John Curry was in pain. For over 20 years, every joint in his body had been under daily attack. Since the age of seven – in the arthritic gloom of ice rinks – he’d twisted and jumped almost every day of his life. Few skaters escaped unscathed and most would eventually nurse corroded hips or crumbling knees; quite often both.
John Curry’s athletic young rival Robin Cousins had been unable to kneel since he was 15, and had the first of eight knee operations two years later. By the time he’d reached his mid-fifties what was left of them was – in his own words – ‘shot to shit’. Curry’s balletic style had minimised the destruction, but in the days following the end of the Cambridge run – wallowing in bruised pride – he was publicly feeling every hurt.
Sometimes I feel as if my whole body is seizing up. There have been nights when I can hear my joints and bones clicking above the sound of the music. I have tendonitis in one arm where a girl skater has to grip tightly when I lift her and I’ve been so tired that it has been an effort to get dressed … I have gone on twice with food poisoning … I cannot be ill myself because it has been my name which has been bringing in the public … one hears such dreadful stories about sportsmen ending up arthritic cripples … it scares me to think I could wake up one morning and never be able to skate again.
Curry’s spell at the Cambridge had amplified more than his physical distress. Under pressure his secret insecurities had, at times, transformed him into a crushing, autocratic bully. When he was a competitive skater, only a handful of intimates – like Nancy, Heinz and Alison – had ever engaged with these hidden complexities. Now he was a professional, running an embryonic company, the circle of witnesses was widening, just as the public gaze was intensifying.
Somehow, Curry had persevered and delivered flashes of brilliance, but the effort had taken a horrible toll. He’d lost weight, and had required two hot baths, a daily sauna and regular massage to keep going. In a Guardian profile – presciently headed ‘Agony of the ice man’ – Curry sounded worryingly hollow. ‘When I’ve washed the winter out of my system everything will be alright,’ he’d said, adding that ‘at the moment I hope to go on skating till I’m 35, but who knows?’
Larry Parnes knew. While Curry recuperated in the USA, his besotted manager was scouring London for a bigger theatre. Despite its limitations, Parnes had been heartened by the Cambridge experience. In a grander venue with a bigger, breezier production, the promoter felt certain he could claw back his losses. It was a fatal misreading of his client’s indifference to Mammon. As Parnes prepared a spring relaunch built around Curry as a mainstream, family entertainer, the Olympic champion was declaring that ‘money has never been my god’. And as Curry dreamed of Covent Garden, Parnes struck a deal with the Soho home of lowbrow schmaltz, the London Palladium, a building with ice in its illustrious past.
In the nineteenth century, a ‘national skating palace’ had stood on the site in Argyll Street. Since 1910 – in a rebuilt Edwardian masterpiece – it had become the premier venue for West End variety. Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby had all performed at the London Palladium. It could seat over 2,200, had a revolutionary revolving stage and boasted a private phone system that allowed the big-money occupants of boxes to call one another. Only Elvis Presley had ever refused to perform there, and even Curry was too focused to do that.
By mid-March, a new schedule had been agreed. Terrified that the skater’s popularity was fading, Parnes had booked out the Palladium for July and August. Ahead of that, he’d arranged a two-week run at the Hippodrome in Bristol. Casting would start in late April; rehearsals would begin a fortnight later. It was all happening very quickly. ‘Just thinking about it makes me feel nervous,’ admitted Curry. ‘But then, I’m nervous before anything new. I would push a disappear button if I could.’
Curry’s fears were not without reason. Under pressure from Larry Parnes, he’d conceded that his Cambridge show may have been too serious, but neither crass vulgarity nor crowd-pleasing frivolity were acceptable alternatives. In February, he’d appeared on Desert Island Discs choosing just one contemporary track (‘Cuddle Up’ by The Beach Boys) amidst a raft of classical pieces. Around the same time, a planned This Is Your Life on the skater had (perhaps wisely) been shelved. From all directions, the signals were the same. Curry would amend, but he could not be changed. His old friend Penny Malec watched developments through her fingers.
John was unwilling to see either the Cambridge or the Palladium as a star vehicle, which was naïve if not idiotic given his celebrity. He wanted to turn the Palladium into Covent Garden, regardless of the business side of the venture. I think Larry tried hard to please him – I remember getting taken to Jonathan Miller’s Three Sisters at one of Larry’s theatres and then all of us meeting Miller, who looked down his nose at us while both he and John jointly looked down at Larry, who was struggling with all the high-mindedness … Although he liked the fame and the things money buys, I really don’t think John was interested at all in making money for himself and this must have been inconceivable to Larry.
Blind – or indifferent – to the risks, Parnes ploughed on. The Palladium would be bigger in every way than its forerunner. In gushing press releases, he promised 12 skaters, over 80 costumes, new dances and even a harpist on the ice. The Theatre of Skating II, as he called it, would cost £140,000, and its star – according to one comically inflated estimate – would be earning £350,000 a year. Although the figures were fanciful, the blunt reality behind them was not. Parnes had dug deep, and Curry, newly back from the States, urgently needed to shake off his transatlantic torpor.
‘A wave of depression, the like of which I have not experienced for many a year enveloped me as I left New York,’ he wrote to Nancy Streeter. ‘Thursday here was unimaginable. I am “reviewing the EST training” starting next weekend. It was either that or the gas oven and I really detest the smell of gas.’
As always, time was tight. From the first show, Cathy Foulkes, Lorna Brown, Paul Toomey and Jacqui Harbord – a self-confessed ‘witch and a bitch’ – were retained. Bill Woerhle and Paul McGrath – with whom Curry had repeatedly clashed – were not. To her unbridled joy, there was a spot for Linda Davis, the girl from the Bayswater boutique. There was also a place for David Barker, the blond-haired Londoner with whom Curry had enjoyed a one-night stand in France. As auditions continued, the final places were hastily filled up by talented, but inexperienced, newcomers. One of them would have an immediate impact on the show’s reluctant star. Very little of it, claim Curry’s surviving friends, was for the good.
In the official programme for The Theatre of Skating II, the career details alongside the photograph of Vancouver-born Ron Alexander took up very little space. As an amateur skater, he had achieved nothing. As a professional, he’d made up the numbers at nightclub shows from Vienna to Las Vegas, mostly as an ‘adagio’ pairs skater – a muscular set of shoulders whenever acrobatic lifting was required. Unlike his lacklustre curriculum vitae, however, Alexander’s mugshot lingered on the eye.
‘John was desperate for people,’ remembers Harbord. ‘I showed him a picture of Ron who was a great mate of mine but just wasn’t very talented. I knew John needed men and Ron was a big strong, handsome guy. John fell in love with the photograph.’
With his dark curls, square jaw and aquiline nose, Alexander had the looks to go with his body-builder physique. He was also sharp-witted, combative and gay. If the girls had privately questioned Curry’s selection criteria for male skaters at the Cambridge, Ron Alexander confirmed it. Nothing Curry had done was remotely within the Canadian’s range. When it became obvious the two men were sleeping together, nobody was surprised. ‘Ron was an opportunist,’ thinks Harbord. ‘When he found out what was required of him, he ended up living with John. He ended up playing that part.’
Apart from his friendship with Julian Pettifer, there had been no lasting ‘other’ in Curry’s life since Heinz Wirz. The adult skater of 1977, however, bore little resemblance to the bashful youth who’d cruised London’s gay clubs alone. Ever since his teens he’d been needy and prone to extreme mood swings. Now, through celebrity, had come an expectation of dominance – to be exerted by Curry over both his art and his new lover. It was a dangerous expectation. Alexander was no wallflower, and their two turbulent on-off years together would be distinguished by bitter rows.
In one crucial aspect, however, they were a perfect match. After years of self-deprivation, Curry was not uninterested in the wilder trappings of 1970s fame. ‘Cocaine. Parties. This is all happening within a few years of the first gay pride march. It’s like the Berlin Wall coming down for gay men,’ explains Foulkes. ‘It’s like, great, you know? People feeling alive. Finally gay guys could party.’ As Curry experimented, Ron Alexander embraced the role of willing accomplice. ‘I think that John knew the dark places before Ron entered the scene,’ points out Harbord. Either way, it was all about to get a great deal darker.
On 9 May, at Twickenham’s world-famous film studios, the new troupe gathered to rehearse on a sheet of belatedly laid ice. ‘Oh it is all such a worry,’ he told Nancy. ‘Only three weeks to put this thing together. It is frightening.’ After the now mandatory ballet warm-up, Curry took command of proceedings. Immediately, the Cambridge veterans could see how much had changed. Only the captivating Faune duet and Norman Maen’s slinky Jazz Suite had survived. Everything else was new, or a work in progress. And all of it had John Curry himself at centre stage.
From the opening fireworks of Le Valse Glace – in which Curry showcased his tricks dressed as a Ruritanian prince – to the wholesome show closer Winter 1895, the new programme appeared, at first glance, to be everything Curry had previously dismissed. Hamming it up as a Cockney pearly prince – or ‘pearly queen’ as Lorna Brown dubbed him – was not exactly high art. Being on stage for two hours of a two-and-three-quarter hour show was hardly the act of a reluctant star.
Every facet of the programme, however, was studded with variety, invention and good taste. The music ranged from Drigo and Debussy to Arthur Sullivan and Thad Jones. And discreetly sandwiched between the mandatory humour was the piece which – to Curry – mattered the most. And which to Larry Parnes made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
For years, Curry had dreamed of an ice ballet in which a skater might appear to fly. During his last trip to New York he’d discussed the idea with the American choreographer John Butler. When their brainstorming threw up the fable of Icarus, Curry was thrilled. Apart from Peter Pan – another Curry favourite – no story could have been more perfect, or more tuned to his painfully unfolding myth than that of the man who yearned to fly only to fall back to earth after venturing too close to the sun. In 1977 – by inviting audiences to swap the wing-melting sun for his own Olympic gold – Curry would be presenting the story of his life so far; and unknowingly, the terrible story of what was yet to come.
One of my beliefs has always been that everyone wants to fly too close to the sun – wants to get something very badly – and when they do get there, they usually find that the thing they want – whether it is the sun, or whatever golden object one might think of – is their ultimate undoing.
Larry Parnes was horrified. For two months he’d been distancing the Palladium show from its earnest Cambridge prototype. Curry’s vision for Icarus – with its specially commissioned contemporary score and sophisticated costumes – risked undermining whatever progress he’d made. It would also be costly to stage, squeeze limited rehearsal time and extend an already bloated production. Thus far, Parnes had granted Curry his every whim. This time, he would not. Unless Curry paid for it himself, Icarus was out. To his amazement, the skater called his bluff. Curry footed the bills and Icarus stayed in.
Across at Twickenham – with Kirk Douglas filming on an adjacent lot – rehearsals continued feverishly throughout May. The schedule was unforgiving, and Curry’s intransigence on Icarus added strain to tension. Not only were the new ensemble routines complex, but Curry dominated each of them. ‘He was the focal point of everything,’ explains Harbord. ‘It was a walk in the park for the rest of us. We didn’t do anything. It was boring for everyone except John.’ Ominously, the pressure on their leader was building.
‘It was not easy,’ he admitted later.
We were preparing five pieces and remounting two with what was basically a new company. The time pressures were great and it fell upon me to be involved in nearly all of this work in one capacity or another; either through learning three new pieces, choreographing two others, or rehearsing the remainder. My concentration and effort were spread over a very large area.
Soon, the old cracks began to reappear. Twelve-hour rehearsals left the skaters fractious and weary and any sign of weakness was pounced on. When Lorna Brown’s foot became infected, she’d switched from ladies’ boots to men’s simply to keep going.
At some point I’d been standing there with John, who was choreographing this dance with a harp and he said, ‘Well, don’t just stand there like a pudding’. I had to go off crying and demand that I was sent to a doctor. I said, ‘Take me out of this number, the whole show’ and stormed off. Then the next day, I was a bit scared to come in, but it was like nothing had happened. It was terrible.
For Linda Davis, fresh from her Wembley ice panto, Curry’s erratic behaviour was disappointing.
He was very strict; very harsh on a lot of us. You mustn’t be a minute late, and there’d be only a strict 15-minute break. To get to the rehearsal in Twickenham involved a bus and a taxi and we had to be there at 8.30 every morning. One day my bus didn’t come and he went crazy. He had no idea about those sorts of things. There was a side of him that was very naïve. He didn’t think that I might have to get help for my son, and that my husband was a pain in the bum. He didn’t understand any of that. He went bananas …
For Curry there had never been anything else. Pain and inconvenience had not been obstacles for him and real art required discomfort. Nor was he particularly interested in what his troupe thought of him. In a letter home, Cathy Foulkes wondered ‘perhaps if we act human towards him, he will act human towards us’. But since there was little personal investment in any of this, that seemed unlikely. On the ice, provided his skaters learned quickly, he would remain calm. Off it, in the canteen queue for his beloved sponge pudding and custard, all his ire would evaporate anyway.
Among Curry’s befuddled skaters the bruises lingered longer. Doubt and fear fostered gossip and mute dissent. The girls especially craved approval, but struggled to get past Curry’s growing regard for Foulkes. ‘John didn’t like women like me, whereas Cathy wouldn’t say boo to a goose,’ says Harbord. ‘She seemed to lose weight just to skate with him. She’d eat a yoghurt a day whereas Lorna was just not his type of person and got terribly upset by it all. Me, I just thought John was a bit stupid. The whole thing was awful.’ As the talk swirled, one issue united all of them; Curry’s supposedly clandestine affair with Ron Alexander was putting the entire show at risk of ridicule.
In his self-funded folly, Curry had cast himself as Icarus and Ron Alexander as his father, Daedalus. It was a decision no one could understand. At best, the Canadian was a passable, chorus line skater. At worst, he was a shuffling novice, hostile to the discipline required to meet Curry’s stratospheric standards. For a piece in which Curry had staked both cash and reputation, it seemed an extraordinary blunder, one that was compounded as John Butler’s vision for Icarus began to emerge.
Nothing about it seemed straightforward. The Palladium band was too small for the original score and all work had to stop while a new one was written. When he was tossed into the air by Ron Alexander, Curry panicked, noting drily: ‘I am not the world’s bravest pair skater. I would rather be the thrower than the throwee.’ The fabric wings that Curry strapped to his arms created severe wind resistance, and his outfit looked like a bikini assembled from chamois leather patches. Fuelled by Toblerones and gripped by anxiety, Curry pressed on. ‘One is scared but one is also excited by such departures,’ he said. Watching from the sidelines, as Curry flapped and fretted, Linda Davis was feeling uneasy.
It took John ages to master the wings contraption. It was all very modern with very skimpy outfits. I personally thought, perhaps they’re going too far but I wasn’t going to talk about it outside the rink. My little boy was only four at the time and he came to rehearsals twice and I remember thinking that this one was really only for grown-ups.
Even as a child, Curry had nursed a weakness for leather. His mother remembered him making his own leather waistcoat, around the time he’d spent his birthday money on that pair of winkle-pickers. In London, he’d hung around Earl’s Court’s notorious leather pub the Coleherne. And six years later he was lusting after a custom-designed highway patrolman’s jacket – ‘with regular collar and epaulets’ – from Langlitz Leathers, ‘the finest motorcycle clothing in the world’.
Nothing epitomised the late 1970s gay stereotype better than a zip-up biker’s jacket. It was the Village People. It was New York. It was gay pride. But with John Curry, it was also the one visible clue to something more troubling. Heinz Wirz referred to it as ‘his dangerous appetite’; a private need for extreme sex, something which his adventurous new partner Ron Alexander seemed eager to satisfy.
‘I think Ron was staying at a flat near White City,’ recalls David Barker.
One day I was summoned there and I think we had sex – Ron and I – and then he said, John’s very interested in leather sex and because I knew so much about it, could I give him a few tips. So I gave him my tips on leather sex – sado-masochism, whipping, bondage, all that sort of thing – and Ron tootled off and told John. But John himself couldn’t come to ask me. He had to ask through Ron.
Everybody knew. But it was never – and could never be – discussed. Increasingly, Curry’s activities were becoming compartmentalised. Admission to one box by no means guaranteed access to another. At best, his closest friends caught glimpses or heard rumours. But nobody ever got the whole picture. Whatever turmoil lay buried behind his choices was known only to Curry himself. The others, like Jacqui Harbord, could only speculate.
John was going through a lot of problems at this time … The S&M thing was certainly one, but then we all knew what John was like. This was what Ron provided for him. Lorna knew that. I knew that. We’d known John since he was ten and he didn’t go for nice young people. He went for older people who were awful.
Linda Davis’s queasiness was not misplaced. Increasingly, Curry’s work was tossing out clues. In later years, he would perform to Khachaturian’s ‘Spartacus’ with his arms bound to his naked upper body. ‘Absolutely there was a message there,’ insists Wirz. ‘He was the slave as Spartacus was and in his sexual orientation he was very much a masochist. He also told me he tried to skate tied up for the whole programme but it wasn’t possible.’ In Faune, he’d visualised his loneliness. Through the homoeroticism of Icarus, Curry was reaching out again. Small wonder Parnes had refused to pay, or that, privately, he feared a box office disaster.
By mid-June, the troupe was ready. At a packed Bristol Hippodrome, the curtains opened with the ‘whizz-dashery’ of a smiling John Curry in tight white pants and waistcoat, shamelessly showboating for applause. Gone was the sombre intensity of the Cambridge. In its place was a populist menu illuminated by Curry’s impeccable taste. Only Icarus stood in the way of a resounding hit show.
Wearing a huge, floating silk cloak, Curry had entered the stage under a giant hollow sun. As the story unfolded – and as Ron Alexander flopped self-consciously in the background – ‘boos and hisses’ could be heard coming from the auditorium. Not since Vancouver had Curry felt so humiliated. According to one review, his costume had resembled a ‘leather nappy’. According to another, it all ‘went on far too long’.
‘Icarus was two men skating together, one of them in a scanty leather g-string,’ says Lorna Brown.
Looking back, it was very gay, but at the time we didn’t think it was a gay thing. We just thought of it as being very contemporary. John would never have let a woman go out and be that naked. For a photo-shoot, he once told me off for wearing a pink ballet leotard, beige tights, and hair in a little bun. ‘Ugh. You can’t have your photo taken like that,’ he said. ‘You look like a stripper.’
After 16 performances in Bristol, the production moved to London. As the liquid stage set hard inside the Palladium, Curry’s nerves were sizzling. Parnes clearly wanted Icarus dropped and, by miserable coincidence, the skater’s new show would open just as Nureyev and Fonteyn were dancing on stage barely a mile away. All his life he’d worshipped Fonteyn’s ‘infinite qualities’. He wasn’t quite ready for his own ice-bound form of dance, to be viewed in direct comparison. And he was certainly in no mood for platitudes. ‘I remember walking into the Palladium with him and musing on who and what had been there,’ remembers Jacqui Harbord. ‘I said to John, “Think of that. This place is just steeped in history.” He just looked at me, and walked off.’
There was another possible reason for John’s foreboding. Across in the States, his old rival Toller Cranston had reappeared in his peripheral vision. On 19 May at the Palace Theater on Broadway, the Canadian had dropped into his own eponymous ice show aboard an illuminated star clad in ‘a black beaded jumpsuit cut nearly to his navel’. Unlike the Englishman, Cranston gleefully embraced his own fame. In interviews, he had also lampooned the intensity of Curry’s alternative brew. ‘His Twyla Tharp piece was totally bland … anti-skating … it didn’t make sense at all … I am sick of this pseudo-intellectualism in dance where very obscure things are often a substitute for greatness.’
Curry could live with Cranston’s knockabout abuse. Curry had the medals, Cranston did not. What troubled him more were the Canadian’s half-empty houses. Despite emphatic reviews, Manhattan’s notoriously picky theatre-goers had stayed away. ‘If we had been a musical or dance company there would have been queues around the block,’ moaned Cranston. ‘It’s hard for people to accept something that’s different.’ After a four-week run, his show had expired. By the time The Theatre of Skating II opened in London on 4 July, Cranston was grimly totting up his losses in a $900-a-month apartment.
Curry need not have worried. Bristol may have sniggered, but London swooned. In every newspaper, the critics spoke with one voice. ‘Curry appears a unique and mysterious being and one absolutely not to be missed,’ raved the Financial Times. ‘A star personality of astonishing theatrical charisma,’ gushed the Herald Tribune. ‘Nothing short of sensational … world-class entertainment,’ boomed the Daily Mail.
Almost inevitably, nothing garnered more compliments than Icarus. It was, said one smitten reviewer, a performance of ‘heroic poetry [which showed] that skating can, in the hands of a master be an act of real, expressive force’. ‘You forget about the skating virtuosity and watch it as ballet,’ said another. According to the Mail’s legendary theatre critic Jack Tinker, it was ‘a sublime essay in the dizzy joy of flight’.
It was precisely what Curry needed to hear. Across the city, Nureyev and Fonteyn were enjoying 15-minute curtain calls, but the Palladium had become London’s hottest ticket, with Curry alone its indisputable draw. However hard they worked, no one else in his cast could match his spell. In one review, a fellow skater was described as a ‘stalwart lady homing in on [John Curry] like a homicidal blancmange’. In another, the show was marked down for its mediocre ‘pit band’ and for a flawed ‘bill devised to keep as many different people as happy as possible’. Only Curry escaped tarnish. Once again he had found redemption through his disdain for compromise.
‘The ultimate and lingering image is of him as a solitary figure,’ wrote Clement Crisp in the FT. ‘His abilities are so far in advance of those of his colleagues, his ambitions and interpretive powers so much richer, that his becomes the isolation of the truly innovative artist.’
John Curry himself, however, was taking little pleasure from his triumph. In a long letter to Nancy Streeter, which he insisted she kept secret, he told her he’d asked Parnes to ‘reduce the Palladium season to 4 weeks or however long it takes to recoup the money spent on my show – then I am finishing and returning to the US to make my home and my life’, adding, ‘Everyone else tells me that it is much better than the Cambridge production – well it may be, but I don’t care for it as much.’
Like it or not, for another three weeks Curry’s show was unstoppable. After each performance, the stage door was snarled by autograph hunters and flowers choked every dressing room. There were private lunches with Princess Margaret and invitations to Buckingham Palace. Well-known thespians and dancers streamed into the Palladium to see it. One of them, the English actor Alan Bates, had already been spotted at the Cambridge Theatre in March. Out of a casual friendship, something enduring and intense – but elusive – was slowly stirring.
‘Years before, we’d seen his naked body wrestling in the film Women in Love,’ recalls Heinz Wirz. ‘When John told me he’d seen Bates in a London play, I told him he should have taken me! Although I’ve no real idea how they met, they would eventually become very close friends. I’m sure they eventually loved one another.’
Very few of Curry’s intimate relationships lasted long. Of those that did, none would be protected quite so fiercely as the one with Alan Bates. When Curry was floundering in America, Bates would suddenly appear at his side. When Curry was dying, Bates would be there to prop him up. Since neither discussed it publicly, and since no letters appear to have survived, the precise nature of their affair died with both men. Bates had been a public figure, married with children, and John Curry had no wish to embarrass him. For almost 20 years, their story lay deep beneath the radar. And in the summer of 1977, Curry already had distractions enough.
Performing had usually recharged Curry. Success at the Palladium – possibly boosted by other stimulants – seemed to knock him off balance. When he was on stage, unnoticed by audiences, his behaviour had become periodically erratic. Away from it, as well as plotting to curtail the run, he had a lifestyle that was raising eyebrows. The two things were almost certainly connected.
‘One night we were skating together,’ recalls Brown,
and he reached out his arm to me so our hands were touching and then he sniffed very loudly. Snorted in fact. I started to snigger, then he started to snigger and we laughed all the way through and tried to make it look as though I was crying. Afterwards he said we must never do that again … On other nights, he would say terribly rude things in my ear during a very intense piece with the harp on stage … maybe something about someone in the audience … and I would just smile and keep going.
When the theatre emptied, nobody – apart possibly from Ron Alexander – seemed too sure where Curry went. After years of on-off lodging with Penny Malec, he’d moved (courtesy of Larry Parnes) into a large furnished flat off Kensington High Street, in Marloes Road. (‘Very grand and good for him,’ Penny told Nancy Streeter. ‘Breaking the umbilical cord and getting him into it was a slightly painful experience but I’m confident that he’ll be happier once he’s used to being on his own.’)
If he was feeling tired, Curry would unwind there with a marijuana joint. When the adrenalin was still pumping, he would wander among Soho’s backstreets. ‘Ron had once taken me to an all-nude review – Oh! Calcutta! – just to shake me up a bit,’ recalls Foulkes. ‘But I was a teenager then. John had a nightlife which I was unaware of.’
Perhaps inevitably, Curry seems to have dabbled briefly with cocaine, the decade’s drug of choice for entertainers with surplus cash and a need for chemically induced energy. Few stimulants, however, were less suited to the pinpoint accuracy required of ice skating than this one. And no drug could have been more likely to short-circuit Curry’s already precarious state of mind. Years later, in words attributed to him, the skater recalled the terrifying feeling of decline:
I had always been a very secure performer but now I found myself falling. No one except Ron knew about my nightly excursions, so my deterioration was put down to depression and fatigue. I knew I was on a dangerous course, but I desperately needed the measure of escape it afforded me. It gave me a kind of happiness … I couldn’t stop.
Almost halfway through an eight-week run, Curry had become an accident waiting to happen. On 26 July, it happened. According to the Guardian, he’d been beaten up on Earl’s Court Road ‘walking home at about 10.30 last Sunday night with friends’. There’d been no arrests and there were precious few details. Curry himself was said to be under sedation, having collapsed at the end of his Monday performance. Until he was fit, the Palladium was offering free tickets and refunds to disappointed customers.
No one knew what to believe. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before. For a major West End show to lose its star was a catastrophe. For the cast, and production crew, there was the sudden vacuum of speculation, not helped by the inconsistencies in Curry’s accounts of what had happened. The ever-alert Lorna Brown had been one of the first to glean any answers. Barely an hour before the doomed Monday performance she’d found him by the ballet barre ‘all cut up and bruised-looking and shocked’.
He said he’d been to get a Chinese takeaway or something and then somebody attacked him. I didn’t believe it because he was sexually involved with Ron Alexander then, and I don’t know what sort of places they’d go to. I think John got led the wrong way.
Heinz Wirz – staying with Curry at the time – had seen the bruises too. ‘Pretty bad,’ he remembers. ‘I don’t know if that wasn’t a proper beating up. He was in agony and I thought then it must have been in one of those sexual experiences but I’m not sure and John would not say.’
For the next week, Curry recuperated at his Marloes Road apartment. Apart from the facial injuries, there was severe bruising to his back, which specialists had urged him to rest. Across at the Palladium, the show stuttered on with an understudy but no one was under any illusions. Without Curry, there was nothing to sell. Faune and Icarus were withdrawn from the running order in his absence. However hard he fought it, a star was what people paid to see. Without one, ticket sales collapsed.
For Larry Parnes it was a body blow. Since the Cambridge, his relationship with Curry had been awkward. By refusing to fund Icarus, he’d allowed their different visions of theatrical skating to become irretrievably polarised. With critical opinion behind Curry, Parnes probably sensed he was losing his man. On top of that, with Curry bedridden, Parnes was losing money. Somehow the ugly rumours had to be stopped. A week after the incident, Parnes summoned reporters to the Palladium. There to enlighten them ‘looking exquisite and extremely fit’ was a recovered John Curry.
It had happened – he told the journalists – shortly after leaving an Indian restaurant, but there was no explanation of why he’d been attacked; or why he’d failed to report it to the police. ‘What can you do?’ he pleaded. ‘There were a thousand people about and the attacker had gone. I just wanted to go home and get my nose fixed up.’ It was a plausibly thin account, beyond which Curry would never publicly go.
Whatever had happened in Earl’s Court, Curry’s life had reached one of its periodic crises. Publicly, Parnes was still telling people that The Theatre of Skating would shortly be touring the United States; and that Curry himself was seriously considering a film script – a romantic drama. But almost all of it was nonsense. When the Palladium show resumed, Curry opted out of the afternoon matinée and for as long as he skated his back would never fully recover from the mysterious assault. More significantly – although as yet mistily – he must have known Parnes would soon be joining his pile of human discards. ‘If John didn’t like something he would never forgive it,’ says Lorna. ‘We could have run the Palladium for a year but they fell out. That’s all we knew. They fell out.’ As always, however, Curry already had his safety net in place.
At 26, David Singer was a young New York lawyer dreading a life measured out on Wall Street. And then he saw John Curry skating to Twyla Tharp’s choreography at Madison Square Gardens. Overwhelmed, he’d sought Curry out backstage. ‘John mattered,’ he explains. ‘I told him I’d welcome a chance to produce a show for him in New York. I was a real devotee. I felt I had good taste and could make distinctions. He said that if I was serious I should come to London.’
Singer was deadly serious. In the early spring, with fellow producer Charlotte Kirk, he’d flown to England to watch Curry perform. Flattered, but seemingly clueless about his ‘contract’ with Parnes, Curry had urged the pair ‘to work things out with Larry’. Larry Parnes, however, had absolutely no intention of sharing his prize asset with two American strangers.
After meeting them he told Curry that the pair had neither the experience nor the funds to produce him in North America. David Singer, for his part, had been equally unimpressed. ‘I felt like I needed a shower after being with Parnes,’ he says. ‘He was not someone to do business with. He was greedy and I didn’t trust him. He asked inappropriate terms and asked for an inappropriate role if I was to work with him.’
Privately, Parnes was rattled. John Curry wasn’t a naïf like Billy Fury. He was smart, he was stubborn and he was fickle. He’d also signed nothing. (‘I don’t think I’d sign for the Pope,’ he’d once told a reporter). Any interest from New York, however vague, was guaranteed to unsettle him and since the ‘assault’ and the euphoria of opening night, he’d seemed even more distant. It was time for a Larry Parnes grand gesture. Soon after Curry returned from his convalescence, further ‘details’ were released concerning the pending ‘world tour’. In a state of high excitement, Cathy Foulkes wrote home, saying:
Rehearsals are to begin mid October in New York and will last about 6 to 7 weeks. Then we’ll tour the US, east and west and then go to Australia for the Adelaide Festival. [John] asked us all to think about whether we wanted to go and let him know. Last night there were a whole bunch of U.S. backers over to see the show … John did Faune and Icarus. His back was killing him.
Parnes alone knew how real any of this was. John Curry no longer seemed to care. Whatever happened – and whatever Parnes conjured up – he and the ‘beat Svengali’ were finished. Curry had wanted out of London for several months anyway. Provided he could navigate through the legal issues, the skater had decided to pair up with David Singer in New York, whatever it took. The hurdles in his way, however, appeared significant.
Parnes owned the Theatre of Skating ‘brand’, and had bankrolled key elements of its choreography. Unless he relinquished control, Curry faced rebuilding a new show from scratch. David Singer appeared untroubled. ‘After talking it through with John it became apparent that working with Parnes was not necessary. The rights were not impossibly sewn up. We didn’t need Parnes at all.’ Meanwhile, the Palladium show limped on.
Everyone had noticed how quiet Curry was. Since his week’s absence, nothing had been the same. Although he continued to perform supremely, the show’s invulnerability had vanished. Backstage, bitter grumbles resurfaced. Curry’s relationship with Jacqui Harbord had never been warm. After his injury, it got worse. ‘She was a great showgirl and John hated vulgarity,’ explains David Barker. ‘I remember once at the Palladium she’d been sitting in the wings with Ron Alexander with a huge dildo and everyone on stage could see this and was laughing. John was horrified.’
During his absence, it had been Harbord who reorganised the show’s music. ‘I kept it open. He didn’t count on that,’ she says.
It was a black mark against me, but I don’t regret doing it. While he was off, people who’d bought tickets to see him were told they could come back for free when he’d returned. But he never gave them the opportunity. At the end of the run there were people who’d been cheated. He would have done brilliantly well if someone had been there to manage it all. But he was just not good at handling people.
Curry’s affair with Ron Alexander was also under strain. Performing Icarus – for each of them – had become an exercise in professional restraint. ‘They were always arguing,’ says Barker. ‘John came up to me one night and said, “David, you’re going to have to do it this evening”. I said, “John, I don’t know anything about it”. He said I was going to have to do it, but thank God it didn’t come to that.’ As Alexander’s ‘throwee’, Curry’s vulnerability had also become a nightly hazard. From one night to the next, he told close friends,’ I would never be quite sure how far or how hard I would be thrown.’
By late August, it was all over. After 60 performances the refrigeration was switched off, the cast said their farewells and Curry flew to New York. Before leaving, he took a satisfying last kick at England courtesy of the Daily Express. ‘If I loved being in London, the way I love being in New York, I would stay here,’ he explained. ‘It is as simple as that … In America, your individual merits are respected.’ He hadn’t mentioned ‘the fairy for the tree’. He hadn’t really needed to. ‘With one leap John Curry frees himself of Britain’ ran the headline. By 10 September, he was back in Manhattan. It would be seven years before the London public saw him in action again.
Escaping from Larry Parnes wouldn’t be quite so easy. Or so swift. The much-touted world tour had evaporated, leaving only a trap. If he turned up in a new show using any of his Palladium material, Parnes had intimated he would sue. Without serious cash, Curry couldn’t afford new choreography. It was a dilemma foreign to his experience. ‘When he came up against people in business he would not bend,’ says Penny Malec. ‘So people started to hate him and that made him crawl back into his shell of self-righteousness.’
Frustrated, Curry stewed angrily through the autumn. Back in his London apartment, Larry Parnes did the same. Without his backing, Curry’s theatrical vision would have been stillborn, and, since he’d genuinely believed in Curry’s project, the entrepreneur was entitled to his disappointment. ‘I suspect that both Parnes and John thought that they could manipulate the other for his own purpose and each was enraged to fail,’ thinks Penny. ‘But John got paid and prestige while Larry lost money and probably credibility among his peers.’
Curry was now 28. For the first time in over a year he had time on his hands. As they so often did, feelings of fatigued numbness crowded in. ‘One really does look around some times and wonder what it is all for,’ he told Heinz in September. ‘My love life hasn’t been terrific and when the professional satisfaction isn’t there, there’s not much left except a constant slog which makes you very tired, but not very satisfied.’
In Manhattan to help break the impasse Curry had engaged the services of Berlin-born celebrity agent Robert Lantz, a New York legend whose clients included Yul Brynner, Bette Davis and Leonard Bernstein. No one could hustle like Lantz. Few people had a better feel for the delicate flower of fame. Or, as he liked to put it: ‘A bad haircut can be a catastrophe of biblical proportions.’ Shortly before Christmas – almost certainly following advice from Lantz – Curry made his move to end the stalemate.
In a letter sent to his ex-Palladium cast – all still awaiting news of more work – Curry informed them that ‘unforeseen difficulties’ had required him to postpone all his plans until autumn the following year. ‘It seems that the change of production company makes it impossible for me to do the show as it stands and it will be necessary to replan it almost completely. For this reason, I must ask you … to seriously consider any offers that may come your way.’ In a handwritten postscript to Cathy Foulkes he added, ‘I am so sad to write all this. There seems no end to the problems and I have not the words to tell you … Keep safe.’
If Parnes had ever been serious about legal action, he wasn’t now. He’d never really owned Curry anyway. It was business. It was pride. Nor was he the only one to be cast overboard. Whatever plans Curry was hatching no longer included Jacqui Harbord. Not everyone had received his newsletter from America. Like Parnes, Harbord had already been shown the exit.
Every night at the Palladium she’d admired L’après-midi d’un Faune from the wings. Sadly for her, however, the admiration was not mutual. ‘After the Palladium I received a pack of photographs from him saying he wished me luck but he would not be taking me to the USA.’ Whatever happened next, both she and Parnes were out of Curry’s story for good.
In the winter, New York can be a glorious place. Cold nights, under skies stripped of cloud, plate the leaves of Central Park with frost. Along the corridors of stone and steel, tempers and temperatures fall slowly away. Unencumbered by his own recent pressures, Curry relaxed, too. After years of semi-permanence, Manhattan felt like home. Among his tight circle of friends, the smiles and the dark humour returned. A refresher course in Erhard Seminar Training was even booked into his diary. ‘He loved this period of his life,’ recalled Nancy Streeter. ‘He’d made a little money. He was in his late twenties. He was independent.’
After the years at the Streeter apartment, Curry was finally equipping a place of his own, a ground floor apartment along 221 West 13th, just a few strides down from Seventh Avenue, opposite what is now the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center. A few blocks away were the coffee bars and galleries of Greenwich Village.
Along the district’s leafy sidewalks it wasn’t difficult to believe that everyone was an artist, a poet or a dancer. Nowhere could have been better suited to Curry’s momentary state of drift. Rarely – if ever – had he stopped. Here in his own sparely furnished place, soothed by the occasional lungful of cannabis, he could enjoy a life void of decisions but almost permanently blessed by good company.
Despite their rancorous arguments, he and Ron Alexander were still lovers. Brian Grant, the male model and skater who’d turned Curry on to EST, lived nearby in the Village with his partner. By the end of the year, Curry’s friend Roger Roberts would have relocated permanently from London to New York. When he did so, he’d share a high-rise apartment on West 43rd Street with Billy Whitener, the dancer who’d introduced Curry to Twyla Tharp. It was hard on Nancy Streeter, but her ex-lodger now had his own circle. And for the time being, loneliness was no longer a concern for John.
‘I saw John almost every day,’ says Whitener.
At that time I was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and on the way back through Manhattan I’d stop and have tea and cookies with him in his lovely apartment. I got very used to it; the English need for mid-afternoon sustenance. It became a custom, a habit. We listened to music, I’d help him select pieces … New York suited him. It suits lots of artists. There’s friction. There’s dialogue. Creative ideas are spawned and circulated. There’s plenty to do. We saw lots of shows. Lots of ballet. We went off Broadway, on Broadway. Sweeney Todd with Angela Lansbury, I remember … In Greenwich Village, John became a New Yorker.
From his home in Switzerland, Curry’s oldest friend, Heinz Wirz, watched with concern. He’d never understood Ron Alexander, and knew Curry’s weaknesses well. ‘I said to John, “I’m not sure if I like Ron” and he said, “Oh you don’t know him”. But in New York, I know, John had dangerous appetites. He wrote and told me about this party and that party but it was dangerous.’
At nights, as in London, no one really knew what Curry was doing. Not even intimates like Billy Whitener. ‘He went to different gay bars than me,’ he explains. ‘He’d won his medals but I was still rehearsing so didn’t stay up too late. We’d bar hop for a while but I had to go home early. The seventies were dangerous.’ Nowhere were they more risky than a short cab ride from Curry’s rented brownstone.
In 1974, the Anvil nightclub had opened in the heart of the nearby meatpacking district. Two years later, it had been joined by the Mineshaft. No two institutions better exemplified the unrestrained excess of pre-AIDS New York. And it seems Curry – and Alexander – were known at both.
‘There was a lot of pressure on him. He needed release,’ thinks Whitener.
I think John got into some dangerous territory in terms of his own emotional landscape. You want to push things to the extreme so you have something to say on stage, and New York is lively. There are all sorts of people. We were pleasure seekers. We were handsome. We were on stage. We were on display. We had a good time. And to be a loyal and true friend to John sometimes meant looking aside. We lived life to its extremes … there was always something wild and unbridled about his gift.
At the Anvil, naked go-go boys jigged on a stage to disco beats. At the Mineshaft, the options darkened. Denim and leather were the dress code. Cologne was forbidden. Once inside, down in the dungeons and cells, the rules petered out. Along one wall, punters knelt to service the disembodied erect penises which emerged anonymously through a line of ‘glory holes’. In a blackened cellar, men so inclined took it in turns to be urinated upon in a bathtub. Sado-masochistic sex and group sex were commonplace. No one seemed to care. No one asked too many questions. ‘The Anvil made the world quiver and quake,’ recalls Cranston. ‘And Curry would go there.’
To what extent he participated will never be known. In the dawn light, few attendees broadcast their nocturnal preferences, and in this respect the skater was no different. In 1978, most people in the Mineshaft wouldn’t have known who John Curry was, and by the mid-eighties AIDS had turned off its lights for good. By then, with most of their former clientele already dead or dying, New York’s grimmest dives had been silenced for ever by the arbiters of public health. And long before that, Curry’s burgeoning fame in New York had required him to keep away.
Whatever need his activities satisfied – and how precisely he satisfied them – remained known only to himself. As a confused teenager, he’d craved ‘normality’. As a man, he seemed bent on punishing himself for the lack of it. Only one tragic link was visible between his secret world and the one on public display. Underlying both was the same persistent sense of unhappiness; the same ache of dissatisfaction. And underpinning all this was the conviction that, as an artist, he had not even begun.
At the start of 1978, Curry still appeared paralysed by his problems. For the first time in two decades skating had not dominated his winter months. Harsh lessons learned under Larry Parnes, however, had chastened him. In business, he was learning the value of patience. Discreetly, he had contacted choreographers Norman Maen, Kenneth MacMillan and Twyla Tharp, seeking permission to use their earlier collaborations in a possible new production. Since Parnes had no hold over their work, each had agreed. Crucially, the priceless Faune was back in the fold.
By mid-February, the two Americans who’d visited him in London, David Singer and Charlotte Kirk, were formally operating as his producers. Writing from a Broadway office, Singer had alerted key cast members (like Cathy Foulkes) to the possibility of a summer tour which would require May rehearsals, to be followed by ‘a winter tour of even grander proportions (including a Broadway engagement)’.
After a few months, unable to secure the finance, this too had started to collapse, leaving only the distant prospect of a New York run in December. Frustrated, and running low on cash, Curry offered himself to the Sky Rink as a teacher. By early June his New York School of Skating was ready to run. All it needed was a launch party.
Even by New York standards, John Curry’s ‘Gala Summer Evening on Ice’ was a shimmering affair. Sipping ‘cocktails at sunset’ and nibbling chocolate-coated strawberries, the sold-out house of 650 boasted the cream of Manhattan party-goers. A-listers like Lauren Bacall, Paul Simon, Liv Ullmann, Andy Warhol, Carrie Fisher and Mikhail Baryshnikov chinked flutes with socialites and tycoons.
Tickets had cost up to $100 each. Nancy Streeter was there. Ed Mosler, too. Members of the New York City Ballet were employed as ushers and the lofty New York Times had given it an entire half page. ‘Mr Curry is devilishly handsome,’ it reported the next day, adding that his ‘virtual unknown’ status in the United States looked all set to change.
For 40 minutes, Curry – with eight other skaters – had thrilled an audience replete with sliced cold veal and spinach quiche. As a showcase for his skating school, it was a success. As a sales pitch for Curry himself, and his embryonic new production, it was a masterstroke. With Kirk and Singer’s help – and his agent Robbie Lantz’s contacts book – the Englishman’s presence in New York had been announced. No one had been disappointed. As always, Curry’s cryptic dance with Cathy Foulkes had moved onlookers to tears. But for once it had been another duet – with a brand new electrifying female partner – which had stirred most of the post-Gala chatter.
If John Curry was a ‘virtual unknown’, the 27-year-old Alabama-born JoJo Starbuck most decidedly was not. As a skater, she was a former Ice Capades star and a veteran of two Olympic Games. As a public figure, she was one half of the so-called ‘golden’ marriage to the idolised Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw. Few men in American football earned more at the time. No sporting sweethearts garnered more headlines.
Sassy, smart, and attractive, she seemed ill suited for John Curry’s lofty vision. Toller Cranston, on the other hand, adored her. ‘A showgirl. A show-poodle,’ he averred. ‘All legs, teeth, rhinestones and blonde hair. Real star quality, a huge personality and a work ethic that was dazzling.’ On paper she epitomised the starlit sequins and tinsel Curry loathed. And yet here she was, at the Sky Rink Gala, stealing the show and sporting a huge diamond ring cut in the shape of a football.
It wasn’t Curry’s choice that she was there. A shrewder brain had seen to that. By the time of the Gala, David Singer had secured a venue – the Felt Forum theatre, at Madison Square Gardens – for a two-week run before Christmas. A glamorous American on the billing would surely protect everyone against box office embarrassment. Less than a month before the Sky Rink Gala, Singer had picked up the phone to Louisiana. ‘What time do you want me there?’ said JoJo.
It was a serendipitous call. Unknown to Singer, Starbuck was lonely, bored and unhappy. During the football season she hung out in Pittsburgh. After it was over she was marooned on a 480-acre cattle ranch near Shreveport. ‘I was so painfully lonely there,’ she now admits.
I came from this amazing world of crazy friends. Like Toller. Great careers. Putting gorgeous costumes and dresses on. And then all of a sudden I’m on a ranch in the middle of nowhere surrounded by cattle. There wasn’t even another house. Terry loved animals. I loved ballet, Broadway, the theatre. There was nothing for me there. Nobody got me, and I didn’t get them. I felt a big chunk of me was void. I couldn’t wait to be wanted again … and then I got this call.
Within days she was in New York. Within two weeks she was ice dancing with John Curry in front of the city’s elite. ‘It was like that old song,’ she says, ‘“How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)”. It was a kinda like that. A total blast.’ Starbuck was fresh, modern and dripping with sexual charisma. Out on the ice, under her spell, every gram of Curry’s frosty reserve disappeared. Nothing he’d done before had generated such erotic heat. No dance would ever prove quite so popular as the one he premiered with Starbuck at his gala.
It had been a Danish-born choreographer – Peter Martins, of the New York City Ballet – who’d stitched together their sleazy Latin extravagance, a number wholly at odds with the skater’s previous repertoire. This was no Icarus. Tango Jalousie – or Tango Tango as it became known – was slutty, sensual and gloriously commercial. ‘It had a hip quality,’ recalls Singer. ‘But I think he resented it. I think it was more lowbrow than he wanted. It also took on a disproportionate degree of success for his company. JoJo’s jump at the end always brought the house down. I don’t think she missed it ever.’
Few of Curry’s works were quite so shameless as Tango Tango. Wearing a tight black matador’s suit and slicked down hair, Curry vamped alone before JoJo swept in wearing a slash of purple satin over exposed thighs and shoulders to lock eyes and arms with her lover. As the music built, the ghosts of Fred and Ginger stirred. On the ice, the couple seemed propelled by genuine yearning. Together, they glided, they waltzed and they spun, and after JoJo’s climactic jump she beckoned her man meaningfully off stage.
At Curry’s summer gala, the audience had brayed with delight. Over the next six years, thousands more would do the same. If it was ‘lowbrow’, Curry was stuck with it. If he resented Starbuck’s evident popularity, he was lumbered with that, too. During the summer months of 1978, plans hardened for his run at New York’s Felt Forum and JoJo’s place in it was now guaranteed. In the meantime, he knuckled down to his twice-weekly teaching responsibilities. Up at Sky Rink, 15 students, of all ages, were awaiting his instruction. Almost without exception, they were terrified. Among them was Nancy Streeter.
‘Patience was rather difficult for him,’ she recalled.
By late summer, Curry had fulfilled his teaching obligations. Although briefly reactivated the following year, his heart had never been in it. From the start, it had been little more than a stopgap and in October rehearsals for the Felt Forum were ready to begin. From the Palladium show, Lorna Brown, David Barker, Paul Toomey and Cathy Foulkes had been retained. So, too, had Ron Alexander. Linda Davis had been invited, but felt unable to leave her young family in London. In her place, Curry had reached into his past and found Patricia Dodd, the lissom Canadian with whom he’d once shared an innocent bed. Alongside her, in a 12-strong company, there was also a spot for his New York friend Brian Grant, an unaccomplished skater with even less experience than Curry’s on-off Canadian lover.
For an artist so fixated on standards, the inclusion of Grant and Alexander was curious. Either it was a spectacular act of friendship or Curry simply knew he would shine brighter in their company. Any bashfulness about his star status had by now entirely vanished. His new show was to be called John Curry’s Ice Dancing and his new publicity guru, Bobby Zarem – the mastermind behind the ‘I Love New York’ campaign – was busily turning him into a Manhattan celebrity. Gossip columns twittered regularly about his activities, and in November a documentary aired on public television promoting Curry’s upcoming new work. ‘I did all that Olympic business,’ he explained to viewers, ‘specifically to get the chance to do this.’
Away from the cameras, however, Curry’s cheery demeanour was being tested. Unlike Larry Parnes, Kirk and Singer were not afraid to challenge the skater’s aesthetic. ‘We had our own ideas. We were present. We did what we had to do,’ admits Singer. ‘I was there at almost every rehearsal. We wanted to have an impact. We needed the show to be fun as much as classical.’ But there was worse.
To Curry’s horror, JoJo Starbuck’s name had been inserted in big letters under his on the posters and hoardings. A ‘creative supervisor’ had also been appointed to hand-hold production. And since rehearsal ice was being shared with the New York Rangers, every day began with a tetchy pre-dawn bus ride through the waking city to Westchester. Outside the rink, the leaves turned red. Inside it, the mood – as David Barker recalls – could be black.
They hired these famous choreographers and they thought we were all trained ballet dancers and we were not. We were ice skaters and some of the rehearsals were excruciating. These people didn’t know anything about ice skating. There was no connection … They had one number, this big cardboard magic box, and we had to be in it and stick our arms and legs out. It was dreadful. Who’d want that in a Broadway show? It was a nightmare.
As rehearsals progressed, fault lines formed, exacerbated by Curry’s new-found reluctance to share the limelight. Feelings of personal diminishment fostered insecurity; constant revisions unsettled the cast; and to the newcomers, Curry’s behaviour was proving an unpleasant revelation. In sly asides to Dodd, Curry carped about Starbuck. ‘All I got from John about her was negative. He’d been told, “You’re not an American, you’ve got to have an American”. When they were doing Tango Tango, I sometimes wondered if he was tempted to throw her out of the wings.’ None of which alarmed Starbuck herself. ‘John didn’t need me and maybe didn’t want me, but I toughed it out because I wanted to be in on this. Suddenly I was learning so much beauty again … so no matter how John treated us – and everyone was hurt by him every day – I was thrilled to be part of the experiment.’
No one questioned Curry on the ice. Out there, away from the barrier, there was no challenge to his control. However much Barker derided it, ‘the cardboard magic box’ (from a routine called Scoop) would stay. So too would Faune and Twyla Tharp’s After All. Despite Singer’s best endeavours, Curry’s lofty instinct still drove proceedings. To his credit, Icarus had been quietly dumped. But so, too, in Machiavellian style, had numerous ideas from his new hands-on producers.
‘When we were up at Westchester, I was cast opposite JoJo in a piece,’ recalls Patricia Dodd.
Ron came up to me and said that John wanted me to really fuck up because he really didn’t want this piece in the show. The producers were watching and he only wanted what he wanted and this was – for John – a tacky, vulgar piece. So I did. I went in with no energy and fell once or twice. Basically, I was bad but it had to be hush-hush and although the choreographer was looking, and might have had some suspicions, it was dropped.
Had David Singer known of Alexander’s role as Curry’s stooge he would not have been surprised. Without Curry’s backing, Alexander would never have been cast. ‘I thought he was an awkward man who didn’t belong in that group,’ says Singer. ‘He was bad on stage and a bad influence on John off it. I also think he was ambivalent about John. Through bad judgment or maliciousness, he could hurt him.’
Unknown to Singer, the feeling was entirely mutual. In a hilariously indiscreet letter to Jacqui Harbord started just 24 hours before the Felt Forum show opened, Alexander branded Kirk and Singer ‘full of shit and fuckups’. ‘Parnes, although a shark, left John alone,’ he added. ‘Kirk and Singer … are always hanging about … [and] are totally incompetent assholes.’ It was a letter which gleefully blew the lid off life inside John Curry’s seething troupe of talents. Whatever his limitations as a skater, Ron Alexander could clearly scratch like a cat.
Patricia comes off very well in the show with a dramatic solo part in the opening … however Patricia feels that John begrudges her this small success in the show. He does have some competition from JoJo Starbuck, as against his better judgement she has remained although he treated her like shit for 3 weeks to the point where she wanted to leave … David Barker freaked out the day before we did our first preview and walked out, creating some small havoc …
Lorna is not pleased with her lot either. She has nothing with John and feels wasted … and is becoming most boring with her complaining about her knee, and back and head. I have a lot of time for Looney [Lorna] but she can be such a pain in the ass … Pat and her have been sharing an apartment [and] Pat wants to leave because of Lorna’s never ceasing ill temper and selfishness … If the show does not continue past December 3rd I will go to Portugal for 2 months to do a dancing nightclub offer … how awful that would be.
Alexander wouldn’t get to Portugal. On 21 November, Curry had opened at the Felt Forum theatre in front of 3,500 people. As always, his dressing room had been swamped with flowers and telegrams. Carlo and Christa Fassi, the dancer Anthony Dowell and Ed Mosler had sent their good wishes. So, too, had both his brothers. Even JoJo had penned a cryptic message; ‘To my passionate tango partner. You drive me mad.’
Two days later, when Ron Alexander finally sat down to finish his interrupted letter to Harbord, John Curry’s Ice Dancing was surfing a tidal surge of acclaim. ‘I’m tempted to tear up the beginning as it really isn’t too positive, but it’s the truth and I will let it stand. The reception we’ve had after 11 performances has been incredible with bravos and standing ovations every night … John could not have had a bigger, or better triumph.’
According to the New York Post the show was ‘a knockout, a mindbender, a unique concept’. ‘Delicate, charming and delightful’ was Variety’s verdict. Even Anna Kisselgoff, the doyenne of Manhattan’s art critics, had been impressed. ‘Everybody should see him, and now they can … a brilliant beginning.’ Amidst the bouquets, however, there were reservations and prescient doubts. At the early previews, Curry’s quest for contemporary edge – replacing Icarus with Robert Cohan’s ultra-modern Myth – had badly backfired. ‘The one out and out fizzle in the show,’ wrote one critic. ‘Totally senseless,’ added another. By opening night Myth had vanished from the running order, and Variety was sounding an ominous note of warning.
Curry is asking for recognition for ice ballet into the top cultural ranks and cutting off the kind of audience that take the kids to ice shows to see stuffed animals and maybe get a ride on the kiddie vehicles … It’s recalled that ice shows had several starving years before the big money came. Curry may experience the same.
As snow piled up in Central Park, few of Curry’s cast were looking that far ahead. At $375 a week the pay was good, and the pre-Christmas mood was high. On the opening night, celebrations had drifted from a Chanel-sponsored party to Studio 54 – the city’s legendary disco club – where champagne and Quaaludes had been on offer amidst half-naked dancers.
After the first weekend alone, box office receipts were rumoured to be $125,000. Sniffing takeover potential, executives from Holiday On Ice had even attended the show and stories were recirculating about either a three-month European tour or a two-week run in Chicago. ‘It now seems clear anything can, and probably will happen,’ Alexander told Harbord. ‘But one can be sure that John will be looking out for himself.’
When the Felt Forum run ended – on 3 December, after just 21 performances – it was clear that New York wanted more. ‘We were very hot,’ recalls JoJo. ‘Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Kris Kristofferson. These people would come and see us, and then we’d go and see them in their shows. One night we had Katherine Hepburn and she couldn’t find her car after the show, and got lost trying to find it, and even that was in the paper. Everything was in the paper. Bobby Zarem was an amazing publicist.’ With demand still high, the skaters would not get long to recover. On 19 December, the show reopened at the Minskoff Theater.
From the beginning, there were danger signs. Christmas was approaching, always Curry’s least favourite time of the year. During the two-week break – while Ron Alexander had been laid up with blood poisoning – Curry had secretly consummated his friendship with Brian Grant at a romantic tryst in New England. Back in rehearsals, Curry was clearly troubled by the Minskoff’s smaller stage. Twyla Tharp’s After All needed reconfiguring, and the choreographer had been recalled to restage it.
‘I seemed to have lost my nerve,’ he subsequently explained.
Twyla kept asking me to skate right into the front corners of the stage, but I would chicken out before I got there. She was incensed, telling me that I was going to ruin the piece. Finally I lost my temper and deliberately skated into the orchestra pit. ‘Is that what you wanted?’ I demanded. Twyla stared in disbelief, gathered her things and turned to leave the auditorium. ‘I don’t work with children,’ she said.
There were problems for Curry’s co-star, too. According to the New York Times, JoJo Starbuck’s husband, Terry Bradshaw, was refusing to allow her back for the Minskoff performances. Only the threat of a lawsuit had apparently got her on a plane. ‘Terry’s southern and those men tend to be a little more old-fashioned,’ Starbuck told a reporter. ‘He’s home alone and he misses me.’ A few years later their marriage was over. ‘Getting back into skating didn’t help,’ she says now. ‘He was seizing his moment. I was seizing mine … I was 25 going on 14 when I married him.’
Predictably, Curry’s Broadway debut had drawn strong notices. Posters mushroomed around the city – ‘back by popular demand’ – and celebrities joined the hunt for tickets. Diana Ross, Johnny Mathis, Ted Kennedy and Woody Allen were among those paying homage, each one intrigued by this putative, new art form and mesmerised by this charming Englishman’s nightly tour de force. ‘Only The King and I was as big as us on Broadway that holiday,’ recalls David Singer.
By Christmas, with demand still high, the run was extended into the New Year. And when JoJo took a weekend break to watch the Pittsburgh Steelers, Lorna stood in (to critical acclaim) and danced Tango Tango. At last she had enjoyed her golden moment with her childhood Romeo. Sadly, for her – and for all of them – it was a prelude to the end.
A week into January, ticket sales collapsed. Broadway’s perennial post-Christmas slump had begun and the rush into the Minskoff suddenly looked ill-judged. With insufficient publicity, Curry’s problematic status as an ‘unknown’ was exposed. ‘He was not yet a bona fide ticket-selling star,’ admits Singer. ‘And he was very difficult to market because he was not a flashy skater. He didn’t like to jump. He was about something better and more important.’
More alarmingly, Singer’s leading man was drinking liquid protein to combat weight loss and getting only four hours’ sleep a night amidst persistent rumours about cocaine. ‘I remember at his flat in New York he’d say, “Can you roll me a joint? Can you get me this drug? Can you get me that drug?”’ claims Barker. ‘Like the star telling the underling to get the thing for him.’ As the producers weighed up their options, the skater’s mysterious demons broke loose. Midway through an evening show, watched by 1,500 people, Curry crumpled to the ice during a sit spin.
‘No one had seen John before the show,’ says Lorna.
Then he came on like he was drunk and went sideways into a sit spin and sat down and put his arms out to the audience. Then Ron came and picked him up and took him off. All this in the middle of a New York show with a big audience. He was all over the place. The curtain closed and there was an announcement and next thing his understudy rushed on and looked like a comedian, and we went from shock to hysterics. You couldn’t help but laugh.
Amidst the chaos backstage, Curry was revealing little. ‘Someone mentioned that he’d been taking muscle relaxants,’ says Lorna. ‘He was crying like a baby.’ ‘I think Ron or someone had given him something,’ says Patricia Dodd. According to the show’s stage manager, Joe Lorden, Curry had been out late the night before. Shortly after his collapse he had also been spotted leaving by a back door with Ron Alexander. Both had been fully kitted out in black leathers. ‘I said, “John, you can’t leave. Your name is over the title. This is your show.” He said, “I’m going” and didn’t come back. I had to cancel that night and we closed a few weeks later.’
Whatever had happened, neither Curry’s producers – nor his ferocious agent – were laughing. Rather like his London ‘mugging’, the fall had seriously exposed the skater’s fragility. ‘This was not an insignificant event,’ says Singer. ‘It affected my confidence in the situation. We were talking about touring but with a show like this, he is the show.’
After 23 nights of standing ovations, John Curry’s Ice Dancing folded on 14 January 1979. With no prospect of a tour – or any further work – the company was dismantled. Few of the 12, including Lorna Brown, would ever skate with Curry in front of an audience again. ‘It didn’t take the form of a break-up,’ explains Singer. ‘It took the form of an absence of business. We simply didn’t have a financial proposition for him.’ For Curry, it was another cruel lesson in economics. Unless it could make money, his infant new art form was doomed.
Among the debris, however, a more alarming picture had emerged. In both London and New York, Curry’s temperament had disintegrated under pressure. Although the work he’d produced was often sublime, the emotional toll on his fellow artists had been high. Each one acknowledged his genius. Most would gladly return. But not one of them really knew him, or knew what he would do next. As the troupe dispersed, the suspicion lingered that somehow Curry, in each city, had deliberately pressed the self-destruct button.
If so, he was not short of reasons. Curry had been drained before New York. After two months of daily performances there – in which he was rarely off stage – he was beyond exhaustion. Box office gloom and a handful of negative reviews had reinforced his own crippling artistic doubts. ‘Maybe when Curry feels more secure,’ observed one critic, ‘he will risk presenting more serious works.’
Far too often he seemed unhappy; his material was still uneven and the skaters around him were mismatched. Some of them – to his eyes anyway – looked too fat. Others simply couldn’t dance. Just as it had done in London, a suffocating shroud of expectation had descended, complicated by his ‘dangerous appetites’ and his traumatic love life. As the Minskoff went dark, mingled with the confused disorientation of failure, there came a deep unheard sigh of relief. It was over, and he was out.
Before January was done, as blizzards stalked Broadway, Curry put himself on a plane bound for Egypt with Ron Alexander. Neither he, nor anyone else, had any idea when – or if – he would skate again.