As the Olympic circus dispersed, Curry headed for London. Six months had passed since he’d last been there and he was both curious to experience fame and desperate for a bolt-hole. All around him the media fallout was still swirling. With no one to help, he’d started to drown under a wave of unopened mail and unsolicited calls. In Britain, surely, he could lose himself and take stock. It was time to fall back on an old friend.
Ever since they’d met at Richmond Ice Rink, he’d stayed close to Penny Malec. Like all of Curry’s enduring confidantes, she was plain-speaking and utterly trustworthy. Since she also now lived with her mother in Richmond, Penny was the perfect solution ‘I was an outlet. He’d tell me stuff,’ she says. ‘He was a terrifically loyal person.’
Throughout Olympic week, nursing flu, she’d watched him win gold from behind the sofa. ‘It was just like Doctor Who,’ she explains. ‘I couldn’t look.’ A few days later, Curry had called her from Innsbruck and told her what plane he’d be on. ‘He said there’ll probably be a few people but I’d really like you to meet me. I must have said OK, but I was quite cross about it. I put on a woolly hat and a big scarf so no one could see me and then the cameras started to flash.’
When Curry had last been in London, few people had known who he was and his personal life had been exactly that. All that had changed and he was now a national curiosity. Sadly he would soon discover that, in some quarters, the veneer of public flattery was wafer-thin, and that beneath it lay cheap innuendo and ridicule. ‘My bubble has been broken,’ he lamented to Alison Smith. ‘I’ve got no reason to get up in the morning.’ For every observer who admired the skater’s courage, there was another who was privately unsettled by him. Legalising homosexuality was one thing. Liking it – or those who practised it – was something else entirely.
‘The fact that he was judged so harshly at the time of the Olympics really mattered to him,’ says Penny. ‘I remember sitting on a train with a man and a woman and she said, “Oh look there’s a picture of John Curry, isn’t he a brilliant skater?” and the bloke said, “Ugh. He skates like a woman.”’
Behind the locked doors of Penny’s Richmond flat, Curry was finally able to draw breath. Outside, whenever anyone left, they would be accosted by reporters. Inside, the telephone rang constantly, and even Penny’s appearance at the airport had made the national newspapers. On a picture caption she’d been described – presumably with heavy irony – as John Curry’s girlfriend. ‘One time a journalist got hold me on the phone and more or less said – are you sleeping with him? John came out of the sitting room like a bolt of lightning and snatched the phone out of my hand and put it down.’
As the siege slackened, Curry ventured into the city. It was, he said, ‘like being in an insane asylum.’ Everywhere he went his distinctive hairstyle was recognised. ‘People ran out of shops; cars would stop right in the middle of traffic while the drivers got out; taxi drivers held up the traffic to let me cross the street; it was really most odd and rather bewildering.’ Although ‘panicked’ at first, Curry found the public’s apparent warmth much less disturbing than expected. He was, after all, a man who enjoyed being looked at.
Very soon, to his mother’s relief, Curry’s footballer perm would be gone. It was only there because he’d lost so much weight during training the previous summer that ‘the sight of [his] own skull in the mirror had depressed [him]’. By having it curled, he’d hoped to present a more ‘cheerful and healthy look, even though I was neither’. What London’s star-struck shoppers took to be normal was merely the transient consequence of Curry’s vanity; and of his lifelong obsession with his weight.
For the first time in months, however, Curry wasn’t even training. Drinking tea in Penny Malec’s flat, he had put his immediate future on hold. In 16 days the World Figure Skating Championships would begin in Gothenburg. If Curry competed and won, he would have taken the European, Olympic and World titles, all inside 50 days, a feat that might never be repeated. The Englishman was keen. His pragmatic Italian coach, however, was not. As far as Fassi was concerned, their work was done; what you have, you hold. A defeat in Sweden taint the noble perfection of Olympic triumph. He was giving Curry’s stablemate Dorothy Hamill the same advice. ‘After you win, you quit and you go home and that’s it.’
As Curry left Innsbruck, he’d fully intended to follow Fassi’s advice. After a week in London, he was no longer so sure. For years he’d resented the need to be a sportsman. Hidden away in Richmond, Curry was unexpectedly missing its certainties; the smell of an empty rink at dawn and the growl of an Italian accent. Competition was all he had ever known and on both sides of the Atlantic precious sanctuaries were being violated. Over in New York, even Nancy Streeter had been tracked down by British reporters. ‘I guess all this is the price of fame,’ she wrote. ‘Come home soon – so many things to hear about.’ Privately, his thoughts turned towards Gothenburg.
As he agonised, demand for Curry’s presence was growing. In Birmingham there had been a civic reception. Advertisers wanted his face on their products. Women’s magazines wanted his life story between the knitting patterns. Promoters wanted him in their theatres. A publisher wanted a book. With no agent, Curry felt unable to sift good from bad, and almost every enquiry was ignored. On Friday 20 February, he weakened. Wearing a paisley tie, and sitting next to Manchester United’s Sir Matt Busby, Curry had agreed to speak in London’s magnificent Guildhall for the Valour in Sport Awards. For days, he’d been crafting a speech on the theme of courage. Penny Malec was there as his guest. Not even compulsory figures had rendered him so nervous.
After the endless toasts and votes of thanks, Curry rose from his seat. The widow of racing driver Graham Hill, killed three months earlier, had just sat down. In his hand was a speech covered in frantic crossings out. ‘People at that moment were ready to listen to almost anything that I might utter,’ he said. For the next few minutes, Curry tore into the poverty of British sports funding. ‘Training in Britain was impossible,’ he said. ‘Half my time was spent dodging other people. The ice was all right in the morning at six … then a school arrived. I owe a debt of gratitude to my American friends … [and] unless something is done the British people condemn their sportsmen to an endless prospect of wasted courage.’
In every corner of the Guildhall, leather seats creaked and mayoral chains rattled. This wasn’t the definition of courage they’d had in mind. Amidst polite applause – and a military fanfare – the winners and the dignitaries filed out. But for some last-minute revisions, it could have been worse. Curry’s fury with British facilities had been diluted for his Guildhall audience. Following the press coverage the previous week, it wouldn’t do to alienate everyone. ‘England loves me right now,’ he told Nancy. ‘It’s all quite overwhelming.’
By the time Curry returned to Penny’s flat, he’d made his decision. Whatever Fassi said, he was going to Gothenburg. That evening, he rang his coach at his training camp in Helsinki. ‘Please don’t come,’ pleaded the Italian. Within hours, Curry was bound for Sweden determined to show that Innsbruck had not been a fluke and to prove to himself that he ‘could again face the possibility of not winning’.
I thought there was a chance that I might not win but I didn’t really mind actually. I just felt that if I didn’t go I wouldn’t be much of a champion. I thought if I’d won the Olympics and turned round and said I wasn’t prepared to face them all again it wouldn’t be much of a gold medal either.
Between London and Helsinki Curry penned a note to Nancy Streeter. ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m not. I’m excited and looking forward to it. I made it into Newsweek and Vogue is next on the list. It is all very exciting. Offers are coming from all directions.’ As the plane banked over the expanse of snowy forest, he paused. Amidst the media carnage, something durable had emerged. ‘Mother has been WONDERFUL about everything. We talked about my being gay and she was so kind and understanding. That has been one of the greatest things to come out of the Olympics. You can imagine how relaxed and easy I feel now.’
Nevertheless, after nine days of inactivity, Curry had set himself a huge task. ‘A week without skating at that level is too long,’ says Dorothy Hamill, who, like John, had ignored Carlo Fassi’s advice. ‘I was pleasantly surprised when he turned up in Helsinki. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d thought, “If Dorothy can do it so can I. What have I got to lose?”’ After a week together in Sweden, however, the Italian felt certain Curry was about to lose everything.
All the old certainties were gone. Idleness had robbed him of his appetite. Inertia had dulled decades of polish. ‘There was nothing I could do, not even if my life had depended on it. For once my long-standing discipline totally disappeared. I never completed a practice programme. I would fall over, or miss 20 things in the first 30 seconds.’ From the sidelines, the Fassis watched in despair. Nothing he said could change Curry’s mind. Two days before the competition began, Carlo, Christa, Curry and Dorothy Hamill shifted camp to Gothenburg. Once again, the newspapers were waiting.
Every time he trained, radio and television crews congregated rink-side to watch. Convinced that he was being bugged, Curry refused to communicate with any of them. As Fassi begged him to concentrate, Nancy Streeter flew in from New York. Shortly afterwards, John appeared to calm down. ‘He looks confident – practising wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “Smile” – and should have no trouble achieving his goal,’ noted Sandra Stevenson in the Guardian. As the competition got underway, no one around the worried Italian couple shared her confidence.
Apart from the Canadian Toller Cranston, all the skaters – even the indefatigable Eastern Europeans – seemed stale. A strange ennui had infected the event. After the school figures, Curry was clinging on in second place, behind the Russian Vladimir Kovalev. No one could understand why. To Cranston, it felt like a scandal was unfolding.
‘As my figures got better, my marks sank lower, and as their figures got worse, their marks climbed. Curry was shaking with nerves,’ he insisted. ‘It was the most terrible school figure ever traced in the history of figure skating … I think that many people knew that Curry didn’t deserve his placement, but he was the Olympic champion and, well, they gave it to him.’
Had they been on speaking terms, Curry would probably have agreed. Judges were drawn to winners. Conservatism was endemic. He’d said as much himself: ‘the final results of the previous year are almost always exactly reproduced in the results of the following year so that means for every year in memoriam whoever came first, second and third in one year will come first, second and third in the next.’ As Olympic champion, Curry was now the beneficiary of a system he’d once lampooned. For Cranston, none of this was any consolation. Very recent history was repeating itself.
Just three weeks before, Cranston had dazzled the Olympics with his short programme. In Gothenburg, he’d done the same. Under the glare of nine judges, a lacklustre Curry had followed him out on to the ice, touching down a trailing foot within seconds of starting. When the scores were totted up, the Englishman was somehow still holding on to second place behind Kovalev. Toller Cranston, lying fourth, felt doomed.
There was darkness all around me. I didn’t see a way out … I foresaw no career whatsoever – only a loss of face, a loss of persona, a fall from grace. That was what I was up against going into the long program … I couldn’t understand why the judges had held up the guys who had fallen and given me only a smidge of a lead. So I pulled up to fourth. Big deal.
Within 24 hours, as Cranston had feared, the World Championship was Curry’s. During a stunning long programme, the Canadian’s brilliance had elicited a ‘drumbeat of approval from the whole stadium’. But Cranston had heard none of it. All he could see through a wall of ‘nausea and apathy’ were nine judges ‘like hungry vultures ready to pick my bones clean’. Once the Minkus music started, the Canadian’s efforts had been forgotten. As Curry danced his Don Quixote routine competitively for the last time, the Swedish audience swooned. Back home in Britain, millions around their television sets did the same. Carlo Fassi had instructed him to ‘go out there and smile’ and he had never skated it better.
‘Gone was the uncertainty which had pursued him through the earlier sections,’ proclaimed the Daily Express. ‘He rediscovered all his delicacy as the audience clapped him on as he lifted the tempo weaving his magic. He was no longer the prisoner of his own art, but the absolute master.’
Flanked by Carlo and Christa, and clutching an enormous floral bouquet, Curry had shuffled nervously as he waited for the scores. A perfect six (from the British judge) for artistic merit – and eight 5.9s – detonated thunderous applause. As Carlo punched the air, Christa clapped her hands wildly and bent double in jubilation. Turning calmly to his coach, Curry leaned forward to shake the Italian’s hand. Since leaving Denver in January, the trio had won the three biggest prizes in men’s figure skating. It was over. Job done. Time to settle the bill and get out.
‘Carlo was business,’ says Dorothy Hamill, who, like Curry, would be leaving Sweden with a world title.
He taught whoever it was and then moved on. That’s the way of the professional coach. You invest all this with a certain skater, then they turn pro or quit, so it’s who’s next? Much as I adored Carlo I always had the feeling that it was business. It was a job. He was getting paid. He was very involved but he also knew that after the Olympics or whatever these skaters would get on with the rest of their lives.
On the podium, Curry had wept. There would be no more tournaments now. ‘No more 6 a.m. patches’, as Nancy Streeter had told him. ‘For so long this had been the only life I had known,’ he said later. ‘The door was closing for the last time and I would never be able to go through it again. It felt like a kind of death.’
As Curry was wiping his tears, Toller Cranston, who’d finished fourth, was staring into a Gothenburg canal holding the skates he’d always worn for his school figures. Nobody could understand why he’d been scored so meanly. ‘Their only fitting resting place was a Swedish sewer,’ he explained. ‘They hit the surface, floated momentarily on the sludge, then disappeared from view.’ Neither Cranston nor Curry would skate competitively as amateurs again.
Once again, the chequebooks were out. Within hours of Curry’s victory, several lucrative options were already on offer. ‘I shall never join Follies or Ice Capades,’ he had promised Heinz 12 months before. But in Sweden he was wobbling. Alongside the gush of telegrams – ‘You are inspiring. I love you,’ wired Werner Erhard – came a string of temptations. Senior representatives of the world’s three major ice show conglomerates arrived separately at Curry’s hotel bearing flowers and gifts. ‘Curry ponders over offers,’ claimed the Guardian. For years, he’d been promising a radical new ‘theatre on ice’, but he hadn’t a clue where to begin, and he hadn’t a penny to his name. Back in London – and aware of what was happening – Penny Malec was urging him to shelve his principles temporarily and cash in.
‘It was the closest we ever had to a row,’ she says.
After he won he was inundated with sponsorship deals for vast sums and he looked at them and said, ‘I’ll do Weetabix because I eat Weetabix’. I said; take it and make all the money you can this year, go with Holiday On Ice and then you’ll be in a position to do what you want to do and won’t have to deal with people who don’t have your vision. He said, ‘No way am I prostituting myself ’, but if he’d put the money in the bank he’d have been free. I’ve always thought he was wrong.
Feeling spooked and out of his depth, Curry turned to Heinz Wirz for help.
He asked me if I’d be his general manager and I’d just started to become a successful [skating] teacher in Switzerland. I told him I didn’t know if I was capable of doing it and I think John was very very disappointed. I think he needed someone who was on his side but I was not the guy to do that. I knew nothing about finance. He told me he was sad because I was the only one he had real confidence in at that time.
Uncertain what to do, Curry fled. For the next three weeks, he burrowed deep into the champions’ exhibition circus; rolling into a different European city every night; performing to music he loved in outfits of his choosing. Historically it was an obligation he had always loathed. After Gothenburg, it saved him. No longer pursued by men clutching contracts, Curry flourished where previously he had wilted. ‘Lo and behold I had the best time I could remember,’ he said. ‘Every night I did my Olympic programme – plop, plop, plop. All fun and no problems.’
During a break in London – a few days before travelling on the Eastern European leg – he’d picked up a letter from Nancy Streeter. Everyone was certain he would quit the tour. Everyone was expecting him back in New York within days. A ‘welcome home’ party had even been planned at Nancy’s apartment. The EST people were going to be there and she was pestering for his flight details. The party would have to wait. ‘So – on to the next venture,’ she wrote. ‘Things may seem a little confused at the moment. Take your time. Things will fall into place. You will have an independence you have never been able to have before. A lot of people are interested in your future … Won’t it be nice to have some leisurely time?’
It was all much too much, too soon. After an emotional gala performance at Richmond Ice Rink – complete with champagne quaffed from a presentation goblet – Curry vanished back into the tour. Eighteen exhibitions in 20 days; standing ovations wherever he skated. Zagreb. Brno. Kiev. Leningrad. Nothing fazed him; not even the winter deprivations of Eastern bloc railways.
As he headed deep behind the Iron Curtain, spindrift billowed across a landscape drained of colour. In Czechoslovakia, frozen snow banks trapped his train for 30 hours. Entering Russia, some of his luggage was lost. In every hotel, there were rumours of KGB listening devices. As other skaters dropped out, Curry soldiered on. If he had lovers – which seems highly unlikely – he told no one. Every day, and every frozen mile, was buying him precious time.
He told an impatient Nancy:
I am anxious to skate for a public who live under a very different set of rules than our own … While I detest the idea of skating for people who consider my way of life as degenerate, there will be many who will enjoy maybe a little hope because of me. You know that I believe every person should be able to live as his heart leads him. I’m doing what I feel is right this time. So please understand and please forgive me once more. I know you will because I know you love me. Please know that I love you.
By 21 March he was in Moscow; journey’s end. Salt-streaked buses patrolled frozen streets. Ice-breakers chewed a ragged path along the Moskva River. It felt right to be bowing out here. All his skating life he’d fought to overcome the Volkovs and the Kovalevs; perfectly groomed specimens propelled by an all-conquering patriotic hunger. Dick Button liked to call them the ‘Russian mafia’. To Toller Cranston they were ‘hammer-throwers’. Whoever they were, all John Curry wanted to do now was stir their hearts.
I found myself determined. I was going to go in there and show them! I was there and I was still kicking and they were going to have to look at me. All the rows of stony faces in the Official Box were trapped in their seats while I was out there on the ice. It was a delicious moment to relish. The actual Russian people themselves do enjoy my skating, strangely enough. I even did an encore, which is something I very seldom do. But it was Russia. I was happy it was all but over and those people who had tried to stop me all those years were having to go on watching.
Midnight in Moscow; that was the end of my amateur career. It was over at last.
The following morning he wrote a final letter to Nancy Streeter, before heading back west:
I wanted to cry because it was the last time. Saying goodbye to all the eastern skaters was sad and they represent a whole part of my life – and the thought of not seeing them again moves me more than I anticipated. Today I feel a little hollow inside. I’m uncertain of the future and tired. It’s time to go home to New York.
At about this time in a west London penthouse flat overlooking Baden-Powell House a brand new colour television set was rerunning pictures of Curry’s recent successes. The beak-nosed man watching them was intrigued. He knew a thing or two about pretty boys. He knew even more about camp.
Across the hallway, his enormous bed hid behind fluted columns and shimmering drapes. On the mantelpiece were the ashes of his beloved Alsatian dogs, Prince and Duke. Everything, and everywhere, seemed drenched in eau-de-Cologne. Only the television – or the gleaming stereogram – broke the silence. Thick creamy carpet swallowed almost every other sound.
Laurence Maurice ‘Larry’ Parnes – also known as ‘Mr Parnes, shillings and pence’ – was a West End legend. As a teenager, he’d worked for his father’s tailoring business in Kent. In his twenties he’d bought a share in a seedy Soho drinking hole on Romilly Street, where he’d latched on to the post-war possibilities of show business for adolescents. By 1956, he’d ‘discovered’ Tommy Steele in a Regent Street club. Five years later, at just 31, he had a business that was turning over a staggering £500,000 a year.
Dubbed the ‘beat Svengali’, Parnes had a formula that was shameless. Flamboyantly gay, he had always craved money and the company of very young men. Through pop music he’d discovered the perfect route to both. Regardless of their sexual orientation, the most handsome ones – presupposing a modicum of talent – were groomed by him for stardom. Reg Patterson, Ron Wycherley and John Askew became Marty Wilde, Billy Fury and Johnny Gentle. Ray Howard, Terence Williams and Clive Powell became Duffy Power, Terry Dene and Georgie Fame.
At a time when most agents took 10 per cent, Larry Parnes insisted on 40 per cent. ‘It costs me £40,000 a year for four years to make a star’ was his justification. ‘At the end of the fifth year, you get your money back.’ By Christmas 1962 a recording of ‘Telstar’ by Billy Fury’s backing band, The Tornadoes, had sold 1,300,000 worldwide with recording costs to Parnes of a paltry £300. He was forming plans for his own record company – even a movie business – and as the royalties poured in so did the country houses, the racehorses, the mohair jackets, the designer dogs and the reputation for unsavoury invitation-only parties.
By 1976 – as he stood dumbfounded by the vision on skates – Parnes was finding it much harder to add to his fortune. Since The Beatles, musicians knew what they were worth. Nobody fell for the slick patter and the shiny suits any more. In 1969, he’d gone back into tailoring with three men’s boutiques branded ‘Sir Larry’, opening the first one – in Kensington High Street – with a male model sitting naked in a foam-filled bath. For the second, in Portobello Road, he’d put a pyjama-clad male in a double bed, alongside Larry’s very own design of plastic Roman togas and ‘off-the-shoulder’ lace shirts.
Along the way, Parnes had staged a play on homosexuality set in a Canadian prison and acquired a lease on London’s Cambridge Theatre, enjoying frisson-free success with popular musicals which never quite thrilled him like the 1960s. Watching John Curry had rolled back the years. Reading about his dreamy plans for a professional ‘theatre of skating’ had given him a notion, and, when Curry returned from Moscow, Parnes invited his fellow Virgo to lunch. By the end of it, he was obsessed.
‘He wanted John because – like everyone else – Parnes fell in love with him,’ says Penny Malec, who at John’s request, had attended all their early exploratory business meetings. Neither had any experience of a man like Larry Parnes. After a lifetime secluded in ice rinks, Curry had strayed into unfamiliar territory. No one could flatter quite like Laurence Maurice Parnes; and no one enjoyed flattery quite like John Curry. ‘I must say I liked your red plaid shirt,’ Parnes told him in a letter after watching a BBC documentary on the skater’s triumphs. ‘Where did you get it? Your interview was superb and I have never seen you more relaxed.’
It was more oily than seductive, but Parnes was in a strong position. As the owner of a West End theatre he could function as both manager and impresario. In London, he could offer Curry a home at the Cambridge for his still fuzzy ‘theatre of skating’. Overseas – if Parnes was to be believed – the ‘beat Svengali’ had the cash and the contacts to turn the skater into an international superstar.
It was a tantalising package, which Curry was in no state to assess. Three weeks on the road had worn him out. Three days’ bombardment from Larry Parnes had left him confused. From New York – via Nancy Streeter – he was also hearing of more professional possibilities. ‘Sorry to land all this on you but as a conscientious secretary I really have to.’ To make matters worse, Curry had a letter in his pocket which had stirred up old guilt.
Since the trauma of Seefeld, he had barely seen – or spoken with – his mother. In mid-March she’d been in the audience at his Richmond exhibition gala, but ‘as people were very anxious for autographs’ they’d met only briefly over breakfast the following day. If it was a situation Rita was prepared to tolerate, that didn’t extend to her Birmingham friends. On 31 March one of them, Dorothy Fantham, let fly.
Whether you realise it or not you have a happy knack of hurting your mother very much. I doubt whether you would even realise this … Rather she would prefer you to think her as being cross with you or something like that. I suspect she will never let you know. However this I have to say, for when we shall see you again God knows and I really feel you should look deep into your heart and ask: ‘Do I really try to repay in some measure the love and support my mother has given me all these years or do I just do my duty call and think that is sufficient’.
It was a lacerating letter, written by a woman who’d made fancy dress costumes for John as a child and who still worked in the accounts department of his late father’s fast-declining factory. After Innsbruck, she’d even taken on John’s fan mail, little of which remotely interested him. ‘Don’t you care John?’ she asked. ‘I know you are tired but this is the life you have worked for, surely that is your reward. My scribble is caused through emotion … I still feel there is a great barrier between your feelings and your home … Remember. You will still need your old friends.’
A day after receiving it, Curry was on his way to America. Parnes could wait. Everyone could wait. Nancy Streeter had rearranged her party. ‘Not long now, the champagne is waiting,’ she’d told him. After the previous year’s friction, their relationship was back on track. In New York, with her to guide him – whatever Rita’s friends might think – he’d find a way through this morass of possibilities.
Every day a new one seemed to be tossed on the pile. According to one newspaper, he was seriously considering three Hollywood film scripts. According to another, he’d been offered a recording contract. ‘It was as disturbing to be potentially rich as it had been to be potentially poor,’ he said some years later. ‘I found myself worrying for days over the difference between 2.5 and 2.55 million.’
This wasn’t true. John Curry’s name was wanted, but not at any price. Despite his persistent snubs, Ice Follies had returned with an offer of $6,200 a week for a three-month tour skating in nine major American cities. Alongside his name at the top of the bill would be one of his idols, Peggy Fleming, the 1968 Ladies Olympic Champion. It was all very tempting, but Curry hesitated. Too many things were still swirling around. Larry Parnes was offering to fly out for a meeting in New York. Even the American über-agent Jerry Weintraub was reporting an interest. ‘I don’t know who to trust any more. The whole thing turns me off,’ he told Nancy.
After a few weeks kicking his heels in Manhattan, Curry went back to Britain. By the end of the year, he’d become an incessant transatlantic commuter. ‘Life just seems to go on here,’ he grimly reported back to Nancy. ‘Nothing new really happens and somehow the days pass and everyone gets a little older.’ Once again, however, Larry Parnes had lured Curry into the cloud of aftershave at his Cromwell Road penthouse. Although there was no apparent physical connection, the two men got on tolerably well. ‘There was a bit of dreamer left in his soul,’ was Curry’s later assessment, and by the end of month they had reached an accord. For a trial period of six months, Parnes was to manage John Curry’s affairs for an undisclosed percentage.
Larry is very kind and thoughtful but he makes me feel very uncomfortable and I’m not sure that our contract will be a very long one. Once again I find myself wondering if I really want all of this. I just don’t know. I want to live and be happy, love and be loved, and it just isn’t happening right now. When you have wished, hoped, worked and dreamed and it all comes ‘true’ and you are still not happy it is very unsettling. Right now I’m not sure what I want and I don’t know what to wish for any more.
It was fortunate that the infatuated Parnes was not privy to these thoughts. Business relationships for John would invariably be defined by what he alone got out of them. There was either John’s way or there was no way at all. Any number of discarded skating teachers could testify to that. Temporarily blinded by Curry’s imperious charm, Parnes had lost sight of basic business principles. He had presumed himself to be in control, but he was not.
In the short term, at least, the partnership showed promise. Curry’s stalled progress once again began to fizz with possibilities. In early June, he’d been awarded an OBE – ‘all very nice and harmless’ – and in a smoke-stained London gambling club, flanked by tables laden with champagne and lobster, Curry and Parnes had appeared before journalists to unveil a spectacular plan. Under a fusillade of flashbulbs, the man who’d created Billy Fury unveiled what the Guardian dubbed ‘extremely ambitious if unspecific plans for a world tour’ taking in Europe, Australia, South Africa and the United States.
Venues were to include the Sydney Opera House and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, but neither had been booked. Six months’ intensive rehearsals were about to begin, and a tour of British theatres would commence in the late autumn. However, no dates had been set, no venues agreed and no skaters had been hired. Curry himself would supposedly be on a six-figure salary and flown by private jet to every engagement. When the tour was over he would have earned £350,000. All of it was Parnes bluster on an epic scale. Even the broadsheets were sceptical.
As bemused hacks attacked the Moët, Curry tried to explain his lifelong vision for a show fusing classical ice dancing with specially choreographed new work. The background noise in the casino grew louder. Parnes’s overblown bubbly was going flat. Pressed for specifics, none were forthcoming. Curry’s only definite booking turned out to be a one-night stand at a Bournemouth ice gala on 27 June and a Christmas special for London Weekend Television. Even a possible television commercial had been canned. ‘I’m only doing [Bournemouth] for the money,’ he confided to Nancy, adding ominously that ‘things just aren’t working out right now’.
Since Moscow, Curry’s skates had festered in their bag. Three months on he could no longer afford that luxury. It wasn’t how he’d dreamed it, but – of necessity – his first professional appearance would be at a seaside resort on the south coast of England. It was everything he loathed; sequinned splendour in a provincial hell. Ahead of him on the summer bill, the Ice Follettes would be performing ‘Viva España’ and after the interval Hami Brown would be wowing the holidaymakers with ‘A Wee Drop of Scotch’. Only two chinks of light shone through.
During his bedsit years, Curry and Linda Davis had held hands and danced at the skaters’ ball. Since then, they’d lost touch. Under pressure from her mother, Linda had turned to the money-spinning glitterball shows and, when John had won the Olympics, she’d been watching backstage on a portable television at a huge Wembley ice panto. When he turned up in Bournemouth, Davis was skating on the bill wearing a figure-hugging spangled catsuit. The hesitant girl with a crush had matured into a dark-haired beauty with a smile as dazzling as her outfit.
Alongside her was another old friend, Lorna Brown. She too had lost contact with John. She too had succumbed to the professional lure of the holiday ice spectacular. Backstage, posing with the Bournemouth ensemble for photographs, Curry stands out among the pink satin in plain black trousers and his tan-coloured Olympic shirt. By his side, Linda Davis shines and sparkles. Her arm is wrapped around the tanned body of Lorna Brown, who is naked but for a gold-braided thong and a tiny bikini top.
‘It was amazing to have him in that show,’ says Linda.
He came down and said, ‘I’m going to skate to “Greensleeves” in my own spot’. I really don’t think the audience knew what they were looking at. It was so beautiful. Most of the rest of the show was just feathers and tinsel. Lorna was in her scanty bikini. We had comedians in between and then at the end of each part we had John. I think he did it just for us actually. Just for me and Lorna.
After one night, Curry was gone. Before leaving, he’d told both girls of his plans for a ‘theatre of skating’. If it ever happened, he’d be in touch. ‘I was the first person he asked to be in it,’ says Lorna. ‘Of course, I said yes.’ Bit by bit, the shape of something promising was starting to emerge. Back in London, he turned, with reluctance, to the Christmas special he’d promised LWT. ‘The thought of what I’m going to do gives me little cause for excitement,’ he confided to Nancy. ‘The truth of it is I’m spoiled and lazy.’
It was to his advantage, however, that 1970s television was not constrained by a quest for ratings. When LWT had asked John Curry for a one-hour special, they had imposed no conditions. Curry could choose the music and the costumes. He could even nominate a favoured choreographer, opting for the Irish dance teacher Norman Maen, a man whose later triumphs included pairing Rudolph Nureyev with Miss Piggy for The Muppet Show’s rendering of Swine Lake.
Equally happy with puppets or people, Maen was an unabashed populist with a classical touch. Television studios were his natural habitat. Handling divas – even foam rubber ones – was his business. During his career, he’d worked with Gene Kelly, Lisa Minnelli and Julie Andrews. When Curry raged about the size of his studio ice rink – less than 30 square metres – the Irishman had the know-how to calm him down. ‘Working with Norman Maen is really great,’ reported Curry with evident relief. ‘He is a very talented man.’
It was a risky pairing. Curry had never shared decisions with a dance choreographer before. Maen had never created for the ice. In a few short weeks, however, they had crafted numerous works of enduring beauty. One of them – a highly charged erotic duet skated with (a pregnant) Peggy Fleming to Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un Faune – would go on to become Curry’s most haunting post-Olympic crowd-pleaser. Others cast him in a jazzy mould; riffing seductively around a hall of mirrors to the drawl of a saxophone wearing a trilby, a tie and black-striped trousers.
By mid-August, the show was complete. Everyone – including John Curry – seemed content with it. Working on such a tiny ‘rink’ had opened his eyes. It had taken a skilled choreographer to unlock the steps, but expressive movement was possible without a vast expanse of arena ice and he was eager for more collaborations. The news from Larry Parnes, however, was not good. No more bookings had come in and the world tour was looking doubtful. ‘Despite everything I feel totally isolated here [London],’ he wrote. With nothing to do, Curry flew directly back to New York. By the time he reached Nancy Streeter’s apartment the tour had collapsed completely.
Only Parnes knew how real it had ever been, but, with still no sign of his theatrical debut he and Curry were no longer on speaking terms. From her Bournemouth flat, Lorna Brown was frantic for news. ‘I’ve heard so many different stories,’ she told him. ‘But I don’t take much notice, not until I hear from you. I have to know if I am wanted and if the show is going on.’
From his mother there was bad news of a different kind. After years of managed decline, his father’s old company was on the brink of liquidation. ‘I wish it would just fold and leave her free,’ he’d told Nancy Streeter. ‘Naturally mum is loath to “give up”. Anyway it highlights the fact that she will have to be supported.’ Suddenly it wasn’t just for himself that Curry needed to be out there earning money.
Under warm September skies, New York offered welcome distractions. Over the years, Curry’s circle of male companions there had grown. Through the dance classes he’d found friends in the ballet world. Through his continued presence at the Sky Rink, he’d found others. Periodically, the possibility of romance would flicker. Mostly, however, it did not. The previous winter, it had been a close fellow skater, Brian Grant, who’d urged him to try EST. Intimate Italian suppers and Valentine’s Day cards had followed – ‘Skate beautifully xxx’ – but so far nothing else.
It had been the same back in his early London days. People looked, but seemed disinclined to go further. In conversation, Curry could be loquacious, indiscreet and savagely amusing. But he could also be overpowering, moody, and a master of the hurtful put-down. In either mode he was intriguing, but not everyone was seduced. ‘Let’s just say he did not suffer fools gladly,’ says his brother Andrew.
Since Heinz Wirz – and Julian Pettifer – he’d had good reasons for solitude. Training for competition had necessitated focus, which was not conducive to relationships. In New York, he finally had the time but nothing was happening. In his so-called ‘magic city’, the familiar ache of loneliness was back; one he masked with his closest Manhattan friends, long afternoon teas and excursions to the theatre with Nancy Streeter, and the gnawing fear that time was being lost.
Ballet dancer Billy Whitener understood how he felt. ‘New York is a city of many lonely people,’ he explains. ‘It’s easier to fit in there if you’re lonely than in other places.’ Some years before, Whitener had taken his teacher’s advice and risen early to watch the English skater everyone was talking about. ‘He was practising at Sky Rink and I knew immediately what I was seeing.’ The two had quickly become ‘very tight friends’. Whitener had met Curry in Europe before the Olympics, and sent a jubilant postcard from St Louis to Innsbruck after watching him win gold. ‘Words seem superfluous right now – actions and feelings are more potent – so I’ve been sending you regular energy doses instead.’
Like Heinz – and Roger Roberts – Billy Whitener would prove to be one of Curry’s most steadfast companions. In the early autumn of 1976, he would also prove to be one of the most influential. As Curry sulked, Whitener was in Brooklyn rehearsing with Twyla Tharp, the Indiana-born choreographer with a reputation for unlikely creative fusions. As a child Tharp had worked at her parents’ drive-in movie theatre on Route 66. Aged just 24, she’d set up her own New York dance company, attracting praise from critics for her ‘technical precision coupled with streetwise nonchalance’.
No movement was out of bounds, from boxing to classical ballet. ‘Art is the only way to run away without leaving home,’ she would say. By the mid-1970s, Twyla Tharp was a rising force of modern dance. Ahead of her were Hollywood movies, Broadway shows, Emmy awards and 19 doctorates. Already behind her was a ballet – Deuce Coupe – set to music by The Beach Boys, which Curry had seen and loved. ‘It was the ballet [which] for me says so much about how I felt it should have been when I was young,’ he explained. To Billy Whitener, Tharp and Curry seemed like a ‘creative fusion’ in waiting. All he had to do was bring them together.
That didn’t prove difficult. Curry’s diary already had a gap in it he urgently needed to fill. In November, he’d promised to perform at an Olympic fundraiser in Madison Square Gardens. Sixteen thousand people would be watching him – his biggest ever audience – and the deadline was just eight weeks away. Since a new work would require money – which Curry didn’t have – the skater had turned for help to the man organising the event. Ed Mosler had never yet refused him. As both men would benefit from a Curry–Tharp collaboration, Mosler wouldn’t, and didn’t, refuse him now.
A few weeks later, a slender dark-haired figure arrived at the New York Sky Rink to watch Curry go through his moves. Although Tharp couldn’t skate, she’d prepared carefully by watching tapes. ‘I’ve got three hours,’ she said. ‘Show me everything one can do in skating on the ice.’ If Curry was doubtful, he said nothing. However dysfunctional the process, this wasn’t yet the time for a tantrum. The next day, Tharp came back with some suggestions.
She put together a combination of steps that had never been done on the ice before; they were a totally new way of moving on an ice skate. And they all worked. This floored me; I could not believe anybody could do that. Also, I could not believe that after twenty years I had not thought of it myself.
For the next few weeks, Tharp and Curry rehearsed furiously on a New Jersey rink. All the clichés and heroic jumps had been discarded. Skating to Albinoni’s Trumpet Concerto in B Flat, Curry swapped razzle-dazzle for single, unbroken movements of such grace they seemed miraculously grafted to the rise and fall of the horn. Nothing mattered to Curry more than this. After the clipboards and the jingoism, this was skating as it was meant to be, jostling for its rightful place as an art form. Or so he hoped.
Recharged by Tharp’s unorthodoxy, Curry turned back to the repentant Larry Parnes, dashing off a letter setting out a blueprint for a London show that would fill seats and, he presumed, make both of them some money. A few days later, a relieved Parnes telephoned his approval to the Streeter apartment. His only caveat was that the show must be staged at his own Cambridge Theatre. Curry’s enthusiasm immediately slumped.
I marked off an area of ice on the rink in New York. Every day I skated only on this area; the same size as the stage at the Cambridge … I became more and more disheartened and frustrated, but I did discover that eventually if I made certain modifications, then I could do quite a lot on that space. In fact my technique in some things had to be altered radically.
Once again, Nancy Streeter steered him through. Over a pot of tea, and with the leaves falling in nearby Central Park, the pair considered Curry’s dwindling options. Very soon, public curiosity in him would have dribbled away. The grandiose touring ice shows were unlikely to come knocking again, and he needed cash. By working with Norman Maen, he’d established what might be accomplished in a tiny space. Nothing about Parnes was perfect, but Curry couldn’t afford to walk away. A few days later, the dates were set. Curry’s long-cherished Theatre of Skating would open at the Cambridge Theatre, London, on 27 December.
Almost overnight, Curry’s ‘lazy’ days became crammed. Breaking off from rehearsals with Twyla Tharp, he flew to London to draw up lists of skaters, choreographers, directors, and costume designers. With barely eight weeks to go, quick decisions were vital. Not all of them would be good ones. Over in New York, a full house at Madison Square Gardens was looming. Nothing could be allowed to spoil it. The Cambridge would get his full attention, but only after he’d taken Manhattan.
As ticket-holders gathered at the Gardens on 15 November, the pre-show bustle concerned Don Quixote. Two hours later, when they returned to their limos, Curry’s piece of Twyla Tharp craft – now formally christened After All – had supplanted it. Although the New York Times later derided it as ‘a solo in love with itself’, the crowd had bellowed in rapture, demanding that even Tharp herself take a bow on the ice. Wearing only white, Curry had delivered on his promise. Skating didn’t have to be a barrage of stunts. ‘Curry was thanking America last night,’ wrote the Guardian. ‘He was also, however, repudiating the specific nature of his achievement, the fact that he had triumphed as an athlete.’
If it was Ed Mosler’s last gift to John Curry, it was a glorious one. If it was Curry’s symbolic expression of thanks, that, too, was magnificently expressed. Either way, his performance of After All had marked a corner. Under pressure, he had concluded his triumphant night with a final grudging performance of his Olympic routine. The applause had been loud, but it had been far louder after Twyla Tharp’s piece. As he flew back to London yet again – ‘back into England’s chilling damp arms’ – he no doubt wondered whether Britain would feel quite the same way.
Tucked off Shaftesbury Avenue on Earlham Street, the Cambridge Theatre was a leftover from the West End’s golden era. Just like five other London playhouses, it had opened in 1930, at the hedonistic midpoint between two catastrophic wars. Unlike its contemporaries, however, the Cambridge had always struggled. Since 1967 – when Ingrid Bergman had starred there in A Month in the Country – it had been run as a rather dismal-looking cinema. From the street, film-goers entered what looked like a giant slice of grey cake. Once inside, they were greeted by sickly red paint, monstrous candelabra and a frieze of bronze nudes in exercise poses. It was an aptly butch motif for its current leaseholder.
By 1976, the fate of the Cambridge was resting with Larry Parnes. It was from there, staffed almost entirely by young men, that Parnes ran the LPO, the Larry Parnes Organisation. And it was at the Cambridge that the promoter hoped John Curry would instigate a creative revival in the failing theatre’s fortunes. It was a substantial ask of a 27-year-old man who had never worked the professional stage before, and whose chosen medium had never been attempted under a proscenium arch better suited for music hall comedians. To his credit, Curry was back from the United States with what passed for a hopeful smile. From mid-November until the following March he would scarcely see the light of day and by the end of it, his smile had been consigned to history.
Curry had never been in a team, let alone recruited or led one. Temperamentally and creatively, he was a loner. Making the right commercial choices – against limited time and budget – would prove a challenge. Conceding even an inch of control, while governing his impatience, would prove beyond him. From the very beginning, backstage problems began to accumulate. For his director, he’d plucked Peter Darrell from the Scottish National Ballet, a man with a formidable creative reputation, none of it earned on a frozen sheet of water. To augment the choreography he’d recruited yet another stranger to the challenge of ice.
As creative director of the Royal Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan was both a legend and a luminary. Where dancing was concerned, however, slippers and not skates were his artistic weapon of preference. Within days, Curry was already quietly regretting his choice. Almost certainly, so was the choreographer. Much as Curry loved MacMillan’s selected music − ‘Feux Follets’, or ‘Will-o’-the-Wisp’, a piano study by Franz Liszt – it was nearly impossible to skate to. Instead of creating flow, it tied his feet in knots. ‘I always assured him I could manage it,’ said Curry. ‘But technically it is something of a killer.’
Every choice Curry was making felt like a statement. The mundane practicalities of fashioning a hit show for Larry Parnes seemed of little or no concern. If he was to be judged seriously as an artist, then the production credits had to impress, whether or not they were right for the job. If any of this worried Parnes, he didn’t show it. In his office, behind a haze of cigarette smoke, the ‘beat Svengali’ kept his head down and sold the advertising space in the project’s glossy programme. Things were looking up. All he needed now was a show people would watch.
By late November, Curry was ready to begin rehearsals. Alongside his backstage team, he’d assembled just six skaters. On the tiny Cambridge stage, there simply wasn’t room for any more. The three men were from the United States − Paul McGrath, Paul Toomey and Bill Woehrle. Of the three girls, two were from Britain. Lorna Brown, to her intense relief, had finally been given her chance. So, too, had Jacqui Harbord, a raven-haired, plain-speaking show skater, who’d performed with Heinz Wirz and known John casually since the late 1960s. Of them all, however, it was the third female, a waiflike American, who intrigued the most.
At 19 years old, Cathy Foulkes was a virtual unknown. She’d won no medals, and her highest place in a major championship had been a lowly eighth. ‘I was not even a blip,’ she admits. ‘Not even a tiny little blip.’ Only John Curry knew why he’d chosen her. Four years before, he’d watched this girl skate near her home town of Lexington, Massachusetts. In some raw way – even at 15 – she’d embodied his vision of how an ice ballerina should look: petite, miraculously slender and born with such gentle features a single glance could tell a story.
It didn’t matter that she couldn’t jump or spin like a champion. In Foulkes, Curry had found an intelligence of emotion, which could never be taught. Now that the moment had arisen, he picked up the phone to her coach. An audition had followed in Boston. ‘We were skating together for a week and it was clear we heard music similarly.’ Out of nowhere, with less than four weeks to go, she was in London. Gradually, over the next eight years – until the dream turned rotten – Cathy Foulkes would become his constant friend and ally; ‘a bit of a Pygmalion thing’. She would rarely skate with anyone else, and she would be the only skater he could never part with.
‘In some strange way John had a snobbism about class maybe,’ thinks Cathy.
Jacqui and Lorna came from a very working class background. But my mother is an Andrews. Her first cousin twice removed was Thomas Andrews; the man who designed the Titanic. My family was Irish establishment. Entrepreneurs and statesmen. My parents were educated in England and my father went to Cambridge.
Foulkes herself was no intellectual slouch. She read books, listened to music and studied the world. When Curry called, she was midway through a law degree. Years later, when Curry’s theatrical dreams had all collapsed, she went back and finished it.
On the morning of Monday 29 November, Curry gathered his six-strong troupe together at a dance studio in Floral Street, Covent Garden. Under the eye of teacher Joyce Graeme, they clasped their hands around the barre, and commenced what would become their daily warm-up ritual of ballet stretches. If it was unorthodox, no one was sniggering. Each skater was on a weekly wage of £300 and few of them had seen money like it. Questions were neither encouraged nor advisable. Already, everywhere they looked there were problems, and Curry’s intransigence was at the heart of all of them.
‘He didn’t know what he was doing. People got frustrated. He was frustrated. There were huge problems with Larry Parnes and him, and he in turn took his frustrations out on the company,’ recalls Jacqui Harbord.
He wouldn’t speak to you for ages, and his favourite thing was to moan, ‘Oh no Jacqui, that’s not really skating’. It was feathers out, sequins out. Pointed toes and sustained edges in. Fantastic. All very clever and ballet-oriented, but the public don’t know anything. The public want to see you do a fast spin. He had no experience of shows whatsoever. Everything was very intense. He would expect this and this and this and it would dissolve because it couldn’t be done.
Keeping his own ego under control had never been easy. Now he had six more. Under the growing pressure, Curry’s composure crumbled. Always friable, he became fractious and visibly flustered. Only he seemed to grasp what he was trying to do. Even the Scottish director seemed lost. To Peter Darrell, it seemed obvious that Curry – Britain’s Olympic golden boy – should enter the stage in the manner of a star. To Curry, that was an abomination. Fanfares were for ice shows not art. At his insistence, he would enter anonymously and without noise. ‘It was a silly thing to do,’ he admitted later. ‘But at the time I thought I was right.’
At the theatre – as the gremlins multiplied – the air became combustible. ‘[It] is rather like a bomb site,’ he told Nancy. ‘Pipes, workmen, debris of all kinds everywhere.’ Space was so tight that the miniature rink had been built over the pit. Four rows of seats had been removed, and instead of a full orchestra Curry had been reduced to a small house band on a specially erected platform. More worryingly, the water was refusing to freeze and the first week’s rehearsals were being walked through amidst the red velvet of a downstairs bar. Under Curry’s controlling eye, every tiny detail was becoming a flashpoint. ‘I think he felt empowered with his three medals. He probably felt he was above everything at that time,’ explains Lorna. ‘He wanted everything his way.’
As a child he had pushed tiny paper ‘actors’ around his home-made toy theatre. Nothing had prepared him for this. From New York, he had invited Joe Eula – the man behind his Olympic outfit – to design the costumes. When they arrived, they were ridiculed. ‘He’d made this thing which looked like an under-slip, then he gave me this rag at three hundred quid a yard for a belt and I got really mad and said I’m not wearing that, so we stitched in some silk instead,’ says Lorna. Jacqui Harbord had felt the same: ‘I looked like I was in a silk sack tied up in the middle with a belt. The [designer] had just freaked out and rushed back to the States. We had to get someone else to finish them off. John’s big idea had blown up like a balloon in front of him. He was higher than everyone else but hadn’t the experience to carry it through.’
Fierce arguments had even broken out over the colour of the girls’ boots. Lorna and Jacqui had arrived with the traditional beige. John had insisted on white. After experimenting with white, Curry suddenly panicked after being told the girls’ feet looked like ‘clubs of ice’. ‘He then wanted beige but not Holiday On Ice beige,’ says Jacqui. ‘I went out and got a Max Factor pancake, which I mixed with shoe dye and showed it to John. We changed the white to a soft ballet-pink beige. He was happy.’
‘All will be fine,’ Curry wrote wearily to Nancy. ‘Though I don’t quite know how.’
‘He picked on everyone,’ says Harbord.
Like he’d often zero in on me. Everything we were doing was so alien so I used to say the show was like amateur hour in Dixie. After that my nickname became Dixie. He had no respect for anybody who had any experience and he shot himself in the foot so many times to prove himself right.
It was hardly surprising that Curry drifted towards Cathy Foulkes. Lacking experience, she generated no friction and made no demands. On and off the ice she had slowly become his favourite. ‘I was his raw material,’ says Foulkes. ‘Maybe a little bit of a muse to him. I think that was problematic for some of the women who were more experienced.’ She was right. But although both the other girls had seen it coming, Lorna, especially, found marginalisation deeply wounding.
From the start, Cathy was completely into John. It was like John was her reason for being. Everything revolved around him. Even though she hadn’t done much ballet before, she’d be in every show, from first to last. She was very willowy and long and some of us were envious because it was obvious he put her into the most beautiful piece.
Ever since recording his LWT special – due to be broadcast on Christmas Day – Curry had been wondering whether to reprise L’après-midi d’un Faune. But since Peggy Fleming was back in America, he needed a new partner. Lorna Brown hoped desperately that it would be her. As teenagers they’d shared a bed and acted out Romeo and Juliet together. Surely no one was better placed to play the female foil to the erotic yearning of Curry’s weird woodland creature.
‘I’d loved that piece since I was a child,’ she says sadly. ‘I had the whole fantasy in my mind. It was something I’d thought about for years and years and years.’ When the part subsequently went to the American newcomer, Lorna Brown was devastated. ‘I was perfect in terms of proportions for him,’ thinks Cathy Foulkes. Seeking consolation, Lorna inevitably blamed the disappointment on her own weight.
I wasn’t fat, but John liked women to be very very skinny. It got so I was afraid to eat in front of him because he’d look at me and I’d think, am I too fat or something? … Cathy was incredibly skinny … I remember going for a meal with him and Cathy and he said to her, ‘Well, I hope you are going to eat something’ because she was picking pieces off a pizza. Literally, almost like tweezering pieces of food. She was so devoted and in tune with him as I would have been if he’d asked me. I just think he wanted me to be longer and thinner.
For Curry – amidst the backbiting and stress – there were occasional distractions, not all of them welcome. In mid-December, he was presented with the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award by Lord Mountbatten, beating British racing driver James Hunt in the public vote. Unknown to most, Curry’s televised handshake with Earl Mountbatten of Burma had been his second brush with royalty that year. In July, the Royal Yacht had berthed off New York for the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. On board had been the Queen, and the OBE she’d carried across the Atlantic for her private time with John Curry.
‘He was thrilled,’ says Penny Malec.
He was on his own. He wasn’t in a herd of people. He had a proper conversation with the Queen and she then said that people on the ship would really all like to meet him. So he went on a tour and the thing he remembered in the kitchens was that the royal vegetables were all in little rows. He’d have really liked that. Vegetables neatly lined up in serried ranks.
Shortly after picking up his BBC award, Curry turned up as a nervous guest in a double-breasted suit on Michael Parkinson’s Saturday night chat show. ‘Had I not won [the Olympics] this year,’ he told the watching millions, ‘I’d just be another crackpot.’ Rudolf Nureyev had been on the same bill, but – for whatever reason – they were interviewed by Parkinson separately.
Backstage, the imperious Russian had quizzed the skater about his upcoming Cambridge Theatre show. Who had designed the costumes? Curry told him it was Joe Eula, the same New Yorker who’d concocted his Olympic outfit. Nureyev was unimpressed. ‘Toilet paper,’ he snorted. Curry’s upstart art form had been put in its place. A few days later it would be Curry’s turn.
At the Sports Journalists’ Association Christmas awards, hundreds of celebrities, hacks and sports stars jostled for the free wine. Haig Oundjian, Curry’s old rival, was there. So, too, was Frank McLintock, the Arsenal FC captain. Towering above all of them was Joe Bugner, the heavyweight boxer. In a dining room almost entirely free of women, locker-room testosterone prevailed; cigar smoke plumed towards the ceiling; and bowties and belts were loosened in anticipation of a rowdy night.
That year’s big winner – John Curry – was late. When he finally arrived, and began inching towards the top table, the evening’s comic turn was midway through his repertoire of seedy gags. ‘It’s good to feel the Christmas spirit among us all,’ he quipped into the microphone. ‘Here comes the fairy for the tree.’
Like many in the room, Haig Oundjian was horror struck. ‘I turned and saw John’s face. It broke my heart.’ According to another witness: ‘There was a little embarrassed laughter, a lot of mutterings, some booing and jeering and Eric Morecambe [one half of comic duo Morecambe and Wise] stepped out of character by shouting “Disgraceful”.’ Unable to escape, Curry received his award in near silence. As the function ended, he turned pale-faced to Oundjian and told him he was finished with Britain. ‘He said, “I’m leaving. I can’t stay here any more”.’ It had been, Curry later told an associate, ‘one of the most hurtful incidents in my life’. Only the Cambridge Theatre show was now keeping him in London.
On Christmas Eve, The John Curry Theatre of Skating squeezed in its first, and only, full dress rehearsal. Three days later, on 27 December, the inaugural incarnation of Curry’s long-cherished fantasy was unveiled to a packed, and expectant, Cambridge Theatre. Standing in the wings, a huge gold ring on his left pinkie finger, Larry Parnes was beaming. Curry’s Christmas Day ITV special had pushed up demand for tickets. No other West End show was exciting quite so much interest. If he was secretly nervous about Curry’s singular brand of ‘entertainment’, it was forgotten as he watched punters shelling out for the show’s glossy programme.
Backstage, Curry had also temporarily pushed away all doubts. Bouquets of white and red roses littered his dressing-room table. Nancy Streeter, just in from New York for opening night, had sent freesias. Bottles of multi-vitamins and Korean ginseng – a habit he’d acquired in New York – jostled for space alongside telegrams, tubs of make-up and ‘gentlemen’s soap’ by Chanel. At his feet were the leather skating boots he’d softened in pans of boiling water, each with a square cut from its heel to help him ‘dance’.
Two hours later, as 1,100 people filed from the Cambridge and the cast partied in the stalls bar, an air of puzzled euphoria hung over the company. As he had feared, Curry had visibly struggled during his Liszt solo. In the subdued opener, ‘Scenes of Childhood’ – set to music by Schumann – the tiny stage had felt ludicrously cramped for six people in motion. Flowing movement had been impossible and the skaters had flirted dangerously with the footlights. Although sections of it had gelled – like the jazzy nod to Fred Astaire – Curry was left with an ominous feeling of anti-climax; a feeling compounded by the Guardian’s savage overnight critique:
In the narrow confines of the Cambridge Theatre, these skaters, even the wonderful Curry, seem like caged birds rather than the wild nightingales they ought to be … and much though Curry’s own skating (and to a lesser extent that of his companions) has benefited from the balletic influence, their ‘line’ cannot rid itself of those heavy skates. As an art form, skating has something to offer, but it is all a bit like ballet in big boots.
Not everyone had been so brutal. The Times had found it to be, rather patronisingly, ‘a jolly good show’. Others had praised the ‘simple, effortless elegance’ of its leading man. No one had effervesced, however, and faint praise appeared to be the norm. Among the skaters – or some of them – a feeling of despondent schadenfreude prevailed. ‘One of the crits said the set looked like the inside of a fridge,’ recalls Harbord. ‘To me, it looked like a blue box. Very minimalist. A couple of trees. I felt it was all so misguided of John. All he had to do to open the show was that famous little step from the Olympics and he’d have had them in his hands.’
Only when it was over would Curry acknowledge his mistake. As his show settled into its run – and as 1976 trickled away – he was unprepared to make changes. Eight times a week, the lights dimmed and Schumann’s hushed piano ushered in the skaters. Through repetition, Curry mastered the footwork required of Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography. Through practice, the production achieved consistency and flow. Night after night, however, only one dance transported the audience where they’d expected to go.
L’après-midi d’un Faune had been included only at the last minute; too late even to be mentioned in the programme. Thrust into the role, teenager Cathy Foulkes had learned her part in just one afternoon. She would have ample time to perfect it. Over the next eight years, she and John performed Faune together hundreds of times. In the process their friendship would flower and deepen. It was, and still remains, one of Curry’s most powerful and personal works of theatrical genius.
As it begins, Curry – the faune – stands alone at the back of stage. A melodic ripple of flute stirs his forest slumbers. He moves forward into the light, where – in the daring leaf-coloured body stocking designed for later shows – he seems totally naked. Every secret ripple of his body is visible. ‘You could hear a pin drop,’ remembers Cathy.
As the music swells, the faune’s body unfurls, moving faster and more freely under the warmth of the sun. Suddenly he is gone, and a young girl in white, a nymph – her long tresses spinning – enters the glade. Like the faune, she has come to be alone, but when the faune gives chase, they touch and they dance and their bodies lock in such tender unison there can be only one shuddering erotic outcome.
‘When we did that, he was always 100 per cent the faune,’ says Foulkes.
He didn’t even look like himself. He was transformed. He literally looked like a creature. Sometimes when he grabbed my hand it took my breath away. It never felt routine. There’s a part where the two ripple through in synch together and there’s clearly masturbation implied. And he was right up against me. Two bodies plastered together. It felt like masturbating.
As the music slowly ebbs away, the bereft faune appears to defy the laws of physics. Skating slowly forward on his right foot, his arms and left leg fully extended, Curry slows and stops. Suddenly, without any perceptible effort, he begins to move backwards along the same line on the same foot. Night after night, audiences were stunned by it. ‘It was the first time I had done any partnering where real feeling was called for between partners,’ admitted Curry. ‘It is the most satisfying of the works I have done. I enjoy it the most.’
For the skater, it was also a piece thundering with buried meaning. Every performance consumed and overwhelmed him. As the nymph flees, the faune is left to dance alone. Although he searches, she does not come back. Hidden within mesmerising code, Curry had opened a tiny window on his life. Not knowing this, audiences simply tuned in to the near-indecency of its passion. ‘There was an eruption every night,’ remembers Cathy. ‘I always think that others questioned why John cast me in the nymph role – a total novice to professional skating. In the end I think it was obvious to all.’
But not even the Faune could save Curry’s show. As the winter months dragged on, the audiences tailed away, deterred by poor weather and patchy reviews. With nearly one in three seats unfilled, Parnes began to sense danger. Staging a skating show in a theatre had been expensive and the risk was all his. Every empty seat was hitting his profit, company morale was low and Curry’s mood was dragging it lower. ‘Being Mr Nice is fine,’ John confided to Nancy. ‘But to get anything done one has to throw a fit. Fit throwing can be rather exhausting.’ Relations between the manager and his client were also in freefall. At her flat in Richmond – where Curry was still periodically camping out – Penny Malec bore witness to her friend’s rapid decline.
‘His nature changed,’ she explains.
He was corrupted by rage. He got bitter in a way that he hadn’t been. He wasn’t a bitter kid at all. He thought his show at the Cambridge would change attitudes, and it was corrosive and personally disappointing that it didn’t. He also couldn’t believe that all these people he’d given this amazing chance to would turn up five minutes before curtain and he’d be there two hours before the show. People never lived up to his expectations of them.
On 12 March, to the secret relief of everyone, the Cambridge show folded. Right from opening night Parnes had harboured doubts. Curry’s show was too intense, and the skater’s fears about the small stage had turned out to be correct. After 87 performances, when the lights finally went out on The John Curry Theatre of Skating, it was exactly 12 months since he’d stood on a podium in Gothenburg.
Four days later ‘the fairy for the tree’ was in New York.