Shortly after eleven A.M. on October 12, 1978, the NYPD responded to a report of trouble inside Room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel. Since the late 1800s, the twelve-story, redbrick Victorian Gothic building had served as a popular waystation for an array of artists, most with bohemian sensibilities and expansive appetites for dangerous intoxicants.
Upon arrival the police found the lifeless body of a twenty-year-old platinum blonde girl lying faceup under the bathroom sink. She was clad only in a lace black bra and panties. Blood was smeared on her legs and torso from a single stab wound near her navel. There was more blood on the bed.
The victim’s name was Nancy Spungen, and she was the troubled girlfriend of notorious Sid Vicious (born John Simon Richie), the enfant terrible of punk rock and former bass guitarist for the Sex Pistols, a band that had broken up earlier that year.
One need not have been a habitué of Manhattan punk rock citadels to know that Sid and Nancy had a tempestuous relationship replete with frissons of S&M behavior and domestic violence. Nancy (known as “Nauseating Nancy” to those in the punk world who disliked her whiny voice) was now dead and Sid was being grilled. It was tabloid mania. Reporters descended upon the Chelsea Hotel like a wave of locusts, eager to find out what had happened.
There was much that was unclear, but one thing was not: Nancy’s death was a depressing coda for punk, which featured unsentimental, fast-paced, and hard-edged songs with angry and nihilistic undertones. It attracted alienated, working-class kids, initially from England and later from the United States and Australia, but no group embraced its ethos more than the Sex Pistols.
Formed and managed by Malcolm McLaren, a savvy clothing boutique owner, the Sex Pistols were a triumph of form over substance. The band featured lead singer Johnny Rotten (real name John Lydon), whose witty and engaging presence made him the troupe’s driving force. The group was renowned for its showmanship and delinquency rather than any pretense of musicianship. Still, there was a rabidly devoted fan base besotted with the band’s antics, such as piercing their cheeks with safety pins, vomiting during performances, spitting on or cursing at audience members, and of course, insulting the Queen of England.
Sid had been plucked from obscurity to join the group as a replacement member in February 1977. He was Rotten’s childhood friend and an exemplar of the punk aesthetic, as he seemed to have been born in tattered jeans, a ripped T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. He also had all the physical trappings of a punk rocker. He was six foot two, skeletal, and consumptive looking, with perpetually downcast furtive eyes and the requisite spiky hair. But it was his drug-fueled appetite for self-destruction that made him a punk avatar. That he could not play more than a few chords was of little importance. “If Rotten is the voice of punk, then Vicious is the attitude,” McLaren once boasted.
Sid was the product of a broken home and was close to his mother, Ann Beverly, who herself was also a junkie. It was not surprising that he fell for a strong-willed American female doppelganger in her mold.
Nancy had been raised in a Philadelphia suburb by middle-class Jewish parents. Growing up she threw tantrums and engaged in crying fits. By age fifteen she was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Her parents sent her to a private school for troubled children. Teachers described her as brilliant and intellectually gifted. In fact she was so smart that she skipped the third grade. But after being left to her own devices in college, she was expelled during her freshman year in 1975.
Nancy Spungen’s body being carried out of the Chelsea Hotel.
At age seventeen she set off to find fame and fortune in New York City the hard way. She bleached her hair white and applied heavy black mascara on her eyes to find work as a stripper in Times Square. On occasion she turned tricks for extra cash. In her free time she immersed herself in the burgeoning downtown punk scene.
The following year, she bolted for London, where she found her soul mate, Sid. They were made for each other. Nancy was brash and assertive. Sid was shy, introspective, and pliable. More important, they shared a love for heroin, general disorder, and high drama.
When detectives showed up at the Chelsea Hotel to question Sid, he was still high on the barbiturates he consumed the previous evening. “Please shoot me—kill me, my baby is dead,” he sobbed.
During the interrogation, he initially denied knowing what had happened to Nancy. He said they had gone to bed about one A.M., but before he passed out, he remembered Nancy sitting on the edge of the bed “flicking a knife.” (Both of them had a fascination with knives.) When he awoke he found Nancy unconscious on the bathroom floor with a stab wound in her stomach. He assumed that she had fallen on the knife and somehow dragged herself in there. He admitted leaving her alone after he found her to get a shot of methadone. When asked why he had left her, he said, “I did it because I’m a dog. A dirty dog.”
Later Sid confessed, “I stabbed her, but I didn’t mean to kill her. I loved her, but she treated me like shit.”
He was released over the prosecutor’s objections on $50,000 bail. Two weeks later, he was rushed to Bellevue Hospital after slicing his wrists with glass from a lightbulb. But Sid could not stay out of trouble. Less than two months after his abortive suicide attempt, he was rearrested for assaulting Todd Smith (the brother of singer Patti Smith) with a broken Heineken bottle. On December 8, 1978, Supreme Court Justice Betty Ellerin revoked his bail.
Whether or not he actually killed Nancy became moot on February 2, 1979. Just thirteen hours after winning his re-release on bail, Sid was found dead of a heroin overdose in the Greenwich Village apartment of his new girlfriend, actress Michelle Robinson.
Sid Vicious led away in police custody on a charge of murder after his girlfriend Nancy Spungen was found stabbed to death
Sid’s mother, Ann, was alleged to have scored the dope that killed her son. Purportedly, she phoned Nancy’s mother, Deborah, in an attempt to have Sid buried alongside his beloved Nancy. Mrs. Spungen flatly rejected the notion. This spawned an enduring rumor that Sid’s mother snuck into the cemetery and sprinkled her son’s ashes atop Nancy’s grave so the pair could remain linked forever.
It is a sweet tale, but a more credible account comes from McLaren. He said that Sid’s mother accidently kicked over the urn containing her son’s remains upon her return to London and inadvertently spread his ashes through Heathrow Airport via the ventilation system.
That account—detailing an unsentimental and existential act of pure cosmic indifference—seems more believable, if only because it is a true distillation of punk’s credo: In the end, all is meaningless.