The beach, which seems to go on for ever, looks south. Along its entire line, hissing breakers crumple on white sand. Grass-tufted dunes back up against sun-greyed boardwalks that run to each horizon. Beyond the snaking walkway, connected to the shore by private paths among the salt-blown marram, hide elaborate timber houses, fronted with fields of glass that drench each room with warmth, allowing the far-travelled Atlantic air to flood in.
No one knows how Fire Island got its name. In the 1970s, everyone knew how it had got its reputation. Over thirty miles long – yet never more than 400 metres wide – this stubborn spit of crushed shells had become a legendary haven for America’s homosexual young. It had no roads, few cars and only a handful of permanent residents. Access, by ferry or seaplane, was awkward, ensuring privacy for the thousands of men who flooded there every summer; streaming out of Manhattan, through Long Island and across the Great South Bay to the source of its dangerous heartbeat, the tiny hamlet of Fire Island Pines.
In the summer of 1977, John Curry had found his way there too. Over the next few years, he would return whenever he could. Nowhere else soothed him like Fire Island. Nowhere on earth allowed gay men to fashion a structured lifestyle so comprehensively devoted to pleasure. Daily life there represented a reward for their long battle for tolerance. Barely ten years before, electro-shock therapy was still being prescribed in the US to ‘decrease same-sex attraction’. As it was for the Atlantic zephyrs, Fire Island was a welcome refuge; somewhere young men could unpack winter-long frustrations.
As a child, Curry had thrilled to the surf’s roar in Cornwall. On Fire Island, among valued companions, the wind tugged his devils away. During the summer months, in a spacious waterfront rental, there would be no skates, and no box office disappointments. Instead there would invariably be Billy Whitener and Roger Roberts – the two loyal pit props of his Manhattan life – supplemented, at times, by a string of passing visitors. The male model Brian Grant was often there. So, too, were Cathy Foulkes, Nancy Streeter and once – from Britain – Curry’s dependable brother Andrew.
‘He loved the beach,’ recalls Whitener.
Sometimes the house would be full. Other times, it was me and John. Or me, Cathy and John. Or Roger, Cathy and John. It was an entourage. Usually the same people. A bunch of friends. John was very generous. He paid most of the rental and I paid some of the bills because I could. I didn’t want to rely on his generosity. There were no freeloaders. John was picky. What did we do? A lot of cooking, and John absolutely loved the beach and there were moments he wanted privacy. More than I did, he needed that. Sometimes he’d retreat.
With no set routine, the friends drifted in and out of the sun, together or alone. ‘I’m out for a walk,’ read one note signed off by Whitener with his drawing of a ballerina. Two hours later, he returned to find a message underneath it from Curry and Roberts – ‘Hi. We are walking on the beach’ – complete with their own tiny cartoons of an ice skater and a rippled body-builder. During these long days, Curry’s slender torso tanned. It was important to look beautiful. Everyone else on Fire Island always did. ‘Roger was especially good-looking,’ says Whitener. ‘Very, very funny. Delightful. Intelligent. He worked out at the gym before it became so popular. At Fire Island you saw people with developed upper bodies. Chicken legs, we called them. Roger rode a bicycle round New York so he was developed all over. A beauty from head to toe.’
Amidst the household goods, the local store sold postcards of bronzed, semi-naked men. At 5 p.m. hordes of them gathered at the Pavilion bar for ‘Blue Whale’ cocktails laced with Curaçao. As the sweet liqueur painted their tongues blue, they moved on to the legendary weekend tea dance, bouncing to disco music till dawn in sleeveless white T-shirts, spilling out across the moonlit sand where the surf still boomed.
‘Every day there seemed to be perfect,’ says Foulkes.
Gay people nude on the beach having a great old time. Very free. Sunny. He wasn’t working and the pressures were gone. Very communal and he liked that. This was another side to John. More relaxed and a little happier … I went to the tea dance but if he was going out late at night, he would put me to bed. There was clearly something he didn’t want me to know about, or be exposed to. He was protecting me. This ‘other thing’ would happen much later at night.
On Fire Island – for everyone – there was nothing to fear. This was life at full throttle. No chance of a crash. Few people were chasing relationships. Mostly it was about sex. ‘It wasn’t our priority to have a regular partner,’ explains Whitener. ‘We were sowing our oats.’ ‘Everyone slept with everyone else,’ adds writer Felice Picano. ‘No one in their twenties or thirties was monogamous at all. Even guys in relationships fucked other people.’
Amidst the dunes, under a constant sun, this new freedom tasted delicious. One summer’s day, Picano had been transfixed by a stranger running along the beach in his shorts. ‘Who’s this guy with the cool rear end’? Soon after, they were lovers. ‘The interior matched the exterior,’ he says. ‘John Curry was a beautiful man.’
I saw him every day in the week that summer. We had sex together. We had a fling. He told me he was sharing a house but I never went to his place. We always met at mine. I’d go down to the harbour and pick up a newspaper, or have breakfast and I’d see him there. He didn’t go to the afternoon events too often. Because of his celebrity, I think he kept a low profile. But he seemed very lonely. In fact, he was always alone in the week. He was very masculine; very straightforward; a nice guy who seemed to have things on his mind. Not a camp or gay cliché. It was a moustache butch community and that wasn’t his look.
It didn’t last. Very little on Fire Island was ever intended to. Even the tide-lashed land itself seemed poised between sunshine and drowning. In the late 1970s, as Freddie Mercury lookalikes oiled their pectorals and Donna Summer ‘felt love’ in the Ice Palace, doctors in New York were pondering the early signs of a ‘rare form of cancer’ exhibited by homosexual men. No one was getting too alarmed, and it wouldn’t merit a headline for another two years. Out on Fire Island puddles of sea spray dried on the ocean boardwalks and the dance music still rumbled until sunrise.
When Curry returned from his Egyptian holiday – in mid-February 1979 – the beach villas of the Pines were still boarded against the winter storms. Not till the spring would the party kick off again. Until then, Curry was marooned in his own darkness. Although Ron Alexander was still around, their relationship remained unsteady. At his Greenwich Village apartment – decorated in beige and grey – Curry fought sleeplessness by night and welcomed select visitors by day. Cathy Foulkes loved its ‘impeccable minimalism’ and its huge collage assembled from schoolchildren’s desk blotters. ‘A sort of Calvin Klein home,’ she says. Patricia Dodd had once encountered Alexander there emerging from the bathroom in leather cowboy chaps. Others escaped with Earl Grey and a Rich Tea biscuit.
Artistically Curry was snared in a conflicted web of boredom and doubt. The shows in London and New York felt like failures. Neither had matched his vision. Both had suffered from restricted stages, artistic compromise and a lack of money. Welding his noble aesthetic to business imperatives had nauseated him. The physical and mental strain had taken him to breaking point, and his fantasy of a permanent company of ice dancers now seemed pitifully remote.
Had he been rich, it wouldn’t have mattered. But Curry’s financial outlook was bleak. Although Larry Parnes had offered 50 per cent of net profit – plus a weekly fee – it wasn’t clear how much profit there’d been, if any. Nor would his income from the Minskoff sustain him for long. Curry wasn’t broke – and had generous friends – but he needed to work. Indolence had its attractions, but returning to England in defeat did not. Radical options were under consideration.
During his first summer on Fire Island, an eight-seater seaplane had splashed down on the ocean as he sat alone on the beach. From inside stepped the English actress and comedienne Millicent Martin, alongside her American partner, voice coach Marc Alexander. ‘We waded ashore with our suitcases over our heads,’ remembers Martin. ‘When John saw my feet he said, “Your feet, your feet, you’ve got beautiful feet.” I’d trained as a dancer and he’d spotted them.’
The two had first met at a celebrity-studded 1976 New Year’s Eve party in St John’s Wood, London. A few months later, when Martin turned up in a New York show, Curry had been the first Englishman she saw. The weekend on Fire Island, including a visit to a tea dance, had followed soon after. It was a friendship that pointed the way Curry had secretly always wanted to go. If he couldn’t skate, he would act. And if possible, finally, he would dance.
On paper, the plan made sense. Curry’s bones were sore, and increasingly he moved in theatrical circles. Back in England, the dancer Gillian Lynne, soon to be the choreographer of Cats, had become a close friend. Clandestine contact with Alan Bates had continued, and a London agent had been retained to help find suitable parts. In New York, Curry had been taking acting lessons, and – be it ballet or Broadway fodder – he rarely missed a new show. The reality of his declared ambition, however, presented him with significant personal obstacles he would have found uncomfortable to acknowledge.
Nature – and public schooling – had endowed Curry with a reedy, aristocratic voice. It was a misfortune compounded by both his manner and his naturally introspective personality. As a dancer, he possessed what Lynne called ‘his natural, beautiful line’. But as a budding actor, other than stunning looks and name recognition, he had little to offer. It was a challenge his various coaches took on with limited success. Among them was Millicent Martin’s new husband, Marc Alexander:
He was ultra-introverted. Painfully shy. You had to pull every single thing out of him. When he was on the ice the centre of him would emerge and there was this grandeur. Off it, he’d close down. So I’d work on his voice and projection and be almost like his psychiatrist. But his voice was very tight because when you close up like he did, it affects the vocal chords. So I’d show him how to punch out his voice; how to make sure he didn’t stop breathing when he got frightened. Because if you don’t breathe on stage, you die.
Back in his apartment, Curry laboured dutifully through sheets of exercises (‘Imagine smelling a beautiful rose and drink in the odour WITHOUT RAISING THE SHOULDERS’). In both London and New York he now had agents prowling for work. In the meantime, there were always the dance classes; the indestructible remnant of the dream his father had sought to demolish. ‘He still often went for those dancing lessons,’ says Heinz Wirz, ‘but I think each time he went through the door he knew that “daddy says no”.’ Ironically, however, as he approached his thirtieth birthday, it would be dancing that suddenly catapulted Curry out of the doldrums.
Since his first London shows, Curry had forged a friendship with the Royal Ballet’s principal dancer, Anthony Dowell. The two men were well met. Although Dowell was slightly older, both were intensely private, and both were driven by relentless artistic curiosity. Curry had watched Dowell dance many times and Dowell, in return, had designed Indian costumes for an aborted ice Suite for Sitar at the Cambridge Theatre. By the time Curry was resident in Greenwich Village, his friend was performing regularly with the American Ballet Theatre in New York. By early spring 1979, he was in a position to make one of John Curry’s lamented fantasies come alive.
Every year, the ABT staged a so-called ‘million dollar celebration’ to raise funds at the city’s Metropolitan Opera House. Then and now, no venue in New York conveys status like the Met and few audiences were more high-recognition than this one. Ahead of them, as they poured across Lincoln Center Plaza, was a night of dazzling world-class entertainment. Nureyev would be dancing with Cynthia Gregory. Makarova would be paired with Patrick Bissell. But it would be the odd couple from England who brought the house down.
Wisely eschewing classical ballet, Curry and Dowell stunned the Met with such a witty homage to Fred Astaire, the New York Times promptly tagged the evening ‘The John and Tony Show’. Dressed in top hat, tails and white bow tie, the two men had tapped and shuffled with an aplomb that even Nureyev’s performance couldn’t match. ‘One trusts that Dowell will don a couple of silver blades and repay the compliment,’ suggested the New York Post. Whatever nameless terrors gripped Curry beforehand had not shown. Steered reassuringly by Dowell, he had danced in public for the first time.
Over the coming year, Curry and Dowell would reunite to perform Top Hat and Tails at gala events in Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. ‘They are a tempting tandem,’ observed one newspaper, but this was a double act with no serious future. By the summer of 1979, Curry was back on Fire Island after reluctantly rerunning his skating class for star-struck pupils at New York’s Sky Rink. Dancing with Dowell had been good for his American profile, but he was no richer for it. A sense of drift hovered above the cloudless skies off Long Island.
For some time Nancy Streeter’s influence in Curry’s life had been fading. Although he would go to her when he needed something – and never forgot her birthday – he no longer welcomed her advice. When she visited him on Fire Island, it would be less as a confidante and more as a spectator; a cruel state of impotence, which made her friend’s apparent aimlessness almost impossible to bear. In July, no longer certain of Curry’s ear, she had written him a long letter but couldn’t muster the courage to mail it. After her death it was found, unsent, among her effects.
What do you really want? Do you want to continue doing shows? Do you want to teach? Do you want to change completely and do something different? If this is it, you better get started and be very realistic about your talents as your name and fame will only last so long … You are tending to drift. 1) Fire Island whole summer 2) Not really skating 3) Not really dancing 4) Not doing much. Are you willing to listen to anyone?
As the days shortened, and Fire Island fell silent, Curry returned quietly to New York. In a letter to Cathy Foulkes – the only former cast member with whom he stayed in constant touch – he wrote plaintively: ‘I am back in the city now … the summer is over and hopefully we shall all be working soon. It has not been easy. The skating is the simple part.’
It was hard to fathom what he meant. No new backers were looming and Curry’s ‘theatre of ice’ was effectively dead. Exhibitions and one-offs were now his only work. In November he previewed a new ‘skaters’ waltz’ at Madison Square Gardens. The following month, he and Foulkes reprised Faune to a live orchestra at the well-remunerated Christmas ‘Pops On Ice’ in Colorado Springs. ‘All this clean air and clean living is for the birds,’ he told Nancy in a cryptic postcard. It was the curious end of a year to forget. The next one would start with a tumult of memories.
In mid-February 1980, the Winter Olympics juggernaut came to Lake Placid. Almost six years had passed since Gus Lussi put him through hell there on a square of ice. Nancy Streeter was right: fame was fleeting. Curry’s own golden night in Innsbruck already seemed like someone else’s life. This time, another young Briton had been marked for figure skating glory. Like Curry before him, Robin Cousins was arriving under the protective embrace of Carlo and Christa Fassi. And like 1976, the British media was feasting on his chances.
From an American television network’s commentary box, Curry watched proceedings unfold. Cousins was undoubtedly brilliant – and destined for gold – but his vigorous style was not to Curry’s liking. Nor did John have any aptitude for broadcasting. While the director bellowed down his earpiece – ‘say something, say something’ – Curry leaned back and purred, ‘let’s just watch the beautiful skating.’ However much they paid him, he would never deface excellence with facile microphone burble. He was also rather troubled and deeply preoccupied.
As the 1976 champion, Curry had been invited to perform at the Lake Placid closing ceremony. Rather than revisiting his triple jumps, he’d reunited with choreographer Twyla Tharp to fashion Three Fanfares, a modern programme set to the music of Strauss, Albinoni and Copland. It was a characteristically bold proposition. Robin Cousins had just topped the podium with a glorious display of athletic power, but Curry’s offering would pointedly showcase his own classical alternative. As a packed Olympic arena awaited his entry, his nerves crashed back in.
Caught on video, it is almost impossible to watch. Standing by the barrier – wearing a powder-blue top over a white shirt – Curry looks tired and hollow-eyed. As he rocks from foot to foot, he stares down at the ice, picking his fingers. When he finally looks up, sucking in deep breaths, his face is ghastly white. And when he walks, head bowed, on to the ice, all confidence seems drained from his stride. Only when it begins does everything flow seamlessly back. Free of figure skating’s rulebook, Curry floats and flows and builds to an exuberant trademark spread-eagle, which drives the audience up from their seats and pushes a smile of relief on to his face.
Not everyone had enjoyed it, however. ‘I don’t know what it was,’ Carlo Fassi was reported as saying later. ‘But it certainly wasn’t skating.’ By taking his art into a sports arena, Curry – perhaps deliberately – had underscored his own isolation. ‘It may have been at this point he realised how alone he was in what he’d set out to do,’ thinks a friend, Charles Cossey.
Shortly afterwards, when Larry Parnes contacted Cousins suggesting a money-spinning ‘skate-off’ against Curry at the Royal Albert Hall, the idea was laughed off the table. The two men shared Olympic immortality – and their paths would cross again – but Curry and Cousins shared little on the ice, and nothing off it. After Innsbruck, Curry had publicly confronted his homosexuality. After Lake Placid, Cousins headed happily off to cash in with Holiday On Ice. One man was relishing the spotlight. The other, temporarily, was trapped in the shadows, unable to secure the platform he craved.
In the spring, with no long-term plans in sight, he flew to London where the Queen’s Ice Rink in Bayswater was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. Temporarily reunited with JoJo Starbuck, he’d given an invited 500-strong audience a dazzling taste of his truncated Broadway show. Nothing at the Palladium had ever steamed hot like Tango Tango. And no-one at Queen’s was still sitting when it was over. ‘They [Curry and Starbuck] knocked a restrained stuffed shirt audience for six,’ proclaimed The Times. ‘This was tango unlike we have ever seen.’ Much as they howled for more, Curry had refused all pleas for an encore. The hit of the evening,’ said another review. ‘Curry has advanced the frontiers of ice dance.’ It was a stop-gap, but it would do for now.
With nothing in the United States to rush back for, Curry lingered in Britain. Fire Island would not be throbbing until July and, since Egypt, his affair with Ron Alexander had slowly faded away. Eager not to waste time, he linked up with the actor George Baker – known later for his Inspector Wexford television role – and knuckled down to more voice coaching. Once again, in the company of the jovial Baker, his wife and daughters, Curry had temporarily found another surrogate family. Between the lessons, he’d also found time to be best man at the choreographer Gillian Lynne’s wedding in Chelsea – preceded by a restrained three-man stag night – before hopeful developments in New York lured him back in early summer.
Together with his father, the infant Curry had been an admirer of thigh-slapping theatrical musicals. ‘I acquired a taste for them very quickly,’ he remembered. ‘We saw everything that came into town.’ Just so long as his son only looked at the dancers, Joseph was happy. Fifteen years after his father’s death, however, John Curry was not only dancing in New York – at a show his ill-fated parent would have adored – but he was also wearing a kilt.
Most musicals are dogged by improbable plots. Brigadoon is no different. Since premiering on Broadway in 1947, its unlikely brew of bumbling American tourists and star-crossed Highlanders has attracted both ridicule and rapture. Once disbelief has been dispensed with, it tells the story of a Scottish village that appears out of the mist only once every century. But after its triumphs of 1947 – and a Gene Kelly film – the musical had surfaced almost as infrequently. By 1980 it was deemed ready for a major revival. All it needed was a star’s name over the door in lights.
Long before it opened, however, Curry’s proposed involvement was causing problems. The director, Manchester-born Vivian Matelon, was in favour of him. The musical’s revered choreographer Agnes de Mille was apparently not; and few people on Broadway ever tangled with ‘Miss de Mille’. Although 75 years old and impaired by a recent stroke, she carried the whiff of Sunset Boulevard. As a child, like Curry, she had been forbidden by her parents from dancing, despite which she’d worked with Dame Marie Rambert, before choreographing hit shows like Oklahoma, Paint Your Wagon and Carousel. In the 1940s, she’d added Brigadoon to her credits and for the part of the villainous Harry Beaton – with its highly complex sword dances – she wanted a professional dancer who could act, not an ice skater who could do neither.
‘His name got him the job,’ insists the show’s stage manager Joe Lorden. ‘Vivian was smitten with him. Liked him a lot. Thought he’d be a terrific Harry Beaton. Miss de Mille was not crazy about his dancing. She went along with the director and the producers, but she was not pleased with his ability.’
Soon after rehearsals began in late August, Curry’s presence had split the cast. Many of the trained dancers were irritated by his lack of expertise. Others – like understudy Tom Fowler – were moved by his courage. ‘He did seem like a fish out of water,’ says Fowler, who wisely avoided a tempting ‘romantic link’ with the skater. ‘Some had compassion for him. Others felt he should not be there. I wanted to help him in any way I could. It wasn’t his milieu. It wasn’t his world. He was lonely. He just didn’t fit in … Something could have happened between us but I would never become involved with anyone I was in a production with.’
Even for stage-hardened, ballet-trained stalwarts, Brigadoon’s Scottish dancing represented a hefty challenge. For the inexperienced Curry, it fast became a confidence-sapping ordeal. Admonished by the grey-haired Miss de Mille from her chair, he battled to master dizzying sword dances plagued by screaming calf muscles, a weak back and battered toes. ‘He was man down from the beginning,’ recalls dancer Amy Danis. ‘I’m sure he was in pain 24/7 as indeed many of the men were … but unfortunately he was also on display from day one as being behind.’
It was a situation fraught with risk. To help him, Agnes de Mille had refashioned much of her original choreography. Curry’s dubious Scottish accent had also been laboriously overhauled. But the skater was unused to public humiliation, and histrionics were never far away. ‘It was very challenging for him to have his voice heard,’ says Fowler. ‘He was self-conscious about how he sounded on stage. Once or twice he became absolutely exasperated and had to leave a rehearsal.’ ‘Rumours would go through the company that he was pitching a fit about something,’ adds Danis. At a press conference to promote the show, Miss de Mille summed up her own feelings with acid aplomb. ‘As a dancer,’ she said, ‘John Curry is a wonderful skater.’
By the time, Brigadoon previewed at the Saenger Arts Center in New Orleans, on 20 August, expectations were low. In his dressing room, Curry uneasily surveyed the usual gush of flowers and telegrams. ‘Knock ’Em Dead’ from Whitener and Roberts. ‘Thinking of you’ from Anthony Dowell. As had always happened before, however, the skater’s onstage professionalism successfully masked the tumult which lay beneath. Not only was the production warmly reviewed – with a standing ovation for Agnes de Mille – but Curry himself was singled out by the New Orleans press for praise.
His Harry Beaton, said the Times-Picayune, displayed ‘the dangerous neuroticism of a spoiled child’. As a review of Curry’s performance, it was exemplary. As a summation of Curry’s persona, it was even better. Two weeks later, after a well-received spell in Washington, Brigadoon was ready for its eight shows per week run at the Majestic Theater on Broadway, New York. Everyone was optimistic. There was no reason it couldn’t stay there for a year. Publicly, Curry appeared settled. Privately, in a letter to Cathy Foulkes, he was expressing his doubts.
We … will move to NY next week – the very idea gives me a cold flush. Things I hope, prey [sic], are in fairly good shape. We shall soon find out – the idea of being reviewed for dancing and acting by Broadway critics gives me horrors. Still, I guess I can live through it … I’m getting used to the idea of living alone – STILL miss Ron. Am well. Think of you often. I do hope we shall skate more.
By early February, after only 133 performances, Brigadoon had shrunk back into the mist. Despite strong notices, Manhattan’s theatre-goers had not warmed to Lerner and Loewe’s dated Caledonian frippery. No one was blaming John Curry. In New York, once again, the critics had dripped honey on his performances. ‘Compelling energy,’ said one. ‘The exhilarating sword dance is brilliantly executed by a balletically perfect John Curry,’ crooned another. Behind the scenes, however, the skater’s periodically toxic behaviour had stretched the company’s patience to the limit. ‘As far as a Broadway show went, he simply wasn’t disciplined enough,’ says Joe Lorden.
Barely 12 months before, it was stage manager Lorden who had mopped up after Curry’s perplexing fall at the Minskoff. Five weeks into Brigadoon’s Majestic run – on 27 November – he was doing it again. Almost everyone, including Amy Danis, had sensed it building. ‘Once we’d got to Broadway he was spending a lot of late nights out; burning the candle at both ends; and coming in the next day just not up to par; unable to do a good show.’ The unspoken twin nightmares of the Anvil and the Mineshaft were stirring.
There were moments when he was physically hurt and it wasn’t because of the show. He’d come in bruised and stuff and I was so young I didn’t really know what was going on. Maybe it was all so overwhelming this was all he could do to relax. I know he wasn’t happy. I knew he wasn’t taking care of himself. I don’t think he realised what was required to do something of this difficulty eight times a week. I don’t think he ever got to the point where he could enjoy it.
At the matinée performance on Thanksgiving, Curry snapped. During the climactic scene in which he threatens to leave Brigadoon, he threw his dagger on stage, where it quivered, blade down in the boards. Curry then walked into the wings, got changed and left the theatre. ‘I had no idea what was going on in his head. His mood swings were incredible,’ says Lorden. ‘He was unapproachable.’ No one knew what had triggered his strop. Other than Lorden, no one in the production had seen anything like it before.
In his absence, an understudy played Beaton’s corpse (the face carefully obscured by a blanket) and later stood in for the walkabout star during the curtain call. If the audience noticed, it never reached the ears of the press, and by the evening Curry had returned. ‘Although the cast were really upset, I embraced him and we had turkey and stuff between the performances … but word got out and it damaged the show.’
Curry never repeated his behaviour. Nor did he ever explain it. By February – when 42nd Street eased them out of the Majestic – there was no one left to explain it to. On a newspaper photograph of himself dressed in a kilt, Curry drew horns and a devil’s tail. Around the head of his co-star Marina Eglevksky he inked a halo. For the second time in a year, he’d been party to a Broadway collapse, and his bankability as an aspirant actor had been crushed. If it was a devastating blow, it was also an entirely predictable one.
It didn’t matter how often people told him he was good. Unless Curry believed it – and he rarely did – there was little pleasure in anything; and therefore no incentive to continue. ‘He had the feeling that it wasn’t worth doing unless it was perfect,’ says a friend. ‘And that’s a problem, because things are not perfect.’
Even in the chaotic minutes after winning Olympic gold – with the world drooling at his grace – he’d telephoned a friend and asked: How was I? Six years later, under sustained and self-imposed pressure, his doubts could only be temporarily suppressed before they blistered and burned. Only on Fire Island was he ever truly free of them. But, like everyone else, he needed to work.
Overnight, New York had lost its shine. The summer was still months away, and Curry had nothing to do. In November he’d skated an exhibition at Madison Square Gardens with the three-times world champion Peggy Fleming. He’d also skated alone most mornings at Sky Rink during the winter. But without Brigadoon, Curry’s solitude was horribly amplified and his relationship with Nancy Streeter was no longer an available solace.
In October, still feeling estranged, she’d penned another heartfelt letter to him. For a second time she chose not to send it. ‘I hope we can work out a friendship that takes into consideration the new interests and directions without wiping out the past which still holds good memories.’ It was a plea that Curry never heard. Loyally, she’d stood and applauded his Harry Beaton, but the skater’s mind was clearly wandering. After the shutdown, in mid-February, Nancy received a terse note informing her that he was returning to Britain. ‘I have been feeling very reclusive lately and I am going to go home soon. I am looking forward to a change of pace and scene.’
For the next few weeks, Curry laid low. Out of sight, his disappointment quickly faded. After a short spell in London, he returned to New York, where there was an early rapprochement with Nancy. ‘I’m pleased that you have managed to talk,’ Rita wrote confidentially to her. ‘I do not understand his wording of intrusion into his life. I’m quite sure that would be your last thought.’ There was also news on the work front; some good, some bad. Starting in September, he would be performing in a Shakespeare play in England. That was the good. Before that, he had to go to China with Toller Cranston on a televised exhibition tour organised by the ubiquitous Dick Button.
By the 1980s, Button had become a significant player in international skating. A five-times world champion himself, he was not only the hugely respected television voice for every major competitive event, he also ran his own company, Candid Productions, packaging glossy professional ice events for American, and foreign, broadcasters. With so few outlets where top skaters could make serious money, Button’s position was a powerful one. Thus far, Curry had survived without his patronage. By early June 1981, devoid of alternatives, he had succumbed. By the time his party reached Beijing, almost everyone else was wishing he hadn’t.
Relations between Cranston and Curry had been contaminated for years. In China – complicated by the presence of JoJo Starbuck – their animosity ensured a trip from hell. ‘JoJo had to cling to John professionally and kowtow to his every whim,’ claimed Cranston. ‘But my impression is that she did not like him (admittedly this is not the way she remembers it). She preferred me. So JoJo ended up between a rock and a hard place. To be honest with John and me, it was … between a landmine and a grenade, and at any second – well, you just never knew.’
For Starbuck it was especially tough. As an amateur, she’d forged a ‘fun camaraderie’ on the circuit with Cranston. On the flight into Beijing, however, Curry had talked openly to her about his father. Appearing to favour either skater would suddenly be awkward; never more so than on the tour bus with only two spare seats left – one next to Cranston, the other next to Curry. ‘Toller would be sitting behind John, so John couldn’t see him indicating that I sit with him, not John. So I think I stood …’
‘Every day, every hour was ruined by John’s froideur towards me and mine towards John,’ remembered Cranston in his 1997 autobiography.
As hot and muggy as Beijing was, every day was chillier than the last. If I wished to address Lord Curry, I needed an intermediary. Face to face conversations were out of the question. JoJo was the designated diplomat whose trip was completely destroyed by having to perform in this capacity.
Nevertheless the tour had its moments. During the rehearsals, over 20,000 people crammed into the city’s stadium to watch. During the televised exhibition, there was an audience of millions. ‘We were mice on the Chinese scale,’ mused Cranston. ‘One felt inferior and insignificant.’ In their time off, there were trips to Ming tombs and the Great Wall followed by interminable banquets where freshly tapped monkey brains were served; and where JoJo and Curry posed for photographs, with cigarettes drooping from their mouths. ‘I confess those particular brains were wasted on us. They were never sampled,’ quipped Cranston. ‘The dinner ended precipitously. All of us, without prompting, fled into the Pekinese night.’
Restored to the ocean sun Curry rode a bicycle up and down the creaking boardwalks, and prepared elaborate meals for his friends. Nowhere else did his life have such structure. Away from it, possibilities and confusion lay in every direction. Reluctantly he’d let go off his Greenwich Village apartment. ‘Packing up has been intense,’ he told Nancy. ‘Still it is all for the best … I’ll let you know my next stop – as soon as I know it myself.’ By September, he knew where that was. In place of an Atlantic beach-house Curry had a room in the Victoria Hotel, Nottingham. Instead of the ocean’s roar, he had the growl of city traffic on Milton Street.
As a teenager, Curry had dreamily read Romeo and Juliet with Lorna Brown. At the age of 32, the Olympic gold medallist had been offered the part of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Nottingham Playhouse. For a seasoned thespian, it would have been an intimidating prospect. Pictures of Judi Dench, Peter O’Toole, and Ian McKellen lined the theatre’s foyer. Nottingham itself was a proud city of culture. As a boy, D. H. Lawrence had strode its broad Victorian streets. In his own youth, Curry had skated there. But he had never trodden the boards; and he had never been so exposed.
He told the Daily Mail shortly after arriving:
I am still surrounded by people who tell me everything I do is a mistake. To most people the only thing that matters is how much money you get and that you appear to be terribly successful … those who [truly] succeed just put everything aside and say ‘This is what I am going to do’ and just keep walking to that goal.
Richard Digby Day, the theatre’s director, had faith. For years he’d nurtured the unwavering premonition that one day he would work with John Curry. Separated by five years, both men had attended Solihull School. As a television viewer, Digby Day had been entranced by Curry’s Olympic performance. He’d also been among the audience at the Cambridge Theatre, and, like Curry, he was gay. ‘So when I got the call from his agent I wasn’t a bit surprised. We went off and had tea together, got on well, and I offered him the part.’
By late September, Curry was shuttling alone to the theatre for private acting sessions with Digby Day. ‘Rehearsals are going well and very happily,’ he told Nancy. ‘Next week the full cast begins.’ Before they arrived, Curry’s voice badly needed to be strengthened. There was no power in it, and he struggled with the unfamiliar rhythms of Elizabethan dialogue.
What Curry delivered, however – without tuition – was the darting grace Puck’s magic required. Wearing an all-black costume he’d designed himself (a suggested thong had been wisely rejected) it was a performance that immediately won over doubtful critics. ‘He is lithe and graceful with a come hither personality,’ concluded the Financial Times. Audiences were impressed. So were his fellow cast members.
‘His voice was rather fey and inexpressive,’ says Malcolm Sinclair, who played Oberon. ‘But he had a natural Pixie-like quality and a very sharp sense of humour. He was also as bright as a button and had an impressive insolence about him. A “take me as you find me” side to his personality.’ There were no diva-like tantrums; no mystery disappearances; no temptations.
‘Life in Nottingham certainly is different to NYC,’ he told Nancy. ‘Fortunately I am busy, but when I’m not it is dreary.’ As a favour to the Victoria Hotel, he would periodically hang around in the lobby to be seen by other guests as they checked in. In return, he got his room for nothing. It was a necessary bonus. Curry’s Equity fee was next to nothing and his name was not even over the theatre door.
Dreary or not, Nottingham had temporarily humbled him. Before the production closed he invited a Fleet Street reporter into his dressing room and articulated his feelings. After the Olympics, he said, ‘it was as if I had walked out of a dark room onto a blazingly lit beach. Everything I thought I had missed wasn’t just available, it was thrown at me. So naturally I went through a period when I wanted to play more than I had, because basically I had never played at all.’ It wasn’t the first time he said it – and as usual it was heavily coded – but Curry’s hint of a lifestyle shift was intriguing. All around him, a dreadful change was coming.
Four months earlier, as Curry bronzed himself on Fire Island, the New York Times had reported 41 cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma – a rare and unusually aggressive cancer – affecting gay men in New York and California. By the end of the year a total of 270 cases of severe immune deficiency had been reported among male homosexuals in the United States. Of those, 121 had died. In late October, as the news drifted around Manhattan’s gay community, Curry flew back into New York and picked up his skates.
There was money to be made on ice in the early 1980s. Thus far, John Curry had been too high-minded to seek it out. In 1981, as Christmas loomed, he was weakening. For the first time in the sport’s history, the American circuit was awash with household names. Excited by saturation Olympic coverage, the television millions wanted more than a single competition once every four years. Figure skating – for its one and only time – was big business and people like Toller Cranston, Dorothy Hamill, Peggy Fleming, Janet Lynn, Robin Cousins and John Curry were its stars.
Dick Button had seen the way. In 1973, he’d run the world’s first professional championships at Landover in Maryland. With insufficient big-name skaters, the fledgling project had faltered, but eight years later Button was back and the US television networks were slathering for the rights. With broadcaster money in place, the high recognition skaters rushed forward, seeking a long overdue cheque after decades of grant-supported self-denial. ‘Peggy Fleming kept saying, “Well, I don’t want to lose my Olympic gold medal.” And I kept telling them they’d never lose their medals,’ says Button. ‘They would never be former or past. They were Olympic champions. Period.’
To shelter fragile egos, the competition – which was staged in December – was organised around a team format. But, in truth, this was no competition at all. ‘A little bit of a circus,’ thought Hamill. Nobody truly cared, or even remembered, who’d won. Many of the skaters were unfit, and regarded the professional format only as a long overdue payday.
‘It was a way of cashing in,’ insists Cranston.
It was the house of horrors. After we’d competed at events like the Olympics we all coasted on our laurels. Never practised and always out of condition. It was showbiz fuelled by celebrity. We were card-carrying members of a golden generation but it was as phoney as wrestling and participating in phoney shit was as an anathema to me as it would have been for John Curry.
Nevertheless, bolstered by a reported fee of $45,000, Curry had been seduced. After a short spell in Boston recording Peter and the Wolf for American public television, he turned up at the Capitol Center in Landover for the second of Button’s revived professional extravaganzas. Every fibre of his being resented it. Only his lack of money was keeping him there. Although, on paper, he was joint captain (with Dorothy Hamill) of the so-called ‘All-Stars’, he had no intention of subjecting himself to scrutiny by a judging panel. Curry would skate only as an exhibition skater and under no circumstances would he perform in the team uniform.
‘He obviously didn’t want to be there, didn’t seem to like any of us and refused to speak to his fellow competitors,’ remembered Cranston. ‘Directly before the competition, he refused point-blank to wear the assigned uniform and threatened to flee to the airport. Somehow, a deal was struck and John consented to wear part of it.’
Years later, Cranston accused Button of ‘personal weakness’, saying he’d ‘caved in to every one of John’s little demands’. Behind the scenes, Button had seen it differently. ‘I had to call his [Curry’s] agent and say, “John will never work again if he walks out on this.” I couldn’t have it. All this complaining about costumes … like a child who has a tantrum … he’d left his room, walked out of rehearsals and the hotel had lost his room. I told the agent that he’d better get his ass back here.’ As always, Curry – even under duress – had skated beautifully, but he would never return to Button’s circus.
Yet again, Curry’s compass was spinning. In December, he switched on the Christmas tree lights at New York’s Rockefeller Center. In February, he reluctantly joined the CBS commentary team for the European Championships in France. If he’d been a dancer, Curry told a journalist bitterly, he’d have ‘gone from flower to flower picking the honey’ with work at all the major ballet companies. As a skater, there were no ready-made equivalents. Either he built up his own productions, or his art simply did not exist. In between times, he would do what he could, short of wearing a ridiculous costume. And every month, while the good money was there, he would send a cheque to his widowed mother for $900.
On Fire Island the previous summer, as he sat alone on a jetty, Curry had received a visitor. Not a stranger; Elva Clairmont’s was a face he knew. Forty-four years old, dark-haired and attractive with a broad, smiling mouth, she had first met him in 1975 at the World Championships. Since then she’d managed Toller Cranston before their partnership imploded amidst vicious legal and financial acrimony. ‘Elva was charming, literate, immensely articulate and wickedly funny,’ recalled Cranston. ‘[She] always said, “Tell people what they want to hear and they’ll go for it every time.” ’ Cranston had gone for it and ended up wishing they’d never met. In due course, so would John Curry.
‘He was really down in the dumps at that point,’ she says. ‘I asked him what he was doing and he said, “I’m wondering what it would be like to drown”. So I thought I’d better just sit there and talk to him because the water was deep and he was never what I’d call a happy person.’
This was no chance meeting. Clairmont had a keen entrepreneurial brain aligned to a thrill-seeker’s indifference to risk. She was also passionate about ice skating, intrigued by the untapped commercial value of characters like Curry and Cranston, and intent upon breaking Dick Button’s stranglehold on competitive professional skating events. If she could secure an Olympic champion, her plan would acquire momentum and gravitas, and, after that, anything was possible.
Over lunch in Manhattan she unfurled her seductive vision. In the long term, she saw a permanent skating school grooming child prodigies, while Curry’s own ice ensemble company performed in theatres worldwide with a live symphony orchestra. More immediately, her plans centred on a lucrative rival professional championship – better paid than Button’s, with an emphasis on ‘the artistic and performance values of the skating’. It was a brilliant pitch which ended – according to Clairmont – with tears ‘welling in his eyes’. Once his obligations to Dick Button were through, he would join her. All she had to do was call.
If entrepreneurs like Larry Parnes had seemed an alien species to Curry, suddenly the waters around the skater were infested by them. Elva was persuasive and committed, but had no money. Behind her were two aspiring players who did. Michael Cohl was a Canadian-born concert promoter whose clients would ultimately include Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson and The Rolling Stones. Alongside him, New Yorker Steve Leber was a rock band manager who’d produced an arena version of Jesus Christ Superstar. Both men were intrigued by John Curry. Both were persuaded by Clairmont’s $5 million three-year television deal for Pro-Skate, her proposed North American skating grand prix. To get things going – but with caution – the pair drizzled backing into the enterprise.
After an extended hiatus, the seductive possibility of his own ice dance company had been revived, and it was Elva Clairmont who had made the difference. Without her, he would surely have run from men like Cohl and Leber. Cranston had felt the same. ‘I wanted someone to be nice to me,’ he wrote. ‘I wanted a certain kind of affection. I wanted someone to tell me the things I wanted to hear. Elva obliged.’ All Curry’s life he’d been drawn to fiercely intelligent mother figures, and Clairmont – with two teenage sons of her own – could play that role; a maternal shelter from commercial imperatives he had no wish to understand.
Alongside her in Pro-Skate was another critical lightning rod. At six foot plus, David Spungen was a mustachioed human bear, with a rich baritone voice and a ceaseless spring of positive energy. Shortly before he and Elva had met, Spungen had been working for Button’s Candid Productions. ‘He was just a runner,’ spat Button years later. Everywhere, it seemed, the stakes – and the temperature – were rising.
For months, agents had been on a feeding frenzy. A feral bidding was underway and one by one, at huge expense, all the headline stars had been wrenched from Button’s grasp. ‘A $25,000 deal would suddenly became a $200,000 guarantee,’ says Spungen ruefully. Curry’s presence alone would earn the skater over $120,000 before Christmas. ‘We’d made it to the big time,’ explains Spungen. ‘But we were a multi-million dollar company with no money.’ Intoxicated by the thrill of the chase, no one seemed concerned. In March, 1982, with John Curry, Dorothy Hamill, Toller Cranston, Peggy Fleming, Robin Cousins, JoJo Starbuck and Janet Lynn all on the roster, Pro-Skate was ready to roll.
Over the next few weeks, sponsored by Labatt’s beer, the fledgling professional tour played in five Canadian cities. Against all the odds, Curry appeared happy. Not even the vulgarity of a sponsor (something his contracts usually forbade) seemed to wobble him. Unlike Cranston and Cousins, he had stayed out of the men’s ‘competition’, and appeared only as an exhibitor; skating ethereally to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in Vancouver, the city where they’d once pelted him with drinks cans. Well paid and royally indulged, Curry now had a sparkle that proved contagious, never more so than among a group of women.
‘He was at his best,’ remembers JoJo.
We’d go out for dinner with Dorothy and Peggy and he would be funny and charming with that biting wit. All four of us on the back seat of a limo, and when we got out we’d be saying between us how sexy he was, and what a hunk he was. Were we wasting our time? Yes, but you can appreciate a handsome, dashing man and he had tremendous sex appeal. He wanted us to adore him and we did. He played games with the men and with the women. What if? Maybe if? Could it happen? I’m not the only girl who was thinking that way. A lot of girls were thinking that … and he had the body of a Greek god.
For the first time in his life – as Pro-Skate’s first tour ended – Curry had funds. The previous July, the statement for his personal company – Frozen Assets Limited – showed a balance of just $3,650. By the end of 1982 his monthly gift to Rita had risen to $1,200, and his balance had soared to $93,000. Very little of it was being spent. During his spells in New York, he was once again living at ‘Hotel Streeter’. Such possessions as he had were in boxes, and by late July he was living out of a suitcase at the Highcliff Hotel in Bournemouth, England; a reluctant star in a shoestring summer ice show.
‘[It] is a singularly depressing experience,’ he wrote to Nancy.
Most of the amateurs should not be performing anywhere, let alone in a paid entrance show. In addition to the lack of quality work, there is a notable lack of audience. There has been virtually no advertising and consequently most performances have about 25–35 people in attendance. All most depressing … Only one week to go – the time cannot pass quickly enough.
Nothing could have been further from Fire Island. On England’s south coast, Curry had few visitors, and, after the Atlantic, the English Channel looked like sludge. Only one thing had illuminated Curry’s forlorn summer. Before leaving America, he had slipped into a Manhattan cinema to watch Steven Spielberg’s latest film, ET. ‘It made such a huge and profound impression on him,’ says Richard Digby Day. ‘Sometimes his instincts would come up with something curiously sophisticated; sometimes it was all quite childlike and innocent. Of all the things we ever saw together, that film affected him most.’
If ET had touched a nerve, it was understandable. There were painful echoes for Curry in its fable of a lonely alien infant, separated from his parents and desperate for home. There was familiar sadness, too, as the extra-terrestrial is hounded and probed by confused scientists. ‘He wrote me a very long letter largely about that film,’ remembers the theatre director. ‘I suppose he lived such a transatlantic lifestyle. In the end you wind up like the alien, not knowing where you belong.’
By the autumn, Curry was moving again. In September, he spent a week in Toronto recording The Snow Queen for American public television. This was more like it. Alongside a stellar cast, Curry shone in a work of ‘ballet-like fluidity’. Two months later, he was back at Madison Square Gardens with Pro-Skate for two days of televised professional competition. Once again, he was on his best behaviour. In front of a full house – but no judges – he skated alone to Ravel’s La Valse but stayed aloof from the so-called sport.
As it transpired his ‘team’ had won, but in their hearts everyone knew it was of no consequence. However hard Button, Clairmont and Spungen strived, however brilliant the skating, only Olympic victory truly mattered. Everything else was just show business masquerading as sport. Publicly, Curry talked the competition up as ‘filling a void’. Privately, he decried it. With his contractual duty as ‘official spokesperson for Pro-Skate’ dutifully honoured, Curry headed for a week in the Caribbean.
When he returned just before Christmas, Clairmont’s Fire Island pledge had taken a huge forward step. The two most perplexing and productive years in John Curry’s life were about to begin.