not just physically, although I was always catching colds, but weak in character too. I just wasn’t able to stand up to my mother, and before I did anything at all I used to ask permission.’

  When she was eighteen her family went to live in New York, and as she couldn’t be left alone in Japan at ‘such a dangerous age’ she went too and enrolled to read philosophy at Sarah Lawrence — ‘a school for girls who thought of nothing but marrying Harvard graduates.’

  While at high school in Tokyo she had been very active in writing and dramatics, and it was while she was at Sarah Lawrence that her first book — Grapefruit — was germinated. From this point her obsession became instructional art and communication.

  ‘I was lying in bed one morning listening to the birds singing and I immediately wanted to put the sound into musical notes. But I found it was too complicated, and thought if I can’t do that perhaps it would be better to use it exactly as it is. So I wrote a one-note flute piece and the accompaniment was to be the sound of the birds singing. And I gave instructions that the one note on the flute should be played in the forest or somewhere while the birds sang.’

  Her biggest problem at first was when she discovered that what she wanted to do was so new that there wasn’t anyone who would produce or accept it. So she rented a loft, converted it into a studio, and held happenings every other week. ‘I remember I bought a baby-grand piano and at the first concert I played it with my body, by rolling along the open string part. It snowed that day.

  ‘Another buzz I got was when we boiled a still of water and listened until it evaporated. One of the men there got so turned on by it that he filmed the whole event — but he found out later he’d forgotten to put any film in his camera.’

  She finally gave up the loft when she felt it was becoming too much a part of the establishment. But she left nearly all her possessions behind her: ‘People cherish the idea of having things which belonged to me.’

  It isn’t enough for Yoko that an artist present his work to the public. The public have to respond with a dialogue. To Yoko Ono everyone is an artist. Her works are unfinished and instructional.

  When she asked people to cut her clothes off at one of her happenings, it was again their reaction which made the event. And the point about her ‘Two Virgins’ LP with Lennon (the cover of which shows them both naked) is not that people listen and say ‘very nice’, but that they add something of their own to it. (It’s sub-titled ‘Unfinished Music Number 1’, and will be followed by other albums.)

  ‘Most artists work in monologue form,’ she says. ‘I don’t believe in the artist deciding what has aesthetic values, but in letting the painting or music or whatever it is grow — be in a state of process. Everything I do is unfinished, so that you, or somebody else can add something and then pass it on.’

  As an artist she’s more of a conceptualist than an actual craftsman. She thinks of an idea, and others perform it.

  She was first married in 1957 to a Japanese composer (’he used to write Stravinsky-type material, but he gradually changed after we met, and now he’s the foremost avant garde composer in Japan’). After six years she left him, when she felt that they were becoming too much a part of the arts establishment. Her second husband was another artist (now film producer) Tony Cox. They have one daughter of five called Kyoko.

  ‘Both of my marriages were elopements,’ she says. ‘Basically I’m a romantic and believe in long-lasting relationships, but somehow I’ve failed up to now. I can’t be happy with relationships when communication starts to fail.

  ‘What is more important to me even than my work now is my relationship with John. Because John, too, is so creative, we can collaborate together.’

  POSTSCRIPT Since the murder of John Lennon Yoko has continued to live in their New York apartment with their son Sean. Before his death John credited Yoko with the turn around in his financial fortunes, and her involvement in business in recent years does seem to have curtailed her efforts in pursuit of the avant garde. Despite the scepticism of many, her marriage to Lennon was (apart from a mid-term break) a great success. As well as being a wife Yoko proved herself to be a chum to Lennon.

  January 1969

  Jean Shrimpton

  We’re in a white-painted little two up, two down, and two further down, cottage somewhere round the back of Knightsbridge, and we’re short of milk for our afternoon tea and there’s Shrimpton — yes, Shrimpton who created all those English rose fantasies for us years ago before fantasy had to mean nightmare — making a bargain with some guy who’s putting a shelf up for her: ‘You get a pint of milk and feed the meter and I’ll do the tidying up and hoovering.’

  And off he trots wondering if he’s not the most fortunate carpenter since Noah. Well, how many members of the British Institute of Certified Carpenters (Inc.) ever made a bargain with Jean Shrimpton? And shouldn’t it be the best shelf anyone ever made?

  Twenty-six, now, and it’s eight years after, and Shrimpton has aged not at all. She’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

  It was 1961 when Jean Shrimpton first began to appear in Vogue: the year David Frost came down from Cambridge, the year Twiggy had her twelfth birthday and when the Beatles were lucky if they earned £10 a week each. And it was well before Time magazine, or anyone else, had got around to inventing that fiction that had us all looking around for swinging London.

  This week Jean Shrimpton was back in London seeing friends and relatives, riding her father’s horse on the family’s Berkshire farm and evading questions about her personal life.

  She lives permanently in New York these days, with a pregnant Alsatian — spending the days traipsing from cinemas to art galleries and sales and on to antique stores, with all their ‘flippin’ vultures’. Her evenings are devoted to a certain anonymous gentleman, neither rich nor famous, but whom she likes very much. London is a part of her past.

  ‘Sometimes people ask me about my generation,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what or who they mean. There’s a whole generation of people, ten years behind me, with whom I feel absolutely nothing in common. I’m really terribly square and out of contact with everything. Sometimes I feel like an old woman.’

  She chats away, voice of a schoolgirl, confident enough to be unaffected, hands constantly to her hair shaping and re-shaping it in frames around that face, lips heavier and a little more sensuous than one might have expected, screwing up occasionally in expressions of distaste and mock derision.

  She went to live in New York three years ago, after her one and only, and, as it transpired, disastrous film appearance opposite Paul Jones in Privilege. The reviews were scathing in the extreme. And the experience seems to have deterred her from filming for life. ‘It was terrible. I just hung around and moped. Failure lives with one so long in London. I just wished I’d given myself a kick in the ass earlier and got away.

  ‘In New York failure is much less important. Everyone’s trying to do things all the time, and if you do fail it’s forgotten within a week, because other more important people than you have failed. Still, at the time of Privilege, it was very good in many ways for me to fail.

  ‘I shall never make another film. I can’t act at all and I never will be able to. In fact, I find trying to act very embarrassing and very tedious. You really have to be devoted to that sort of life — like my sister Chrissie. I hope to God she makes it, because I feel so sorry for her. You have to. She’s got it very tough. It must be horrible having a sister who’s more successful. And I’ve always been the lucky one. Things have always been so simple for me and complicated for her.’

  Shrimpton is not a rich woman. Far from it: ‘Most of the work I did in Britain was for Vogue, who only paid me £10 a day. I could
have got more for an hour’s advertising work.’

  She is now under contract to an American cosmetics company, for reasons which she describes as mercenary. Apart from that when she works it is with Richard Avedon. It’s a pleasure to go to Avedon’s she says. It clearly isn’t as much of a pleasure to go to David Bailey’s any more: ‘No, I haven’t done any work while I’ve been here this time,’ she says — suddenly laughing. ‘Bailey’s usually such a bloody pest, but he never got round me this time. I like him, though.’

  She is at a watershed of her career. She used to worry that, when the time came for her days as a top model to be finished, she wouldn’t know how to cope. ‘But now that it has come I find I just don’t care. It just doesn’t matter to me any more. I’m happier than I’ve ever been for ages,’ and her hands get lost again in her hair… parting and waving and tugging and stroking.

  When she was making Privilege it began to fall out in alarming quantities, and she spent hundreds of dollars trying to find out why. Unsuccessfully.

  Her looks she considers a bore. One doesn’t care, she says philosophically, as one gets older. ‘When I was younger I cared about looking sexy and went around wearing padded bras, but now that I’m older it doesn’t bother me at all.’

  She would like to do an interview programme for television with journalist Polly Devlin, who is now an associate features editor of American Vogue and her closest friend in New York.

  ‘Polly’s terribly clever. I’m surrounded by clever and talented people which can be very frustrating, because I can neither write, nor paint, nor play an instrument.

  ‘I can drive a car and ride a horse, and that’s about all. That’s all very nice, but it’s hardly creative. All I’ve achieved so far is enough to know I want to do something more.’